Marketing budget template

Have you ever created a marketing budget—and then promptly forgot about it? Often, you spend a lot of upfront time outlining your budget and then never circle back to it throughout the quarter. The next thing you know, the quarter is over—and you’re way off target. 

Mismanaging your marketing budget can be detrimental for a lot of reasons. Overspending can cost your business more money than expected, and staying too far under budget can prevent your team from hitting goals. 

A marketing budget template takes the guesswork out of planning your marketing budget. This template gives you real-time visibility into your marketing budget and standardizes how your team tracks costs throughout the quarter—so you’ll never misalign your projected costs and actual costs again. 

What is a marketing budget?

A marketing budget details how much money your marketing team anticipates spending on specific initiatives over a month, quarter, or year. Your marketing budget should outline the costs associated with all your marketing projects, such as marketing events, paid advertising, social media initiatives, and more. The budget can be granular—for example, listing out all elements included in a specific marketing campaign—or high-level. Marketing budgets help your team keep costs under control, meet marketing goals, and better calculate how funds should be allocated in the future. 

What is a marketing budget template?

A marketing budget template is a duplicatable framework that marketing teams use to manage and oversee their budget. A marketing budget template gives your team visibility into their budget in real time—like how much money has been allocated for an initiative, what’s been spent, and what’s remaining—and lets them easily share with stakeholders. Plus, establishing a standardized template means everyone on the team tracks costs the same way, making it easier to create and collaborate on future budgets.  

With a marketing budget template, you can:

• Quickly map out your marketing initiatives and corresponding budget. At the start of each month, quarter, or year, add your marketing initiatives to your marketing budget template. Then, simply add in the allocated budget for each initiative and use the template to track costs. 

• Easily track where you are with your marketing spend. Once you’ve added in your allocated budget for each marketing effort, use the template to track your actual spend, what amount you have remaining, and analyze how that compares to your projected costs. 

• Align your marketing efforts with high-level team goals. In addition to keeping track of your overall spend and remaining budget, use your template to map your marketing efforts to your high-level team or company goals. That way, you can quickly visualize how your spend connects to organizational priorities. 

• Provide visibility in real time. When team members contribute to the marketing budget consistently, it’s easy to see how much you’ve used in real time. When using a work management platform like Asana to track your monthly budget, you can display this information on a dashboard so key stakeholders can track budgets at a glance. 

• Keep multiple budgets consistent.When you have multiple budgets—for example, budgets for different marketing initiatives—reporting and organizing them can be challenging. With a marketing budget template, all budgets follow the same formatting, keeping bookkeeping consistent. 

• Encourage collaborative budgeting. Keeping track of marketing budgets on larger teams can be a struggle. Templates establish one system of record to ensure that all costs are accounted for. 

How to use marketing budget template

1. Build out your template with essential budget information. Your marketing budget template serves as a framework for tracking your monthly, quarterly, or yearly marketing budget. To simplify this process, build out your template with essential budget information. Start by breaking up your template into sections, such as quarters. Then use custom fields to track important budget information for each section, such as the total amount budgeted for the initiative, the actual spend, the remaining spend, and whether the initiative’s spend is on or off track.. 

2. Connect your marketing budget to your goals. Use custom fields to connect your budget to team or organizational goals, so your team has a better understanding of how much funding is available for specific resources.

3. Regularly document your expenses. Define a process for your team so when someone needs to log an expense, they know exactly how to do it and where it goes. Make it clear who is responsible for recording this information in the budget. 

Integrated features and recommended apps for your marketing budget template 

Take advantage of Asana’s integrated features and synced business apps to create a single system of record—and make budget collaboration easier than ever. 

Integrated features

1. List View. List View is a grid-style view that makes it easy to see all of your project’s information at a glance. Like a to-do list or a spreadsheet, List View displays all of your tasks at once so you can not only see task titles and due dates, but also view any relevant custom fields like Priority, Status, or more. Unlock effortless collaboration by giving your entire team visibility into who’s doing what by when.

2. Reporting. Reporting in Asana translates project data into visual charts and digestible graphs. By reporting on work where work lives, you can reduce duplicative work and cut down on unnecessary app switching. And, because all of your team’s work is already in Asana, you can pull data from any project or team to get an accurate picture of what’s happening in one place.

3. Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization. 

4. Dashboards. Dashboards are project-level tabs containing graphs and visualizations that let you zoom out from the day to day to quickly understand your project’s progress. Customize Dashboard charts so you can instantly identify potential blockers in your team’s work and subsequently move the project forward. Use the Dashboard tab as a reference point to find data to get a quick pulse on how the project is progressing. 

Recommended apps

1. Dropbox. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Dropbox file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane.

2. Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

3. Gmail. With the Asana for Gmail integration, you can create Asana tasks directly from your Gmail inbox. Any tasks you create from Gmail will automatically include the context from your email, so you never miss a beat. Need to refer to an Asana task while composing an email? Instead of opening Asana, use the Asana for Gmail add-on to simply search for that task directly from your Gmail inbox. 

4. Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack. 

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