Your Quarterly Marketing Plan

A dream becomes a goal when action is taken toward its achievement.

A year is too long to plan marketing well. By the time you find out something did not work, half the year is gone. A week is too short, because most things need more than seven days to show what they can do. A quarter sits in the middle. It is long enough to learn something and short enough to change your mind.

We see it all the time: owners do marketing in bursts. They run something when things go quiet and stop when they get busy. A quarterly plan does not remove that rhythm, but it gives you something to check yourself against.

What goes on the page

The Quarterly Marketing Plan Worksheet on the Resources page is one page, and each part of it answers a plain question.

Start with the target. How many customers do you need this quarter, and how many leads does that take? If you have not worked this out, How Many Leads Do You Actually Need walks through it. Then the budget: how much are you willing to spend, based on what a customer is worth to you in gross profit? That is the subject of Budgeting from Gross Profit, Not Revenue.

Next, the channels. Which two or three will you use, and what should each cost per customer? If you are unsure how to choose, What Approach Is Right for You? and Choosing Channels by What a Customer Costs are the two lessons to lean on. Keep the list short. A plan with nine channels is usually a plan with nine half-efforts. After that, the campaigns themselves: what you will run, when it starts, who owns it and what you will do to know whether it worked. And finally the stop numbers: for each campaign, the point at which you will pause or change it.

Set the quarter, then leave room to learn

Decide what you are going to do, but do not treat it as fixed. Put a date in the middle of the quarter, about six weeks in, when you will look at real results and decide what to keep, what to change and what to drop. That is where Pausing or Scaling a Campaign Responsibly comes in.

Also be honest about capacity. If your calendar is already full for the quarter, more leads is not the goal, and your plan might be about referrals, repeat customers or a better price. If you are quiet, you might need to push harder. The plan has to fit the business you actually have.

How the quarter fits into your routine

The plan is only as good as the rhythm around it. Each month, take a short look at spend, leads, customers and cost per customer, and compare them with the plan. That is a small routine, and it is the same habit as The Monthly Financial Review. Do the two together. Marketing numbers mean far more when you read them beside the money numbers. Your Monthly Marketing Routine, later in this track, is the monthly version of this plan.

At the end of the quarter, ask the bigger questions. Did we hit the target? What did each customer cost? What surprised us? Did the money that came in cover what we spent, and what was left over after costs? Then take what you learned into the next quarter’s page. Aim for a plan that gets a little better every three months, and forget about a perfect one.

Before the next lesson

Download the Quarterly Marketing Plan Worksheet and fill in just the first two lines: your customer target for the next three months and the most you will spend to reach it. Then put two dates on your calendar: a monthly check-in and a review at the halfway point.

Your first quarterly plan will probably take two to three hours, mostly because you will be finding numbers you have not looked at before. After that, expect an hour or two at the start of each quarter and about 30 minutes for each monthly check. The worksheet is free.