Most marketing plans are written to be presented, not used. Forty slides, a competitor matrix nobody revisits, three personas with stock photographs and invented names, and a “brand pillars” diagram. It gets signed off, admired briefly, and never opened again.
Meanwhile the actual marketing carries on being decided on a Thursday morning by whoever shouts loudest, or by whichever salesperson rang up about a directory listing.
A plan that gets used is one page. It answers four questions, and it’s specific enough that you’d notice if you stopped following it.
Here’s how to write one.
Before you write anything: the honest diagnosis
The thing you think is wrong with your marketing usually isn’t the thing costing you money. In sixteen years of doing this, that’s the pattern I’d stake most on.
Businesses come to me saying they need more leads. About half the time they don’t — they need a better conversion rate on the leads they already get, or a higher average order value, or to stop wasting three days a week quoting for work they never win.
So start with the numbers you already have:
- How many enquiries do you get a month, and from where?
- What proportion turn into customers?
- What’s a customer worth, first order and over three years?
- Which type of customer is genuinely profitable, and which just feels busy?
- What did your best five customers last year have in common, and how did they find you?
That last one is the most useful question in marketing and almost nobody asks it. If your best customers all came from referral, your plan probably isn’t a social media plan.
If you can’t answer these, that’s your first month’s work, not a failure.
The one-page plan: four questions
1. Who, specifically?
Not “SMEs in the South”. Specific enough that you could name ten of them.
Owner-managed engineering firms within an hour’s drive, £1m–£5m turnover, 10–40 staff, who sell to larger manufacturers and win work on reliability rather than price.
Write the version that makes you slightly uncomfortable with how narrow it is. Narrow doesn’t reduce your market — it makes your marketing legible to the part of it that matters. You will still take the work that comes in from outside it.
2. Why you rather than the obvious alternative?
Not your values. Not “quality and service” — everybody says that, so it says nothing.
The test: could your closest competitor put your sentence on their website without lying? If yes, it isn’t a differentiator, it’s table stakes.
Good answers are usually specific and slightly costly to say out loud: a published price, a guarantee with teeth, a genuine specialism, a named person who does the work, a process nobody else bothers with.
3. Where will these people find you, and in what order?
Pick two or three channels, not eight. This is where most plans fail — they list everything, so nothing gets done properly, and doing five channels badly loses to doing two well every single time.
Choose by where your buyers actually are and how they buy:
- They search when they need you (trades, professional services, B2B suppliers) → local SEO and your website first, Google Ads second. SEO → · PPC →
- They need to know you exist before they need you (considered purchases, longer sales cycles) → content and email. Content marketing → · Email →
- They buy visually or impulsively (retail, hospitality, consumer services) → social and paid social. Social media →
- They buy on trust and reputation (high-value B2B) → referrals, case studies, LinkedIn, events, PR.
Then write what actually happens in each. Not “improve SEO” — “a page for each of our six services, written by the end of March“. A plan you can’t fail is a plan you can’t follow.
4. What does good look like, and when will we check?
One number per channel, and a date. Enquiries a month, cost per enquiry, email list size, quotes issued, conversion rate. Whatever the channel is actually for.
And a review date in the diary — monthly for paid, quarterly for everything else. Not because reviews are virtuous, but because the plan you don’t check is the plan you’ve abandoned without noticing.
What it costs, so you can budget it
Rough guidance for an established SME, and everyone’s mileage varies:
- A common benchmark is 5–10% of turnover on marketing, higher if you’re growing hard or entering a new market, lower if you’re established with strong referral flow. Treat it as a sanity check, not a rule.
- Split it roughly 70/20/10: 70% on what’s already working, 20% on improving it, 10% on genuine experiments. Most businesses put 100% into either “what we’ve always done” or “the new shiny thing”, and both are expensive mistakes.
- Include the doing, not just the media. A £500 monthly ad budget with nobody to manage it and no landing page behind it will underperform £300 spent well.
The bit nobody writes down: what you’re not doing
Add a fifth line to your one page: “This year we are not doing…”
Not TikTok. Not the exhibition. Not the rebrand. Not the podcast someone suggested.
Writing it down does two things. It stops the same conversation recurring every six weeks, and it makes the plan an actual decision rather than a wish list. Strategy is mostly the things you’ve said no to.
How I do this
The first thing I do with any client is a Deep Dive — properly inside the business: customers, competitors, numbers, history, what’s been tried. The problem you tell me about is rarely the problem costing you money, and that’s what this stage is for.
Then the plan. Not forty slides — a working document that says what we’re doing, in what order, what it costs and what it’s built to achieve.
It’s available as a standalone piece of work at £350 a day, typically three to five days depending on the size of the business. You keep the audit, the strategy and the roadmap whether or not we go any further, and plenty of people take it away and run it themselves. That’s a legitimate outcome and I’d rather you had a plan you executed than a retainer you resented.
Common questions
What should be in a small business marketing plan?
Four things: who you’re targeting specifically, why they should choose you over the obvious alternative, which two or three channels you’ll use and what you’ll actually do in each, and how you’ll measure whether it’s working. One page is enough. Anything longer tends to be written to be presented rather than used.
How much should a small business spend on marketing?
A common benchmark is 5–10% of turnover, higher when you’re growing or entering a new market. More useful than the percentage is the split: roughly 70% on what’s already working, 20% on improving it, 10% on experiments — and remember to budget for someone to do the work, not just the media spend.
How often should you review a marketing plan?
Monthly for anything with money going out daily, such as paid advertising. Quarterly for the plan as a whole. Annually you should be willing to change the strategy itself, not just the tactics. Put the dates in the diary when you write the plan, or they won’t happen.
Do I need a marketing strategy or just marketing?
If you’re spending under a few hundred pounds a month and one channel is clearly working, get on with it. Once you’re spending real money across more than two channels, or you can’t explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, you need the strategy — otherwise you’re buying activity rather than customers.
How much does a marketing plan cost?
Agencies typically charge £2,500–£7,500 for a strategy piece. I do it as a standalone Deep Dive at £350 a day, usually three to five days, and you keep everything whether or not we work together afterwards.
Start with the diagnosis, not the tactics
Tell me what you think is wrong and I’ll tell you honestly whether I agree. Thirty minutes, no pitch. Quite often the answer is smaller and cheaper than expected, and I’d rather say so.
