What a good first six weeks should produce

The short answer: the first month with an agency should leave you holding four written things: a study of your market, a positioning you can say in one sentence, a plan with priorities, and the tracking and access that let you measure what comes next. If you are paying for ads and posts before those exist, the money is buying activity, not progress.

The first month of an agency relationship sets the pattern for the rest of it. Done well, it ends with a clear picture of your market, a positioning you can defend and a plan with priorities. Done badly, it ends with a lot of activity and no idea what it was for.

Our first month is six weeks, not four, and the extra two are free. They are spent on strategy and market study before execution begins. Whoever you work with, here is what a good first stretch should leave you holding, and how to tell when it has not.

Why the first month matters most

Everything that follows in a marketing programme inherits the decisions made at the start: who you are talking to, what you say to them, where you say it and how you will know it worked. Mistakes in those decisions are cheap to fix on paper and expensive to fix in a live campaign.

That is why strategy is the least expensive part of the work and the part that decides how well the rest performs. A strong first month is not slow. It is the fastest way to stop paying to learn what should have been decided on day one.

1. A study of your market

You should receive a written view of who your customers are, what they care about, who else is competing for their attention and where there is room to stand out. It should be specific to your business and your market, not a general summary of marketing best practice.

A useful market study answers questions like these:

• Who buys from you today, and who should be buying instead?
• What do they search for, ask about and worry about before they decide?
• Who are the three to five competitors that actually compete for the same buyer, and what do they say?
• Which claims in your category are already crowded, and which are still open?

The test of a good study is that someone in your company reads it and learns something they did not know, or sees something they suspected written down clearly.

2. A positioning you can say in a sentence

Positioning is the answer to three questions: why you, for whom and instead of what. If it takes a paragraph to say, it is not finished.

Along with it should come a tone of voice and a small set of messaging pillars, so that every writer, designer and platform can speak with one voice. This is what stops your social posts, your ads and your website from sounding as though three different companies wrote them. If you work in more than one language, this is also where you decide how each language should sound, written natively rather than translated.

3. A plan with priorities

A plan names the objective, the audiences, the channels, the order in which things will be done and the numbers that will show whether it is working. It also says what will not be done yet, and why. If everything is a priority, nothing is.

Look for these parts:

• One objective that matters to the business, for example qualified enquiries, not a list of ten.
• The audiences in order of importance, with what you want each of them to do.
• The channels chosen for a reason, with what each one is expected to do.
• A sequence: what happens in months one, two and three.
• The measures that will show progress, agreed before spend begins.

If you want a plan shaped around a launch or a new market, our go-to-market strategy and brand positioning work is built around exactly this stage.

4. The foundations in place

Tracking, accounts, access and reporting should be set up before spend starts, so that from the first campaign you can tell what is producing enquiries and what is not. This is dull work and it is the first thing skipped when an agency is in a hurry.

• Analytics and conversion tracking are installed and tested.
• Ad accounts, social profiles and the website are owned by you, with the agency added as a user.
• Enquiries are recorded somewhere your team can see, with the source noted.
• There is an agreed rhythm for reports, and a sample of the first one.

Account ownership deserves special attention. If the agency owns the accounts, you do not own the history, and leaving them means starting again.

What the six weeks look like

The exact order depends on the business, but a healthy six weeks has a shape like this:

1. Weeks one and two: listening and study. Interviews with your team, a review of what already exists and the first pass at the market.
2. Weeks three and four: positioning and messaging, tested on people who know the customer.
3. Weeks five and six: the plan, the foundations and the first small, safe pieces of execution.

You should see something written at the end of each pair of weeks, not only at the end of the six.

What you should review and approve each week

A planning phase is not a black box. You should expect to be asked to look at something every week, and to say yes, no or change this.

• Week one: a short summary of what the agency heard from your team, so you can correct it early.
• Week two: the first findings from the market study, including anything that surprised the team.
• Week three: two or three draft positioning options with a recommendation.
• Week four: the chosen positioning, tone of voice and messaging pillars.
• Week five: the draft plan, with priorities and what is deliberately left out.
• Week six: the final plan, the measurement set-up and a sample of the first report.

If a week passes and you have been asked to review nothing, ask why. A plan that arrives all at once at the end has had no chance to be corrected.

Warning signs

• Budget is spent before the positioning exists. Activity without a direction is the most expensive way to learn.
• Nothing is written down. If you cannot read the plan, you cannot hold anyone to it.
• The deliverable is generic. A deck that could belong to any company in your industry has not studied yours.
• Reporting is vague. If you cannot tell from the first report what will change next month, nothing is being learned.
• The agency owns your accounts. You are renting your own marketing history.

A sample list of what you should hold at the end

1. A written market and customer study.
2. A competitor review that names who you are really up against.
3. A positioning statement and a one-page messaging guide.
4. A channel plan with the reasoning for each choice.
5. A three-month sequence of work.
6. A measurement plan with the numbers that will be reported.
7. Confirmation that tracking and reporting work.

None of these needs to be long. Several can be a page or two. What matters is that they exist, that they are written for your business and that you can hold them up against what happens next.

Related reading

• Go-to-market strategy for a new product: first 90 days
• Planning marketing when results take six months

Why it matters

Strategy first is not about slowing down. It is about making sure the money you spend in month two goes toward something you chose on purpose. It is the cheapest part of the work and the part that decides how well the rest performs.

When you compare agencies, ask what you will hold at the end of month one. It is one of the five questions in our guide to telling a partner from a vendor, and it is the one that most clearly separates them. If you would like to see how we run it, our page on the full-service marketing agency model shows how the first six weeks fit the rest of the work.

Start a conversation about your first six weeks.