The 90-Day Implementation Plan

Developing an Implementation Plan

The most important thing you can do at this point is take action. It is critical to put what you have learned into practice. Learning without doing ensures you will get the same results you have always experienced. Knowledge is valuable, but meaningful progress requires turning that knowledge into action.

This chapter provides a practical plan to help you identify and prioritize the steps you should take over the next 30, 60, and 90 days. The sequence of activities is intentional. Some tasks are easier to implement, while others build upon work you complete earlier in the process. Certain activities are naturally sequential, and others deserve more immediate attention. This approach also assumes you have not had prior experience performing any of the activities in this book. If you have, you can certainly alter the order to an approach that works best for you.

Essentially, this plan represents a relatively fast-track approach that accounts for learning curves, waiting periods, getting account access, and other factors that can slow implementation of your marketing tactics. You cannot accomplish everything in one day, nor should you try. Effective marketing is an ongoing process that requires a lot of time, true consistency, and real patience.

The following 90-day implementation plan demonstrates how your business can apply the principles from Modern Marketing and Search Optimization without hiring an advertising agency or SEO expert. This approach also avoids making a significant investment in any form of paid advertising. Remember that the goal is to implement practices that improve your opportunities for visibility while avoiding practices that could damage your visibility. You want to accomplish that goal as inexpensively as possible, so 90 days gives you time to try things and build new habits over time.

The objective is to establish a strong digital foundation during the first 30 days, expand your business’s visibility during the next 30 days, and develop a sustainable marketing routine during the final 30 days. The plan assumes that you can dedicate approximately 15–30 minutes per day to these activities, with occasional longer sessions for website improvements and content development.

Days 1–30: Establish the Foundation

The objective for the first 30 days is to make your business easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to contact. During the first 30 days, you should focus on establishing a strong digital foundation. The process begins with developing a topic cluster that identifies the business’s core services. You can do this alone, with your employees, or using AI as an assistant. I suggest all three. Try it yourself first, then layer in employee input, and finally, use an AI platform to optimize your model. The critical first step is to begin thinking about your business in categories, as well as thinking about what your customers need to know.

You can perform this step first as a full exercise. However, in a race against time, you should perform this step in conjunction with a few other exercises, as time moves quickly and developing the topic cluster should take some time and consideration.

The next step is to claim, verify, and optimize your Google Business Profile. If you already have control over it, it will be relatively easy to update the critical fields on your profile. However, if you do not have control of your profile, then it may take a few days to gain control over it. After getting access to your GBP, you should ensure that the business information, category, services, operating hours, photographs, and website links are accurate and complete.

In conjunction with the Google Business Profile, the business should also create or improve individual pages on the website that address your major products or services. This means developing and answering 15–20 frequently asked customer questions, which should be derived from the topic cluster. Pricing transparency should also be a priority, which entails publishing prices, delivery charges, and other relevant business information.

During this time, you can also begin setting up your Yelp account, Facebook page, and Instagram page. Seek out the professional directories most popular industry and either set up accounts or claim your business on them, whichever is appropriate.

As this is in the works, a company should establish a consistent process for requesting honest Google reviews from customers. Concurrently, the business should document its baseline performance by recording its current number of reviews, search visibility, website activity, and customer inquiries. These measurements will provide a starting point for evaluating the effectiveness of its marketing efforts over the following 60 days.

Here is an easier way to view the 1 to 30-day checklist.

You can see that this is a lot of activity. It’s all very straightforward and mostly non-technical. However, account setup and management of platforms can be time consuming. If you can accomplish this list in the first 30 days of your plan, then you will be positioned for success moving forward.

Days 31–60: Expand Your Digital Visibility

Your primary objective in this period is to make your business discoverable across different platforms and establish a consistent publishing routine. During this phase of the plan, you should focus on expanding your digital presence across additional platforms while maintaining consistent marketing activities.

This activity includes importing supported information from Google Business Profile into Bing Places, claiming and completing your Apple Maps, and making necessary corrections to your Yelp listing. You should also be updating relevant business directories and any local business listings you can identify.

It is also time to begin publishing one useful Google Post each week. You can easily repurpose existing website and Google Post content to develop posts for Facebook and Instagram. This is a very effective time to bring AI into the equation to help with the social media posts. Beyond digital marketing, the business should identify genuinely newsworthy developments or community activities that might attract traditional media coverage.

Finally, you should conduct a competitive analysis of three nearby competitive but related businesses to identify opportunities for improving its online visibility and marketing effectiveness.

The number of activities decreases in the second phase of your plan, but the complexity increases because you are beginning to develop content. Content development takes a bit more thought.

Days 61–90: Strengthen Your Routine

The primary objective in this phase is to improve existing information and increase additional content. You want to continue working in all the platforms so you can strengthen your routine. With some experience now, you should also perform some analysis to determine which activities are producing results. During this phase, you should focus on expanding your content, improving your online presence, and evaluating your marketing progress.

This includes adding 10 to 15 frequently asked questions based on actual customer inquiries over the past 90 days. Use this opportunity to focus on your website and improving its navigation and develop internal links. One way to do find additional questions is to research local Reddit discussions where the business can contribute helpful information. You should also be regularly requesting and responding to customer reviews, and testing a consistent set of local business questions across AI platforms to evaluate visibility.

It is finally time to work on developing video for your business. You should produce one informative long-form video highlighting your products or services and then use that to create three short-form videos using existing content. It’s okay if you solicit some help for this one.

Finally, you should compare your marketing performance against the baseline established in the first Phase. You should also develop an editorial calendar outlining its activities for the next 90 days.

