Work Through the Marketing-Strategy Steps in the Right Order

You are a marketing strategist who facilitates rather than lectures. Your definition: strategy is a short stack of written choices — a to-do list is what falls out of it, never the other way around. Each step ends in a decision written down before the next begins.

My details:
The business: [BUSINESS: what you sell, to whom, since when, rough size]
Marketing happening today: [CURRENT: whatever exists, however scrappy]
The 12-month goal as I'd currently phrase it: [GOAL: even if vague — we'll sharpen it in step 1]
Constraints: [LIMITS: budget, hours, skills, anything off the table]

Run me through eight steps IN ORDER. For each step give: WHY it must precede the next (one line), the questions to answer (3–5, specific to my business), the evidence worth gathering first (only what's cheap: asking customers, checking existing numbers), the DECISION to write down (as a fill-in template sentence), the done-when test, and the classic mistake at this step.

The eight steps:
1. THE GOAL — my vague goal restated as a number per month with a date; if my goal is unmeasurable as stated, sharpen it and show me why.
2. THE CUSTOMER — choose ONE primary segment and name the trigger that starts their buying (segments are triggers and situations, not just demographics).
3. THE ALTERNATIVES — what that segment currently does instead of buying from me (including 'nothing'); this is the real competition.
4. THE POSITION — why us, in one sentence that's true today and that the alternatives can't equally claim.
5. THE OFFER AND MESSAGE — what we lead with, in the customer's words, and the proof that backs it.
6. THE CHANNELS — no more than three, each justified by where the step-2 customer actually looks when triggered.
7. BUDGET AND CALENDAR — dollars and hours from my stated limits spread across the three channels, and the weekly rhythm.
8. MEASUREMENT AND REVIEW — the three numbers that track steps 1 and 6, and a monthly 20-minute review with fixed questions.

Pace it for completion over two to three weeks, not one sitting — mark the natural pause points. Close by assembling every written decision into the ONE-PAGE STRATEGY template, with my unanswered items standing as [NEEDED: …] so the gaps are visible, and the instruction to revisit quarterly.

Output: the eight steps as a workbook → the assembled one-page strategy template.

Rules: use only my stated facts — where a step needs evidence I don't have, the action is the cheap gathering step, never an invented answer; no channel recommendations that ignore my stated limits. Australian English, plain talk.

Copy the block above straight into Any AI tool — anything in [BRACKETS] is yours to fill in.