90-day planning templates for implementing marketing and digital marketing plans

How will this 90-day planning template help me and my business?

Planning your digital marketing in 90-day intervals is powerful because it helps you focus on a shorter and more manageable timeframe, compared to planning for a whole year. This approach allows you to execute strategic initiatives from your annual plan within a practical period, which is more feasible than a 30-day timeframe.

For instance, 'always on' tasks like improving your homepage or updating an email sequence may take longer than a few weeks to analyze, plan, and implement, especially in larger organizations where discussions and approvals can take time.

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.

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 anyone involved in 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 split into two parts:

1.  RACE 90-day mapping of objectives to “always-on” 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 idea is for you to create a one or two page summary which gives clarity on a manageable number of initiatives you must commit to and work on in the 90-day period to boost performance. These will cascade down to more detailed activities, for example in a project management system.

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

2. 90-day plan 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.