Growth Strategy

Marketing plan: a 90-day template your team can use

Build a marketing plan with a free template, a worked example and clear budget decisions. Set priorities, assign owners and measure progress over 90 days.

Vladlens Kecko · 2026-10-13 · 10 min read

A 90-day marketing plan should tell a small team what to do next, who owns the work and what evidence will change the plan. A list of every possible channel is not yet a plan.

Choose a manageable commercial objective and work backwards from the constraint. Ninety days is a useful planning window, not a promise that a long sales cycle will finish within the quarter.

Choose the customer and offer before choosing a channel

Write one sentence: “We help [specific customer] solve [problem] with [offer], and our evidence is [approved proof].” Replace broad labels such as “everyone who needs marketing” with the situation that makes someone buy. Interview recent buyers and lost prospects; record their own words, alternatives and objections.

Business.gov.au's planning guidance connects customer research, positioning, goals, activity budgets and regular review. Our practical application is to select one customer group, one offer and one conversion path for the first test.

1. Start with a baseline and a decision

Record the current offer, audience, spend, enquiries or orders, and the business's capacity to fulfil more demand. If measurement is unreliable, name that gap instead of using uncertain numbers as precise targets.

Write the objective as a change in a business outcome. “Publish more” describes activity; “increase sales-accepted enquiries for our installation service” gives the work a purpose. Define what accepted means with the people handling those enquiries.

BDC's marketing-plan guidance emphasises objectives, responsibilities, timing and budgets. The worksheet below turns those principles into a short operating plan.

2. Find the constraint before selecting channels

Ask where progress stops: too little relevant demand, an unclear offer, poor page conversion, slow follow-up or limited delivery capacity. Review customer conversations and actual journey evidence alongside analytics.

For example, an illustrative installation company already receiving suitable enquiries may discover that no one owns the first response. Adding another advertising channel before fixing that gap could increase workload without increasing completed jobs.

3. Choose a small set of initiatives

Prioritise work that directly addresses the constraint and can be delivered with available people and money. Include creative production, website work, staff time and tools in resource planning, not just media spend.

These are example milestones, not a requirement to wait a month before making a straightforward fix. Choose dates around dependencies and your sales cycle.

Work backwards from a commercial target

Suppose, hypothetically, a service business wants 10 new customers, wins 25% of valid enquiries and turns 5% of relevant website visits into those enquiries. It needs 40 valid enquiries and 800 visits under those assumptions: 10 / 0.25 = 40; 40 / 0.05 = 800. These are planning inputs, not a forecast.

If average CPC were €1.50 and all 800 visits came from paid clicks, media would cost €1,200. Add production, management and sales costs separately. Recalculate when real conversion rates arrive; do not purchase 800 clicks simply because a spreadsheet says so. The CPC vs CAC guide explains the cost scope; the conversion funnel guide shows which stage to investigate.

4. Copy this one-page planning template

A practical rule might be to pause expansion if sales cannot contact the enquiries already arriving. Another could be to fix an unmeasured form before comparing campaign performance. Make rules specific to the business rather than copying a generic budget split.

5. Review decisions, not just completed tasks

Keep a short weekly log of what was learned, what changed and what will happen next. A public planning discussion illustrates the workload problem of trying to cover too many channels. It is a useful question, not evidence that one channel mix fits everyone.

Use a weekly marketing scorecard for ongoing decisions and the marketing investment guide for budget reasoning. At the quarter's end, retain the evidence and unresolved assumptions, not just a slide deck of activity.

What if the business has almost no data?

Plan a smaller learning cycle: test collection, speak to customers and run one clearly scoped acquisition experiment. Write assumptions as assumptions and avoid precision the evidence cannot support.

Turn one priority into an assignment with the marketing brief template.

A completed marketing plan for a Latvia business

Use this illustrative example for a Riga installation company. It is a planning exercise, not a client result or a market benchmark. Replace every assumption with your own baseline before approving spend.

Copy the plan into your own worksheet

Download the editable marketing-plan CSV. Open it in your spreadsheet app and complete the objective, baseline, constraint, hypothesis, deliverable, owner, resources and review fields. The worksheet is a starting point; it contains no pre-set agency fees or guaranteed targets.

Start with one offer and one constraint. For the first review, check that every enquiry reaches an owner and receives a recorded next step. At the next review, compare accepted enquiries by acquisition cohort. At day 90, decide what to retain, change or stop using mature results rather than activity totals.

Turn the plan into a decision record

For each initiative, keep five fields: observation, evidence, decision, owner and review date. A screenshot of clicks is not evidence that sales improved. Link the acquisition period to CRM outcomes after the normal sales cycle, and record unresolved enquiries separately.

For a Latvia campaign, compare LV, RU and EN journeys only where you can serve those customers. If a language segment has very few enquiries, inspect the individual journeys before declaring a winner. Use the advertising break-even calculator to document the economics behind the spending limit; a calculator scenario is not a forecast.

Our published construction case study covers a six-month engagement combining Meta lead campaigns, CRM stages and sales follow-up. Its reported 4,002 Meta form leads and €818,984 CRM won-deal amount describe that engagement. They are not targets for this illustrative 90-day plan. The useful planning lesson is to connect acquisition and sales records rather than treat lead volume as revenue.

Read the original campaign guide and its CRM/Meta screenshots in the construction case study.

A first-week action checklist

• Agree the priority offer, customer and fulfilment capacity with the business owner.
• Record the baseline and separate observations from assumptions.
• Complete the existing worksheet; assign one owner and review date to each deliverable.
• Test one successful enquiry and confirm who receives it.
• Choose one experiment and one decision rule. Keep a control or comparable period when feasible.
• Reserve time for customer feedback and sales follow-up, not only campaign setup.

How long should a marketing plan be?

Start with a page that makes decisions clear, plus the evidence and working budget. More pages are useful only when they clarify ownership, constraints or execution. A 90-day action plan can sit inside an annual strategy.

What if we have a small budget?

Choose a narrower test, a lower production burden and a learning objective you can afford. If traffic is too limited for a useful comparison, gather customer feedback and fix obvious measurement faults first. No universal channel split or minimum spend fits every business.

When the first priority is disputed, use the marketing SWOT worksheet to separate internal constraints from external conditions before assigning the next test.

Before choosing a campaign start date, check whether interest is seasonal in Google Trends and compare it with your own enquiries or sales.

Find the next priority with CPCInsider

Book a free 30-minute founder-led growth review. Bring your current plan, funnel or cost report. We will discuss the main growth constraint and follow up with a short written three-priority action plan. There is no obligation to hire CPCInsider; implementation is agreed separately.

Explore strategy for help connecting strategy, advertising and customer outcomes.

Turn the approved spending limit into a monthly forecast with the marketing budget template.