How to Create a 90-Day Marketing Plan

It's always a good idea to take time throughout the year to evaluate how well your marketing plan is doing and consider changes which might improve its overall effectiveness. Try something new. Rather than creating a one-year marketing plan or a five-year marketing plan, try a 90-day marketing plan.  

The Benefits of a 90-Day Marketing Plan

While longer plans have their place, 90-day plans offer some major benefits:

• You can use it to track short-term progress. 
• The data you gather over that 90-days can be used to create a baseline to more effectively track your larger plan. 
• A 90-day plan enables a more agile response:
  • If something is not working, address it and change it quickly without worrying that it will affect your annual plan. 
  • Smaller time blocks allow you to stay in tune with change and meet market demands, without detouring from your master goal. 
• Your master plan will not become irrelevant because your 90-day goals will continue to drive it forward with a greater vision of the finish line. 
• If your business is new you can chunk your 90-day marketing plan into 30-day segments to create an action plan: Learn (1–30 days), Construct (31–60 days) and Prioritize (61–90 days).  

What better time to get started than today? Revamping your marketing plan and building out a workable strategy often ignites a new excitement about the business which can easily get lost in the paperwork and busyness of day-to-day duties. 

Steps to Creating a Plan

Ready to get started? Find a quiet place, sit down, and spend some time evaluating and answering the following questions: 

• What marketing approaches worked well for the business in the past six months? 
• What marketing approaches worked well, but could have been more effective in the past six months? 
• What marketing in the last 12 months didn't work well at all? 
• The marketing done in the last 12 months that performed well did so because: 
• The marketing done in the past 12 months that failed did so because:  
• In the next 90-days, I define my target market as:
  • Will I change the geography of my target?
  • Will I target a different income level or demographic of consumers?
  • Will I target product-oriented users, service users, or both?  

Integrate online content strategy into your 90-day strategy as well. Draft content ideas and social media posts which will help drive traffic and capture leads and/or sales. Identify the number of pieces of content you will post each week to determine how many content generators you will need.  

• In the past six months, my consumers could be defined by the target market as _______
• What marketing vehicles will I use, in the next 90-days and why? 
• I need to work on enhancing, concentrating or revising my marketing message by _______ 
• Marketing budget for the next 90-days will be: _______

Chart the answers to these questions on a 90-day timeline. Set your start date, your end date, and specific execution steps in between. Evaluate weekly how your plan is working; tweak here, adjust there, when necessary. 

A solid, functioning marketing plan is vital. Diligence with an eye toward optimizing valuable marketing dollars is best—and most easily—achieved by tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns as they roll out. Armed with a list of 90-day objectives, you'll have a realistic working plan, a clearer picture of priorities, and the ability to better control the results you generate.