In our last blog, we walked through the first 90 minutes of your planning session – mapping customer intensity cycles and flowing your revenue goals to match reality. You built the strategic foundation.
Now let's turn that foundation into an execution plan.
Steps 3-5 take about two and a half hours and give you everything you need to actually make this happen. You'll identify what marketing work is required for each phase, build your integrated calendar, and establish how you'll track progress throughout your 5-quarter period.
Let's keep going.
Step 3: Identify Marketing Work Required (60 Minutes)
You know when your customers are in high, medium, and low intensity phases. You've flowed your revenue goals to match those cycles. Now you need to determine how you're going to show up during each phase.
Here's what's important to understand: your channels probably aren't changing. You've already figured out where your customers are – email, social media, your website, networking events, whatever works for your business. That's established.
What changes is how you show up in those channels.
Brand awareness runs through everything. You're always staying visible, always reinforcing who you are and how you meet needs. But the intensity of everything else shifts based on where your customer is in their cycle.
During low intensity phases, brand awareness is your primary focus. This is when you stay present without pushing. Social proof and testimonials work well here – they're technically about you, but they're really showing prospects how customers like them get results.
You're still touching on pain points. You're still making occasional offers. You're just not leading with them or pushing them as hard. The frequency is lower, the approach is softer. You're not using multiple channels to push the same person toward the same thing. The message is simple: "We're here when you're ready."
And here's the caveat: brand awareness doesn't mean abandoning customer-centric thinking. It's not your chance to say "look how great we are." It's still about how you meet needs. You're just not pushing for action.
During medium intensity phases, brand awareness continues, and now you're ratcheting things up. You start speaking more directly to pain points. You reference your customers – their specific challenges, what they're dealing with, what's keeping them stuck. You're drawing them in, building engagement, creating connection.
Offers are more present than in low intensity – more frequent, a bit more direct. But you're still not in full push mode. They're starting to feel the need more acutely, and your marketing acknowledges that while building toward the next phase.
During high intensity phases, everything escalates. Brand awareness continues. Pain point messaging continues. And now offers become direct and frequent. "Buy now." "It's time to do this." "Here's how to get started." You're reaching out more frequently, across multiple channels. This is when you push – because your customer is ready to act.
How to facilitate this step:
Walk your team through each intensity phase on your customer cycle map. For each phase, ask:
- How do we show up during this phase?
- What's the primary focus of our messaging?
- How frequent is our contact?
- How direct are our offers?
- What does brand awareness look like for us here?
The conversation should flow naturally from your Step 1 work. You already know WHEN each phase happens. Now you're deciding HOW you respond to each phase.
What you should have at the end of Step 3:
A clear understanding of how your marketing approach shifts across phases – not new channels, but a defined approach for showing up in your existing channels based on customer intensity.
Step 4: Build Your Integrated Calendar (60 Minutes)
This is where everything becomes real. You're taking the intensity phases from Step 1, the revenue flow from Step 2, and the marketing approach from Step 3, and associating it all with actual time.
You're going to map out what each month looks like across your entire 5-quarter period.
If February is a low intensity month for your customers, what does February look like for your marketing? What's the approach? What's the frequency? What themes make sense?
Themes matter here. During certain times of year, certain messages resonate more than others. If you're in the weight loss space, "get ready for summer" hits differently in March than it does in October. If you sell products that work as gifts, you're building toward holiday giving starting in September or October – and how early you start depends on how significant the purchase is.
These themes give your team guardrails when they sit down to create content. They're not starting from scratch every month wondering what to talk about. They know: we're in medium intensity, we're building toward this seasonal moment, our theme is X, here's how we show up.
Important: This is strategic, not tactical.
You're not writing every social post and email campaign during this step. You're seeing the shape of your 5-quarter period. You're understanding how the phases flow and where you're building toward something.
The tactics come later – on a monthly or quarterly basis, whatever works for your team. But when you sit down to plan those tactics, you have the strategic framework to guide you. You know what phase you're in. You know your themes. You know how you should be showing up.
Pay attention to transitions.
Phases don't usually end abruptly and start fresh. They build into each other. You're ramping up from low to medium, building from medium to high, then tapering back down. Your calendar should show those transitions – where you start shifting your approach, where you begin introducing new themes, where you start building toward the next phase.
The exception might be something like January 1st if you're selling anything related to New Year's resolutions. That's a harder cut. But most businesses have gradual transitions, and your calendar should reflect that.
Format doesn't matter.
Whiteboard. Spreadsheet. Sticky notes on a wall. Project management software. Whatever works for your team. The value isn't in the format – it's in seeing the whole picture and understanding how everything flows together.
What you should have at the end of Step 4:
A visual representation of your entire 5-quarter period that shows intensity phases, marketing approaches, themes, and how everything builds from one period to the next. Whether that's a shared calendar, a project board, or a one-page plan on your wall – the format matters less than the thinking that got you there.
Step 5: Tracking and Accountability (30 Minutes)
You have a strategic calendar. Now you need to make sure it doesn't become something you created once and never touched again.
Step 5 is about two things: defining what you measure and committing to how you stay on track.
Define what you're actually measuring.
This isn't about generic marketing metrics. It's about understanding YOUR funnel and what drives revenue in YOUR business.
Break your revenue goal into the stages that lead to it.
If your business runs on lead generation – offering something free to capture information, then following up to convert – you need to know: How many leads do we need? What's our conversion rate from lead to conversation? From conversation to sale? How long does that process typically take?
If your business is direct purchase with potential upsells – you need to know: How many initial purchases do we need? What's the conversion rate to the higher-end product or service?
Every business is different. The metrics that matter are specific to how YOUR customers buy and what it takes to get them there.
Once you know your stages and conversion rates, you can work backwards from your revenue goals. If you need X revenue in a high-intensity quarter, and your conversion rate is Y, you know exactly how many leads or conversations or opportunities you need to generate.
This connects directly to Step 2. You flowed your revenue goals across customer cycles. Now you know what activity needs to happen to hit those goals.
Commit to check-ins.
Divide up who's responsible for what. Make sure everyone knows their role in executing the plan.
Then build in review points:
- Monthly check-ins at the team level to see what's working, what's not, and what needs adjusting
- Quarterly reviews minimum to assess: Are we on track? What are our numbers telling us? What do we need to do differently as we move into the next phase?
This plan is a living document. Your customer cycles and intensity patterns probably won't change dramatically, but how you respond to them might need adjusting based on what you learn. The quarterly reviews keep you connected to the strategy while giving you room to adapt tactics.
What you should have at the end of Step 5:
Clarity on what metrics matter for your business, how they connect to your revenue goals, and a commitment to regular check-ins that keep everyone accountable and the plan alive.
You Have a Plan
Four hours. Five steps. And you walk out with something most businesses never build: a marketing approach that's aligned with how your customers actually buy.
You're not guessing what to do each month. You're not scrambling to hit arbitrary revenue targets that ignore customer reality. You're not creating content in a vacuum and hoping it connects.
You know when your customers are ready to engage. You know how to show up in each phase. You know what you're building toward and how each quarter connects to the next.
The format of your plan – calendar, spreadsheet, project board – doesn't matter. What matters is the strategic thinking underneath it. You built that in these four hours.
Now the work is execution. Monthly tactics that fit your strategic framework. Check-ins that keep you honest. Adjustments based on what you learn.
In our final blog, we'll talk about what happens when this becomes your normal way of operating – and how to make sure you don't slip back into reactive mode when pressure hits.
For now: you have a plan that works with your customers instead of against them. That's the foundation everything else builds on.
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