The step you’re skipping before you even look at your marketing data

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TL;DR: Marketing planning fails the moment it stays in your head instead of on paper, and that one reason is why your marketing data will never tell you what actually worked. This post explains why documenting your marketing plan alongside your metrics reveals what caused your results, and outlines four steps to build a plan you can actually track against: setting goals, defining channels, planning campaigns, and building a consistent content routine.

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You’ve heard it a hundred times: track your marketing metrics. Know your numbers. Make data-backed decisions. And you’re in Ally’s orbit because you probably do (or at least are this close to starting). The thing is, there is a (very important) step most people skip when it comes to tracking their numbers in a way that actually helps them make decisions from them. And that is to document what marketing they did to influence those numbers. 

If you skip that step, you’re going to open Google Analytics, look at your website traffic, and then stare at the screen because you have absolutely no idea what you can do with those numbers.

Here’s what you’re going to learn when you read this entire blog (about a 7 minute read):

• Your marketing data can’t tell you why something happened 
• Why a documented marketing plan will directly impact your results
• The four things a real small business marketing plan has
• Why doing your own marketing in too many tools isn’t the best approach

Data can only tell you the result. You have to supply the why.

Ally talks a lot about using data to understand what’s working in your marketing and what isn’t. And she’s right—the data is there, and it’s telling you what the result of your marketing was. But there’s a critical thing that needs to happen beforehand that almost everyone skips: you have to know what marketing you actually did to get those results.

Think about it this way. Say your website traffic spikes in October. Amazing, right? But if you can’t go back and confidently say, “I published three blog posts that month, participated in an online summit, and focused my emails on sales CTAs, and shared 6 Instagram stories with links to those blogs”, you have no idea what influenced or caused that spike. 

Which means you have no idea how to replicate it. Or do it better next time. 

The same logic applies going the other direction. If your inquiries tank in March, being able to look back and see that you only posted twice on Instagram that month (instead of your usual eight times) and skipped sending your newsletters entirely? That’s the insight that actually moves your business forward.

Data tells you what happened. Your documented marketing plan tells you why.

Without both, you don’t actually have what you need to make data-backed decisions about how you’re going to market your small business.

The step everyone skips: documenting your marketing plan

Most small business owners think about marketing documentation after the fact—if at all. And I know this because I surveyed 245 small business owners for the State of Small Biz report and less than a quarter of them said they have a documented marketing plan. That means 75% of small business owners are in the camp of not being able to look at their marketing data and even have a chance at knowing what they did to get (or not get) those results.

Now, you might be thinking, “Tayler, I sort of know what I did for my marketing last month.” 

Okay, I’ll give you that. But since marketing typically is not an instant gratification thing, and 60-90ish days are going to pass until you really start to see results from what you did…can you tell me what you were doing that long ago? Probably not. So when future you sits down to look at your analytics at the end of the quarter and tries to reverse-engineer what you did—you’re not going to be able to dig that deep into your brain. 

What actually works is treating your marketing like most other business things you keep yourself organized around: something that gets planned, written down, and reviewed with enough specificity that you can learn from it.

Here’s what documenting your marketing plan as a small business owner who is doing it themselves actually needs to look like to be helpful.

How to approach your marketing planning (and document it so it means something with your data)

Taking the energy you’re putting into marketing planning and actually creating a documented marketing plan isn’t just a solid approach to help you make data-backed decisions, it actually has other really positive consequences too. Another one of my favorite stats from the State of Small Biz report is that small business owners with a documented marketing plan are not just 3x more likely to follow through on what they set out to do, but they are 3x more likely to say their marketing actually works! 

So now you have 3 reasons to get this done. And here is exactly how I would approach documenting my marketing plan as a small business owner.

1. Write down your goals (for the month, quarter, and year)

A marketing plan is supposed to help you do something other than just create content—it’s supposed to help you organize all your marketing ideas and to dos in a way that helps you reach your goals. So as elementary as it may seem, writing down your goals is the first step to documenting a marketing plan that can then be made better by the marketing data you track and make decisions from.

But resist the urge to write down a bazillion goals! You’re most likely doing your own marketing and only have so much time and energy. So focus on 3 overarching goals that you can actually build momentum around (trying to go after 8 different things at once is a great way to feel like you’re doing all the things and not seeing results).

2. Pick your marketing channels and be specific about how you’ll use each

Before you can track anything, you need to be clear about which marketing channels you’re actively using and what the purpose of each one is. Instagram for brand awareness and top-of-funnel reach. Email for nurturing and converting your existing audience. SEO and blogging for long-term organic traffic. Pinterest for passive lead generation.

This matters for tracking because each channel has different metrics that signal success. If you’re not clear on what a channel is for, you’ll measure it wrong — and draw the wrong conclusions from the data.

