a 30 day marketing plan template for founders, not new hires

search for a 30 day marketing plan template and page one is two kinds of page. one is a social media calendar: a post a day for a month, sorted by platform. the other is a 30 60 90 day plan for someone who has just been hired as a marketing manager and needs to show their boss what they will do. neither is written for a founder with a product and no marketing team.

this is the version for that founder: what a 30 day marketing plan needs in it before the calendar, a template you can copy, and what underway now does to write one for you from your own site, your own numbers and your own episodes.

what goes in a 30 day marketing plan before the calendar

a month of posts with no message behind it is a month of noise. the calendar is the last page of the plan, not the first. before it come four short things, each a few lines, never a page.

• who it's for: the first group of buyers, in a few words, a line on where they are and what stops them, and two or three signs one is ready to buy.
• a positioning statement: for who, who need what, your product is the one that does this. unlike the main alternative, it does that.
• the messaging: one line each for the headline, the problem, the solution, the proof and the call to action, and three or four things to keep saying.
• where to spend the effort: four to six channels in order, the first one marked start here, each with why it suits these buyers and what to do there.

only then the month itself.

a 30 day marketing plan template for a founder

four weeks, a theme each, three or four things to do each week. every task is one concrete thing, starts with a verb and could be done by you this week.

• week 1, foundation: write the positioning statement and put it on your homepage. tell the story of why you built it, once, on the channel you start with. list the three searches your buyers make.
• week 2, seeding: post on the first channel every day for a week. answer five people asking about the problem, without pitching. ask three customers what they used before you.
• week 3, search: write one page that answers a search your buyers already make. turn your best week 2 post into a short video. ask five customers for a review.
• week 4, double down: keep the channel that brought the most visits and drop the weakest. write next month's plan from what the numbers say.

the trick most templates miss is the last task. the plan is only worth writing again if the next one starts from what this one taught you.

why the plan should start from your own numbers

a generic plan picks channels from a list. yours should pick them from what is already working. search console shows the searches your site already shows up for and the pages people land on. google analytics shows where your visits come from. if a third of your visits come from one place already, that place is probably week 2, and a template cannot know that.

what underway does now

your marketing brief, on promote, now writes this whole plan for you, and it is laid out as documents rather than a page to read. it is on every plan, the free start included.

• it asks first, one step at a time, and every step has do it later: your website, where you post (x, linkedin, instagram, youtube, tiktok), google search console and google analytics. both google connections are read-only.
• while it writes, a live log shows what it is doing: the pages it read, each search it made for what your buyers use instead, the numbers it read from google, the quotes it checked against your episodes.
• it hands back documents, rows in one white list, each with a coloured mark, that open below themselves: who it's for, positioning, messaging, where to spend the effort, your next 30 days, who else they look at (with each one's logo), how you sound, the product, and what it couldn't tell.
• your next 30 days is four weeks of tasks you tick off as you go, with a bar for how far through you are.
• every line comes from what it read. a call to action is one your site already makes, and an offer you do not make is never written in.
• every part has correct this, and what you correct stays as you wrote it when the brief is written again each month.

the brief lives in promote, the shop window beside the diary. none of it reaches your interviews: the questions you are asked on camera come from your day, never from a positioning statement.

the phone has the same setup, the same live log and the same documents, under promote.

faq