Tech Recipes, powered by RootIQ

The one-page advertising
planning template

Five questions that force the strategy to make sense before anyone starts buying ads.

01Business goal

What has to be true for this to be worth doing? Write the number.

02Audience

Who are we trying to reach, and what do they already believe?

03Offer

What are we asking them to do, and why would they bother?

04Channel role

For every channel: what job does it do? Reach, persuasion or conversion. One job each.

05Decision rules

What will make us spend more, spend less or stop? Decide before you buy.

Tech Recipes · page two

What to do next

The page before this is your plan. This is what we would do about it on Monday.

01Make this specific

One of your five answers is too vague to spend money against.

Take the answer you were least sure of and put a number and a date on it. A goal with neither is a hope, and a hope cannot be judged at the end of the month.

02Three questions for your agency

Ask these at the next meeting. The answers tell you more than any report will.

  • Show me the whole line: what you charged us, what your margin was, and what was left to spend on advertising.
  • What share of our money is your fee, and what share actually bought us something?
  • Send the raw file rather than the slides, so we can check the numbers ourselves.
03Your guardrail

Set this before the money goes out, not after.

Give it 30 to 45 days before you judge it. Anything shorter reads normal ups and downs as a result. And if a second quote for the same thing comes back 10 to 15% cheaper, that gap is worth a conversation rather than a shrug.

Write down the one number that would make you stop, and tell whoever spends the money what it is.