Your marketing plan,
scored in three minutes.
Pick the tactics you actually run. Get a Growth Health Score out of 100, find out which of the four pillars is holding you back, and share the result with a link.
Most businesses do not have a marketing plan. They have a marketing reflex.
Something gets tried when results dip. An ad campaign, a new website, some SEO after a competitor starts outranking you. Each move is reasonable on its own and none of them compound, because nothing was chosen in relation to anything else.
A plan does not need to be a fifty-page document. It needs to answer three things clearly: where your best customers actually come from, what stops them choosing you, and what system keeps them once they arrive.
This tool will not write that plan for you. What it does is show you the shape of what you currently run, score it, and tell you which pillar is weakest, so the next thing you spend money on is the thing that was actually missing.
It takes about three minutes and it is deliberately blunt. If your mix is thin, the score will say so.
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You stop paying for the wrong thing first The most expensive mistake in marketing is not a bad campaign, it is a good campaign pointed at a problem you did not have. Most businesses buy traffic when the constraint was conversion, or buy ads when the constraint was follow-up.
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Order of operations matters more than channel choice Paid ads before the website converts. Social before there is anything to say. A salesperson before there is a follow-up process. The sequence is usually what fails, not the tactic.
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Channels compound only when they connect Search builds the authority. Paid brings people now. Retention raises what each one is worth. Run them in isolation and you pay full price for each; connect them and the cost per customer falls.
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Ambiguity is expensive Whether the work is done by you, a contractor or an agency, a written plan means everyone knows the priority order. Without one, effort goes to whatever was mentioned most recently.
Build your mix. See your score.
Add the tactics you are genuinely running today. The score updates as you go, and the panel underneath names the single biggest gap.
Drag a tactic across, or click it. Everything works by keyboard too — tab to a tactic and press Enter.
or click them in the list
Category balance
Strategy mix
Your biggest gap will appear here
Add a few tactics and this panel names the weakest pillar, plus the highest-value things you are not currently doing.
Send your snapshot for a free review
We read the mix, compare it against what usually works in your situation, and reply with what we would fix first. A person does this, not an autoresponder.
Four steps to a usable roadmap
Most free marketing audits are automated PDFs that restate your own website back to you. This is a framework instead: four pillars, weighted, with the weakest one named.
Select what you actually run
Add every tactic your business currently executes. Be honest. Adding things you intend to do produces a flattering score and a useless diagnosis.
Watch the score move
The score rewards weight and balance together. Ten tactics all in one pillar scores worse than six spread across three, because concentration is fragile.
Read the gap panel
It names your weakest pillar and the highest-weight tactics you are not running. That list is your priority order, not a menu.
Share it or send it
Copy the link to send your plan to a partner or your team, download it as a text file, or send the snapshot to us for a free written review.
Four pillars, in priority order
The order matters as much as the contents. Businesses routinely buy demand before they can convert it, and hire salespeople before there is a process to hand them. Each pillar below makes the next one cheaper.
A note on evidence: claims about documented strategies outperforming undocumented ones come from self-reported marketer surveys, which are correlational and flattering by design. We use the framework because the sequencing logic holds up in practice, not because a survey said so.
One number here does have decent research behind it. A study in the Journal of Marketing tracking referred and non-referred customers at a German bank found referred customers were both more valuable and more loyal over time. That is the strongest argument for pillar three, and it is the one most businesses skip.
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1 — Search and AI visibility
Organic search, local map placement, technical health and content depth. The compounding asset: it keeps working when you stop paying. It now includes being readable by AI answer engines, which is largely the same work as being readable by a screen reader. See AI website design.
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2 — Demand generation
Paid search, social, video, retargeting and offline media. Produces leads now while pillar one matures. It is also the pillar that punishes weak conversion hardest, because you pay for every visitor whether or not the page works. See PPC management.
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3 — Retention and referrals
Email flows, reviews, referral programs and repeat purchase systems. Consistently the most underinvested pillar relative to return, partly because the gains show up in lifetime value rather than in a monthly lead count. See marketing automation.
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4 — Operations and systems
CRM, a written sales process, call handling, onboarding and training. You can generate all the demand in the world and lose it to a voicemail box. When marketing looks broken, this is frequently where it actually broke. See sales training.
What your score actually means
The bands below are how we interpret the number when reviewing a snapshot. The score is a description of your mix, not a prediction of your revenue.
Revenue is coming from referrals, existing relationships or luck. Nothing here compounds, and a single lost customer or channel change is felt immediately. Start with one pillar rather than trying to fix everything.
Usually one channel doing all the work. This is the most common score and the most fragile position, because performance is entirely dependent on something you may not control. Adding a second pillar matters more than optimizing the first.
Real activity across more than one pillar. At this stage the gap panel is the useful part: the missing pillar is usually retention or ops, and both are cheaper to fix than buying more demand.
