How to Write a Marketing Plan: One Page, Nine Boxes and a Worked Example

Why the plan should fit on one page

A long plan feels thorough and works badly. Nobody rereads forty pages in July, so the decisions inside them stop steering anything by spring. A single page gets taped to the wall by the dispatch desk, argued over at the monthly meeting and corrected in pen. That is what a plan is for. It is a working document, not a report to a board you do not have.

One page also forces the useful kind of honesty. There is no room for "increase brand awareness across platforms." There is room for a number, a customer, a few channels and a budget line for each. If something cannot be said in a box, it probably has not been decided yet. The bigger choices behind the boxes, which customers and which channels in principle, belong to your marketing strategy; the plan is the year's schedule that carries them out.

The nine boxes of a one-page marketing plan

Draw a grid of nine boxes, or copy the table below into a document. Fill the boxes in order, because each one constrains the next: you cannot pick channels before you know the customer, and you cannot set a budget before you know the goal.

Box 2 deserves real evidence, not a guess. Our audience research guide builds a customer description from reviews, calls and search data. Boxes 3 and 4 are where the 4 Ps of marketing earn their keep: product, price, place and promotion, checked against what competitors charge and claim. Box 5 is the SBA's sales plan in plain clothes: each step a customer takes to buy, which is where a plan usually finds its cheapest fix.

Start from one number you can count in December

"Grow the business" is a wish. "240 new customers from marketing this year, at no more than $150 each" is a goal, because in December you can count it and know whether you hit it. A plan built on a countable goal also tells you what every other box must deliver, by simple division.

Work backward from the goal to the leads you need. Take the share of real leads that became paying jobs last year, from your own records. Divide the customer goal by that rate to get the leads needed. Divide by twelve, adjusted for your busy and slow months, to get a monthly target. Then multiply the customer goal by the most you will pay to win one customer, and you have the year's marketing ceiling. Every figure in that chain comes from your own books, which is why it beats any industry percentage.

1. 1.Customer goal: new customers, not leads, not visits. Leads are a step on the way.
2. 2.Close rate: the share of genuine inquiries that became jobs, from last year's records. If you never tracked it, start now and use a cautious guess.
3. 3.Most you will pay per new customer: a share of the gross profit a new customer brings in the first year, with repeat work as the cushion.
4. 4.The ceiling: customer goal times what you will pay per customer. Spend under it; never plan above it.

If you have no idea how big the market is, or whether 240 new customers is ambitious or timid for your area, the market analysis guide sizes local demand with free public data.

A worked example: a hypothetical plumbing company's plan

What follows is a hypothetical home service business, invented to show the method. The company, its numbers and its results are illustrations, not a client and not a forecast. Picture a plumbing company with four trucks in a growing suburb, where the owner still answers the phone before 8 a.m.

Notice that box 5 found a problem no ad budget would fix: after-hours calls going to voicemail. The plan's first action item is an answering service or a missed-call text, before a dollar goes to ads. Our marketing automation guide covers the missed-call text, and the plan for this trade in particular is laid out on our plumbing marketing page.

The budget table, line by line

The hypothetical owner's records show an average new customer brings about $450 of gross profit in the first year, and he decides to pay up to a third of that, $150, to win one. At 240 customers, the ceiling is $36,000 for the year, or $3,000 a month on average. These are the owner's chosen allocations, not price quotes; get current prices from any vendor before you copy a line.

Two adjustments make a home service budget realistic. First, spend follows demand: the owner's own call log shows spikes in the coldest and hottest weeks, so ad money moves into those months and out of the quiet ones while the annual total holds. Second, the floor gets funded before anything else. Ads that send callers to voicemail or to a slow site waste their money, which is why tracking and the website sit on the first line.

If you hire help, put its cost on the same table as the ad spend. For reference, DataCram's local marketing plans start at $500 a month, and PPC management requires an ad budget of at least $1,000 a month, billed by Google to your own account, with the first custom landing page built and included. What clicks actually cost in your trade is covered in the Google Ads cost guide.

Turning the boxes into a calendar for the year

A plan without dates is a list of intentions. Break the year into quarters and give each one a short list of jobs with a name beside each. For the hypothetical plumbing company, the calendar reads like this.

1. 1

   Months 1 to 3: fix the floor

   Plug the after-hours leak. Complete the Business Profile, add photos, start asking every customer for a review using the steps in get more Google reviews. Install call tracking. Launch search ads on emergency terms only.

2. 2

   Months 4 to 6: add the second channel

   Start Local Services Ads. Mail postcards to the twenty houses around each finished job. Send the first monthly email to past customers. Rewrite the water heater page so it answers the price question.

3. 3

   Months 7 to 9: cut and double

   Compare cost per new customer by channel. Move money from the worst performer to the best. Run the quarter's experiment, perhaps a Nextdoor test, with a stop date written in advance.

4. 4

   Months 10 to 12: rewrite the page

   Count the year against the goal. Keep what worked, drop what did not, and write next year's one page before the busy season starts.

Ideas for the experiment slot, with costs and effort, are in thirty marketing ideas for small business. Every channel the plan might use, priced, is in how to advertise your business.

The monthly half hour that keeps the plan honest

The SBA's advice on measuring a plan is to compare marketing and sales costs with the revenue they bring in, and to be consistent in how you measure, even though some tactics are hard to measure. In practice that means the same three numbers per channel every month, from the same sources, pulled by the same person.

The counting only works if it is wired in. Conversion tracking setup connects calls and forms to their source, and the SEO KPIs guide explains which search numbers belong in a monthly review and which are decoration. To see where you show up in Google search and maps today, before the plan starts, run the free local visibility check.

Five ways a marketing plan dies in the drawer

• The goal is a feeling. "More leads" cannot be missed, so it cannot be managed. Use a number with a date.
• Nobody owns anything. A channel with no name beside it gets done when someone remembers, which is never in a busy month.
• Every channel at once. Seven channels on $3,000 a month means none gets enough money to tell you anything. Start with two or three.
• No not-now list. Without one, every sales call from a radio station or a directory becomes a new line item by summer.
• Operations left out. The SBA reminds owners that things like staff uniforms and return processes shape the customer's experience. A plan that brings calls to a company that shows up late is buying bad reviews.

Advertising inside the plan also has to be legal. The SBA notes that advertising must comply with the law, and the Federal Trade Commission's rules on truthful advertising and reviews apply to small companies too. Our copywriting guide covers making claims you can prove.

Writing the plan alone, or with a second pair of eyes

Most owners can fill in all nine boxes in an afternoon, and should, because nobody else knows the close rate, the busy weeks or the customer who calls at 6:45 a.m. Where outside help earns its fee is in the boxes that need skills or data an owner does not have: the ad accounts, the tracking, the honest read on which channel is actually working.

DataCram's online marketing strategy service reviews a plan like this one, finds where the handoffs leak and says which channel to build next. If you would rather the plan were run for you, local marketing and paid search both run on monthly terms with no long contract, and our home services page covers how we work with trade businesses. Either way, the free website audit shows whether the site is ready for the traffic the plan will send.