Ankit Thakor October 27, 2021 Small business owners often suffer from time and resource limitations.
If you are one of them, you must have wished to get the most of your marketing dollars?
But what happens is you try different marketing strategies without a plan and leave with little success.
According to Forrester statistics, 37% of marketers waste investment due to poor data quality. Around 35% struggle with random targeting, and 30% lose customers due to this issue.
Even if you get lucky racking up a big deal, soon you’ll find yourself unable to scale your business and drive consistent growth.
Until now.
In this guide, we’ll unearth how you can crush it this time with a simple, practical system named: The 1-Page Marketing Plan.
What is the One-Page Marketing Plan?
The One Page Marketing Plan is a strategic blueprint to create, implement, and track marketing tactics for a specific duration.
Allan Dib introduced the concept through his Amazon bestseller, The 1-Page Marketing Plan.
Allan boils down the most critical elements one can quickly put into action, achieve results and then adapt to boost performance.
This article will break down Allan Dib’s marketing plan, how it works, and why you should use it.
Let’s get started.
How to Write a One-Page Marketing Plan?
The name One Page Marketing Plan emphasizes putting your direct response marketing campaign on a single page. It requires you to deconstruct your marketing efforts into specific components, plan your actions and set your marketing in motion.
So, where do you start?
Aim for S.M.A.R.T. Goals
For businesses, the key to long-term success is to build an actionable marketing plan consisting of S.M.A.R.T. goals.
Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (SMART) goals push you out of your comfort zone, give you direction, and help you achieve your goals.
Here’s the structure you can use to define S.M.A.R.T. goals.
Draw Your Goals on a Template
A template turns your focus on more effective and creative work. It helps you generate content for users while staying brand compliant. Templates also omit content wastage, bringing down the overall customer acquisition cost.
Allan offers a “One Page Marketing Plan” canvas in his book, presenting a straightforward way to build a perfect marketing plan. You can use this template to create your personalized 1-page marketing plan.
The template entails three marketing stages: before lead generation, during lead generation, and after the prospect turns into your customer. Each phase has three steps, covering a total of 9 steps of the template.
With that in mind, let’s break down each step to see how the template helps your team operate more efficiently and make you stand out in today’s competitive marketplace.
The “Before” Stage
In the “before” stage, you’re connecting with the prospects—people who don’t know you exist.
The goal of this phase is to spread awareness, get your prospects to know you, and pursue them to respond to your message.
1. Zero in on your target market
Selecting a super-specific niche is a crucial first step in the marketing process. It will ensure your marketing assets resonate better, making your marketing much more effective.
The key here is to find a niche in pain.
If you think of the last time you bang your head for not creating enough content, a SaaS business won’t find it hard to sell you content marketing tools. You will pick it up at least for trial, as you’d do anything it takes to create loads of content faster.
If you already live in your target market, you must be aware of their challenges and worries.
Otherwise, it’s time to conduct a market segment research:
- Find books your target market reads.
- Read forums where they ask questions.
- Analyze the PVP (Personal fulfillment, Value, Profitability). Make sure your target market brings you joy, money, and a problem to solve.
- Test whether your target market pays money to vanish their pains.
2. Craft a compelling message
Most marketing messages are ordinary and boring. To stand out from the nearest competitor, you should craft an instant attention-grabbing message combined with your unique selling proposition for your target market.
How?
Allan’s rule of thumb is to focus on one ad, one objective. It means with each ad (or any other marketing asset like blog posts), focus on one purpose at a time.
Let’s say you offer a social media marketing automation tool. Focusing on one social media channel for the ad is more effective than going vague with all channels. A LinkedIn automation tool is more impactful than a social media automation tool.
You have to be clear on the purpose of your marketing assets before you create them.
Remember: people don’t buy products. They buy the solution to their problems. Your ad must reflect the pain point and offer your product as a solution simultaneously.
