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Copyright © 2018 by Successwise

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief

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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

Act I: The “Before” Phase Chapter 1: Selecting Your Target Market Chapter 2: Crafting Your Message Chapter 3: Reaching Prospects with Advertising Media

Act II: The “During” Phase Chapter 4: Capturing Leads Chapter 5: Nurturing Leads Chapter 6: Sales Conversion

Act III: The “After” Phase Chapter 7: Delivering a World-Class Experience Chapter 8: Increasing Customer Lifetime Value Chapter 9: Orchestrating and Stimulating Referrals

Conclusion About the Author

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Acknowledgments “If I have seen further than others, it is

by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” ISAAC NEWTON

wish I could tell you all the ideas in this book were my inventions and that I’m some kind of marketing and business genius. The truth is, though I’m a collector of elegant ideas, I rarely invent anything, and when I do, it’s rarely

worth writing about. 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.

Reinventing the wheel requires you to be a genius, and even then, it carries with it a high probability of failure. I’m no genius and I hate failing, so I prefer to just closely copy the things that made others successful—at least until I’ve got a very good handle on the basics. This tilts the odds in my favor and gives me a high probability of success.

While I did create the system that has become the 1-Page Marketing Plan (1PMP), many of the direct response marketing concepts that make it work are the inventions and ideas of other great business leaders and marketers.

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. Regardless of whether you consider me a “great

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artist” or a thief, I want you to benefit from the treasure trove of the proven business-building ideas that follow.

Certainly, there’s a place for creativity and invention but in my opinion, this should come after you’ve first mastered the basics. This book contains many of those basics. 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

Some have been personal mentors to me, while others have been mentors to me through publications and other works they’ve produced. I try to credit them in footnotes throughout this book when, as far as I know, an idea I’m presenting has originated from one of them. However, I’m certain that I’ve left other people out or not acknowledged enough of the ideas of the people above. When you collect ideas over a period of many years it can sometimes become a blur when trying to recall where one originated. For that I apologize in advance.

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. The plan is literally reduced to a single page.

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Please enjoy the ideas in this book and, more importantly, implement them in your business. Remember, knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing.

IMPORTANT:

This book is designed to be interactive. For this reason, you’ll find signposts along the way in this book that will lead you to a special resources section of The 1-Page Marketing Plan website.

These resources are exclusively available to readers of this book and are designed to go hand-in- hand with it. They include the 1-Page Marketing Plan canvas and examples, as well as links, videos, and articles referenced throughout this book.

Access these resources at 1pmp.com

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http://1pmp.com
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Introduction

What’s This All About?

f I had to summarize the essence of this book in one sentence it would be, “the fastest path to the money.” I’ve purposely put this as early as humanly possible in the book because I don’t want to waste your time. I know for a certainty that this opening sentence will be off-putting to a

large number of people and frankly I’d much prefer they read someone else’s business book full of ear-tickling clichés like “follow your passion,” “work hard,” “hire the right people,” blah blah blah.

If that’s what you’re after, then search Amazon. There’ll be a gazillion business books there for you on all these airy-fairy concepts and much more, mostly written by professional authors and researchers who’ve never actually built a high-growth business.

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

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Running Out of Oxygen Really Sucks

As Zig Ziglar famously said, “Money isn’t everything... but it ranks right up there with oxygen.”

Yup, nothing—NOTHING—kills a business faster than a lack of “oxygen” (AKA money).

Why am I so unashamedly focused on the money getting? There are a few good reasons.

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 a hobby, not a business. And yes, I know all about delivering value, changing the world and so on, but how much of that are you going to do if you’re broke? How many people can you help?

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.

Why fit your own mask before helping others? Because if you’re slumped over your seat suffering from a lack of oxygen:

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1. you can’t help anyone else, and even worse; 2. we now have to deploy scarce resources to come and help you, otherwise

you’ll soon be dead.

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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.

The statistics vary on exactly what percentage of businesses fail within the first five years. Some estimates put it as high as 90%. However, I’ve never seen this statistic being quoted as anything less than 50%. That means that if we’re being super-optimistic you have a 50 /50 chance of still having your doors open after five years.

However, here’s where it really gets worse. The statistics take into account only businesses that completely cease trading. They don’t take into account the businesses that plateau at a low level and slowly kill or make the lives of their owners miserable.

Have you ever wondered why most small businesses plateau at a mediocre level?

At one end of the spectrum there’s Pete the plumber who works sixteen- hour days, weekends and never takes holidays while barely making enough to keep his head above water. On the other end of the spectrum there’s Joe who runs a plumbing company with twenty plumbers working for him. It seems like his primary business activity is counting the huge sums of money that keep rolling in.

It’s very common for small businesses never to grow past the point at which they generate just enough profit for the owner(s) to make a modest living. It seems that no matter how hard the owner(s) try, their efforts to get to the next level just lead to frustration. At this point, one of two things happens.

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Either they get disillusioned or they just accept their fate—that their business is nothing more than a low-paid, self-created job.

