The 1 Page Marketing Plan - Chapter 1

The 1-page marketing plan, through a series of steps, takes you on the path to your business goal, straight to the point. It has been my marketing bible for the past few years. This book extracts the best examples and anecdotes from other books that we will be analyzing later on.

This book is to follow the path of money, although it does not guarantee success in my opinion can increase the chances of getting there if you understand the steps and adapt them to your business.

"If I have seen farther, it is because I sit on the shoulders of giants" - Sir Isaac Newton

The 1 Page Marketing Plan - Written by Allan Dib

You can't run without oxygen:

In my opinion, the reason why we always want money and strive for it is because we want to give a better quality of life to the people we care about, but in order to help those people we first have to help ourselves.

A clear example is the airline safety instructions: in an emergency, they tell you what to do with oxygen masks. First you must put it on before you can help someone else. Because if you start helping others sooner or later in that example you could lose consciousness.

Knowing what to do

You don't need to have the skills of a formula 1 racer, the muscles of Hercules or the brains of Einstein in a specific situation... you just need to know what to do.

Professionals have a plan, doctors have a treatment plan, airlines have a flight plan and soldiers follow a military operation plan.

Pareto and the 80/20 rule

The secret is to make more than 20% of the activities that really work, which should be equal to more money with less work, for this I cite some examples of Pareto's law:

• 80% of utilities of the company come from the 20% of its customers.
• 80% of accidents of traffic is caused by 20% of drivers.
• 80% software is used by the 20% of users.

In other words, Pareto's law predicts that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Rule 64/4

It is the crazy result of 80% of the initial 80 and 20% of the remaining 20 of the Pareto law. We speak that from the 64% of the effects comes the 4% of the causes (the top 4%; meaning that the 96% of the things you do is a waste of time).

The best kept secret of the rich

Struggling business owners waste time looking to save money while successful businesses give money to save time. This is called leverage and leverage is the best kept secret of the rich. By far the biggest leverage in any business is MARKETING... that's where the money is.

Applying the 80/20 and 64/4 rule in the MARKETING PLAN: the 1 page marketing plan is to work on 4% of the effort that generates 64% or more of the results in your business.

What is Marketing?

You may have already read or heard about it...

• If the circus comes to town and you paint a sign saying: "The circus is coming, performance on Saturday" - that's it: ADVERTISE
• If you put the ad behind an elephant and it walks around town, that is: PROMOTION
• If the elephant walks through the governor's flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, then it's: ADVERTISING.
• And if the governor laughs at that, then it is: PUBLIC RELATIONS
• If citizens go to the circus, you show them various amenities inside the circus, explain to them how much fun they will have spending money on those amenities, answer their questions and they spend money at the circus, that's it: SALES
• If you planned all this... that's what it's called: MARKETING... marketing is THE STRATEGY you use to make the market know you, like you and trust you enough to be your customer. We will talk about strategies and tactics in due time.

The answers have changed:

Once upon a time, you placed an ad in the yellow section and you had your marketing done for the whole year. Now you have Google, social media, Tik Tok, YouTube, influencers, blogs, websites and much more.

For example, in one of Einstein's classes, it occurred to him to apply a test identical to the one he had applied a year earlier to the same students, to which his assistant asked him why? - The answer was: as in physics, the answers change with the passage of time and lead to new discoveries; just like the answers of this exam.

Strategy versus tactics:

Understanding the difference between tactics and strategy is the key to marketing success.

Strategy is the big picture:

Imagine you buy a piece of land to build a house on. You buy the bricks and start stacking them...of course not (or so you hope). Instead you hire an architect and a builder to come up with a plan that takes everything from the foundation to putting mats in the driveway. That is STRATEGY.

On the other hand, once you have the strategy created, you know how many bricks you need, you know where the foundation will go and also what kind of rooms you will have. Now you can hire a mason to lay the bricks, carpenter, plumber, electrician, and so on... that's it. TACTICS.

You can't make something work without strategy and tactics.

Strategy without tactics leads to paralysis by analysis. No matter how good an architect and builder you are, the house will not begin to be built without someone laying the bricks.

For Tactics without the strategy imagine they start building without the plans, soon after they realize they started building in the wrong place.

This is the same way many of the businesses we have come across do their marketing plan. They engage in too many tactics in the hope that it will lead them to find a customer. They start by putting up an aimless website, which ends up being an exact copy of their brochure, or they start on social media because they heard it's the latest thing in business and other businesses are doing super well.

