Notes for owners · Digital marketing
How to create a monthly digital marketing plan
A monthly digital marketing plan fits on one page: the enquiry target, the budget split, what gets published, who does it, and the review date.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
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A monthly digital marketing plan is one page with five things on it: the enquiry target for the month, the money split by channel, the specific work that will be published or launched, the person responsible for each item, and the date the results get reviewed. Anything longer gets written once and never opened. Most small businesses have activity instead of a plan, which is why nobody can say at month end whether the spend worked.
Start with the enquiry number, not the activity
Work backwards from the business. If the sales team needs 24 orders this month and roughly one in six qualified enquiries becomes an order, the plan needs about 144 qualified enquiries. If your existing channels produce 100, the plan has to find 44 more, and that number decides everything else on the page.
Two cautions. Use qualified enquiries, not all enquiries, or you will plan for volume you cannot sell to. And use your own conversion rate from your own records, not an industry figure, because the difference between one in four and one in ten changes the budget entirely.
If you do not have the data, spend the first month building it: every enquiry logged with source, date, first reply time and outcome. That record is worth more than the plan itself.
What goes on the page
| Section | What it contains | How long it should take to read |
|---|---|---|
| Target | Qualified enquiries needed, split by channel | One line |
| Budget | Money by channel, with last month next to it | Six lines at most |
| Foundations | Website, page or tracking work being done this month | Three lines |
| Publishing | What gets written or made, with dates and owners | Six to eight lines |
| Campaigns | What is being launched, paused or changed, and why | Three lines |
| Sales side | What marketing needs from sales, such as reply time or feedback on lead quality | Two lines |
| Review | The date, and the five numbers that will be looked at | One line |
One page. If it needs a second page, the month has too much in it.
The order of work inside a month
Week one is for foundations and setup. Anything that makes everything else work better: a page that was missing, tracking that was broken, the Google Business Profile, the enquiry form. Launch campaigns at the end of this week, not on the first.
Weeks two and three are for publishing and running. The articles, the pages, the creatives, the emails. This is also when you look at early campaign numbers and cut the obviously poor performers rather than waiting for the month to end.
Week four is for review and the next plan. Pull the numbers, write the five lines of what happened, and decide next month's target and split. Do this in the last week rather than the first week of the next month, or you lose a week.
The common failure is to launch everything on the first and look at it on the thirtieth.
Which five numbers to review
Keep it to five and look at the same five every month.
Qualified enquiries by channel, against the target. Cost per qualified enquiry by channel. First reply time, because a channel's quality is judged on outcomes and outcomes depend on how fast someone called. Enquiries that became orders, by channel, even if the order lands next month. And one leading number for whichever channel you are building, such as search impressions or profile calls.
Reach, impressions, likes and followers are inputs. They can sit at the bottom of the sheet if someone wants them, but they do not belong in the decision.
A worked example
For example, imagine a firm in Bengaluru selling modular kitchen work to homeowners, with four sales people and a target of eighteen orders a month at an average of around ₹3.5 lakh. The details and figures below are illustrative.
One in eight qualified enquiries closes, so the plan needs roughly 144 qualified enquiries. Search and the Google Business Profile currently produce about 90. The gap is 54.
The page reads like this, on an illustrative budget of ₹1.6 lakh:
- Budget: ₹95,000 to paid search on high-intent terms such as modular kitchen price, and modular kitchen in specific localities; ₹35,000 to social with a price band stated; ₹30,000 to photography of two completed kitchens
- Foundations: a page for each kitchen layout type, and the enquiry form cut from nine fields to four
- Publishing: two articles, one on what decides modular kitchen cost in Bengaluru and one on what to check before finalising a vendor, plus eight photographs of completed work for the profile
- Campaigns: pause the display campaign that produced forty enquiries and no orders last month
- Sales line: every enquiry called within fifteen minutes during working hours, with the sales head marking each one qualified or not, so next month's plan is built on real data
Review lands on the 28th, on the five numbers. The shape of the page is the part worth copying.
What to do next
Write next month's plan on one page before the month starts, beginning with the number of qualified enquiries your sales team needs. If you cannot calculate that number from your own records, make building that record the first item on the plan. If you want help setting the target, the split and the review rhythm, tell us what you need.
