A six-week campaign is not a big campaign. It is a small, complete one: an objective you can state in a sentence, a budget you can repeat for three months, and a review that produces a decision. Everything below assumes a monthly spend of roughly twenty to fifty thousand rupees — enough to learn something, small enough that a mediocre result will not hurt.
Week 1 — Fix one objective and one number
The single most common cause of wasted advertising spend is a campaign with two objectives. Awareness and enquiries pull in opposite directions: awareness is bought cheaply at scale, enquiries are bought expensively at the bottom of the funnel. Splitting a small budget between them means neither works.
Write the objective as a number with a date. Not "increase brand awareness" but "generate 40 qualified enquiries in six weeks." Not "grow sales" but "add 12 new customers by 30 November."
The stop criterion
Before you launch, write the number that would make you switch a channel off. This is the part almost everyone skips, and it is the part that protects your budget. A useful form:
If cost per qualified enquiry in a channel exceeds ₹800 for two consecutive weeks, pause that channel and reallocate to the best performer.
A campaign without a pre-agreed threshold gets judged on mood, and mood is usually wrong in both directions — too patient with a bad channel, too impatient with a good one that is still in its learning phase.
Week 2 — Define the audience narrowly, then write the offer
Narrow audiences are cheaper to reach and easier to judge. A workable audience definition has three parts: who, where, and what triggers the need.
- Who: "owners of independent textile retailers with two to eight staff."
- Where: "within a 12 km radius of our store, plus a 30 km delivery ring."
- Trigger: "they are restocking ahead of the festive season."
That is specific enough to write creative against and specific enough to know when you have missed the target.
The offer is not the message
The offer is what the customer gets. The message is how you say it. Both need to be decided in week two, not week five. If the offer is a discount, state the end date now — advertising an open-ended discount means you have permanently lowered your price.
Test the offer with five people first
Show the offer to five people who look like your audience and ask one question: "what would stop you from doing this?" The answers, not the compliments, are the useful part. If three of five name the same objection, fix it before spending anything.
Week 3 — Brief the creative properly
Revision rounds are the quiet budget killer. Most of them happen because nobody wrote down what "good" meant. A one-page brief prevents that and takes twenty minutes.
A brief that survives contact with a designer contains:
- One message in the customer's words, not internal language.
- One action — call, visit, enquire or buy. Not "engage."
- The audience sentence from week two.
- Hard exclusions: claims you cannot substantiate, competitor names, terms that may change.
- A named approver who gives final sign-off, decided before work begins.
- Format specs: every size and ratio you actually need, listed once.
Approve creative before booking media. The reverse order creates a deadline that forces you to accept work you would otherwise reject.
Week 4 — Set up tracking before anything goes live
If you cannot see which channel produced an enquiry, week six is guesswork. This week is unglamorous and non-negotiable.
- Send a test enquiry through each channel and confirm it appears in your report.
- Check the landing page on a small phone over mobile data, not office wifi.
- Confirm the enquiry route is staffed — who answers, in what hours, with which script.
- Set daily spend caps so a misconfiguration cannot consume a month's budget overnight.
- Agree with whoever answers enquiries what counts as qualified, in writing.
The definition of qualified is the most valuable line in this section. If the person answering the phone counts every call as a lead, cost per enquiry will look excellent and mean nothing.
Week 5 — Launch in sequence, not all at once
Launch one channel, wait two days, launch the next. This single habit makes debugging possible. When three channels go live on the same morning and enquiries are wrong, you have no way to tell which one to fix.
Sequencing also spreads your attention. Week one of any campaign needs someone watching daily — approving ads that get rejected, answering questions the creative provokes, checking the landing page on devices you did not anticipate.
| Day | Action | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Mon | Channel A live | Approvals, first enquiries, spend pace |
| Wed | Channel B live | Enquiry route capacity, response times |
| Fri | Channel C live | Cost per enquiry by channel |
| Mon (wk 2) | First reallocation | Move budget from worst to best performer |
| Fri (wk 2) | Creative refresh if needed | Fatigue: falling response at same spend |
Week 6 — Review on a scheduled date, and write it down
Book the review when you launch, not when the campaign ends. Thirty minutes, three findings, one decision. The format matters more than the depth.
Answer these in order:
- What was the objective and the target number?
- What was the actual result?
- What did each channel cost per qualified enquiry?
- How many enquiries became customers?
- What would we not repeat?
- What is the one decision for next month?
Question four is the one that changes budgets. A channel with a slightly higher cost per enquiry but double the conversion rate is usually the better channel, and only this number reveals it.
Keep the debrief
Six months of debriefs become the most useful marketing document a small business owns: your own cost benchmarks, your own best-performing creative, your own seasonal patterns. Nothing you can buy replaces it.
Five mistakes that account for most wasted spend
- Two objectives. Awareness and enquiries split a small budget into two ineffective halves.
- A round-number budget with no split. "Let's try ₹30,000" without deciding the channel mix means whoever asks last gets the money.
- Creative approved after media is booked. The deadline then decides what you accept.
- Everything live on day one. No attribution, no debugging, no useful learning.
- No stop criterion. Without a threshold, a bad channel survives on optimism for months.
What to do next
Work out the split before you pick the channels — the arithmetic usually changes the plan. Then take the printed checklist into week four so nothing in setup gets skipped.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a small business spend on its first advertising campaign?
Enough to run for at least six weeks at a spend level you could repeat for two more months without stress. For many Indian small businesses that is between twenty and fifty thousand rupees a month. A shorter or smaller test rarely produces a readable signal, because week one is mostly setup noise.
Should I advertise on several channels at once?
Launch two or three, and stagger them by two days each. Staggering means a sudden change in enquiries can be attributed to a specific channel. Launching everything on one day makes the results impossible to interpret when something goes wrong.
What should I measure if I only have time for one number?
Cost per qualified enquiry, and how many of those enquiries became customers. Impressions and clicks are easy to watch but do not tell you whether the campaign is worth continuing. Qualified enquiry cost ties spend directly to a business outcome.
How long should a small campaign run before I judge it?
Six weeks is a reasonable minimum. The first fortnight is setup and learning, weeks three to five produce the useful data, and week six is the review. Judging at day four mostly measures whether the creative was approved quickly.