When you’re developing a marketing strategy, you often find yourself struggling with lots of different moving parts and not enough time to plan everything perfectly. That’s where Google Project Planner comes in. It’s a brand new tool from Google that aims to make the whole process of marketing planning a little simpler.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to use Google’s new tool to plan your marketing strategy. We’ll cover:

What is Project Planner?

If you’ve been following along so far, you’d know that Google has had numerous product announcements in the last year that revolve around marketing and strategy. With Project Planner, Google wants to make sure you have all the necessary tools to develop a solid marketing strategy. So with that in mind, here’s a quick overview of what Project Planner is and does.

• It’s a tool that helps you plan marketing activities
• It can organize your ideas and help you make sense of your scattered thoughts
• It allows you to track your progress over time, as well as compare different outcomes
• You can sync it with other apps like Google Sheets and Docs to stay on top of your content strategy

How Does It Work?

The basic idea behind Project Planner is that you create a simple spreadsheet with six columns:

• Activity (checking this box will keep the activity in the upcoming months)
• Target audience (this is the main section of the spreadsheet where you put all your different target audiences)
• Channel (where you’ll enter all the different channels that you’ll use to reach your target audiences)
• Funding (this is where you put all the different sources of funding for the project)
• Role (this is where you define who the main actor is going to be in your project)
• Date (this is where you can specify the deadline for each activity)

Then, you just need to follow these steps to create your project plan:

• Click the project name in the top-right corner
• Click the gear icon to the right of the project name
• Click the New button
• Enter a short description of your project
• Select the checkbox next to Planner
• Click the Save button

From there, you can track your progress and collaborate with others on your project. You can also export your plan as a Google Sheet so you can share it with other team members or clients. Plus, you’ll have all the necessary information at your fingertips, so you can followup with the necessary actions quickly and efficiently.

Why Should You Use Project Planner?

The main advantage of using a tool like Project Planner is that it simplifies the process of coming up with a marketing strategy. Instead of spending lots of time going through lots of different documents and spreadsheets, collecting ideas, and coming up with a list of action items, you can just enter your information in the relevant cells and hit Save. Then, you can move on to the next step.

Plus, you can collaborate with other members of your team or across different teams (like sales and marketing) to come up with the best possible strategy. And if you prefer to use a tool to manage your content strategy, you can sync your plan with other apps like Trello and Clio to stay on top of your tasks and progress.

Another great thing about Project Planner is that it provides you with all the necessary metrics to determine the success or failure of your plan. You can track your progress over time and see how many activities you’ve completed and how many you still need to do. Plus, you can monitor the results of your activity and determine if you’ve reached your target or not. So, if you do decide that a certain activity hasn’t worked out as expected, you can either change your strategy or modify your activity to suit the results you’re getting. It’s never easy to determine what’s going to be effective and what’s not, but with metrics, you’ll have all the necessary information at hand.

When Should You Use Project Planner?

As mentioned, Project Planner is a tool that simplifies the process of coming up with a marketing strategy. So, if you’re looking for a place to start, you can either choose from one of the predefined templates or you can create your own. Either way, you’re going to end up with a structured workplan that can help you track your progress and determine if and when you’ve reached your target audience.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to update your strategy from time to time, you can do so with minimal effort by simply making changes to your plan. Instead of starting from scratch every time, you can use existing templates or drag and drop to modify the plan as you see fit. Plus, if you ever decide that a certain strategy isn’t working out as expected, you can simply find the activity that you changed and determine what happened. You can then either change your approach or modify the activity to better suit your expectations.

In Conclusion

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use tool to help you develop a marketing strategy, you can’t go wrong with Project Planner. Not only does it provide you with all the necessary foundations to develop a solid game plan, but it also gives you all the tools you need to followup once the strategy has been put in place. And for those of you who love to collaborate, you can invite others to participate in the development of your plan, while still keeping track of your progress and the status of each individual task. So, if you’re looking for an easy tool to help you plan your marketing strategy, give Project Planner a try.