Plan marketing budget

Use the Marketing plans section in Creatio to create marketing plans for promoting a brand, attracting new leads, schedule a series of activities, such as events, webinars, and bulk emails. You can manage your marketing activities in terms of weeks, months, and quarters.

In the Marketing plans section, there are two types of records: a “marketing plan” and a “marketing activity.”

A marketing plan is a schedule of activities that comprises the marketing strategy of a company. The schedule contains several activities with assigned owners, deadlines, and budgets.

Marketing activity is a specific activity within a marketing plan.

All marketing plans can be viewed by clicking the button at the top of the section workspace.

To view detailed information, open the page by clicking the marketing plan title.

To view activities for all marketing plans, click the button.

To view and analyze activities within each of the marketing plans, we recommend using standard filters or set up a custom folder in the Filter menu.

By clicking the and buttons at the top right of the workspace section, you can choose whether records are displayed as a drop-down list or as scheduled periods in the calendar (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Viewing marketing activities as a calendar

In the View button menu, you can choose to display activities by week, by month, or by quarter. You can view the yearly plan by using the scroll bar at the bottom of the calendar.

To view the planning performance, go to section dashboards by clicking .

Create a marketing plan 

In the “Marketing plans” view , click the New plan button. A new record page will open (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Populated marketing plan page

1. Populate the required fields – Name, Type, Status, Start date, and End date.

2. Specify the name of the brand and the planned budget.

3. Add marketing activities by clicking the button on the Marketing activity detail.

4. Save your new marketing plan.

Manage planned marketing activities 

To edit the list of activities, select a marketing plan from the list by clicking its name. The plan page will open. Here you can create a list of activities that are conducted as part of a plan. To add a new activity, click . This opens the activity page with the Marketing plan field populated automatically (Fig. 3). To remove an activity, highlight it in the list and select the Delete command in the menu.

Fig. 3 Populated marketing plan page

Assess activity distribution and workload 

To assess activity distribution:

1. Go to the “Marketing activity” view.

2. Click and select the calendar display.

3. Select a time period: week, month, quarter.

4. Visually estimate the workload for a particular calendar period and adjust it by changing the planned dates of the activities. To adjust the dates of a planned activity, click the activity name in the calendar and drag it to the desired date. This option is available only when activities are displayed in terms of weeks. The date and other activity parameters can also be changed on the activity edit page.

   To assess the employee workload, set up an appropriate filter in the Filter menu.

Analyze marketing channels 

To track how effective a specific channel is, set up filtering by channel in the Filter menu. For example, to check the usage of the email channel in the planned marketing activities:

1. In the Filter button menu, select the "Add condition" option.

2. Specify the column by which records will be filtered. In the second field, specify the name of the channel, for example, email.

3. Apply a customized filter, by clicking .

4. You will see a list of all activities for which the email channel is used.

Assess marketing budget compliance 

To control the execution of the marketing budget, use the “Planned budget” and “Actual budget” metrics, available in the Marketing plans section dashboards. Section dashboards can be opened by clicking .

To assess budget compliance for a specific activity or a specific marketing plan:

1. Click the View button in the activities list, set up the Planned budget and Actual budget fields.

2. Additionally, set up a filter for marketing plans in the Filter menu.

   After applying the filter, you will see a list of activities of the marketing plan, as well as the planned and actual budgets for each activity.