Growth Strategy
Growth strategy consulting that ties every team to one goal through a North Star metric, a KPI tree and a channel role map.
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Growth consulting
Marketing Planning Services: A 90-Day Plan and Budget Calendar
A strategy that never makes it into the calendar stays in the slide deck. Our marketing planning service ties every strategic decision to a date, an owner and a budget line. The first 90 days are planned week by week; everything after that stays a monthly draft and is rewritten each month based on actual spend and what we have learned.
Purpose and appearance
What do we use this service for?
Marketing planning makes sure strategic decisions happen on time and with the right budget. It keeps channels from running dry in peak season, stops unowned tasks from slipping and keeps currency swings from turning into unplanned media losses. The result is a spreadsheet that shows who finishes what each week, updated every month with actual spend.
Funnel stages it serves
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
- Loyalty
How we structure a 90-day marketing plan
Month one is the foundation month. Measurement fixes, cutting waste in campaigns and writing the first hypotheses all happen here; we don't open new channels. Month two is the testing month: the ideas at the top of the ICE ranking go live in two-week cycles. Month three is the scaling month: budget moves to the winning channels and messages, the losers are switched off, and the plan for the next quarter is written with this data.
Every row in the plan has an owner, a start week and a definition of 'done'. 'Write blog posts' is not a plan row; 'category guide live in week 3, owner: content editor' is. We flag tasks owned by people outside the agency, such as development or design work, separately at the start of the plan; most delays come from these rows.
A marketing budget calendar built around seasons in Türkiye
Splitting the annual budget into twelve equal parts leaves channels starved in the weeks when demand rises. We build the calendar around the seasons that emerge from the sector's own data, and we check past years' search and sales curves with our seasonal behavior analysis. We also add the two to three weeks before demand rises to the budget, because automated bidding strategies need time to adjust to a new budget level.
- Religious holiday (Bayram) rows move to their new dates each year; last year's calendar week is not used as the reference
- The November sales period increases competition in ad auctions; preparation and creative production wrap up in October
- Category-specific periods such as back to school, New Year and Mother's Day are planned as separate rows
- On platforms billed in US dollars, exchange rate movements affect the TL budget; we show the currency difference separately in the monthly update
Why we reserve part of the marketing budget for testing
When the entire budget goes to proven campaigns, there is no room left to learn anything new. We put a fixed but small testing share into the plan and reserve it for the ideas prioritized in growth experiments. A winner from the testing share moves into the main budget the following month. Where possible, we place the testing share in weeks when costs run relatively low, and we don't open the main budget to untested ideas at the peak of the season.
We also reflect the platforms' spending behavior in the calendar. Google Ads, for example, can spend up to twice the average daily budget in a single day depending on traffic fluctuations, but it doesn't exceed 30.4 times the average daily budget over the month. Since budget changes made mid-campaign can disrupt this calculation, we time large increases for the start of a month or the start of a season. This rhythm follows the same calendar as the monthly review in our growth approach.
Marketing Planning: when do we recommend it?
We recommend it
- Marketing teams that have a strategy but no weekly execution calendar
- Retail, tourism and education brands whose budgets swing strongly with the season
- Organizations where launch, campaign and content work piles up across different teams and deadlines are often missed
We don't recommend it
- Brands whose goals and channel roles aren't defined yet; strategy work comes first
- Organizations that want to fix twelve months in weekly detail; a plan at that level of detail loses its validity after the third month
How we manage Marketing Planning
- List of strategic decisionsWe turn every decision in the KPI tree and channel map into work items for the plan.
- Capacity checkWe map the weekly capacity of the in-house team, agencies and developers, and distribute the work accordingly.
- Season and budget calendarUsing past years' data, we allocate the TL budget by month and channel.
- Weekly plan spreadsheetWe write the first 90 days into weeks, with owners, dates and a definition of done.
- Monthly revisionWe update the plan every month with actual spend, currency differences and test results.
Marketing Planning: metrics and requirements
Metrics we track
- Planned vs. actual budget
- Share of tasks completed on time
- Spend share by channel
- Use of the testing share
- Target achievement in peak season
What you need to get started
- An approved annual or quarterly marketing budget
- Monthly sales and spend data for the last two years
- Campaign and product launch calendar
- An owner who will approve and prioritize the plan
Official sources
The Brand Move Growth Consulting Team
Contact us nowTo learn more about Marketing Planning or other growth consulting services, contact The Brand Move Growth Consulting team today.
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Growth Consulting overview
Other Growth Consulting services
Growth Experiments (ICE)
A growth experimentation process: ICE prioritization, two-week test cycles and a shared log of every hypothesis, result and decision.
ExploreFrequently asked questions
Marketing Planning: frequently asked questions
What is included in your marketing plan?
An annual budget and seasonal calendar, plus a week-by-week plan for the first 90 days. Every row has an owner, a start week and a definition of 'done'. It lives in a shared spreadsheet with a weekly status note, and tasks owned by people outside the agency, such as development or design, are flagged separately.
Why do you plan for 90 days rather than a full year?
We still produce the annual budget and the seasonal calendar, but we write weekly detail only for 90 days. After three months, what we learn from testing changes priorities a lot. Planning distant weeks in detail just creates work that will have to be redone.
How do you allocate the marketing budget across channels?
Based on each channel's role and the marginal return shown by historical data. Proven channels get the main share, and a small testing share goes to new ideas. We redo the allocation every month from actual results and gradually cut a channel's share once its return starts to decline.
How often is the plan updated?
Every month. We update it with actual spend, currency differences and test results, and the next month's rows are rewritten based on what we learned.
How do currency fluctuations affect the plan?
On platforms billed in US dollars, the same TL budget can buy more or less media within the month. We keep the plan in TL, show the currency difference on a separate row in the monthly revision and adjust media targets if needed.
Let's run a first Marketing Planning review together.
In a free call we listen to your goals, channel mix and current plan, then send you the three highest-priority steps in writing.
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No sales pressure. Just findings.