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

by Allan Dib

You need to develop your unique selling proposition (USP). This is where a lot of people get stuck. They say something like “I sell coffee. There’s nothing unique about that.”

The entire goal of your USP is to answer this question: Why should I buy from you rather than from your nearest competitor?

Another good test is this: if I removed the company name and logo from your website, would people still know that it’s you or could it be any other company in your industry?

The common place that people go wrong with developing their USP is they say “quality” or “great service” is their USP. There are two things wrong with that: Quality and great service are expectations; they are just part of good business practice—not something unique. People only find out about your quality and great service after they’ve boug...

Positioning yourself as a commodity and hence being shopped on price alone is a terrible position for a small business owner to be in. It’s soul crushing, and this race to the bottom is bound to end in tears. The answer is to develop a unique selling proposition.

There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

There are two questions I ask my clients when helping them develop their USP. Answering these two questions is the path towards marketing and financial success in your business.

So the two questions you must ask yourself and answer are: Why should they buy? Why should they buy from me?

The uniqueness may be in the way it is packaged, delivered, supported or even sold.

You need to position what you do in such a way that even if your competitor was operating directly opposite you, customers would cross the road to do business with you instead of your competitor.

Do it really well, and they may even stand in line overnight to do business with you instead of your competitor l...

Getting into the Mind of Your Prospect

So, to get into the mind of the prospect, we need to discover what result they are actually buying. Once you understand this, you then

need to craft your unique selling proposition based on the result your prospects want to achieve.

For example, if you’re a printer, you’re in a commodity business. You want to get out of the commodity business as quickly as possible. I don’t mean get out of the industry, but...

Stop selling business cards, brochures, and printing and start asking open-ended questions, such as, “Why are you coming to a printer? What is it that you want to achieve?” The prospect doesn’t want business cards and brochures. They want what they thi...

If You Confuse Them You Lose Them Understand that your prospect has essentially three options: Buy from you Buy from your competitor Do nothing

need to first answer the question of why they should buy. Then, you need to answer the question of why they should buy from you.

Can you explain your product and the unique benefit it offers in a single short sentence?

You must understand a very important concept: confusion leads to lost sales.

When you confuse them, you lose them.

People have too many options and too much information coming at them constantly, and they’re rarely motivated enough to wade through a confused message.

How to Be Remarkable When You Are Selli...

How do you charge high prices for your products and services while having your customers thank you for it?...

When given this answer, the first thing many business owners do is mutter under their breath something...

How can our café owner be different? Check this out:

How much extra did it cost the café to serve art with its coffee? Pretty close to zero, I would expect. Maybe some extra training for the barista and a few extra seconds of time per cup. But how many people will each customer tell or, better still, bring in to show? Could this café owner charge 50¢ more per cup than the café down the road? For sure. That’s 50¢ of pure profit multiplied by hundreds of thousands of cups per year straight to the bottom line.

Here’s another example. Most e-commerce sites send the same boring confirmation email when you buy from them. Something along the lines of, “Your order has been shipped. Please let us know if it doesn’t arrive. Thank you for your business.” But have a look at how CD Baby creates a remarkable experience for the customer and a viral marketing opportunity for themselves instead of a normal boring confirmation email:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle, and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards, and the whole party marched down the street to the post office, where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Again, nothing unique about the product, but the transformation of something ordinary and boring gives the customer a smile and creates free viral marketing for the business.

Here’s one more example from another highly competitive, commodity industry—consumer electronics:

When Apple first launched their legendary music player, the iPod, they could have talked about the five-gigabyte storage capacity or other technical features like all the other manufacturers of music players of the day did. But instead, how did they promote it? “1000 songs in your pocket” Genius! Five gigabytes doesn’t mean a thing to most consumers. Neither does a bunch of technical jargon, but “1000 songs in your pocket”—anyone can instantly understand that and the benefits it will offer. The iPod was by no means the first portable music player on the marke...

Yet, the seller can and does command premium pricing because they are selling a remarkable experience.

Lowest Price

I’m sometimes asked, “Can’t lowest price be my USP?” Sure it can, but can you absolutely guarantee that everything you sell will be priced lower than all your competitors, including the behemoths like Costco and Walmart? Unlikely.

A better option than discounting is to increase the value of your offering. Bundling in bonuses, adding services, customizing the solution can all be of genuine value to your customer but can cost you very little to do. This also helps you create that valuable apples-to-oranges comparison that gets you out of the commodity game.

Don’t hate the player; hate the game. So, as hard as it may be to resist, don’t play the commodity/price game. Develop your USP, deliver on it and make those you deal with play your game, on your terms.

Create Your Eleva...

A great way of distilling your USP is by crafting an “elevator pitch.” An elevator pitch is a concise, well-rehearsed summary of your business and its value proposition, which can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride, in other words, 30 to 90 seconds.

I once asked a woman what she did for a living and she replied, “I’m a senior event builder.” None the wiser about what she did, I continued probing until I finally came to understand that she arranges seating for concerts and large events in stadiums.

The next time someone asks what you do for a living, it’s your cue to deliver an elevator pitch. It’s a perfect opportunity to convey your marketing message on a regular basis in many different settings.

Most elevator pitches suffer from the same problem as overinflated job titles. It leaves the recipient confused or thinking “what a douchebag” rather than the intended effect of impressing them.

Bad marketing is highly product-focused and self-focused. Good marketing, especially direct response marketing, is always customer and problem/solution focused,

We want to be remembered for what problem we solve rather than for some impressive but incomprehensib...

Good marketing takes the prospect through a journey that covers the problem, the solution and, finally, the proof. Your ele...

So how do you effectively communicate these three components in the space of about 30 seconds? The best formula I’ve seen is: You know [problem]? Well, what we do is [soluti...

Insurance Sales: “You know how most people rarely review their insurance coverage when their circumstances change? Well, what I do is help people have peace of mind by making sure their insurance...

Electrical Engineering: “You know when there are power outages that bring down critical systems in large businesses? Well, what I do is install backup power systems for companies that rely on having a continual supply of power for their operations.

Website Development: “You know how most company websites are out of date? Well, what I do is install software that makes it easy for people to update their own websites, without the need to pay a web designer each time.

Crafting Your Offer