A digital marketing strategy is a decision written down: who you are trying to win as customers, which channels will reach them, how the budget is divided between those channels, and how you will know within a few months whether it is working. I write it from your own sales, spend and analytics data, so it reflects how your business actually wins customers rather than general advice.
You get the strategy, a budget split by channel and month in pounds, and a 90-day plan saying what happens in what order and who does it. It is a defined project with an end point; who carries it out is a separate decision.
What a strategy settles, and what changes for you
Without one, marketing decisions get made one supplier at a time. The SEO agency asks for more content, the ads freelancer for a bigger budget, the social media manager for more posts, and each is judged on a report it wrote itself. Nobody compares the cost of a customer across all of them, so the budget drifts towards whoever argues best.
A written strategy gives you one view instead: a single cost per customer that every channel is judged against, and a record of which channels you are leaving alone and why. When a supplier proposes something new, you can measure it against the plan rather than against their enthusiasm.
Who it suits, and who it does not
A strategy engagement is built for:
- Founders with an established offer who have tried several channels with mixed results and want to decide where to concentrate before spending more.
- In-house marketing teams that need an outside view and a budget case a finance director or board can follow.
- Businesses about to make a larger commitment, such as a first marketing hire, a new agency or a move into a new part of the UK.
- Companies whose marketing is spread across several suppliers with no shared target.
It is the wrong starting point in three cases. If you have not settled who you sell to and why they should choose you over the alternatives, work on your brand positioning first, because no channel plan rescues an unclear offer. If you already know which channels you need and want them run against a single cost-per-lead target, performance marketing across your paid channels gets you there faster. And if the business is only weeks old, my guide to the first 90 days of marketing a new business covers most of what you need for now.
What the strategy covers
A baseline of where customers come from today
I start with what has already happened. GA4, Search Console, the ad accounts, your CRM or sales records and the notes your team keeps when someone phones all go into one picture: enquiries, sales and cost per sale by channel over the past year. I also record where the data cannot be trusted. Often the most useful early finding is that nobody can say which channel produced last month’s customers.
Who buys, and how they decide
Next comes the customer: who buys, what prompts them to start looking, how long they take to decide and who else has a say. A homeowner with a leaking boiler and a finance director comparing payroll software behave in entirely different ways, and the channels follow from that. Where people already search for what you sell, most of the job is being found at the moment they look. Where they do not yet know they need you, the plan has to create that interest, which is slower and usually costs more per customer. Your enquiry history, search data and the people who answer your phones show which situation you are in.
What a customer is worth, and what you can pay to win one
This is the section most marketing plans skip. From your prices, margins and how often customers come back, I work out the contribution margin on a typical sale and the most you can spend acquiring a customer before the sale stops paying for itself. That figure, your affordable customer acquisition cost, becomes the yardstick every channel is measured against. My LTV and CAC calculator runs the same comparison if you want to check the arithmetic yourself.
The channel mix and the budget split
With the baseline and the affordable cost in hand, I set out the channel mix: which of organic search, paid search, paid social, email, partnerships and the rest receive money and time, and which are parked for now. Each funded channel gets a monthly budget in pounds, the result it is expected to produce and the point at which it would be cut back or given more. Where your own history is thin, expected costs come from published UK figures such as my UK cost-per-click and cost-per-lead benchmarks, labelled as estimates until your data replaces them.
On most small and medium budgets, my recommendation is fewer channels run properly. If the choice comes down to Google or to Facebook and Instagram, my comparison of Facebook Ads and Google Ads sets out how I decide.
A measurement plan
The strategy names the few numbers that will judge it, typically enquiries or sales, cost per customer and the share of enquiries that become paying customers, and says where each one is recorded. If tracking is unreliable, repairing it goes first in the 90-day plan. My guide to testing whether your conversion tracking works is a quick way to find out before we speak.
