Marketing program sample: a worked ninety day programme, filled in
A complete example you can copy, with owners, weekly actions, budget split and the numbers reviewed every Monday.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 13 October 2026
A marketing programme is the operating document, not the strategy document. It names the objective, the buyer, the offer, the channels, the person who owns each line, what that person does every week, how the budget splits across the lines, and the five numbers reviewed every Monday. Below is a complete worked sample for an invented company, filled in rather than left as blanks, so you can see what each line looks like when somebody has actually made the decisions. Copy the structure and replace the content.
The difference between a plan and a programme is the difference between deciding and running. A plan can be right and sit in a drawer. A programme has an owner per line and a meeting that happens whether anyone has good news or not.
The sample company
Marlow Instruments is invented for this example. It is not a real company. It sells calibration services to manufacturing plants, has nine staff, two of whom touch marketing, sells through a quote following a site visit, and competes against two larger national firms and several one person operators.
The programme, filled in
| Line | What Marlow wrote |
|---|---|
| Objective, ninety days | Twelve qualified site visit requests a month from plants within a three hour drive, up from five |
| Who we are selling to | Maintenance managers at plants with 50 to 400 staff, who hold the calibration schedule and get audited on it |
| What they are afraid of | Failing an audit because a certificate is out of date, and a line stopping while they wait for an engineer |
| The offer | A free calibration schedule review, delivered as a one page document within five working days of a site visit |
| Why us, in one sentence | We publish our engineers' response times and our accreditation scope, and we work weekends at no premium |
| What we will stop doing | The monthly newsletter nobody opens, and the trade show stand that produced no quotes last year |
The channel lines
| Channel | Owner | Weekly action | Share of budget | Measure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search, organic | Priya, marketing lead | Publish or rewrite one page answering a maintenance manager's question; check Search Console on Friday | 25 percent, mostly a freelance writer | Impressions and clicks on the service pages |
| Search, paid | Priya, with an external specialist monthly | Read the search terms report, add negatives, check cost per enquiry | 35 percent | Cost per qualified enquiry |
| Local and listings | Dan, operations | One review request after every completed job; keep the profile and service areas current | 5 percent | Reviews received, calls from the profile |
| Direct outreach | Dan | Twenty named plants researched, five first emails, five follow ups | 10 percent, tooling only | Replies and meetings booked |
| Referral and partners | The owner | One conversation with an equipment supplier or industry body | 5 percent | Introductions received |
| Proof assets | Priya | One customer story or published data point per fortnight | 20 percent | Assets live, and whether sales use them |
Six lines is the practical limit for a team of two. Every additional line halves the attention the others get, which is why the stop list above is part of the programme rather than an afterthought.
The ninety day sequence
| Weeks | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 and 2 | Baseline recorded: current enquiries by source, current positions for the ten queries that matter, current conversion rate on the two service pages. Tracking fixed so every enquiry gets a source. Nothing new launched yet |
| 3 and 4 | The two main service pages rewritten around the audit fear and the response time claim. Paid search live on a narrow keyword set with the free review as the offer. Review requests start |
| 5 to 8 | One new page a week. Outreach cadence running. First customer story published. First monthly read of cost per enquiry, and the keyword set tightened on what the search terms report shows |
| 9 to 12 | Double down on whichever line produced the cheapest qualified enquiry. Cut or pause the weakest line. Write the next ninety days from the numbers rather than from the plan |
The Monday meeting, thirty minutes
- Qualified enquiries last week, by source. One number per channel line.
- Did every line's weekly action happen? Yes or no, no explanations in the meeting.
- Cost per qualified enquiry on the paid line.
- One thing we learned from a customer conversation.
- One decision: what changes this week.
Thirty minutes is enough when the agenda is fixed and the numbers are already in the document before the meeting starts.
The stop rules, agreed in advance
- A paid campaign that has spent a month at more than twice the target cost per enquiry gets paused, not optimised again.
- A channel line whose weekly action is missed three weeks running is either reassigned or removed from the programme.
- Any asset nobody in sales has used within a month stops being made.
Agreeing these before the programme starts is what stops the quarterly review turning into an argument about effort.
How to adapt it to your business
- Keep the objective to one sentence with a number and a date. Awareness is not an objective because nobody can tell you on Monday whether it moved.
- Name a person per line, never a team. Shared ownership means the line stops quietly.
- Write the weekly action as a verb, small enough to finish in an afternoon.
- Split budget by share rather than by amount at the planning stage, so the shape of the programme survives a budget change.
- Put the stop list on page one. A programme that only adds work fails in week six.
This page covers the operating document and a filled in example of it. For the strategic decisions that come before it, the five questions on one page, see the marketing plan template. For the competitor work that informs the offer line, see competitor analysis.
The marketing program sample questions worth an answer
What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing programme?
The plan holds the decisions: who you sell to, what you offer, why you win. The programme holds the execution: channels, owners, weekly actions, budget split and the review. You need both, and the programme is the one that goes on the wall.
How long should the document be?
Two pages. The tables above are the whole thing. A twenty page document is a strategy deck, and nobody opens it on a Monday morning.
How many channels should a small team run?
Three to six, with one owner each. Fewer lines done properly beat more lines done occasionally, and the first programme is usually an exercise in removing things.
What if we have no historical numbers to baseline against?
Spend the first two weeks creating them: tag every enquiry with a source, record current positions and conversion rates, and ask the last ten customers how they found you. Two weeks of real data beats a benchmark from somebody else's business.
Should the budget split be fixed for ninety days?
Set it at the start, review it at day thirty, and move money at day sixty to whichever line produced the cheapest qualified enquiry. Changing it weekly produces noise.
Who owns the programme?
One named person, who runs the Monday meeting and keeps the document current. The owner does not have to own every line, and does have to notice when a line stops moving.
A seventh line for the Monday document
The sample has six lines, and each one reads something your own systems record. A seventh reads something they cannot: what an assistant tells a buyer who asks which company to use in your category. Write five buyer questions, put them to two or three assistants with your company name left out of the prompt, and log who gets named and which pages get cited. That count sits in the Monday document beside pipeline and spend. AI Knows Us can run the same comparison across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews if you would rather not do it by hand.