After the decision is made to use templates with your marketing, the first question most are going to ask is how long can they keep using the same template before they have to make more? The more time you get from each template the more time you save on what would've gone towards designing new templates. You also technically get a lot more for the money that went towards designing the first template, and save money by not having to design more.

Each type of advertising is going to be different when it comes to how many times you can use it. For brochure templates you can often get away with using the same one for a very long time if you spread out your print brochures enough. Because brochures are more complicated than a lot of other forms of marketing it's harder to tell when a template is being used more than once.

For this to work you have to be sure that the first brochure templates you design are made in a generic enough design that it won't be easily recognizable should you use it more than once. From there you can probably use it year after year, so long as you limit how many brochures you make with it.

With postcards you don't have as much room to work with because of the more basic designs they have. The same can be said for posters as well. Both have very few elements, and so if you just change around an image or text on a template people are going to be more likely to notice that the layout is the same.

This is made more important to consider with postcards because you're likely to make a lot more postcards than you would brochures. For a postcard marketing push you'll likely need to make a constant stream of postcards, forcing you to make use of those templates over and over again quickly. You might be able to use the same brochure for months, if not longer, once again allowing your brochure template to be stretched even further.

The nice thing though is that postcards are easier design, so you can make multiple templates for the same amount of time that it would take to make a single brochure one.

You want to be sure that your customers never start to notice that you're repeating the same layout, and if they do start to realize anything, you know you've used your templates a few too many times. The further you spread out using them the more use you'll naturally get.

Remember too that a template you used a few years ago can still be used again if enough time has passed. Once you get enough templates under your belt you might very well never have to design another one again.