You will be able to set up a 90-day cycle with weekly checks and a monthly review that ends in a decision.
A marketing plan does its job only when you look at it on a regular schedule, and the schedule needs as much thought as the plan itself. If you leave too long between checks, a problem can carry on for months before you see it. If you look too often, you start responding to noise, meaning short-term rises and dips, such as a single week's figures, that are too unreliable to base a decision on.
Run the plan in cycles of roughly 90 days, which is about one quarter. Most channels need that long before a trend appears. When you add new photos and collect fresh reviews on a Google listing, it takes weeks before the listing starts appearing more often. With a monthly broadcast, you need at least two or three sends before you can judge whether replies are going up. One poor week says almost nothing about a channel, and one month on its own can give you the wrong idea.
A quarter is also short enough to leave room to change direction, so a failing channel can only waste a limited amount of your time and money. Many small businesses already plan in blocks of this size, around school terms and seasonal peaks. GST-registered businesses also file GST quarterly.
The bigger decisions come at the end of each cycle, and Lesson 7.3 deals with them. In the weeks between, two regular checks keep the plan on track: a weekly check and a monthly review.
The weekly check takes fifteen minutes, once a week, always at the same time. It answers two questions.
The first question is whether the work in the plan got done. Check that the broadcast was sent, the photos on Google were refreshed, and each enquiry got a reply within a day. Many plans that seem to be failing are plans where the work simply stopped, say in week four, without anyone noticing. When the planned work has not happened, that week's numbers say nothing about whether the channel works.
The second question is how your leading numbers moved. These come from Lesson 6.2: your enquiries, the calls that come from your listing, and replies to your broadcast. Write them down in one place each week, whether that is a spreadsheet, a notebook or a phone note, so you can read the weeks next to each other. Judge them by the direction they have moved over several weeks, because one week's figure is too noisy to act on.
Use the same record for things outside your business that can shift the numbers. Examples are school holidays, festive seasons, a competitor running an opening sale, or a rainy month if you have a weekend market stall. With these noted down, the monthly review can tell the effect of your own changes apart from the effect of events around you.
The weekly check has two jobs: spotting work that slipped and logging numbers. Leave the plan itself alone at this stage. If anything looks seriously wrong, note it for the monthly review. Real faults are the exception. Fix a broken link or wrong opening hours the same day.
The monthly review takes an hour, once a month. Bring three things: the weekly numbers, the month's lagging numbers (orders, new customers and revenue), and your one-page plan.
Start by comparing the results with your goal and asking whether you are on pace to reach it. Suppose the plan calls for 27 enquiries a month and 19 came in. If there is a shortfall, work out where it came from, channel by channel and week by week.
Finish by picking a single change. It could be a fresh broadcast message, a different offer on your Google listing, or moving hours from one channel to another. Write it on the plan with the date next to it.
Mei Ling's case shows why you make only one change. She owns a small business and has written a marketing plan. Three weeks after writing it, she had a slow week, with two enquiries instead of her usual eight. She panicked and changed four things at once. She rewrote her Google listing, changed her broadcast message, posted a discount and asked her nephew to start a TikTok account. The following week, enquiries were back to nine. She has no way of knowing which change worked, whether any of them did, or whether the slow week was just the start of the school holidays. Her four changes produced one result, and nothing tells her which change caused it.
One change a month can feel slow, but it is the only way to find out what works. If you change several things in a month and results go up, you cannot tell which change did it, so you cannot repeat it. If results drop after several changes, you do not know which one to reverse.
While you test the change, hold everything else steady: keep the same channels, the same posting rhythm, the same offer and the same budget. Many people find this the hardest habit to keep. Holding steady does not mean ignoring outside events. They move your numbers too, so they go into your weekly record, and the review can take them into account.
Pick times for these reviews that you will actually keep, even if they are not the most convenient. A fifteen-minute check done every Friday gives you more information than an hour-long review that keeps getting moved. In each calendar entry, write the numbers you will look at, so you do not have to remember them on the day.
Mei Ling has booked her next cycle like this:
Every Friday at 4pm, a fifteen-minute weekly check covering WhatsApp enquiries, calls and messages from Google, broadcast replies, and whether the planned work happened. The first Monday of each month, three times in the quarter, a one-hour monthly review covering confirmed orders against the goal, the weekly numbers, and one change to try. At the end of the quarter, a longer session for the continue, change or stop decisions from Lesson 7.3.
Now open your own calendar and add your weekly check, your monthly reviews and your end-of-quarter review, at times you'll keep. In each entry, write the numbers you'll look at.
Put your weekly check and three monthly reviews for the next 90 days into your calendar, and note the numbers you will look at each time.
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