Most marketing advice assumes you are already halfway up the mountain. It talks about scaling campaigns and testing creative, as if you already have traffic, tracking and a website that converts. If you are starting from zero, none of that helps. You need to know what to do first, what to do next, and what to ignore for now, so you do not spread a small budget across ten things and get nothing.
This is the order we would work in for a business starting cold. Not the most exciting order, the one that stops you wasting money. Ninety days is enough to build a foundation that works, but not enough to do everything at once, and trying to is the most common way new businesses burn their first budget. Sequence beats effort here.
Days 1 to 15: measurement and the free win
Before you spend a single pound acquiring a customer, make sure you can tell whether it worked. Marketing without tracking is not marketing, it is donating. So the first fortnight is unglamorous plumbing:
- Set up GA4 and, more importantly, define a real conversion. Not a page view, not a stray button click, but a genuine enquiry, booking or sale, with a value attached where you can. Get this wrong and every figure you look at for the next three months is fiction.
- Put a "How did you hear about us?" field on your enquiry form from day one. It is the cheapest attribution tool there is, and it catches the channels analytics misses.
- Claim and fill out your Google Business Profile completely. For any business with a location or service area, this is the single highest-return free thing you can do: real address, categories, hours, photos, and a steady trickle of reviews. It often brings in enquiries before you spend anything on ads.
None of this creates demand yet. It makes sure that when demand arrives, you see it and can measure it.
Days 15 to 45: one capture channel, funded properly
Now you go and get customers, and here is the discipline that matters most: pick one channel and fund it properly. One. The instinct is to hedge, a little on Google, a little on Meta, boost a post. Spread thin, everything starves, nothing learns, and you conclude that "marketing does not work" when what did not work was doing six half-things.
At this stage, choose a demand-capture channel: one that gets you in front of people already looking for what you sell. The intent does the heavy lifting, so these channels pay back fastest, and fast payback is exactly what a business starting from zero needs. For most, that means Google Search ads on the terms people type when they are ready to buy, or Google Shopping if you sell products. You are not creating want yet, you are collecting the want that already exists, the quickest route to revenue you can reinvest.
Fund it at a level where it can actually learn. A campaign starved of budget never gathers enough conversions to optimise, so it stays dumb and expensive forever. Better one focused campaign run properly for six weeks than three timid ones that all fail quietly. And because you did the first fortnight properly, you will know whether it is working, not just feel it.
Days 30 to 60: make the website earn the clicks
This overlaps with the last stage deliberately. The moment you pay for traffic, the job shifts to not wasting it, because the fastest way to make paid ads profitable is rarely the ads. It is the page they land on.
An ad has one job: get the right person to click. After that, the landing page does the selling, and this is where most new businesses leak money. Someone searches "emergency electrician Norwich", clicks an ad that says exactly that, and lands on a generic homepage with no phone number in sight. The click was perfect. The page threw it away.
The conversion basics that matter most early on are not subtle:
- The page names the thing the person searched for. Match beats clever.
- The main action, call, book or enquire, is above the fold, not buried under an "about us" story.
- It loads fast and works properly on a phone, because most of your traffic will be on one.
- It answers the obvious next question and removes the obvious next worry.
A rough rule from years of this: if a landing page converts under two in a hundred visitors for a clear commercial search, fix the page before the campaign. Improving the page you already pay to send traffic to almost always beats raising the bids.
Days 60 to 90: content and demand creation, once capture converts
Only now, with a converting capture channel running, does it make sense to invest in the slower, compounding work. Content and demand creation take months to pay back, and if your capture layer is not converting yet, you are filling a bucket with a hole in it, warming people up only to lose them to a competitor at the moment they finally search.
Once capture is working, you widen the funnel. This is the demand-creation half: getting in front of people who are not searching yet and planting a want that was not there. The two natural moves:
- SEO fundamentals. Start building the pages that earn free traffic over time. Bottom-of-funnel pages that capture ("best accountant for landlords in Norwich") and top-of-funnel content that creates interest ("how to stop losing a day a week to bookkeeping"). SEO is slow, which is exactly why you start it now, so it is maturing by the time you need it.
- A creation channel, tested small. Paid social or video to reach people before they are shopping. Fund it modestly and watch that "How did you hear about us?" field, because these channels rarely get the credit they earn in last-click reports.
This comes last not because it is unimportant, but because it is the only way to grow beyond the fixed pool of people already searching. You build it on a capture layer that already converts, so the demand you create does not leak straight to a competitor at the finish line.
The one rule underneath all of it
If you remember nothing else, remember the order: measure, capture, convert, then create. Each stage funds the next, and content and creation, built last on a working foundation, are what turn a functioning business into a growing one.
The businesses that struggle almost always did these in the wrong order, or all at once, on a budget that could only really do one. Ninety days, done in sequence, beats a year done in a panic. If you want a second pair of eyes on where to start, mapping out this kind of plan is exactly what we do with a client before running a single campaign.