Small Business Marketing Strategy: 90-Day Plan Template
Most small business owners I meet are not short of marketing ideas. They are short of a plan. One week it is a Facebook ad, the next it is a flyer drop, the next it is a half finished blog post that never gets published.
That is not a strategy. It is a series of guesses, and guesses cost money. A proper small business marketing strategy is not complicated, but it does need structure, and it needs someone to actually follow it week by week.
I have spent 18 years building and fixing marketing for small businesses, most of them here in Derbyshire and across the East Midlands. In that time I have seen the same pattern over and over. Owners who try to do everything at once burn out and get nowhere. Owners who follow a sequence, foundations first, then demand, then loyalty, start seeing results within 90 days.
This post gives you that sequence. It is a genuine 30-60-90 day template you can follow without a marketing degree or a big budget, broken into three phases that build on each other. By the end you will know exactly what to do in month one, month two and month three, and why the order matters.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
Before you start a 90 day plan it helps to know where you are actually starting from. Run your business through the BIG12 Scorecard and get a free breakdown of your strengths and gaps across all 12 pillars.
Take the free BIG12 ScorecardWhy most small business marketing strategies fail in the first 90 days
I can usually tell within ten minutes of talking to a business owner whether their marketing has a plan behind it or not. The giveaway is always the same. They can tell me what they did last week, but not what they are doing in six weeks' time.
Most small business marketing strategies fail for one of three reasons. They try to fix everything simultaneously instead of in sequence. They chase tactics before fixing foundations, so leads land on a website or Google profile that cannot convert them. Or they never get to the third phase at all, because nobody built in the bit about keeping customers once they have been won.
The plan below fixes all three. It follows the order I use with every OYM client, built around our BIG12 framework: get found first, then get leads, then get loyal. Skipping a phase does not save time. It just means you redo it later, usually at a worse moment.
| Phase | Focus | Key actions |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1 to 30 | Get found | Website fixes, local SEO, Google Business Profile, local directories |
| Days 31 to 60 | Get leads | Lead generation offers, social media, AI visibility, staying ahead of algorithm changes |
| Days 61 to 90 | Get loyal | Brand consistency, partnerships and influencers, CRM and follow-up, test and measure |
Days 1 to 30: get found
The first month of any small business marketing strategy has to be about visibility. There is no point generating leads if the place those leads land cannot be found, or does not look trustworthy once they get there.
Week 1: fix your website basics
Start with your website. Check it loads in under three seconds on mobile, has a clear phone number and contact form above the fold, and actually says what you do and where you do it within the first line someone reads. I still see Derbyshire businesses with homepages that never mention a location at all.
We did exactly this for a legal sector client who came to us with a tired, slow site. Once we rebuilt the structure and the on-page basics, their web traffic grew roughly tenfold over the following months. That did not happen through a single big change. It happened through getting the basics right first.
Week 2: sort your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a potential customer sees before your website. Claim it if you have not, fill in every field, add real photos, and ask your last ten happy customers for a review this week. For a local service business this one task alone can move the needle faster than almost anything else.
Week 3 and 4: local SEO and directory presence
Work through SEO basics specific to your area. Make sure your business name, address and phone number are identical everywhere online, get listed in relevant local directories, and start a short list of local search terms people actually type when looking for a business like yours in Derbyshire or the wider East Midlands.
This is also the point to think about local marketing more broadly. We worked with Etta Plumbing, based in Osmaston on the edge of Derby, on exactly this kind of foundation work. Within months they were ranking on page one for "plumbers Derby" and "plumbers near me", backed by a 53% improvement in their overall SEO score and more than 30 local blog posts supporting it.
Every Derbyshire business I have worked with that skipped the foundations ended up paying for leads that bounced off a broken website. Fix what people land on before you spend a penny driving them there.
— Stuart Baddiley
Days 31 to 60: get leads for your small business marketing strategy
With the foundations in place, month two is where you start actively generating demand. This is the phase most owners want to jump to on day one, and it is also the phase that fails hardest without the first 30 days behind it.
