Below I’ve included some free resources to help you level up your content and marketing efforts. The mix of templates below will help you make sure you check off all your boxes when you start a new project, send outreach emails, and organize your processes.
Content Resources
1) Content project brief
View the project brief I send out to new clients. This will cover the most important details of a freelance writing project, such as objectives, guidelines, and expectations.
2) Trello board for content projects
This is the Trello board set-up I use for my content clients. I use it to track internal article progress and manage inbound and outbound guest post exchanges. I use lists to show progression, and titles and tags to keep everyone on the same page at a glance.
3) Guest post pitch
Copy and paste this email template I use to send out guest post pitches. Fill in the relevant details to ensure you hit the important points, such as title pitches, samples of work, and relevant links.
4) Case study question bank
A list of case study questions you can ask during your customer interviews. This bank provides more questions than you need, but can help you structure your interviews toward the most important insights you’d like to prioritize.
5) Customer interview question bank
60+ questions to ask your customers to uncover how they discovered you, what motivated their initial search, how well your onboarding process works, communication preferences, valuable marketing channels, and different use cases of your product or service.
Event Resources
1) Webinar planning document
This is a planning doc you can use when hosting a joint webinar with co-marketing partners. It will help ensure key information is easy to find for all parties and clear up any questions, even before they get asked. It’ll have links to key information like the shared slide deck and landing page, as well as important dates and contact information.
2) Landing page lookbook
A collection of screencaps of some of the online event registration pages and websites I’ve seen around. You can use these to get inspiration for your own events, see what others are doing to drive registrations (ie. the types of prizes they’re highlighting), and learn how to structure your agenda, speakers, and more.
3) Online event planning templates
I created these in anticipation of organizing an online eCommerce conference for a client. It includes some email templates for reaching out to speakers, potential registrants, and your internal team to share out the event. You’ll also find tracking documents to stay on top of your budget, internal approvals, and timeslot reservations, and checklists for promotions planning, event partner resources, and more.
Partnership Resources
1) Brand Partnership Research Template
Use this spreadsheet as you start researching and evaluating the different partnerships you want, whether they are co-marketing partnerships, integrations, sponsorships, or more. Once you’ve narrowed down which brands to collaborate with, move to a partnership tracking document instead.
2) Partner Activity Tracker
Here is a template of the Trello board I use to track our partnership co-marketing activities. You’ll see the columns we’ve found work best, tags we use to see partner status at a glance, and checklists to keep our outreach and activities on track.
Product Marketing Resources
1) Competitor Research Template
Visit this blog to download and learn how to use a competitor research template that takes you through key information to collect, deeper dives into their audience and communication channels, and prompts to assess their product, marketing, and SWOT.
Management Resources
1) Marketing Budget Tracker
This is a simplified template of the budget tracker I use as I manage my clients’ marketing teams. It has sections to track internal team member salaries, consultant and agency fees, software, and miscellaneous expenses. I have used versions of this tracker to plan out annual budgets and track how well we’re staying within them.
2) Marketing Strategy Planning
This is the template I’ve used to project goals and KPIs for different marketing teams. You’ll find an overview page of our planned activities, as well as individual metrics tracking sheets (with monthly goals) for each team.