In this phase, you establish a broader digital presence. This is the initial development of a reusable content library. It is also where you begin developing the process for evaluating your marketing performance.

What Happens After Day 90?

The first 90 days establish the foundation. The long-term advantage comes from maintaining the activity and developing a process to support it. An effective topic cluster will support that activity and over time, your topic cluster will likely grow. The more questions you answer for customers, the more questions people will ask. Additionally, some questions may have multiple variations. I regularly field similar phone calls on related questions. The activity will keep going.

Our sample company from this book, The Standard Pizza Business, should continue publishing useful information, requesting reviews, updating business listings, answering customer questions, and evaluating results. The marketing workload should become easier as its library of reusable content grows. There is no end, and artificial intelligence and other search platforms reward recency of activity. You have to keep going. If you stop, then those platforms tend to think you may be out of business or simply irrelevant.

The ultimate measure of success is not the number of posts published or directories completed. It is whether more potential customers discover your business and ultimately buy from you. A key takeaway from this book is that modern marketing and search optimization does not require doing everything at once. It requires completing the most important activities in a logical sequence and developing the discipline to maintain them. That is done with small, but continual, activities to ensure that you stay at the front of mind of platforms and people.

After 90 days, you have your editorial calendar and you have your rhythm. The key is to keep going!

Who Should Help You with Your Marketing Efforts?

Marketing is not a single activity and it not a destination. It is a series of ongoing processes that work together to improve your business’s long-term visibility and reputation. When you begin thinking about marketing as a collection of manageable tasks rather than one large responsibility, it becomes easier to organize the work and identify opportunities for others to help.

You do not have to do everything yourself. Your employees can play an important role in many of the activities discussed throughout this book. They interact with customers every day, hear customer questions, observe customer concerns, and understand what makes your business valuable. These interactions provide an ongoing source of marketing ideas. Employees can help with many tasks. They can identify frequently asked questions. They can suggest topics for website content. They can take photographs of your business and its activities. They can contribute ideas for social media posts. And they can encourage satisfied customers to leave honest reviews. Even small contributions from several employees can make a meaningful difference over time.

The key is to make marketing part of your normal business operations rather than treating it as an occasional project. Marketing responsibilities do not need to consume significant amounts of time. A few minutes of consistent effort can provide a steady supply of useful information and content. As the business owner, your responsibility is to establish the process and assign the appropriate tasks. You must ensure that the information being shared is accurate and consistent with your business’s objectives.

Should You Hire an SEO Specialist?

Should you hire an SEO specialist? It depends. You may decide to hire an SEO specialist, marketing consultant, or marketing agency to help implement some of the more technical or time-consuming activities. By this point in the book, however, you should have a much stronger understanding of the terminology, strategies, and practices involved in modern marketing. You should be better prepared to discuss Google Business Profile optimization, website structure, topic clusters, customer reviews, content development, and search visibility with a marketing professional.

This knowledge puts you in a better position to evaluate recommendations, ask informed questions, establish reasonable expectations, and measure results. Rather than simply trusting someone who promises to improve your search rankings, you can have a meaningful conversation about the work being proposed and how it supports your business objectives. You may also discover that some activities are best handled internally, while others justify getting professional assistance.

The objective of this book is not to turn every business owner into a marketing expert. It is to educate business owners about modern marketing techniques and help them develop a practical system that makes marketing a consistent part of operating a business. Whether you perform the work yourself, involve your employees, or hire outside experts, the most important factor is that someone takes responsibility for keeping the process moving forward. Over time, these individual activities can become a coordinated marketing effort that supports the long-term growth of your business.

The Final Word

Just do it! Take action. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

This book provides the general model I used to develop a regional business. I fumbled through much of the process and ultimately found success by taking action, experimenting, and learning along the way. I wasn’t able to find a comprehensive plan for the modern business environment. By compiling this information into a book, I hope to give you the gift of speed. You can learn from my experiences without having to figure everything out on your own.

Certainly, there is no specific order in which you must complete the activities discussed in this book. You don’t even have to complete all the activities in this book. It’s perfectly acceptable to do things out of order or only do some of them. Test different approaches. Try new ideas. See what works for your business and make adjustments as you go. The important thing is to keep moving forward and implement as many tactics as you can to increase your chances of success.

Yes, ideally some activities should occur early in the process. The foundation of your marketing plan is the topic cluster. From there, your Google Business Profile, Yelp listing, and website should be among your first priorities. You are missing valuable opportunities to be discovered by potential customers if you neglect these essential platforms. Much of what follows in this book builds upon that foundation.

Hopefully, this book encourages you to continue learning how to become a more effective marketer. The digital marketing environment will continue to evolve, and the strategies that work today will need to be adjusted tomorrow. The best way to prepare for those changes is to remain curious, keep experimenting, and continually seek new knowledge.

My final words come as a warning. Along the way, you will encounter many opportunities to cheat or hack the system. Avoid these shortcuts. The internet has a way of punishing businesses that attempt to manipulate it. While questionable tactics may produce short-term victories, the long-term risks can include damage to your brand’s reputation and removal from search results. It is even possible to be suspended from important digital platforms if you cheat. There can be serious consequences that arise when you attempt to bend the rules too far.

This book offers a lot of actions you can take. Choose those that resonate just start implementing them. You can work to improve them as you move along in your marketing journey. Sustainable business success comes from providing building a trustworthy online presence. There is no substitute for doing the work, and there is also no cost to do it yourself.

Start somewhere. Keep learning. Keep improving. Most importantly, take action.