Balanced enough that channels reinforce each other. Gains now come from quality rather than coverage: better offers, faster follow-up, tighter measurement. This is where testing starts to be worth the effort.
Very few businesses run this many pillars well simultaneously. At this level the binding constraint is usually capacity rather than marketing, and the honest advice is often to stop adding channels and fix operations.
Five mixes we see constantly, and what is wrong with each
Run the builder for a few hundred businesses and the same shapes keep appearing. If one of these describes you, the fix is usually the same one.
Monoculture
Six or seven tactics, all in the same column. It feels sophisticated because there is a lot of activity, and it scores poorly here on purpose. One algorithm update, one cost-per-click rise, one competitor with a bigger budget, and the whole business moves at once. The fix is not more of what is working; it is the first tactic in an empty pillar, which is almost always cheaper than the eleventh in a full one.
Leaky
Bucket
The most expensive pattern on this list. Money goes into acquiring customers who then never hear from the business again. Every new sale has to be bought at full price because none of the previous ones are working for you. A welcome sequence and a review process are usually a week of setup, and they raise the value of demand spend that is already happening.
Ghost
Ship
Leads arrive and disappear. No CRM, no written sales process, nobody owning the phone during the hours customers call. This one is painful because the marketing is genuinely working and the business concludes it is not. Before buying another channel, listen to ten recorded calls; it is usually all the diagnosis needed.
Paper
Plan
A score in the nineties from a business that cannot show evidence of half of it. Usually the tactics existed once, or a contractor set them up and left. A tactic nobody has touched in ninety days is not part of your mix, it is part of your history. Deselect it and see what the honest number looks like.
Slow
Build
Well-run, well-documented, and nobody knows it exists. Common in businesses built on referrals that have started to slow. Everything downstream is ready, which is genuinely valuable, and the missing piece is anything that puts the business in front of people who are not already customers. This mix converts fastest once demand is added, because nothing leaks.
Questions about the plan builder
Yes. No login, no card, no trial. Use it as often as you like. Your selections are held in your browser and encoded in the page URL, which is how the share link works, and nothing is transmitted to us unless you fill in the form and press send. If you do send a snapshot, a person reads it and replies at no charge, because it starts a real conversation and occasionally that turns into work.
Each tactic carries a weight from 3 to 10 based on typical leverage. Your selected weights are summed, capped at 110 out of a possible 183, and scaled to 70 points. The other 30 come from pillar coverage: 8 for any Search tactic, 6 for Demand, 8 for Retention, 5 for Ops, and a further 3 for running all four. The cap makes depth inside a single pillar saturate quickly, which is why six tactics all in Search scores 39 while four tactics spread across all four pillars scores 52. It is a structured heuristic rather than a measurement of your business.
Below 20 means there is effectively no marketing engine and revenue depends on referrals or luck. Between 20 and 39 usually means one channel is doing everything, which is the most common and most fragile position. Between 40 and 59 shows real momentum with visible gaps. Between 60 and 79 is a functioning engine where channels reinforce each other. Above 80 is rare and usually means the constraint has moved from marketing to delivery capacity.
No, and this is the main way people get a useless result. The builder is only diagnostic when it reflects what you actually execute. A good test: if you could not show a colleague evidence of a tactic happening in the last thirty days, leave it out. Businesses consistently overestimate their own activity, where "we do email" means one newsletter last quarter and "we have a CRM" means a spreadsheet nobody has opened since spring.
Both. The copy-link button puts your selections into a URL you can send to a business partner, your team or a contractor, and opening it restores exactly what you built. The download button produces a plain text file with your score, category balance, selected tactics and identified gap, which is easy to paste into a document or an email. Neither option requires an account and neither sends anything to us.
A person on our team reads your mix, your score and whatever you wrote about your challenge, then replies within one business day with what we would prioritize and why. Sometimes that answer is that your marketing is fine and the problem is elsewhere, which is a genuinely useful thing to be told. There is no obligation and no sequence of automated follow-ups.
Because concentration is fragile rather than efficient. A business that gets everything from one channel is exposed to any change in that channel: an algorithm update, a rising cost per click, a platform policy shift, a competitor outbidding them. The weight cap means the eleventh tactic in one pillar adds nothing, while the first tactic in an empty pillar adds a lot. That is deliberate, and it reflects how these failures actually happen.
Yes, and it works well as a facilitation tool. Building the mix live in a planning meeting tends to surface disagreements about what the business actually does, which is usually the more valuable output. The share link means everyone can see the same plan afterward, and the text export documents it. If you are an agency or consultant and want to talk about using the framework more formally, get in touch.
Stop reacting. Start sequencing.
Your score is a starting point, not a verdict. The useful part is knowing which pillar to fund next, and that is a fifteen-minute conversation rather than a project.