Somewhere in your downloads folder there’s a marketing plan template you filled in about a third of.
A digital marketing plan you’ll actually use is six sections long, fits on one page, and every single line names a person, a number, or a date. It’s a schedule with money attached, not a document about your business. If a line doesn’t change what somebody does next week, it isn’t a plan line.
That’s the whole standard, and it disqualifies most of what plan templates ask you to write.
There’s also one line in it that decides whether you ever open the thing again, and it isn’t the goal.
What Makes a Digital Marketing Plan One You Open Again
Run every line through four questions. If a line can’t answer all four, it belongs in a different document.
- Who does it? A name, not a department. In a business of three people, “marketing” is not a name.
- When does it happen? A day of the week or a date, not “ongoing”.
- What does it cost? In dollars per month and in hours per week, because hours are the resource you’re actually short of.
- What number is it accountable for? One number, and one you can find without asking anybody.
Take a line most plans contain: “Improve our social media presence.” It has no owner, no date, no cost, and no number. Now take the version that survives the test: “Jorge posts twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, 45 minutes total, and we don’t hold it accountable for anything.”
The second one is honest, which is why it works. It admits that organic social isn’t going to carry the business, and it puts a small, real amount of time against it instead of pretending it’s a growth channel.
One section of a standard template fails all four questions at once, and it’s the section people spend a whole afternoon on.
Three Things to Settle Before You Write a Word
These are inputs, not sections. A plan can’t produce them for you, and trying to work them out inside the plan is why plans stall halfway.
- Who you sell to, specifically enough to choose a channel. Not “homeowners aged 25 to 55”. Something closer to “people who own a house built before 1970 and just discovered the wiring is knob and tube.”
- What one job or sale is worth, and at what margin. Everything downstream is arithmetic on this number. Without it you can’t tell whether a $120 lead is a bargain or a disaster.
- Whether the basics are in place. If your phone doesn’t get answered, your site takes nine seconds to load, or nothing is tracked, a plan will faithfully spend money into a hole. The conditions that have to be true before any channel works are worth checking before you allocate a dollar.
If you’re stuck on number one or two, that’s a real signal, and it’s not a planning problem. It usually means the question you’re facing is whether you’re missing a strategy or missing the hours to execute one, which has a different fix.
How to Write a Digital Marketing Plan, Section by Section
Six sections. Aim for one page. If it runs to three, you’ve started writing analysis.
1. The one number
One business outcome, with a figure and a deadline. Not three. One.
“Twelve new roof jobs a month by April” is a plan goal. “Increase brand awareness” is not, because nothing you do on Monday can be checked against it. Work backward: if you close one in four estimates and one in three leads books an estimate, twelve jobs means about 144 leads a month, and now you know what the rest of the plan has to produce.
2. The channels you’re actually running
Two or three. Occasionally four. Almost never more, and the reason is arithmetic rather than focus.
Every paid channel has a working minimum below which it can’t function. Meta’s delivery system needs roughly 50 optimization events in seven days per ad set before it stops guessing, and Google’s Smart Bidding wants at least 15 conversions in 30 days for Target ROAS. Split a $2,000 monthly budget across four channels and each one gets $500, which in most local service categories buys too few conversions for any of them to clear its own floor.
Two fed channels beat four starved ones, and that’s a measurable difference rather than a philosophy. Write down the channels you’re running and, just as importantly, the ones you’re deliberately not running this quarter.
3. The money, per channel
A single marketing budget number is useless. Break it down per channel, and split each one into cash and hours.
The widely quoted guideline is that small businesses spend about 7 to 8 percent of gross revenue on marketing, which is a reasonable starting bracket rather than a rule. Whatever number you land on, allocate it line by line, and include the software. A $50 email tool and a $99 scheduling tool are a real $1,788 a year.
4. Who does what, and when
Every channel gets one name and one slot in the week. This is the section that turns a plan into a schedule.
Be honest about which jobs you can genuinely hold. Some marketing work reports back fast enough to learn from, and some fails silently while looking perfectly healthy, which is a different kind of job and belongs to somebody who does it daily.
5. The number each channel answers for
One number per channel, checked on a stated cadence. This is the section nobody writes and the one that makes the plan decidable.
Pick numbers you can actually pull yourself, without asking a vendor for a report:
- Cost per lead, straight off the ads dashboard
- Calls and direction requests from your Google Business Profile
- Pages published this month
- Click rate on your last email
Where a channel genuinely doesn’t have an honest number, write “none” rather than inventing one, then give that channel the smallest slice of time.
6. The review date and the kill rule
An actual date on the calendar, and a written rule for what makes you stop. Between them, these two lines decide whether the other five sections survive contact with a busy month.
A Filled In Plan for a Real Business
Take a local remodeling contractor doing about $600,000 a year, with two crews and an owner who has maybe four hours a week for this.
The one number: eight remodel jobs a month by the end of Q2, up from five. At a 25 percent close rate on estimates that’s 32 estimates a month, and if about two in three leads book an estimate, roughly 48 leads.
The channels: Google Ads, Google Business Profile and reviews, and website content. Deliberately not running: paid social, TikTok, email newsletters. Not because they’re bad, but because there aren’t hours for them this quarter.
| Channel | Cash per month | Hours per week | Who | When | Answers for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | $1,800 ad spend | 0.5 | Owner | Friday morning | Cost per lead under $150 |
| Google Business Profile and reviews | $0 | 1 | Office manager | Every job close | 15 new reviews a quarter |
| Website content | $600 writer | 1 | Owner briefs, writer drafts | Monday brief | 2 pages published a month |
| Tracking and tools | $130 | 0 | Set up once, outside help | One afternoon in March | Conversion tracking reports correctly |
| Organic social | $0 | 0.5 | Office manager | Tuesday | None, and that’s deliberate |
Total: $2,530 a month in cash, an hour and a half a week of the owner’s time and the same again from the office manager. That’s about 5 percent of revenue, inside the usual bracket, with room to raise the ad budget if the cost per lead holds.
