Write your Project Brief

"Do some marketing" is not a task anyone can succeed at

It is, however, roughly the task most people are given.

Someone says "we need to do more marketing", or "can you look after our social media", or — if it's your own business — you notice revenue is flat and think I should probably be doing something. None of these can be completed, measured, or failed. They can only be worried about.

The fix is a Project Brief: one page saying what the business sells, to whom, what's happening now, the one thing you're trying to change, and what you have to work with. It takes fifteen minutes and it will be the most-referenced page in your entire Marketing Plan, because every later module measures itself against it. When Module 9 asks whether you should run ads, the answer comes from the budget line in this brief. When Module 6 asks which keywords matter, the answer comes from the goal.

Write it honestly and the rest of the Program gets easier. Write it aspirationally and you'll build a strategy for a business you don't have.

A well-formed goal has exactly three parts

One metric. One number. One date.

That's it. It's SMART stripped down to the parts that actually do work.

❌ "Grow our brand awareness significantly" ❌ "Get more customers" ❌ "Become the leading onboarding tool in the Netherlands" ✅ "Go from 8 to 20 demo requests per month by 1 April"

The first three can't be finished. The fourth can be checked on a specific morning, and either happened or didn't. That's uncomfortable, which is precisely why it works.

One goal, not four. You have a few hours a week. Four goals is zero goals with extra steps. Pick the metric that matters most between now and then; the others can wait for the next brief.

Output goals, not input goals

An input is something you control directly: publish two posts a week, send one newsletter a month, spend €150 on ads.

An output is something you influence but don't control: twenty leads a month, thirty bookings, €4,000 in online revenue.

Your brief needs one output goal. Inputs come later — every module you complete adds inputs, and by the capstone you'll have a 90-day plan full of them. But if you set an input as your goal, you can hit it perfectly and still have achieved nothing. Publishing twice a week for six months and getting no enquiries is not success; it's a lesson about the wrong channel that took six months to learn.

The output goal keeps you honest about whether the inputs are working.

Constraints are design inputs, not confessions

Two numbers in this brief do more work than any other: budget per month and hours per week.

People are sheepish about these. Don't be. They aren't a measure of your seriousness — they're what determines which strategies are even eligible.

A business with €0/month and 2 hours/week should not be planning around paid advertising, and any advice that tells it to is wasting its time. That same business might do very well with one well-chosen local search channel and a customer email list. A business with €800/month and 10 hours/week has a genuinely different set of correct answers.

There is no strategy that's right in general. There are only strategies that are right given a budget, a time constraint, and a starting point. So write the real numbers. €0 is a valid answer, and it changes the advice you'll get from here on.

An honest baseline beats a flattering one

You'll be asked what your current number is. You may not know it precisely. Write your best estimate and tick the box that says it's an estimate.

"Roughly three enquiries a month, I think" is a genuinely useful baseline. "We get a decent amount of interest" is not, because in four months you won't be able to tell whether anything changed. Module 1 will firm these numbers up properly — right now, approximately right beats precisely absent.

The same applies to the obstacle question. "I don't know where new patients would even look for us" is a better answer than something that sounds more competent, because it's true, and because Module 2 and Module 6 are going to answer it directly.

"How will you know it worked?"

This question appears in every module project in this Program, so meet it now.

It's not asking for a number. It's asking whether you've built any way of finding out. A goal with no way to observe it is a wish — and a surprising amount of marketing is done by people who genuinely cannot tell, at the end of a quarter, whether any of it did anything.

For now, just make sure your goal metric is something the business could actually count. Bookings, enquiries, subscribers, orders — all countable. "Awareness" and "engagement" are not, at least not by you, this year.

Tomas's brief, annotated

Here is the whole thing for Herzog Physio. It's short on purpose.

What we sell. Physiotherapy sessions at €65, and 6-session rehabilitation packages at €350. Two locations in Graz. Sports injury rehab, back and neck pain, post-operative recovery. Who buys. Adults 30–60 in and around Graz with back pain, sports injuries, or recovering from surgery. Currently most arrive by GP referral or word of mouth. Current marketing. A website built in 2019 that nobody updates, an Instagram account with 340 followers last posted in March, and a Google Business Profile I've never logged into. Produces maybe 6 online bookings a month. Goal. 25 online bookings per month by 1 March 2027 (currently about 6 — estimate). Budget. €150/month. Time. 3 hours/week, usually Sunday evening. Biggest obstacle. I don't know where new patients would even look for us, or whether they search at all before choosing a clinic.

Why this works: every line names something specific. Prices are real numbers. "Who buys" is a guess, but a falsifiable guess — Module 2 can test it. The current marketing section admits the Instagram is dead and the Google profile unused, which is exactly the sort of thing a flattering brief would omit and which turns out, in Module 6, to be the largest and cheapest opportunity he has. The goal is one metric, one number, one date, with the baseline flagged as an estimate. And the obstacle is stated as an honest question rather than a diagnosis, which leaves room for the research to say something surprising.

Four times the bookings in six months is ambitious. It's also plausible from a base of six with an unclaimed Google Business Profile — which is the sort of judgement the rest of this Program will teach you to make.

Now write yours.

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