Using both strategy and tactics is where the marketing plan begins.

I have a great product or service, do I really need marketing?

Ask yourself - when does a prospect know a product is good or not - the correct answer is - when they buy it - if they don't buy it, they will never know how good it is. As Thomas Watson of IBM said, "Nothing happens until the sale is made".

We must understand an important concept: A good product or service is a customer retention tool. If we provide the experience of a good product or service, they will refer us, they will buy more from us. But before retention we need to think about acquisition. The most successful entrepreneurs always start at Marketing.

How to kill your business:

What small businesses do is copy the big successful companies... after all, if they are successful with those plans... so are we, right?

The first mistake: Large companies have a different agenda when it comes to marketing plans. Their strategies and priorities differ from yours significantly, for example:

• Pleasing the board of directors
• Reassuring shareholders
• To satisfy the prejudices of superiors
• Satisfy existing customers
• Winning prizes
• Growing your shares
• Profit.

The priorities of a small business can be summarized as: Make a profit.

The second mistake: Large companies have a VERY DIFFERENT budget.
The strategy changes with scale: if you have a budget of $10 million and 3 years to get results, you will use a very different strategy compared to someone who needs to make a profit immediately with a budget of $10,000.

Marketing of large companies:

It is known as mass marketing or branding, examples such as coca-cola, apple o nike that use a large amount of budget, media and advertisements in which, in addition to offering their products or services, they also strengthen their brand presence. It is almost certain that you will fail copying this type of strategies being a small business, unless you have a similar budget but that is no guarantee of success.

SME Marketing:

Direct response marketing: is the branch of marketing that gives small businesses the opportunity to compete on a small budget. It is designed to obtain return on investment (ROI) as well as being quantifiable: it is focused on solving specific problems of the prospect with the objective of solving it with education and specific solutions.

When you turn your ads into direct response ads they become Lead Generation Tools.

Direct response marketing is designed to get an immediate response by having your prospects perform a specific action, such as registering on your website, responding to an email, making a call, making a purchase, and so on. Here are some characteristics:

• It is traceable
• It is quantifiable
• Use compelling titles
• Focused on a target audience
• Makes a specific offer
• Request an answer
• Short-term follow-up of several steps: from obtaining the prospect's data, emphasizing the next step to obtain a discount, schedule an appointment, visit the store, etc.
• Follow up with those who did not register or did not take any action.

There are 9 fields placed in 3 phases in the marketing plan process. Like great plays, movies and books, a 3-act structure.

The 3 phases of the marketing journey: it is a process with which we want to guide our ideal market. It is divided into 3 phases, the formerly, during and the then.

THE BEFORE:

We label people at this stage as PROSPECTSIn this phase, prospects don't know you or even know you exist. The result of this phase is that the prospect knows you and indicates interest.

Example: Tom, an ever-busy business owner, who can't keep his contacts synchronized between his laptop and his smartphone. He searches the internet for a solution and comes across an ad - "5 small strategies that unlock the power of your business information systems". Tom clicks on the ad and is offered a free report by leaving his email address. He sees value in that download so he fills out the contact form.

DURING:

We label people at this stage as LEADSAt the beginning of the phase the lead indicates interest in your offer, the successful outcome of this phase is that the lead buys for the first time.

Example: Tom sees value in the downloaded report, has found good advice that he didn't know about and implements it in his business which has saved him time. In addition, the IT company sends him information with valuable tips, information, offers and an audit. Tom requests the audit and discovers that he has vulnerabilities in his computer systems. The company offers a technician to fix his problems identified in the audit. Tom takes the offer.

AFTER:

In this phase we label people as CUSTOMERSAt the beginning of this stage, customers have already given you money. This phase never ends and if done correctly creates a virtuous circle where they will constantly buy from you and not only that, but will consider referring you with new prospects.

Example: Tom was really impressed, the technician arrived on time and explained everything in colloquial language so he could understand the issues. The next day, Tom received a call from the company to see if he was satisfied with the service. In the same call he was offered a follow-up policy with a monthly fee which included unlimited service for the duration of the policy. Tom took them up on the offer and referred them to 3 of his friends because of the great experience.

We will take an in-depth look at each stage of the marketing plan in the following articles.