I have read a lot of annual marketing plans written for companies with 10 to 50 employees. Most of them were thorough, well formatted, and completely unused by March. Somebody spent two weeks on the document, presented it, and then the year happened to everybody instead.
The plans that get used share a property. They fit on one page, and the people responsible can say what is on the page without looking at it.
Why the long plan never gets read
Three reasons, and they compound.
Nobody has time to reread 40 pages. A plan only works if it changes what somebody does on an ordinary Wednesday. To do that it has to be in their head. Forty pages does not fit in anybody's head, so the plan lives in a folder and decisions get made without it.
Length hides the decisions. A long plan describes many things and commits to few. Ten pages of market analysis and audience research feel substantial, and then the section that says what we will actually do is a bullet list of every channel. Nothing has been chosen, which means nothing has been decided, which means the plan has done no work.
It goes stale fast. A detailed twelve-month plan assumes you can predict month nine, which nobody at a 30 person company can. When reality diverges in month four, the whole document becomes suspect and people stop consulting it. A one-page plan states the direction, so it survives a change in tactics.
The long plan does have one honest use. If you are raising money or reporting to a board that requires it, write it. Then write the one-page version for the people doing the work.
The six things the page must contain
Six questions, and one to four sentences each. If a section needs more than four sentences, you have not finished thinking about it.
1. Who we sell to. The specific kind of company and the specific person inside it. "Operations managers at food manufacturers in the Lower Mainland with 40 to 200 staff" is a target. "B2B companies that value quality" is not, because it excludes nobody. Include who you are choosing not to serve this year, because that is what makes it real. Working this out properly is its own exercise and worth the time.
2. What we are claiming. The one thing you want that buyer to believe about you, in a sentence they would repeat. Not your tagline. The argument. "We are the only shop in the region that does the millwork and the installation with our own crew, so nobody points fingers when something goes wrong." If you cannot write one sentence here, the rest of the page is decoration. A clear message is the part everything else hangs on.
3. Where they find us. Two or three channels, chosen, with the reason. Not the list of everything available. If your buyers search Google when a machine breaks, that is one channel. If they hear about you from an engineering firm that specifies your product, that referral relationship is a channel and deserves deliberate work. Naming three and doing them properly beats naming eight and touching each one monthly.
4. What we will spend. A yearly number, split roughly across those channels, including the cost of people's time. A plan without a number is a wish list. Include the hours, because an owner spending six hours a week on marketing is spending real money whether or not it appears in a budget line.
5. Who does it. A human name next to each channel. Not a department, not a placeholder, not "we." If the same name appears next to five things, the plan is fiction and you have found that out in November rather than April.
6. How we will know it is working. Two or three numbers you will actually look at monthly, with a starting value written down today. Qualified enquiries per month is usually the honest one. Website visits is usually the comfortable one. Pick the honest one.
Setting a target that is not a fantasy
Most annual targets are set by taking last year's number and adding a percentage that sounds ambitious in a meeting.
Work backwards from your own arithmetic instead. Start with the revenue you need from new business, divide by your average deal size to get the number of deals, divide by your close rate to get the number of qualified opportunities, and divide by your enquiry-to-qualified rate to get enquiries. Now you have a monthly enquiry number that is connected to something.
Do this and one of two things happens. Either the number is achievable, and you now know what has to be true each month. Or the number is absurd, which is more useful, because it tells you in January that the plan requires a change in deal size, close rate, or expectations rather than more effort on the same activity.
If you do not know your close rate or your average deal size, that is the first project of the year. A target set without those numbers is guessing with extra steps.
Be honest about the lag as well. If your sales cycle runs four months, marketing you start in January produces revenue in May at the earliest. A twelve month plan that expects twelve months of results from twelve months of activity is wrong by a third. Picking the right measures keeps this visible instead of producing a panic in March.
What to leave out
Everything that makes the document look professional and changes nobody's behaviour.
Leave out the competitor grid. You know who you lose to, and a table of feature checkmarks has never changed a decision at a small company. Leave out the audience personas with invented names and stock photographs. Leave out the swimlane diagram of the customer journey. Leave out the three-year vision, which is not a marketing plan.
Also leave out anything you have no intention of starting this year. Every small company plan I read contains a line about a podcast, a webinar series, or a rebrand that nobody touches. Those lines cost you credibility, because when the team sees three things on the page that obviously will not happen, they treat the rest of the page the same way.
If something is genuinely a maybe, put it in a note below the page titled not this year. That is a real decision and it stops the idea from coming back every month.
Writing it in one sitting
This takes 90 minutes, not two weeks.
Put the owner, whoever runs sales, and whoever does the marketing work in a room. Three or four people. Any more and you get a document written by committee that commits to nothing.
Go through the six questions in order and write the answers on a screen everyone can see. Force the sentence limit. When a section sprawls, that is the section where the group has not agreed, and the argument is the valuable part of the meeting.
Expect to get stuck on question two, what we are claiming. Most groups discover in that moment that three people in the room describe the business differently. Better to find that out in a planning session than in a proposal.
Print the finished page. Put it where people work. A plan in a shared drive is a plan nobody opens.
Reviewing it quarterly
Four times a year, 45 minutes, same people, four questions.
What happened to the numbers? Compare the two or three measures against the starting values you wrote down. No narrative yet, just the figures.
What did we say we would do and not do? The honest audit. Usually two of the three channels got attention and one was quietly dropped. Say so and decide whether to restart it or remove it from the page.
Has anything changed that makes the page wrong? A lost major client, a new competitor, a capacity problem. If the answer is yes, change the page rather than pretending.
What is the one thing for next quarter? One, not five. A small company changes one thing well per quarter.
Rewrite the page if it needs rewriting. It is one page. That is the whole point of it being one page.
The takeaway
Book 90 minutes with three people, answer six questions in four sentences each, and print the result. Who we sell to, what we claim, where they find us, what we spend, who does it, how we know.
Set the target by working backwards from your close rate and your average deal size. If you do not have those numbers, getting them is the first job of the year.
A page that six people remember will beat a document that two people read once. The value was never in the writing. It was in the six decisions.