What I'd Do in the First 30 Days If I Took Over Your Marketing
I get asked a version of this question a lot on discovery calls:
"So what would this actually look like?"
It's a fair question. So let me just tell you. Here's exactly what I'd do in the first 30 days if you handed me your marketing.
Week 1: I Stop Everything and Listen
Not to you — although your perspective matters. I mean I stop and listen to your data.
Before I have a single opinion about what you should be doing, I need to understand what's actually happening. That means auditing everything: your website traffic, your social media performance, your email open rates, your Google Business Profile, your competitors' positioning, and your last six months of content.
Most businesses are surprised by what the audit turns up. Not because the results are terrible — but because nobody has ever looked at everything together at once. You might have a blog post from two years ago quietly driving 40% of your organic traffic. You might have a service page with a 90% bounce rate that nobody noticed. You might be posting on a platform where your audience simply doesn't exist.
I also want to know: what have you tried that didn't work? What do your best customers say when you ask why they chose you? What's the one thing you wish your marketing was doing that it isn't?
Week one is about building a real picture — not assuming I already know what you need.
Week 2: I Figure Out Who We're Actually Talking To
This is where most marketing falls apart and where I spend serious time.
Most businesses think they know their target audience. And they do, sort of. They know demographics. They know general job titles, income brackets, or zip codes. But that's not enough to write a caption that converts, let alone a marketing strategy that grows a business.
I want to know what keeps your ideal customer up at night. What have they already tried before finding you? What does a win look like for them? What words do they actually use to describe their problem — because those are the exact words your marketing should be using back to them.
If you don't have customer research, we build it. If you do, we dig into it. Either way, by the end of week two, I can tell you exactly who we're talking to, what they need to hear, and where they're most likely to hear it.
Everything else — every caption, every email, every ad — gets built on top of that.
Week 3: I Build the Strategy
Now I know what's working, what isn't, who we're talking to, and where the gaps are. This is where the actual strategy comes together.
That means making deliberate decisions about:
Where to show up. Not every platform. The right ones — based on your audience, your capacity, and where your competitors are leaving the door open.
What to say. Your messaging framework. The core themes your content will rotate around, built around what your audience needs to hear at each stage of the decision process — not just what you want to say.
What to stop doing. This is the part nobody expects, but everyone needs. There are almost always things in your marketing mix that are costing you time and money without returning anything. We cut those.
What success looks like. Defined goals, defined KPIs, defined timelines. No more measuring marketing by feel.
By the end of week three, you have a documented strategy. Something you can hand to a team member, a designer, a copywriter, or use yourself, and know that every decision connects back to a real goal.
Week 4: We Build the Foundation to Execute
Strategy without execution is just a really good document sitting in a folder.
Week four is about setting up everything you need to actually run the strategy and making sure it's sustainable without me holding your hand forever.
That might look like: building out your content pillars and a 30-day content calendar. Cleaning up your website CTAs so they match the strategy. Setting up tracking so you can actually measure what's working. Creating templates that your team can use without starting from scratch. Write the first round of copy in your new messaging framework so you can hear what it sounds like in practice.
By day 30, you don't just have a strategy. You have a plan you can execute, tools to do it with, and clear metrics to tell you whether it's working.
What Changes After 30 Days
The businesses I work with describe the same feeling at the end of a strategy engagement: clarity.
Not because marketing suddenly got easy. But because they stopped making decisions in the dark. They know who they're talking to. They know what to say. They know where to show up and what to measure. They know what to stop wasting time on.
That clarity is worth more than any single tactic. It's the thing that makes every dollar and every hour you spend on marketing go further — for as long as you use it.