A one-person marketing team rarely has a plan. It has a queue: the CEO’s idea from Tuesday, the sales team’s request for a brochure, a trade show in six weeks, and a website somebody says looks tired.
Ninety days is long enough to move one number and short enough that nobody loses interest.
Weeks 1 to 2: audit and baseline
The temptation is to start producing. Wait a fortnight. You cannot show progress in month three without knowing where you stood in week one.
Gather these and put them in one document:
- Enquiries. How many came in over the last three months, from where, and how many became customers.
- Website basics. Visits, top landing pages and form completions from your analytics. Queries and clicks from Google Search Console.
- Site health. Run an audit covering speed, mobile behaviour, accessibility, security and broken links. See how to read a website audit.
- Search gaps. What your market searches for that your site says nothing about.
- Existing assets. Email list size and how recently it was used, social accounts, case studies, sales documents, anything half-finished.
- Sales conversations. Talk to whoever sells. Ask what questions buyers raise, what objections come up, and why deals are lost.
Finish with a one-page baseline: a few numbers, the three biggest problems, the three best assets.
Pick one goal and one audience
One goal. Make it a commercial result that a CEO at a company your size cares about, written so that anyone could tell whether it happened. For example: “Increase qualified enquiries from the website from an average of ten a month to fifteen by the end of the quarter.” (Those figures are an illustration. Use your own baseline.)
Avoid goals such as “raise awareness” or “improve our social presence”. They cannot fail, so they cannot succeed either.
One audience. Choose the group most likely to buy, most valuable when they do, and easiest for you to reach. Describe them in a sentence: their job, their type of company, the problem that sends them looking.
For 90 days, every piece of work either serves the one goal or goes on the “later” list.
Get the CEO to agree the goal and the audience in writing before you go further.
The plan on a page
Copy this table and change the contents to fit.
| Period | Focus | What you do | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1 to 2 | Baseline | Gather numbers, audit the site, talk to sales | One-page baseline agreed with the CEO |
| Weeks 3 to 4 | Fix the path | Repair what blocks enquiries: forms, slow key pages, unclear service pages | A stranger can find, understand and enquire from a phone |
| Month 2 | Build | Create the core pages and content your audience is looking for | Planned pages are live and being indexed |
| Month 3 | Distribute and refine | Push content out through email, sales and one channel. Improve what is working | Goal measured against baseline |
| Week 13 | Review | Report results, decide what continues | Next 90 days planned |
Month 1: fix the path
Sending more visitors to a site that loses them is waste. Work from the audit, taking first whatever stands between a visitor and an enquiry: a form that fails on mobile, a key page that takes an age to load, a service page that never says what the service is. Then rewrite the three or four pages your chosen audience is most likely to land on, so each states plainly what you do, who for, and what to do next.
Also fix tracking. If you cannot count enquiries by source at the end of this month, you will not be able to prove anything at the end of the quarter.
Month 2: build
Now make the things your audience is searching for and not finding. Take the questions from sales and the gaps from your search research, and choose a few to answer properly. Four strong pieces beat twelve thin ones.
A sensible mix: one or two service or landing pages aimed at searches you have nothing for, two or three articles answering real buyer questions, and one piece of proof such as a case study.
Month 3: distribute and refine
- Send it to your email list, in more than one email.
- Give the sales team links and a line on when to use each.
- Pick one outside channel where your audience really is, and post consistently there.
- Look at what is getting traffic and enquiries. Improve those pieces, and stop worrying about the ones that are not.
A weekly rhythm
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Monday, first hour | Check the numbers. Choose the three things that must be finished this week |
| Tuesday to Thursday | Two protected blocks of two hours for plan work. No meetings, no inbox |
| Friday, last half hour | Note what was finished, what slipped and why. Send the CEO three lines |
| Monthly | A one-page update against the goal |
Three lines every Friday (done, next, blocked) is how a CEO comes to trust that the plan is moving.
What to measure
Keep to a handful of numbers, recorded weekly in a plain spreadsheet.
- The goal number. Qualified enquiries, or whatever you chose.
- One or two leading indicators. Signs that arrive earlier than the goal: visits to your key pages, search impressions and clicks for your target topics, form starts.
- A quality check. Ask sales monthly whether the enquiries are the right kind.
Ignore follower counts. Be honest with the CEO about timing too. New pages can take weeks or months to earn search traffic, so month two may look flat. Say that at the start, not as an excuse at the end.
What to say no to
A plan for one person is mostly a list of things not being done. Decide these in advance:
- New social channels.
- A rebrand or a full website redesign, unless the audit shows the site is beyond repair.
- Events that do not reach your one audience.
- One-off requests with no link to the goal.
- Any new tool that has not earned its place. See the AI tool stack worth having.
Wording that tends to work: “Happy to do that. It would push back [specific item] in the plan we agreed. Do you want me to swap them, or shall I put it on the list for next quarter?” Keep a visible “later” list as well.
Where AI drafts and where you decide
| AI drafts or sorts | You decide and check |
|---|---|
| Summarising call notes into themes | Which audience and which goal |
| Grouping search queries into topics | Which topics are worth a page |
| First drafts from your outline and notes | The argument, the examples, the facts |
| Variations of subject lines and titles | Which one sounds like you |
| Reformatting an article into an email or posts | Whether it is good enough to publish |
| A first pass at the monthly report | What the numbers mean and what to do next |
The pattern on the right is judgement, which is the part that stays with you. Anything published under your company’s name should be read, corrected and approved by a person who knows the business. That is what human in the loop means.
Week 13
Stop and report. One page: the goal, the baseline, the result, what worked, what did not, and what you propose for the next 90 days.
If the first fortnight is the part you lack time for, our Website Audit and Search Visibility report cover the site health and search gap steps, with a person checking the findings before you get them.