The 1-Page Marketing Plan

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💡 Key Takeaways

• By far the biggest leverage point in any business is marketing.
• Focus on a narrow target market to avoid diluting your marketing message.
• Craft a clear and compelling message that focuses on the customer’s problem/solution.
• Use emotionally charged words and phrases to capture and hold the attention of your target market.
• Develop an irresistible offer by providing value, justifying why you’re doing it, and offering bonuses or upsells.
• Use social media and email marketing to reach your prospects effectively.
• Create lead-generating ads to capture a larger portion of the market and build a database of leads.
• Nurture leads by providing continuous value until they’re ready to buy.
• Build trust and demonstrate value to convert interested leads into paying customers.
• Deliver a world-class experience to turn customers into raving fans.
• Increase customer lifetime value through price increases, upselling, ascension, and increasing purchase frequency.
• Ask satisfied customers for referrals to stimulate word-of-mouth marketing.

✏ Top Quotes

96% of the stuff you do is a waste of time.

Marketing is the strategy you use for getting your ideal target market to know you, like, and trust you enough to become a customer.

A good product keeps the customer. But before that, we need to think about customer acquisition.

Putting the right stuff in front of the wrong people or the wrong stuff in front of the right people is one of the first marketing mistakes made by business owners.

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📝 Summary + Notes

ACT I - The “Before” Phase

• In the “before” phase you’re dealing with prospects.
• Prospects are people that may not even yet know you exist.
• The goal of this phase is to get your prospect to know you and respond to your message.

Chapter 1 - Selecting Your Target Market

• To be a successful small business marketer you need a laser-like focus on a narrow target market, sometimes called a niche.
  • You have a limited amount of money. If you focus too broadly, your marketing message will become diluted and weak.
  • The goal of your ad is for your prospects to say, “Hey that’s for me.”
• Use the PVP index to figure out your ideal target market:
  • P - Personal fulfillment: How much do you enjoy dealing with this type of customer?
  • V - Value To The Marketplace: How much does this market segment value your work?
  • P - Profitability: How profitable is the work you do for this market segment?
• Try to imagine and be your customer.
• A way to enter the mind of your prospect is to find out what they blame and use a device in your copy known as “the enemy in common.”

Chapter 2 - Crafting Your Message

• Rather than trying to sell directly from your ad, simply invite prospects to put their hand up and indicate interest.
• This lowers resistance and helps you build a marketing database—one of the most valuable assets in your business.
• Know exactly what you want your ad to achieve and the exact action you want your prospect to take.
• Develop a unique selling proposition (USP). Something that positions you differently.
• Can you explain your product and the unique benefit it offers in a single short sentence?
• Bad marketing is highly product-focused and self-focused. Good marketing, especially direct response marketing, is always customer and problem/solution-focused.
• Questions to think about when you’re crafting your offer are:
  • What problem are you sure that you could solve for a member of your target market?
  • Of all the products and services you offer, which do you enjoy delivering the most?
  • What is my target market really buying?
  • What’s the biggest benefit to lead with?
  • What are the best emotionally charged words and phrases that will capture and hold the attention of this market?
• Elements of an irresistible offer:
  • Value: What is the most valuable thing you could do for your customer?
  • Language: If you’re not a member of your target market, you need to learn the language and jargon used within your target market.
  • The reason why: When you have a great offer, you need to justify why you’re doing this.
  • Value Stacking: Packing in many bonuses can make your offer seem like a no-brainer.
  • Upsells: When your prospect is hot and in the buying frame of mind, this is the perfect time to offer them a complimentary product or service.
  • Payment Plan: This one is absolutely critical for high-ticket items and can mean the difference between the customer balking and walking away or making the sale.
  • Guarantee: As discussed previously in this chapter, you need an outrageous guarantee. One that totally reverses the risk of doing business with you.
• People buy with emotions first and then justify with logic afterward. Trying to sell to their logical brain with facts and figures is a complete waste of time.
• How to name the product: The name should equal the content. In other words, if the name doesn’t make it automatically obvious what the product, service, or business is, then you’re starting from behind.

Chapter 3 - Reaching Prospects With Advertising Media

• What gets measured, gets managed. Be ruthless with your ad spending by cutting the losers and riding the winners.
• Targeted advertising ends up being much cheaper than mass marketing because there is far less waste.
• To have a successful campaign, you need to send the right message to the right target market, through the right media channel.
• Advertise through social media and email marketing.
• If your marketing consistently fails and loses you money then STOP and change what you’re doing.
• If your marketing is working and consistently giving you a positive ROI, then you should crank it up and throw as much money as you can at it.
• You should not depend on one source (one customer, one market, one ad service, one social media).

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ACT II - The “During” Phase

• In the “during” phase you’re dealing with leads.
• Leads are people that know you and have indicated an interest in what you have to offer by responding to your marketing message.
• The goal of this phase is to get your leads to like you and what you have to offer enough to buy from you for the first time.

Chapter 4 - Capturing Leads

• If you tried selling directly from your ad, you’d be targeting only the 3% who are ready to buy immediately and losing the other 97%.
• By creating a lead-generating ad, you increase your addressable market to 40%.
• Don’t put sales pressure on your ad, provide value, get trustworthiness, and acquire leads.
• At the absolute center of your marketing infrastructure is your database of customers and prospects.

Chapter 5 - Nurturing Leads

• The lead nurturing process ensures that leads are interested, motivated, qualified, and predisposed to buying from you before you ever try to sell to them.
• Advertise with the intention of finding people who are interested in what you do.
• Add them to your database.
• Send your high-probability prospects a continuous stream of value until they’re ready to buy.

Chapter 6 - Sales Conversion

• Sales conversion is all about creating enough trust and demonstrating enough value to motivate interested leads to become paying customers.
• Signals which scream to potential prospects that you are small or potentially untrustworthy:
  • No phone number is listed.
  • A PO Box address or no address listed instead of a proper physical business address.
  • Lack of privacy policy and/or terms of use.
  • Poor or cheap-looking design website.
• A free trial (try before you buy) is also very important.

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ACT III - The “After” Phase

• In the “after” phase you’re dealing with customers.
• Customers are people that like you and what you have to offer enough to have paid you money at least once.
• In this phase, you’ll turn your customers into raving fans by delivering a world-class experience.
• The goal of this final phase is to get your customers to trust you and buy more from you.

Chapter 7 - Delivering A World Class Experience

• Don’t stay a boring commodity that forces you to compete solely on price.
• Tell your audience about all the effort that goes into delivering your product or service.
• No one cares about your logo, company name, or some dubious claim about being the leader in your industry. They want to know what your product will do for them, and your backstory is essential to this.
• Implement systems in your business. They build a valuable asset, have leverage and scalability, consistency, and lower labor costs.
• You should think about your exit strategy. Who will buy your business and why?
• If your business can’t be operated without you, then it’s not a saleable asset and you’re stuck.

Chapter 8 - Increasing Customer Lifetime Value

• One of the most overlooked ways of increasing the lifetime value of a customer is simply by raising prices.
• Upsell: “Most customers who bought X also bought Y.”
• Ascension. Move existing customers to your higher priced, and hopefully higher margin, products and services.
• Increasing the frequency with which your customers buy from you is another solid strategy for increasing lifetime value.

Chapter 9 - Orchestrating And Stimulating Referrals

• One of the best ways to get referrals is by straight out asking for them from customers for whom you’ve delivered a good result. ** **