You do not need a forty-page document. A useful marketing plan for a small business fits on one page and answers five things: what you want to achieve, who you are trying to reach, which one or two channels you will actually use, what you will spend, and how you will know whether it worked. That is it. Everything else is a marketing department writing to justify a marketing department.
The template is at the bottom of this page, filled in and blank. The five sections before it explain what goes in each box and why.
What Is a Marketing Plan, Actually?
A marketing plan is a decision about where your limited time and money go. That is the whole thing.
The reason most small business marketing plans never get written is that people imagine the wrong document. They picture market analysis, competitor matrices and a positioning statement, feel appropriately overwhelmed, and go back to posting on Facebook occasionally and hoping.
What actually helps is much smaller: writing down what you are trying to achieve and what you have decided not to do. The second half is the important one. Without a plan you end up doing a bit of everything badly, because every channel sounds plausible when someone is selling it to you. A plan is mostly permission to say no.
You are also in good company on the fundamentals. business.gov.au lays out six steps for a marketing plan: research your market, position your business, set your goals, outline your strategies, set your budget, and keep it up to date. They provide a free template as well. What follows is a compressed version aimed at an owner with an hour, not an afternoon.
What Should a Marketing Plan Include?
1. Your Goal
One goal. Specific, with a number and a date.
“Grow the business” is not a goal. “Ten new enquiries a month by December” is. The number does not need to be scientific, it needs to be checkable. SMART goals, the standard framing on business.gov.au and elsewhere, is just a way of saying specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Prompt: by [date], I want [number] of [thing], up from [current number].
If you do not know your current number, that is your actual first task, and it will take you twenty minutes.
2. Your Audience
Not “everyone in Perth”. One kind of customer, described specifically enough that you would recognise them.
The most useful version of this is not demographics. It is the problem they have and the moment they decide to do something about it. A conveyancer’s customer is not “people aged 30 to 50”. It is someone whose offer just got accepted and who has been told they need one by Friday.
Prompt: my best customers are [type], who come to me when [trigger], and choose me because [reason].
If you have existing customers, this is a memory exercise, not research. Look at the last ten good ones.
3. Your Channels
Pick one or two. Write down the rest and label them “not now”.
Match the channel to the audience and goal. If people search for what you do, that means SEO or Google Ads. If what you sell is visual and discovery-led, that means social. If you serve a local area, your Google Business Profile and reviews come before either.
The single most common failure I see is five channels running at ten percent effort. Two channels at full effort will beat it every time.
Prompt: I will focus on [channel one] and [channel two]. I am deliberately not doing [list] this year.
4. Your Budget
A rough figure you can commit to monthly without flinching.
A common rule of thumb is a percentage of revenue, and you will see figures between roughly 5% and 10% quoted widely for established small businesses. Treat that as a sanity check rather than a rule, because it breaks at both ends: a new business with no revenue would spend nothing, and a business with a huge margin can justify far more.
More useful for most owners: what is a customer worth to you, and how many can you handle? If a customer is worth $2,000 and you want four more a month, spending $1,000 a month to get them is obviously fine. Work from that direction.
Also budget time, not just money. Two hours a week is a real commitment and belongs in the plan.
Prompt: I will spend $[amount] a month and [number] hours a week.
5. Your Measurement
Decide now how you will know, because deciding later turns into arguing with yourself.
For most small businesses the honest measure is enquiries and where they came from. That means asking every caller how they found you and writing it down. It is unsophisticated and it beats most analytics dashboards, because it captures the word-of-mouth and the “I saw your van” that no tracking will ever attribute.
Prompt: I will check [metric] every [frequency], and I will judge this working if [number] by [date].
Set the review interval before you start too, and make it quarterly rather than weekly. Marketing checked weekly gets abandoned, because almost nothing moves in a week and the absence of movement feels like failure. Three months is long enough for something to have actually happened and short enough that you have not wasted a year on the wrong channel.
A Note on Being Wrong
Your first plan will be partly wrong. That is not a problem with the plan, it is how this works.
The value is not in predicting correctly. It is in having written down what you expected, so that in three months you can tell the difference between “this is not working” and “this has not been going long enough”. Without a written expectation, every channel feels simultaneously promising and disappointing, and owners tend to abandon things right before they start producing, or persist with things that were never going to work.
Give a channel a fair run, decide in advance what a fair run is, and then actually make the call at the end of it.
