90-day planning templates for marketing

Our 90-day planning template recommends a structure and process to continuously improve and optimize your digital marketing

How will this template help me and my business?

The power of 90-day planning for digital marketing is that it gives you focus on a manageable period to plan and implement strategic initiatives identified in your annual plan within a more practical period than 30-days.

For example, for ‘always-on’ digital marketing activities, to set up structured experiments to improve your home page or update an email nurture sequence is likely to take longer than a few weeks to analyze, plan and implement, particularly in larger organizations where discussion and sign-off can be extended.

Promotional campaign activities can also be scheduled using this template.

Some agencies and businesses prefer to work in shorter 30-day / monthly periods to enable a more dynamic approach and show value to clients more rapidly. If you work in this way you can still apply the Smart Insights RACE planning activities we describe in this template format.

Who is the template for?

It's designed for those involved with implementing digital marketing strategies and plans including:

Digital marketing managers, marketing managers or project managers in a business
Account managers and project managers in a business implementing improvements for clients

What does the template include?

This template is in two parts with tables for mapping...

1. Your objectives for the next 90-days against marketing activities

This table helps companies focus on activities which boost sales through optimization activities that should be completed every month, but after often neglected due to a focus on campaign activities like price promotions which are planned separately.

The aim is to give a one or two-page summary of SMART objectives which gives clarity on a manageable number of initiatives you will work on in the 90-day period to boost performance.

We provide an example template for a business followed by a blank template covering the 25 core RACE activities to consider.

2. Commercial 90-day planning defining targets for KPIs

This table gives an example of a simple conversion model which helps give you a commercial focus on specific objectives for each quarter. This shows how your campaign and always-on activities will improve sales.

Annual marketing or digital marketing plans are a regular part of the annual budgeting process. But annual plans have the weakness that they don’t readily translate to operational plans that can be used to manage and project plan different marketing activities. This is where 90-day or quarterly planning can help. It’s a “half-way house” between annual planning and weekly or monthly operational planning.

These simple templates show how you can manage continuous improvements to your marketing and ‘always-on’ digital marketing by focusing on 25 defined activities across the Smart Insights RACE customer lifecycle.

Resource Details

Author: Dr Dave Chaffey and Chris Soames, formerly Managing Director of Agency First10
Format: 15 page A4 Word document structured around the Smart Insights RACE planning framework with examples for you to amend to create your plans
Most recent update: Updated example and blank template updated with 25 core activities within the RACE framework.

About the authors:

Dr. Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey Dave is co-founder of Smart Insights. He is editor of the 100 templates, ebooks and courses in the digital marketing resource library created by our team of 25+ Digital Marketing experts. Our resources used by our premium members in more than 80 countries to Map, Plan and Manage their digital marketing.

For his full profile, or to connect on LinkedIn or other social networks, see the About Dave Chaffey profile page on Smart Insights. Dave is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing.

Chris Soames

Chris Soames

Chris Soames is a Smart Insights blogger and consultant, he has worked in digital marketing for over 6 years with the last few years managing international web strategies for a leading travel brand. Now the Commercial Director at First 10, an Integrated marketing agency, he helps clients get clarity on their marketing strategy and create campaigns engineered to engage with their consumers to help drive sell-through. Most of all, Chris enjoys working with talented people who want to create great (& commercial) things not just tick boxes.