Your first 30 days of marketing: a week-by-week plan for a business that has never advertised

The first 30 days of marketing for a business that has never advertised should be boring on purpose: one offer, one page, one channel, one number you trust. Week 1 builds the foundations. Week 2 launches a single campaign on the channel that fits how people find you. Week 3 is for watching, not fiddling. Week 4 is for a decision – keep, kill or scale – made against your own numbers, not someone else's benchmark. Fifteen minutes a day is enough to run it.

What should you do in your first 30 days of marketing?

Do one job per week, in this order, and don't skip ahead. Most first campaigns fail because the ad goes live before anyone can tell a real enquiry from a click.

If you want the whole thing on one sheet before you start, fill in the one-page marketing plan template first. It takes about an hour.

Week 1: foundations

Week 1 is about making sure that when someone does respond, you'll see it. No ads yet.

One offer. Pick the single thing you want a new customer to buy first, and say it so it's understood in three seconds: what they get, for whom, and why now. "Windows cleaned inside and out before winter, fixed price for a two-room flat" beats "Professional cleaning solutions". If you're stuck, here's how to write an offer people get in three seconds.

One landing page. One page about that offer, not your whole website. It needs the offer at the top, a price or a price range, two or three reasons to trust you (photos of real work, a named review), and one way to respond – a short form, a phone number or a booking link. Everything else is decoration.

Tracking that counts real enquiries. Decide what counts as an enquiry: a form sent, a call answered, a message with a real question, a booking. Then count them somewhere you trust – a simple spreadsheet with date, name, where they came from, whether it was real, and what happened. Platform dashboards are useful, but they count what the platform can see. Your spreadsheet counts what reached you. Two habits help:

• Use tagged links for every ad and post, so your analytics can tell sources apart.
• Ask every new enquiry "How did you find us?" and write the answer down.

Google Business Profile. If you serve customers locally, create or claim your free profile following Google's own steps: the right category, opening hours, service area, real photos, and the same phone number as your landing page. Verification can take several days, which is why it belongs in week 1.

Week 2: your first campaign, on one channel

Choose the channel by one question: do people already search for what you sell?

• If yes – "plumber Tallinn", "dog groomer near me", "winter tyres change" – start with search ads. The demand already exists; you just need to be there when someone looks.
• If no – a new kind of product, an impulse buy, something people don't know they want yet – start with social ads on Facebook and Instagram. You're creating the demand, so you need to show people something.

To check, type your service into Google and look at what it suggests as you type, and compare a few phrases in Google Trends. If the suggestions finish your sentence, people are searching.

Keep the first campaign small and simple: one campaign, one audience or one group of keywords, two or three ads that say the same offer in different ways. Set a budget you can afford to spend on learning. A useful rule of thumb: enough to buy 10–20 enquiries at the price you can afford per enquiry (week 4 shows how to work that out).

How we fit in, honestly: Pilgud Agent builds campaigns on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google. It writes the ads, and the campaign is created paused – nothing runs or spends money until you approve it. If you'd rather have people run it, our services team does.

Week 3: learn – what to look at and what to leave alone

Week 3 is the hardest week because the right move is mostly to do nothing. The platforms need time and data, and so do you.

Look at:

• Real enquiries in your spreadsheet, and what each one cost.
• Whether the enquiries are the right people: right area, right service, able to pay.
• The questions people ask. If everyone asks the price, put the price in the ad.
• Clicks versus enquiries. Many clicks and no enquiries means the page or the offer is the problem, not the ad.
• For search ads: the search terms report – the actual phrases people typed before they clicked.

Leave alone: the campaign settings. On Meta, new and edited ad sets go through a learning phase while the system works out who to show them to. Meta's own help page on the learning phase says an ad set needs roughly 50 optimisation events within a week of its last significant edit to leave it, and that significant edits – like changing the audience, the creative or the budget by a lot – send it back to the start. A small local business often won't reach that number and will see "Learning limited". That's common at small budgets and doesn't mean the ads don't work. Judge them by your enquiries.

So in week 3, don't change the budget every day, don't add a new audience, don't swap the pictures, and don't judge anything after two days. For what the columns in Ads Manager actually mean, see how to read Meta ads results.

Do fix broken things straight away: a form that doesn't send, a wrong phone number, a rejected ad, a spelling mistake. Broken isn't the same as underperforming.

Week 4: decide – keep, kill or scale

Decide with your own numbers: what one customer is worth, and what you can therefore afford per enquiry.

What is one customer worth, and what can you pay per enquiry?

Start with three numbers you already know or can estimate: how much a new customer spends with you over a reasonable period, how much of that is left after direct costs, and how many enquiries it takes to win one customer.

With a target and a break-even number, the decision writes itself:

Scale gently. On Meta a big budget jump counts as a significant edit and restarts learning, so several small steps beat one large one.

For honesty's sake, here's the one real result we quote, from our own window-cleaning business: for Aknaässad, €49.92 of Meta ad spend brought 22 leads and about €2,380 in revenue – in high season, with sales closed on site. That's one campaign at a moment of peak demand, not a benchmark. It does show the pattern this plan is built on: an offer that meets demand people already have, and someone who closes the sale.

A daily 15-minute routine

Fifteen minutes at the same time every day beats two hours on a Sunday. Here's the routine:

1. Minutes 0–5: count. Add new enquiries to the spreadsheet. Mark each real or not. Note where it came from.
2. Minutes 5–10: check it's working. Are the ads running? Has anything been rejected? Does the form still send? Answer comments and messages on your ads – they are enquiries too.
3. Minutes 10–15: write one line. What did you notice today? "Two people asked about weekends." "Nobody from Lasnamäe." Don't change the campaign; write the idea down for week 4.

Once a week, add 30 minutes: total spend, total real enquiries, cost per enquiry, and how it compares with last week.

What does "good" look like in your first month?

Good in month one means a number you trust and signals moving in the right direction, not a profit target. We won't give you an industry average – they vary so much by place, season and offer that they mislead more than they help. Compare yourself with yourself:

Good signs:

• Your cost per real enquiry is below your target, or falling week by week.
• Enquiries mention the specific offer, so people read the ad.
• Enquiries turn into bookings at about the rate you planned for.
• New customers say "I saw your ad" without being asked.

Warning signs:

• Clicks but no enquiries: the page or the offer isn't doing its job.
• Enquiries from the wrong area or for things you don't sell: the targeting or the wording is off.
• Lots of "how much?" and then silence: say the price, or at least a range, up front.

At the end of 30 days you should know three things: what one enquiry costs you, how many enquiries become customers, and which channel to put next month's money into. That's a real result for a business that has never advertised.