3. Choose your marketing mediums
There are many advertising media to deliver your message, including blogs, emails, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), podcasts, radio, and T.V. Instead of going for one medium, experiment with a couple of channels to find what works best for you.
The trick is to find out where your targeted audience spent their time. It could be Facebook or LinkedIn, or both.
For instance, Instagram is the best channel to help people lose weight with exercises and diet tips.
The “During” Stage
In the “during” stage, you’re dealing with prospects. They know you and have shown some interest in your products or services by responding to your marketing messages.
The goal of this stage is to convert leads into customers.
4. Capture Leads
Capturing leads isn’t only about saving prospects’ contact information in hopes of making them buy in the future. Its purpose is to offer lasting value, build trust, and develop authority.
It works like connecting with real human beings by giving them a gift to make their lives a bit easier.
An email offering a free pdf or a link to video-sharing “how to rank first on Google” is the best way to provide value, show your expertise, and strengthen relationships.
5. Nurture Leads
You can’t just send gifts and wait for the sales to come in. Nurturing leads is as important as drawing them in.
A promising future follow-up email is like a welcomed guest for leads.
You can go beyond emailing by creating your marketing infrastructure, including newsletters, email sequences, social media, podcasts, etc.
6. Convert Leads
At this step, you have to build enough trust and illustrate value turning leads into customers.
How?
Offering testimonials, case studies, and guarantees help you gain the trust your brand seeks.
Once leads believe in your value, you are ready to pull the trigger with an irresistible offer.
Use these tactics to design an attractive offer:
Limit choices: Instead of giving too many options, limit your offer to the “standard” and “premium” versions.
Make it risk-free: Offer an “unlimited” version of your product or service for a fixed price.
Provide a High-Ticket ingredient: Considering only a limited number of people buy the best option, give them a unique, high-budget product or service.
No more discounting: Instead of offering a discount, increase the value by adding more products or extra services.
Let them “Try Before Buying: It works like dating with customers before they commit. Genuine customers don’t turn their back if your product meets their needs.
Here’s a tempting offer, with a free trial and extra services, I received from Semrush, a keyword research tool:
The “After” Stage
In the “after” stage, you’re connecting with customers. They already like your products or services and have paid you at least once.
The goal of this stage is to turn your one-time buyers into repeated, loyal customers. Your relationship with customers continues like an ongoing “virtuous cycle” where you grow your relationships, do more business, and obtain more referrals.
7. Deliver a world-class customer experience
Businesses have customers; brands have raving fans.
A world-class experience for your customers turns them into your tribe of followers who look forward to buying from you.
Here are some tips to turn customers into fans:
- Continuously woo your customers
- Build and cultivate lifetime relationships
- Make it fun and straightforward to do business with you
- Create a theatre around your products or services. Make your education and delivery more entertaining.
- Build processes guaranteeing a consistent delivery of a WOW experience.
Ben Greenfield, a biohacker and fitness coach, never fails to WOW his followers. His recent email to make a mouth-watering dessert out of healthy ingredients sets a perfect example of W.O.W. customer experience.
To deliver an experience like this, you have to keep digging into your customers’ pain points and providing solutions via your products or services.
Customer Lifetime Value
You can continue the flow of income through your existing clientele. Some remarkable ways to do so are:
- Upsell additional products or services.
- Raise the prices along with the quality.
- Transform from low-cost to high-cost products with other functionality.
- Revive your past customers with new versions of your products or services.
Referrals
Your existing customer base is the foundation of your new customers.
Take actions that stimulate referrals.
- Ask satisfied customers to refer to your products or services.
- Offer discounts, vouchers, and gifts in exchange for referrals.
Bringing it all together
You can leverage the One Page Marketing Plan as the fastest path to earnings. It helps you reach out to interested leads, turn them into buyers, increase the frequency of transactions per customer, and transform them into raving fans.
Start designing your marketing plan now and see the results yourself.
If you have any questions or need help, feel free to comment below.
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