A one-page marketing plan for a small business, with a free template

Most marketing plans fail in the same way. Someone writes forty pages, everyone agrees with them, and nobody opens the file again.

One page gets round that. It is short enough to write in an afternoon, short enough to pin above a desk, and short enough to check every month without a meeting. What it gives up in detail it makes up for in being used.

What follows is the template we would give a small business that has never had a plan: eight boxes, in the order you fill them in. They are also on a single printable page, free to download. If you are still deciding whether you need a plan at all, start with do you need a digital marketing strategy?, which sets out the signs and the thinking behind each section. This page is the working sheet.

The eight boxes

1. Where we are now. Last year's enquiries and sales, and where they came from. Not a feeling; a count. List your last 20 customers, how each found you and roughly what each was worth, and the pattern usually jumps out. If you cannot say where enquiries come from, write that down. It becomes the first job in box 7.

2. Who we are for. Your best customers, described so a stranger could spot one. What they buy, what problem sent them looking, and how they choose between you and the alternatives. Pick the customers you want more of, not everyone you have ever served.

3. What we say. One sentence: what you do, for whom, and why you rather than someone else. If it takes a paragraph, keep cutting. We wrote a whole piece on explaining what you do in one sentence, because every other box depends on this one, and a messaging framework if you want to settle the rest of what you say.

4. The goal. One number and one date. "Twenty more enquiries a quarter by the end of March" can be checked. "Grow the brand" cannot. If you are tempted to write three goals, you have not chosen yet.

5. Channels. Two or three at most, each with a single job. Your Google Business Profile to be found by people nearby. Email to bring past customers back. One paid channel to fill a gap, if the numbers support it. Everything else waits. Spread across too many places and you tend to do none of them well.

6. Budget. Money and hours, both. Hours are the budget small businesses forget, and the one that runs out first. For the money, work up from your own numbers rather than a percentage from a survey; we show how in how much to spend on marketing.

7. The next ninety days. A list of jobs in order, each with a name against it and a week. The first job fixes the biggest gap you found in box 1. Ninety days is long enough to see something happen and short enough that the list stays honest.

8. How we will know. Two or three numbers, checked on the same day each month: usually enquiries, where they came from, and how many became customers. If enquiries are not being tracked, box 7 starts there; our guide to the five GA4 reports you need covers the website side.

A worked example

To show how the boxes fit together, here is a plan for a made-up business: a bathroom fitter in Surrey, two people and a van, doing well enough but with enquiries that come and go. Every figure below is invented for the illustration.

Notice what is missing. No social media calendar, no brand refresh, no list of twelve tactics. The plan picks one gap, the January slump from new customers, and aims three channels at it. If it works, the next plan builds on it. If it does not, box 8 will show that within a quarter, not a year.

Box 5 leans on the Business Profile for a reason: for a local business it costs nothing but time. Our Google Business Profile guide covers setting it up properly, and marketing for small local businesses looks at the other channels a local firm can use.

Keeping it alive

Put the plan somewhere you will see it. Then, once a month, spend twenty minutes on three questions: did we do the jobs in box 7, what do the numbers in box 8 say, and does anything in boxes 2 to 6 need to change? Every ninety days, write the next list of jobs.

Resist rewriting the whole thing every month. A plan that changes every time you look at it is a to-do list, and a to-do list will always fill up with whatever feels urgent.

Where the evidence is thin

• One page against forty. We know of no published study comparing small businesses with short marketing plans against those with long ones. The case for one page is practical, not proven: a plan that is used beats one that is not.
• Benchmarks for your numbers. What a good enquiry rate or conversion rate looks like depends heavily on the trade, the price and the area. We have not found a reliable UK source for small businesses, which is why the template asks you to start from your own figures.

If you would rather have someone build the plan with you, our 90-day marketing plan is a fixed £2,500: where your marketing money goes now and what it earns, a budget split channel by channel, and a ninety-day plan with the jobs in order.