A one-page marketing plan for the owner of a company with fewer than twenty staff

A twelve-person company has little time to read a marketing plan. A one-page plan for a company with fewer than twenty people has six parts and a budget line: the goal, the buyer, the offer, three channels with owners, one thing to stop, and a weekly check. If it does not fit one sheet, it is a wish list, not a plan. Print it, put it where the whole team sees it, and mark it up as numbers come in.

Why a small company needs the sheet to be this short

In a company of twelve, the owner is also the salesperson, the buyer of stationery and the person who answers the angry customer. A twenty-page plan goes into a drawer. A single sheet gets read, argued over and corrected.

The sheet also forces a choice. You cannot fit eleven channels onto it. Three is about what a small team can run without any of them going slack. Our longer note on how to create a marketing plan for a small business walks through how to fill the blanks one at a time. This post gives you the sheet itself and adds the check you do every week.

The sheet

Copy this layout onto one page. The example below it shows it filled in.

GOAL (next 90 days)     ___ enquiries and ___ orders from ___ (area or segment)
BUYER                   Who, where, what they buy us for, what makes them decide
OFFER                   What we sell them, from what size or price, what we do not do
CHANNEL 1 / OWNER       What we do / who / how we judge it
CHANNEL 2 / OWNER       What we do / who / how we judge it
CHANNEL 3 / OWNER       What we do / who / how we judge it
STOP                    One thing we are stopping to make room
WEEKLY CHECK            Day, who, three numbers, one decision
BUDGET                  Rupees per channel, and the cap

Keep each box to two or three lines. If a box needs a paragraph, you are still deciding.

A filled-in sheet: a sheet-metal job-work unit in Faridabad

For example, take a fourteen-person unit in Faridabad doing sheet-metal fabrication for auto-component makers. The figures are invented for illustration.

Look at what is absent: no social media, no brand film, no new website. They may come later. Right now the sheet puts effort where an order is closest.

Say the first month ends with 4 enquiries and one small order, and two of the old quotes revived but not yet won (still invented). The directory calls did drop, as the sheet predicted, and the owner has to resist putting the listing back. That is the sheet working: the check shows exactly which row is behind.

How to choose the three channels

Pick one channel that reaches people who already want what you sell, such as search or a listing. A second should work your existing contacts: old quotes, past buyers, referrals. The third is in person or by phone. That suits a business with few, named buyers. For a business with many small buyers, swap the third for an advertisement or a marketplace.

The test for a channel is whether you can name the owner and the number it will produce. A channel without an owner is off the plan. A channel without a number is a hobby. Read the sheet once more as a competitor would: if any row could sit unchanged on their sheet, it is a slogan, and you should rewrite it.

The weekly check

This is what turns a plan into a habit. Choose a day, a person and fifteen minutes. Look at three numbers: enquiries received, quotes sent, orders won, each by channel. Then ask one question: what is the one change before next week?

The decision matters more than the numbers. "Chase the five open quotes" is a decision. "Keep monitoring" is not. If the same decision appears three weeks running, the channel or its owner needs changing, not the wording. Write the decision at the bottom of the sheet and tick it off at the next check. When a quarter ends, the sheets are your record, and they feed into a quarterly review that changes the next quarter.

What to do when the sheet will not fill

If you cannot write the buyer box, you do not know who buys from you. Take the last ten orders. Who signed? What did they ask first? Why did they choose you? If the offer box is vague, the problem is the offer, not the marketing. Our guide to a messaging framework on one page helps with that.

When a one-page plan is not enough

Skip this format if you have several product lines selling to different buyers, multiple branches, or a team of marketers. Each line needs its own sheet, and the owner needs a layer above them. And if there are no records of enquiries at all, start with the record: you cannot judge a plan without numbers.

Fill it in one sitting

Write the sheet in a single sitting, show it to each person named on it, and hold the first check before the week is out. If the three channels turn out to need more than your team can run, marketing and digital marketing strategy is the service that sets the plan, and the marketing section holds the related posts. To describe your own case, tell us what you need.