The review date: the first Friday of every month, 30 minutes, same five numbers.
The kill rule: if Google Ads runs over $200 a lead for two months in a row, the budget halves and nothing goes back in until the landing page has been rebuilt and tested.
That’s the whole plan. It fits on one screen, and every line tells somebody what to do.
The Sections That Belong Somewhere Else
A SWOT analysis is the section that fails all four questions at once. It has no owner, no date, no cost and no accountable number, which is precisely what makes it a workshop rather than a plan section. Run one once or twice a year if you find it useful, and put only its output into the plan: usually a channel choice or a change in what you say. The grid stays in the workshop.
A standard template also asks for an executive summary, a market analysis, a competitive analysis and buyer personas. These are genuinely useful pieces of thinking, and none of them belongs in the document you open on a Monday morning.
- The executive summary exists for people who won’t read the plan. If nobody outside your business is reading it, it has no audience.
- Market and competitive analysis is research that should already have chosen your channels. Once it has, the analysis is history and the channel list is the output.
- Buyer personas matter enormously, and their proper home is your messaging rather than your operating plan. The plan needs just enough of the answer to pick a channel.
Keep whichever of these earn their keep. Keep them in a separate file, and let the plan be the page with the names and the numbers on it.
The Review Date and the Kill Rule
A date is what decides whether you open the plan again. Not a promise to review it, not “quarterly”, but a specific recurring appointment with a length attached: thirty minutes on the first Friday of the month, with the same five numbers pulled every time.
Thirty minutes is enough because the meeting has a fixed shape. Pull each channel’s number, write it beside last month’s, and ask one thing of each: better, worse, or flat. Three of the five will usually be flat, and flat is information rather than failure.
Then spend whatever time is left on the one number that moved, and only that one. A review that tries to improve everything improves nothing, and it runs long enough to get skipped the following month, which is how plans quietly die.
Everything else in a plan is written once. The review date is the only line that keeps working after the day you wrote it, which is why a plan without one becomes a document and a plan with one becomes a habit.
For the contractor above, February’s review takes about eleven minutes. Cost per lead came in at $138, under the $150 threshold, so nothing changes. Fourteen reviews landed against a target of fifteen a quarter, which is on pace.
Two pages published, on plan. Somebody submitted the website form himself to confirm the tracking still fires. Nothing crossed a kill rule, so the meeting ends and the plan goes untouched for another month.
March is where the plan earns its keep. Cost per lead comes in at $214, the second month running over $200, and the kill rule fires. The ad budget halves to $900 that day, and the $900 does not quietly move to another channel; it sits unspent until the landing page has been rebuilt, because moving it would hide the fault rather than fix it.
That’s the entire reason for writing the rule down in January. In March, with three months of effort behind the channel and crews who need work booked, nobody makes that call cleanly. In January it costs nothing to decide.
Write every rule as a threshold and a consequence: if this number passes that figure for this long, we do this.
Set the thresholds against each channel’s own clock, though. Paid search reports back in days, content in months, and judging every channel on the same timeline is how good long term work gets cancelled in week six.
Content is where kill rules get written badly. A page published in March can’t be judged in April, so a threshold like “cut content if it hasn’t produced leads in two months” just cancels the one thing on the plan with compounding returns.
Write the content rule against the input instead. If two pages a month stop being published for two months running, the problem is capacity rather than the channel, and the fix is to shrink the commitment to one page, not to abandon it.
Write the six sections, put the date in your calendar before you close the file, and you’ll have a plan that’s still true in March.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a digital marketing plan include?
Six things: one business goal with a number and a deadline, the two or three channels you’re running, the budget for each channel in both cash and hours, the person responsible for each channel and when they do it, the one number each channel is accountable for, and a review date with a kill rule. Anything else is analysis, and it belongs in a separate document.
How long should a marketing plan be?
One page for a small business. If it runs past two, you’ve started writing market analysis rather than a plan. Length is a useful warning signal: a plan gets long when it starts describing your business instead of instructing your week.
What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy?
The strategy is the decision about who you serve, what you offer them, and why they should pick you. The plan is the schedule that carries the strategy out: channels, money, people, dates and numbers. A strategy can live in your head; a plan can’t, because other people have to read it and act on it.
How much should a small business spend on marketing?
The widely quoted guideline is 7 to 8 percent of gross revenue for businesses under $5 million, and it’s a starting bracket rather than a rule. What matters more is that the number gets split per channel, that hours get counted alongside cash, and that the total is measured against what a job is actually worth to you.
How many marketing channels should a small business run?
Two or three, sometimes four. The limit is arithmetic rather than discipline: paid channels have working minimums, and a budget spread across four channels can drop every one of them below its own floor. Two properly funded channels usually beat four starved ones.
How often should I update my marketing plan?
Review the numbers monthly in about 30 minutes, and rewrite the plan itself once or twice a year, or whenever the goal or the budget genuinely changes. The monthly review isn’t a rewrite, it’s five numbers and a decision about whether anything crossed a kill rule.
Do I need a SWOT analysis in my marketing plan?
No. A SWOT is a thinking exercise that produces decisions, and it’s the decisions that belong in the plan. Run one if you find it useful, keep it in a separate file, and put only its output, usually a channel choice or a positioning change, into the plan itself.
What is a SMART goal in marketing?
Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. In practice, the acronym is a long way of saying your goal needs a number and a date on it. “Twelve roof jobs a month by April” passes; “grow the business” fails, because nothing you do this week can be checked against it.
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