The 90-day plan
Everything ends in a 90-day plan: the tasks in order, the owner of each one (you, your team, a supplier or me), what each task needs and the dates for reviewing results. Ninety days is long enough to launch, gather data and make one round of changes, and short enough that the plan is still accurate when you reach the end of it. A full year planned in that detail is usually out of date by the second quarter.
How I run a strategy engagement
- Scoping call. We go through the business, what has been tried and what decision the strategy needs to support. If it is a good fit, I send a written proposal with the scope, timing and fee in pounds.
- Access and figures. You give me read-only access to analytics, Search Console, the ad accounts and any records of where customers came from, plus prices and approximate margins, which I treat as confidential.
- Conversations with the people who sell. Short calls with whoever handles enquiries, because they hear why people buy and why they walk away.
- Analysis and draft. I build the baseline, cost model and channel plan, and send a draft with my reasoning shown so you can challenge it.
- Working session. We test the assumptions against what you know and agree the budget split.
- Final documents and handover. The finished strategy, budget and 90-day plan, and a handover call with whoever will carry out the work.
What a UK strategy has to allow for
Some decisions in a UK plan are set by law and the calendar as much as by marketing, so they go in from the start.
- Consent and missing data. Advertising cookies need consent under PECR, and many sites also hold analytics back until the visitor agrees. The plan estimates how much that hides, so a lower reported figure is not mistaken for a fall in performance.
- Who you can email. PECR lets you email existing customers about similar products under the soft opt-in, but emailing individuals who have never bought from you needs their consent. That decides whether email mainly wins customers for you or keeps them.
- VAT on ad spend. Budgets show VAT separately, because the difference matters to a business that is not VAT-registered and cannot reclaim it.
- The UK calendar. Demand moves around dates that differ by sector: the 31 January Self Assessment deadline for accountants, the end of the tax year on 5 April for financial advisers, January for gyms, September for schools and training providers, and Black Friday and the Christmas posting dates for online shops. The budget is phased month by month to match.
- Sector rules. The CAP Code, enforced by the ASA, applies to every advertiser and has detailed rules on health, beauty and weight-loss claims; financial promotions also fall under FCA rules, and solicitors’ advertising under the SRA’s. The plan rules out channels and messages that would breach them before money is spent.
- Local or national reach. A business serving a few London boroughs needs a different plan from one selling across the UK. For a local business, local SEO and the Google Business Profile often deserve the first share of effort, because they reach people already searching nearby.
Strategy mistakes I see most often
- A small budget spread across every channel. Each channel gets too little to produce a clear result, so after six months nothing can be judged. Two channels with enough money behind them will teach you more in a quarter than six with a few hundred pounds each.
- Channels judged on their own dashboards. Google Ads, Meta and GA4 each count conversions their own way, and added together they often claim more customers than the business won. The plan names one source of truth, usually the CRM or the sales records.
- Copying a competitor. A competitor’s heavy spend on one channel shows what they can afford, not what works for them, and their margins may look nothing like yours.
- Tasks with no owner. Plans often assume someone in the business will write case studies, film videos or chase reviews, and nobody has the time. Every task in my plans has a named owner and a realistic time allowance.
What you receive
- The written strategy, with the reasoning and sources behind each recommendation.
- A budget spreadsheet by channel and month in pounds, with VAT shown separately and the thresholds for cutting or increasing each channel.
- A measurement plan: what is counted, where, and how often it is reviewed.
- The 90-day plan, task by task, with owners and dates.
- A handover call with whoever will carry out the plan.
Everything is in plain English for the people who will decide from it, and the documents are yours to share with your team or any supplier.
What it costs
The fee depends on how many channels are in scope, how usable your data is and how many people I need to speak to. A single-site business weighing two or three channels is a much smaller job than a multi-site company with an in-house team and several agencies. After the scoping call you receive a written proposal with the fee in pounds, before any work starts. Ad spend is a separate cost, paid to the platforms on your own account.
Next step
Send me a short message through the contact page with your website, the channels you use now and roughly what you spend each month. I will reply to arrange the scoping call, and if something smaller than a full strategy would do the job, I will tell you that instead.