So decide on what your active channels are going to be (again don’t spread yourself thin!) and assign an intentional role to each one. If you can’t answer “what is this channel supposed to do for my business,” that’s worth figuring out before you invest any more time in it.

3. (Pre) plan your marketing campaigns

I know a lot of really smart and experienced small business owners aren’t super familiar with the concept of a marketing campaign, so let’s make sure we’re on the same page. A marketing campaign is any coordinated marketing push with a specific goal during a specific timeframe. (A product launch, a seasonal promotion, a collaboration are all examples.) These need to be documented with clear start and end dates, the goal behind them, and the channels you will use. but, most importantly, they should be planned ahead of time.

No you don’t have to do and plan every detail about each of your campaigns, but what is incredibly helpful is at least putting them on the calendar so you don’t end up with too many campaigns right next to each other and you can not have them sneak up on you.

This is another layer of documentation that makes your marketing data make sense. When you see a spike in email clicks or a jump in website conversions, you need to be able to point to a campaign and say “that’s what drove it.” Because when you are putting extra time, money, and energy into your marketing, you want to know it was worth it.

4. Build a routine around planning, drafting, and scheduling content

This one feels tedious, but it’s one of the simplest and most impactful things you can do in the name of being more consistent with your marketing. I’m bringing this up here because 44% of small business owners said “consistency” was the one thing they know they should be doing but aren’t (as a part of the State of Small Biz report), and it’s because you know that consistency impacts your marketing data.

So the first thing I really encourage you to do is have a monthly marketing planning session. Maybe it’s a couple hours or half a day, but the point is to actually do your marketing planning for the next month ahead. That’s the task, and you can stop there. But the next part of this is actually holding yourself accountable to doing that plan, and this is where I recommend having a routine to batch draft and schedule content.

But the point that is really related to documenting your marketing plan here is when you keep a running record of what content you published, when, and where, you (again) can point to the reason your marketing data is going up or down on the graphs.

Note to (your)self for when you want to make really data-back decision

This is something a lot of people don’t think about because they assume that marketing planning is kind of a set it and forget it exercise—but it isn’t. So before the month or quarter starts, write down your focus. What are you prioritizing as a business? What are you pulling back on? Asking yourself these questions should influence the goals you set.

And I’m not telling you to write a 10-page strategy document. It can be three sentences. But having it documented means that when you sit down to review your data later, you can evaluate performance against your intentions—not just in the tasks. Doing this makes metrics stop feeling like numbers and start feeling like feedback.

The other thing you want to do is make a note of any time you decided to change course in the middle of the plan. Did you switch up your posting frequency? Try a new email subject line format? Pause a channel for a month? Add a call-to-action you hadn’t been using?

Document it. With a date. Because changes are often invisible in data unless you’ve noted them. And these changes (even small ones) are usually a very interesting thing to analyze. The difference between “engagement dropped in June” and “engagement dropped in June, which is also when I stopped using video in my Instagram posts” is the entire difference between useful information and a dead end.

Where does your marketing plan live?

Here’s the thing. I know you’re tempted to create your marketing plan in a Google doc or your Asana account because you use those already. What that looks like is up to you. And technically that can work—my goal here is to get you to just not have your marketing plan live in your head. But none of this documentation does anything if it’s scattered across a bunch of places. 

Doing it that way is a big part of the reason you can’t seem to get your marketing done on a regular basis, and it definitely won’t make it easier to figure out why your marketing data is what it is.

So you are going to set yourself up for success by using one place where your marketing plan, your campaigns, your content, and your strategy notes all live together. And that is one of the reasons we built Enji’s marketing project management tools the way we did. Because I know you’re smart when it comes to marketing. But what you’re doing hasn’t been documented nor has it been trackable. 

Enji brings your marketing plan, your content calendar, your campaigns, and your AI copywriter, and social media scheduler together in one place, so when it’s time to look at your data, you actually have something to look at it against. And when you pair it with Ally’s dashboards, you are going to understand what the heck is going on with your marketing better than you ever thought possible.

What this looks like when you can make real data-backed decisions about your marketing

When your marketing plan stops living in your head and is actually documented so you can refer back to it, something shifts. Reviewing your marketing data stops being a good thing to do and starts being the thing that helps you make super-smart decisions. 

Because you will start to see the patterns between your behavior, content, and numbers. You start making decisions with confidence instead of just following your gut or copying what someone else is doing. You start building a real understanding of your business and your audience—which is the only data that actually matters.

The small business owners who get the most out of their marketing metrics aren’t necessarily the ones with the fanciest analytics setup. They’re the ones who did the boring, unglamorous work of writing things down.

Document your marketing plan. Track your metrics alongside it. Then let the data do what it’s actually supposed to do.