A small-business marketing plan fits on one page, in seven blocks: the business goal, the customer, the promise, three chosen channels, budget per channel, a quarterly calendar, and four numbers you track. Anything longer than a page will not be re-read, and a plan nobody re-reads steers no decisions. The full template is below; it copies into a blank document in about forty minutes.
One rule separates a working plan from a document written for show: every block must contain a number or a proper noun. General intentions cannot be checked the following January.
The template, block by block
1. Business goal. Not a marketing goal. “Move from $1.8M to $2.2M in sales in 2027, $300,000 of it from new customers.” Marketing is a means; the goal lives in the financial statements. Without this block, none of the other six can be settled.
2. Target customer. One line, lifted from your profile sheet. “General contractors, 8 to 30 employees, Greater Montreal, projects above $200,000.” The full method is in defining your ideal customer.
3. Promise. One sentence your competitor could not write identically. It is the fifth decision in brand identity, and it is copied here rather than reinvented.
4. Three channels, not five. One that brings people in, one that converts them, one that brings them back. For a Quebec service business the most common combination is local search, a service page that converts, and an email newsletter. A fourth channel gets tested, not planned.
5. Budget per channel. In dollars, monthly, not percentages. The usual benchmark is 5 to 10% of revenue while growing and 2 to 5% while holding; splitting it across channels is covered in allocating your marketing budget, and Quebec market rates in what web marketing costs in Quebec.
6. Quarterly calendar. Four lines, one per quarter, one priority each. In Quebec the seasonality is too sharp to ignore: agency searches spike in September and again in January. The breakdown is in seasonal marketing in Quebec.
7. Four tracked numbers. Visitors, enquiries, quotes, contracts — the four stages of the sales funnel. Recorded on the first Monday of each month, in the same file, so comparison is possible.
Every block needs a number or a proper noun. Otherwise it is not a plan.
What to keep out of it
No twelve-page market analysis: it will be stale by June and nobody will have read it. No list of tactics without a budget beside each one — a tactic with no dollars attached is a wish. No SWOT grid: that exercise belongs to an annual strategy session, not to the document steering the quarter.
And above all, no fifth or sixth channel. The reason is arithmetic: a company with $3,000 a month spread over six channels puts $500 everywhere, which is below the effectiveness threshold of every one of them. Three channels at $1,000 produce measurable results; six at $500 produce six disappointing reports.
The quarterly review, in thirty minutes
A frozen annual plan is wrong by March. The quarterly review is three questions. One: did the four numbers move in the right direction? Two: was the budgeted money actually spent — the most revealing question of the three, because a small company’s marketing budget is the first thing frozen when a job goes sideways. Three: is there a channel to cut?
Cutting a channel is the most profitable decision and the least often taken. A channel that has produced no identifiable enquiry in two quarters does not need more time: it needs to be stopped, and its budget moved to the one that works.
Who writes the plan
The owner writes blocks 1, 2 and 3: those are company decisions, not marketing decisions. Blocks 4 to 7 can be written with an outside partner, but they must stay readable by the owner without translation. A plan only the supplier can read is a plan that leaves when the supplier does.
For a company between $2M and $5M in revenue with nobody in-house to hold the plan and execute it, that is exactly the role of a fractional marketing director: $60,000 a year, one point of contact, execution included. And if you want to frame the envelope before talking about execution, the marketing budget guide sets the benchmarks by company size.
If you would rather fill the seven blocks together with your real numbers in front of you, book the diagnostic call. You leave with the page filled in, whether or not we work together afterwards.