Strategy without an experiment register isn't strategy.
Generic agency plans are 60-slide decks built to justify a retainer. Ours are working documents — falsifiable hypotheses, kill dates, channel-mix decisions tied to your P&L. The plan is the operating manual for the next 90 days, not a one-time artefact.
What planning actually means
The plan converts the audit's prioritised findings into a sequenced execution map. Every initiative has a hypothesis, success criteria, and a kill date. Every channel has a budget tied to payback math, not platform recommendations. The plan is reviewed quarterly and revised when data demands it — not when the calendar does.
What this step produces.
Channel-by-channel playbook for the next 90 days. North-star metrics, leading indicators, decision rules, hand-offs between channels. Written for the founder + leadership team to read in 15 minutes.
Every test currently in flight, with: hypothesis, primary metric, expected lift, sample size, start date, kill date, status, learnings. Visible to your team. Updated weekly. Outcomes archived for cross-engagement learnings.
Spend allocation across channels modelled against payback period, blended ROAS target, marginal incrementality. MMM-supplemented at $1M+ annual spend. Updated quarterly with actual performance feeding back.
Hypothesis-driven creative briefs, production pipeline, message-market hypotheses, kill dates per asset. Standardised brief template enforced across paid social, paid search, lifecycle.
What to hire, when to hire, what to consolidate in tooling. Headcount mapped to revenue thresholds. Tooling consolidated against actual usage data we pulled in audit.
How the days run.
Strategy intake
Working session with founder + leadership: business goals, P&L constraints, board commitments, growth thesis. The plan is built backward from these — not from platform best practices.
Hypothesis generation
Audit findings translated into testable hypotheses. Each: 'we believe X will lift Y by Z%, measured by W, killed if not by date D.' 25–40 hypotheses generated, sequenced by impact × effort × confidence.
Channel mix modelling
Spend allocation modelled against payback math. Marginal channel efficiency curves drawn. MMM-supplemented where applicable. Mix proposed with explicit confidence ranges.
Strategy doc draft
Plan written. 12–20 pages. Reviewed by senior reviewer for cross-channel coherence. Drafts shared with founder for feedback.
Strategy review + sign-off
90-min strategy review with leadership. Refinements. Sign-off on Q1 hypotheses + channel mix. Experiment register populated and live.
Named owners, not "the team".
| Role | Leads | Contributes | Consumes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior strategist | Strategy doc + hypotheses | Channel mix, creative roadmap | Audit findings, founder context |
| Lead operator | Channel mix + experiment register | Hypothesis prioritisation | Strategy doc |
| Founder / leadership | Business context, sign-off | Constraints, goals, must-haves | Strategy doc, channel mix model |
| In-house team | Execution capacity input | Domain knowledge, dependencies | Experiment register, creative roadmap |
Non-negotiables for this step.
- Every hypothesis is falsifiable.
- Every test ships with a kill date.
- Channel mix decisions tied to a P&L line.
- No more than 8 simultaneous tests on one channel.
- If the plan changes, the change is logged with a reason.
- Plans are living documents. Quarterly revisions. Daily-decision-friendly.
The plan was the first marketing doc we'd seen with kill dates. Every prior agency gave us a 60-slide quarterly deck and asked for the same retainer. RoiSpends gave us a working register we still update weekly.
31 hypotheses tested in Q1. 19 wins, 11 kills, 1 inconclusive. Cumulative paid efficiency +43%.