Why Your Marketing Plan Needs “Rocks,” Not Resolutions

We are halfway through 2026. If your marketing goals are still living in a January planning doc, it’s time for a different approach.

Most business owners set annual marketing goals at the start of the year — grow brand awareness, get more leads, post more consistently — and by March, those goals have slipped to the bottom of the to-do list. Not because the goals were wrong, but because a year is too long a runway to actually change behaviour day to day.

This is where a concept from EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) is worth borrowing: Rocks.

What a Rock Actually Is

In EOS, a Rock is a priority you commit to finishing in the next 90 days. A specific, ownable, measurable outcome.

Example:

• “Increase brand awareness” isn’t a Rock.
• “Launch the redesigned homepage by November 15” is a Rock.

The 90-day window matters. It’s short enough to stay urgent and long enough to actually get something meaningful done. Which makes it a natural fit for marketing, where most real progress (a new lead magnet, a cleaned-up CRM, a content system that actually runs itself) takes more than a week but shouldn’t take a year.

What This Looks Like for Marketing

A small business heading into Q4 2026 might set Rocks like:

• Build and launch a 90-day content calendar
• Ship one new lead magnet and connect it to email follow-up
• Clean up and properly tag contacts in the CRM

Three priorities. Three owners. Three deadlines. That’s it! Not a 40-item wish list.

Rocks Are Only as Good as the Rhythm Around Them

That being said…. A Rock without a weekly check-in is just a to-do list with a deadline attached. The accountability is what makes it work. A short weekly touchpoint where you ask: is this on track, off track, or stuck? That rhythm is exactly what we build into the weekly sessions in our Run With Vision marketing and small business coaching program. Rocks aren’t a document you write once and revisit in three months, they’re a conversation you have every week.

An Important Note If You’re Early in Your Marketing Journey

If you don’t have a lot of marketing data yet, your first few rounds of Rocks are going to look different — and that’s exactly as it should be.

Think of it like building a stone wall. You lay your first 30-day Rocks. Then your 60-day Rocks go on top of those. Then 90 days. Each layer sits on the one before it — you don’t clear the ground and start over every quarter. You keep building on what you’ve already learned.

In the beginning, your Rocks might not be about results at all. They might simply be about discovery — understanding your audience, figuring out what to track, deciding which direction to even go. If your budget is limited, this stage matters even more, because you can’t afford to guess. Getting clear on those things is an accomplishment, even if there’s no dashboard to prove it yet.

It won’t always feel like something is happening. Early-stage marketing rarely does — especially with a limited budget, when growth is slower and less visible. That’s normal. Marketing is never perfect, and it’s not supposed to be linear. What matters is whether each round of Rocks is building on the last one, whether you’re learning, adjusting, and carrying that forward, instead of starting from zero every quarter.

Keep that in perspective as you look at where you are halfway through this year and start shaping your goals for next year: some quarters are about discovery, some are about momentum.

The Bigger Picture

One more thing worth saying clearly: marketing Rocks shouldn’t live in isolation.

Marketing isn’t a department that gets its own separate goals — especially for a small business. It’s one of the clearest ways your business’s bigger focus shows up in the world. Your marketing priorities should always connect back to a larger conversation about where the business itself is headed: your vision, your priorities, what you’re actually trying to build.

That’s the real value of borrowing a model like EOS for marketing. It’s a way to make sure your marketing is never operating on its own, but always in service of the bigger picture.