Week 5 and 6: build a proper lead generation offer
Lead generation works best when you give people a reason to raise their hand before they are ready to buy. That might be a free guide, a quick assessment, a discovery call, or a simple quote tool. Whatever it is, make it specific to your industry and easy to act on in under two minutes.
We built a staged lead generation sequence like this for Balance and Beam, and their weekly enquiries went from 3 to 32, a 500% increase, once the offer and the follow-up were both working properly. That is not an overnight result. It is what a focused six-week push looks like when the groundwork is already done.
Week 7: get active on social media
Pick two social media channels where your actual customers spend time, not every platform at once. Post consistently, show real work and real people, and use local hooks where they fit naturally. Croots Farm Shop in Duffield built this up to over 3 million social media impressions in a single year, and it started with a consistent weekly rhythm, not a viral moment.
Week 8: get ahead of AI and algorithm changes
Two things are moving faster than most small business owners realise right now. Search engines increasingly surface AI generated answers before a traditional results list, and the platforms you post on keep shifting what they reward. Budget half a day this week to check how your business shows up when someone asks an AI assistant about businesses like yours, and stay aware of algorithm changes on whichever channels you rely on. Avon, one of our longer standing clients, now holds page-one positions for 2,500 keywords, built through consistently adapting rather than chasing every new trend.
A focused 90 day plan compounds
Balance and Beam went from 3 to 32 weekly enquiries, a 500% increase, once their lead generation and follow-up were built properly within a structured plan like this one.
See how lead generation worksDays 61 to 90: get loyal
The final month is the one most small business marketing strategies skip entirely, and it is usually the most profitable 30 days of the whole plan. Winning a new customer is expensive. Keeping one is not, if you build the right systems.
Week 9: tighten your brand consistency
Look across your website, social profiles, invoices and any printed material. Is your brand presentation consistent, or does it look like three different businesses stitched together. A consistent brand builds the kind of trust that turns a one-off customer into a repeat one.
Week 10: explore partnerships and influencers
You do not need a celebrity. A genuine local partnership, a joint offer with a complementary Derbyshire business, or a small influencer marketing collaboration with someone your customers already trust can bring warm referrals that convert far better than cold outreach.
Week 11: put a CRM and follow-up system in place
If you are still tracking enquiries in your head or a notebook, this is the week to stop. A simple CRM and a basic follow-up sequence means nobody who shows interest ever falls through the cracks again. Inn Farm Dairy saw a 366% increase in daily revenue after tightening exactly this kind of follow-up and conversion process.
Week 12: test, measure and plan the next 90 days
Finally, sit down with the numbers. What worked, what did not, and what should change going into the next quarter. Test and measure is not a one-off task, it is the habit that turns a single good 90 days into a repeatable growth engine. AEGIS Engineering built this discipline into their marketing and saw a 51% increase in yearly sales as a result.
How this 90 day plan maps to the BIG12 framework
If you look back over the three phases, you will notice they are not random. Days 1 to 30 cover the Get Found cluster of our BIG12 framework: website, SEO, Google and local marketing. Days 31 to 60 cover Get Leads: lead generation, social media, AI and algorithms. Days 61 to 90 cover Get Loyal: brand, influencer marketing, CRM, and test and measure.
That is not a coincidence. The 30-60-90 structure in this post is simply a time-boxed route through the full 12-pillar framework we use with every OYM client, which you can explore in full on our 12 pillars page. Once you have been through all three phases once, the plan does not stop. You go round again, deeper each time, which is exactly what we teach through our online marketing training.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
Score your business against all 12 BIG12 pillars for free and see exactly which phase of this plan you should start with.
Take the free BIG12 ScorecardThe challenge is never learning. It is doing.
Reading a 90 day plan is easy. I could hand this exact template to ten different Derbyshire business owners and get ten different results, because the gap is never the knowledge. It is finding the time each week to actually do the work, consistently, while running the rest of the business at the same time.
That is the real reason I started Optimise Your Marketing. Not because small business owners do not understand marketing, but because they do not have the hours in the week to execute a plan like this properly while also running their business. Eighteen years of doing this work has taught me that a plan without someone accountable for running it rarely survives past week three.
If you want this 30-60-90 structure built around your actual business, rather than a generic template, that is exactly what we do.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
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