The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd

by Allan Dib

An early business mentor of mine, Mal Emery, would often say, “I’ve never had an original idea in my life—it’s just too bloody dangerous.” Yet he was and continues to be an extremely successful businessman and marketer. The secret of his success, and subsequently mine, was to just model things that were known to reliably work rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

Perhaps I flatter myself but the aphorism “Good artists copy; great artists steal,” repeated by Steve Jobs and attributed to Pablo Picasso, is certainly a philosophy I’ve held in mind when collecting these elegant ideas over the years and writing this book.

Some come from my own experiences but most come from people who’ve been “giants” in my business life and on whose shoulders I’ve stood. In no particular order, I’d like to acknowledge: Mal Emery Dean Jackson Joe Polish Pete Godfrey Dan Kennedy James Schramko Jim Rohn Frank Kern Seth Godin

The 1-Page Marketing Plan is an implementation breakthrough rather than a new marketing innovation or concept. It’s by far the easiest way for a small business to go from knowing nothing about marketing to creating and implementing a sophisticated direct response marketing plan for their business.

knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing.

Access these resources at 1pmp.com

Introduction

This book is blatantly and unashamedly about growing your business fast and reaping the rewards of that kind of success.

Running Out of Oxygen Really Sucks

As Zig Ziglar famously said, “Money isn’t everything... but it ranks right...

Why am I so unashamedly focused on the money getting?

Firstly, there’s almost no business problem that can’t be solved with more money. Which is handy because almost every business I know of is full of problems. Money helps you solve the vast majority of things that make business a pain in the backside. Secondly, when you’ve taken care of yourself, you have a chance to help others.

If you didn’t go into business to make money then you’re either lying or you have...

When you board an airplane and they’re going through all the safety procedures, the airline attendant will inevitably get to a point that goes something like this: Should the cabin experience sudden pressure loss, oxygen masks will drop down from above your seat. Place the mask over your mouth and nose and pull the strap to tighten. If you are traveling with children or someone who requires assistance, make sure that your own mask is on first before helping others.

Knowing What to Do In his book titled The Book of Survival, Anthony Greenbank wrote: To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need to have the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do.

Some of the most common industry complaints I hear are: It’s too competitive. The margins are too low. Online discounters are taking customers away. Advertising no longer works.

Many small business owners fall into the trap described in Michael Gerber’s classic book, The E-Myth Revisited. That is, they are a technician, for example, a plumber, hairdresser, dentist and so on, and they are good at what they do. They have what Gerber describes as an “entrepreneurial seizure” and they start to think to themselves, “Why should I work for this idiot boss of mine? I’m good at what I do—I’ll start my own business.”

This is one of THE major mistakes made by most small business owners. They go from working for an idiot boss to becoming an idiot boss! Here is the key point—just because you’re good at the technical thing you do doesn’t mean that you are good at the business of what you do.

The owner of the business may have excellent technical skills but it’s his lack of business skills that causes his business to fail.

A business can be an amazing vehicle for achieving financial freedom and personal fulfillment—but only for those who understand and master

this vital distinction and figure out what they need to do to run a successful business.

Professionals Have Plans As a kid my favorite TV show was The A-Team. In case you’ve never watched it, I’ll give you the executive summary of 99% of the episodes: Bad guys harass and threaten an innocent person or group. The innocent person or group begs and pleads with the A-Team to help them. The A-Team (a motley bunch of ex-soldiers) fight, humiliate and drive away the bad guys. Episodes would invariably end with Hannibal (the brains of the A-Team) chomping down on his cigar and triumphantly mumbling, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Look at any profession where the stakes are high and you’ll see a well-thought-out plan being followed. Professionals never just wing it. Doctors follow a treatment plan. Airline pilots follow a flight plan. Soldiers follow a military operation plan.

Invariably, when someone makes a mess of something it often becomes clear in the aftermath that they didn’t have a plan. Don’t let that be you and your business. While no one can guarantee your success, having a plan dramatically increases your probability of success.

It’s more than just your ego on the line so it’s time to “go pro” and create a plan.

The Wrong Kind of Plan

realized that while the document itself was a bunch of nonsense, the process I went through with the consultant was valuable in clarifying some of the key elements in my business, particularly one key section of it called “the marketing plan.”

My Friend Vilfredo Pareto and the 80/20 Rule

Pareto was an Italian economist who noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Hence the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80 /20 rule, was born.

It turns out, the 80 /20 rule holds true for more than just land ownership in Italy. It holds true for almost anything you care to think of. Some examples: 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its customers. 80% of road traffic accidents are caused by 20% of drivers. 80% of software usage is by 20% of users. 80% of a company’s complaints come from 20% of its customers.

80% of wealth is owned by 20% of people. Woody Allen even noted that 80% of...

the Pareto Principle predicts that 80% of effects come f...

If you don’t want to sit on the couch chowing down on nachos 80% of the time, then doing more of the 20% stuff is your fast track to success. And in this context, success = more money while doing less work.

The 64/4 Rule

So we take 80% of 80 and 20% of 20 and end up with the 64 /4 rule. So 64% of effects come from 4% of causes. Put another way, the majority of your success comes from the top 4% of your actions. Or put yet another way, 96% of the stuff you do is a waste of time (comparatively).

This proves that lack of information isn’t the issue holding back the bottom 80% of business owners—it’s human behavior and mindset. That certainly hasn’t changed in the last 100 years.

The Best Kept Secret of the Rich

Struggling business owners will spend time to save money, whereas successful business owners will spend money to save time. Why is that an important distinction? Because you can always get more money, but you can never get more time. So you need to ensure the stuff you spend your time on makes the biggest impact.

This is called leverage and leverage is the best kept secret of the rich.

If you want more success, you need to start paying attention to and expand the things that give you the most leverage.

There are various areas of your business where you could start looking for leverage points. You may look at getting 50% better at your negotiation skills. This, in turn, may help you renegotiate

with key suppliers and get an incremental improvement in your buy price. While this is great, at the end of the day after all that time and effort you’ve still just improved your bottom line incrementally. This is not what I’d call mass...

By far the biggest leverage point in any business is marketing. If you get 10% better at marketing, this can have an exponential or m...

When it comes to business the reason we want to focus so heavily on marketing is the same—because that’s where the money is.

Applying the 80/20 and 64/4 Rules— Your Marketing Plan

The marketing plan ended up being the 20% part of the business planning process that produced 80% of the result.

The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the 4% of effort that generates 64% (or more) of the result in your business. It’s the 64 /4 rule applied to business planning. Using this process, we can boil down hundreds of pages and thousands of hours of traditional business planning into a single page that can take as little as 30 minutes to think about and fill in.

What Is Marketing? Some people think marketing is advertising or branding or some other vague concept. While all these are associated with marketing, they are not one and the same. Here’s the simplest, most jargon-free definition of marketing you’re ever likely to come across: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Showground Saturday,” that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that’s publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations. If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and, ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales. And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing. Yup, it’s as simple as that—marketing is the strategy you use for getting your ideal target market to know you, like you and trust you enough to become a customer. All the stuff you usually associate with marketing are tactics. We’ll talk more about strategy vs. tactics in a moment. However, before we do that you need to understand that a fundamental shift has occurred in the last decade and things will never be the same.

The Answers Have Changed

Strategy vs. Tactics Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is absolutely key to marketing success.