While simplified and by no means finite, it's skipped more often than it should be.
Before booking anything, your agency should understand the business: its commercial objectives, ideal customer profiles, customer journeys, competitive position, historical performance and whatever you already know about your customers. It should review the available data, speak to the relevant internal teams and establish what success actually means.
So, are we building awareness, generating enquiries, acquiring customers, increasing sales, or improving the efficiency of something already running? Often it's a combination, and each channel needs a clearly defined job.
Audience research should then identify who you need to reach, what motivates them, where they spend their attention, and what barriers might stop them acting. There are plenty of tools for this, some static and some dynamic, and the dynamic end is where we invest. Either way, that foundation is non-negotiable.
Only after all that should anyone recommend a media strategy, channel mix, investment level, campaign phasing and measurement framework.
Skip it, and you start with whatever channels were used last year, then reverse-engineer a strategy around them. That's the wrong way around.
At the end of the onboarding process, you should be holding:
It looks like a lot, and it doesn't need to be a hundred-page deck full of jargon. It needs to be clear enough that everyone with a stake, whether that's the CMO, the marketing manager or the business owner, understands what we're doing, why, and how it will be judged.
The exact timing shifts with the campaign, market conditions, competitive landscape and buying cycle, though the shape should be consistent.
At 30 days, you're confirming the foundations hold. Tracking is working, campaigns are live as planned, and creative and placements are being delivered correctly. There's no obvious wastage. You're starting to build a performance baseline, and you should be careful about drawing big conclusions from a small amount of data.
Patience is the hard part here, because business owners want results immediately.
By 60 days, your agency should be identifying genuine patterns. Which audiences, messages, placements and channels are performing? Where are people dropping out? What's being optimised, and why?
This is the point where you should start seeing decisions, not just observations, alongside delivery against the KPIs you agreed at the outset.
At 90 days, things should be humming, and you should get a proper strategic review.
What have we learned? What worked? What didn't? How is media delivery connecting to business results? Do we continue, change the mix, scale the investment, or rethink part of the approach?
The point of the 30, 60, and 90-day rhythm is progression. You should see incremental growth across the business, underpinned by constant communication.
Typically, two to four weeks before media is booked, depending on how much existing data and research you can hand over. Rushing it usually costs more later than the delay saves.
You should expect confirmation that the foundations are right, not proof the campaign is working. Meaningful performance patterns generally need at least 60 days, and longer in considered purchase categories.