The One-Page Template
Here it is filled in, for a fictional Perth business, then blank.
Filled Example: A Two-Person Landscaping Business in the Northern Suburbs
| Section | What they wrote |
|---|---|
| Goal | By 31 March, 8 quote requests a month for full backyard renovations, up from 3. |
| Audience | Homeowners in Joondalup, Duncraig and Hillarys with tired backyards, who decide after a summer of not using the space, and choose us because we show real local jobs. |
| Channels | Google Business Profile and reviews, plus Instagram with before-and-after photos. Not doing: Google Ads, letterbox drops, TikTok. |
| Budget | $300 a month plus 2 hours a week. Mostly photography and boosting the best posts. |
| Measurement | Count quote requests monthly and ask every caller how they found us. Working if 8 a month by March. |
Notice what is not in there. No positioning statement, no competitor analysis, no brand values. It fits on one page and every line is a decision.
Notice also how specific the audience line is. Three named suburbs rather than “Perth”, a stated trigger, and a reason they choose this business over another. That specificity is what makes the channel choice obvious afterwards: once you know your customer is a homeowner staring at a tired backyard in February, Instagram photos of finished local jobs stop being a guess and start being the clearly correct answer. Most plans fail at the channel line because the audience line above it was too vague to decide anything from.
Blank Version
Copy these five lines somewhere you will see them. A note on your phone is fine.
| Section | Fill this in |
|---|---|
| Goal | By [date], I want [number] of [thing], up from [current number]. |
| Audience | My best customers are [type], who come to me when [trigger], and choose me because [reason]. |
| Channels | I will focus on [channel one] and [channel two]. I am deliberately not doing [list]. |
| Budget | I will spend $[amount] a month and [number] hours a week. |
| Measurement | I will check [metric] every [frequency]. This is working if [number] by [date]. |
Set a reminder to look at it once a quarter. That review is the part that makes it a plan rather than a note.
If filling in a line stops you, that is information rather than a failure. A goal you cannot put a number against usually means you are not tracking something you should be. An audience line you cannot make specific usually means you have not looked closely at who your good customers actually are. Both are worth an hour on their own, and both make everything downstream easier.
Free Help That Is Genuinely Free
Two Australian resources worth knowing about, neither of which is trying to sell you anything.
business.gov.au has a free marketing plan template and an interactive tool that walks you through market, goals, channels and budget.
If you are in WA, the Small Business Development Corporation offers free, confidential advice from actual small business advisers on 133 140, plus free workshops, templates and regional offices around the state. It is a genuinely underused service and it costs nothing.
I would use both before paying anyone, including me.
When It Is Worth Getting Help
If you can fill in the five lines above, you probably do not need a strategist. Go and execute for six months.
It is worth a conversation in two situations. The first is when you keep writing plans and never executing them, which is usually a capacity problem wearing a strategy costume. The second is when you genuinely cannot decide between channels because the trade-offs depend on things you cannot see, like what your competitors are doing or what the search demand actually looks like in your area.
If that is you, talk it through with me for fifteen minutes. It is free, and often just saying the five lines out loud to someone else is enough to unstick the decision. If you want it done properly, that is what a marketing strategy session is, and it produces exactly the one-page output above, filled in with real numbers for your business.
Questions Owners Ask Me About Marketing Plans
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a small business marketing plan include?
Five things: one specific goal with a number and a date, a clear description of the customer you want, the one or two channels you will focus on and what you are deliberately not doing, your monthly budget in money and hours, and how you will measure whether it worked.
How much should I budget for marketing?
A common rule of thumb is 5% to 10% of revenue for established businesses, but it is only a sanity check. More useful is working out what a customer is worth and how many more you can handle, then deciding what it is worth spending to get them.
Do I really need a marketing plan?
You need the decisions in one, which is not the same as needing a document. The value is in choosing one or two channels and writing down what you are not doing. Without that, most small businesses do a bit of everything badly.
What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy?
Strategy is the thinking: who you serve, how you are different, where you will compete. The plan is what you will actually do about it, by when, with what budget. Small businesses generally need a light strategy and a specific plan, not the reverse.
How often should I update it?
Look at it quarterly. Change it when something real changes, such as a channel clearly not working after a fair run, or your capacity shifting. Rewriting it monthly usually means avoiding execution.
