Q1 FY27 Marketing Check-In: Are You on Track?
The new financial year started on 1 July. If you set marketing goals for FY27, you are now two weeks into delivering them. So here is the uncomfortable question: is anything actually happening yet?
Most marketing plans do not fail in a dramatic way. They fail quietly. The plan gets written in June, everyone feels good about it, and then July arrives with its usual mix of invoices, staff leave, EOFY clean-up and client work. By the time anyone looks up, it is October and the plan is a document nobody has opened since it was approved.
The fix is not a better plan. It is an earlier check-in. Two weeks in is exactly the right time to look, because nothing has gone badly wrong yet and everything is still cheap to correct.
Here is what I would review this week if I were sitting in your business.
1. Goals set versus activity happening
Open your plan and look at the first quarter. Not the annual targets, just July to September. For each goal, ask one question: what activity happened in the last fortnight that moves this forward?
Not "what did we intend to do". What actually happened. An email that went out. A page that got updated. A call that got made.
If the answer for a goal is "nothing yet, but we will get to it", that goal is already at risk. Not because two weeks matters much on its own, but because the pattern is set early. A goal with no activity in July usually has no activity in August either. Something else always feels more urgent, and the plan slides one polite week at a time.
While you are there, check the goals themselves. "Grow our brand" is not a goal you can check in on. "Twelve enquiries a month from the website by September" is. If your goals cannot be measured fortnight to fortnight, sharpen them now while the year is young.
You do not need activity against every goal. You need to consciously decide which goals get attention this quarter and which ones wait. That is a plan. Ten goals drifting along with no owner is a wish list.
2. Budget allocated versus budget spent
This one takes five minutes and tells you a lot.
Look at what you allocated for marketing this quarter, then look at what has actually been spent or committed. Two patterns show up constantly in small businesses.
The first is nothing spent. The budget exists on paper but nobody has pulled the trigger on anything, because every spend feels like it needs one more round of thinking. Unspent marketing budget is not saved money. It is deferred results. If you planned to spend it, the plan assumed it would be working for you by now.
The second is spend with no connection to the plan. Money going out to the same subscriptions, the same directory listing, the same ad account that has been quietly running since 2024, none of which appear anywhere in your FY27 goals. If you are spending on things your plan does not mention, either the plan is wrong or the spend is. Work out which.
3. One channel working versus five half-working
This is the most common problem I see, and July is the best time to face it.
Most small businesses are doing a bit of everything. A bit of LinkedIn, a bit of email, an occasional blog post, some ads that were set up a while ago, a Google Business Profile that gets touched when someone remembers. None of it is done badly, exactly. None of it is done properly either.
Five half-working channels almost always lose to one channel done well. The half-working channels each demand attention, none of them build momentum, and you cannot tell what is contributing because nothing is getting enough consistent effort to produce a clear signal.
So ask: if we could only keep one channel this quarter, which one would it be? Usually the answer is obvious within a minute. It is the channel where your actual customers already are, or the one that has produced real enquiries before. Give that channel most of your effort for the quarter. Keep the others on a maintenance footing or park them honestly.
Why now and not December
Here is the maths that makes early correction worth it. If your marketing drifts for two weeks and you catch it, you have lost two weeks. If it drifts until the December break, you have lost half the year, and January in Australia is not a month where anything restarts quickly. Realistically, a plan that is not corrected by spring does not get corrected this financial year.
The December review is where small business marketing plans go to be quietly forgiven. Do not wait for it.
The 30-minute version
If all of this sounds like a day of work, it is not. Block 30 minutes this week:
List your Q1 goals. Mark each one: activity happening, or not. (10 minutes)
Compare budget allocated to budget spent. Note the gap and why. (5 minutes)
Name your one primary channel for the quarter. Decide what happens to the rest. (10 minutes)
Write down the single biggest correction and who owns it. (5 minutes)
That is the whole check-in. Nothing sophisticated, just done early enough to matter.
If you do it and find the plan itself is the problem — too vague, too ambitious, or written for a business you are not actually running — that is worth knowing in July too. A smaller plan that happens beats an impressive one that does not.
If you want a second set of eyes on any of this, take the free five-minute Marketing System Score — it shows you exactly where the gaps are — or see how I work with clients on this at macinnismarketing.com.au/services. If you'd rather fix it yourself, Small Biz Prompt Shop has the AI tools and prompts to help you build and run the check-in without an agency.
Two weeks in. Still cheap to fix. Have the look.