In fact, the reality is that many business owners would probably be better off just finding a job in their industry. They would likely work fewer hours, have less stress, enjoy more benefits and have more holiday time than in the prison they have created for themselves. On the flip side, there are a few business owners that just seem to have it all. They work reasonable hours, have a fantastic cash flow from their enterprise and enjoy continuous growth.

Many business owners who are struggling blame their industry. It’s true some industries are in decline—examples such as book stores or video rental stores immediately come to mind. If you are in one of these dead or dying industries, it may be time to cut your losses and move on rather than torture yourself to death financially. This may be particularly difficult if you have been in the industry for a long time.

However, for the most part, when people blame their industry they are just playing the blame game. 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.

However, it’s rarely the industry that is truly to blame; after all there are others in that same industry that are doing very well. So, the obvious question is, what are they doing differently?

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.”

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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.

So going back to our example, a good plumber is not necessarily the best person to run a plumbing business. This is a vitally important distinction to note and is a key reason that most small businesses fail. The owner of the business may have excellent technical skills but it’s his lack of business skills that causes his business to fail.

This is not meant to discourage people from starting their own businesses. However, you must resolve to become good at the business of what you do— not just the technical thing you do. 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.

If you’re good at the technical thing of what you do but feel like you could benefit from some help on the business side, then you’re in the right place at the right time. The whole point of this book is to take you from confusion to clarity—so you know exactly what to do to have business success.

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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:

1. Bad guys harass and threaten an innocent person or group. 2. The innocent person or group begs and pleads with the A-Team to help

them. 3. 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.”

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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.

How would you feel about engaging the services of any of the above professions if the practitioner were to say to you, “Screw the plan. I’ll just wing it.” Yet, this is exactly what most business owners do.

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.

Just like you wouldn’t want to be on a plane where the pilot hadn’t bothered with a flight plan, you don’t want you and your family relying on a business for which you haven’t bothered with a business plan. Often the stakes are almost as high. Marriages, partnerships, jobs and more are often the casualties of failed businesses.

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

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The Wrong Kind of Plan

Early into my first business, I was smart enough to identify that a business plan was going to be important to my success. Unfortunately, that’s where my smarts ended.

With the help of a business consultant (who’d never actually run a successful business of his own), I ended up many thousands of dollars poorer but had a document that most business owners never bother with—a business plan.

My business plan was many hundreds of pages long. It had graphs, charts, projections and much, much more. It was an awesome-looking document but essentially was a bunch of nonsense.

After it was written, I shoved it in the top drawer of my desk and never saw it again until the day we were moving offices and I had to clean out my desk.

I dusted it off, flicked through it and tossed it in the trash, angry at myself about the money I’d wasted on that phony baloney consultant.

However, later when I thought about it more carefully, I 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.”

In fact, a lot of what we did to create the marketing plan shaped the business and created much of our future success.

More on this in a moment but for now let me introduce a man and his concept that’s going to be the key to your business success.

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My Friend Vilfredo Pareto and the 80/20 Rule

I never had the privilege of meeting Vilfredo Pareto, mostly because he died over half a century before I was born, but I’m sure we would have been best buds.

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 success is showing up.

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

Maybe it’s just my laziness talking but this gets me seriously excited. It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention but I’d argue that

laziness is, and my friend Vilfredo is my mentor in that pursuit. So essentially, you can cut out 80% of the stuff you’re doing, sit on the

couch eating nachos instead and you’ll still get most of the results you’re getting.

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.

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The 64/4 Rule

If you think the 80 /20 rule is exciting, the 64 /4 rule will blow your mind. You see we can apply the 80 /20 rule to the rule itself. 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).

The most surprising thing is that the 80 /20 rule and 64 /4 rule still hold up in a remarkably accurate way. If you look at wealth distribution statistics from the last century, you’ll notice that the top 4% own about 64% of the wealth, and the top 20% own about 80% of the wealth. This is despite this being the “information age.” You’d imagine that a hundred years ago only the wealthy had good access to information, hence it’s understandable why they held 80% of the wealth. Yet this wealth distribution statistic still holds up today, an age where information has been democratized and where even the poorest people have pretty much the same access to information as the wealthiest people.

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.

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The Best Kept Secret of the Rich

In my observation of and work with numerous business owners around the world, there’s one thing that differentiates the wildly successful and wealthy ones from the struggling and broke.

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. These big impacting, leveraged activities are the things that make up the

key 20% of the 80 /20 rule and the 4% of the 64 /4 rule. 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 massive leverage. We want exponential improvement, not incremental.

By far the biggest leverage point in any business is marketing. If you get 10% better at marketing, this can have an exponential or multiplying effect on your bottom line.

Willie Sutton was a prolific American bank robber. During his forty-year criminal career he stole millions of dollars and eventually spent more than half of his adult life in prison—and also managed to escape three times. Sutton was asked by reporter Mitch Ohnstad why he robbed banks. According to Ohnstad, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” When it comes to business the

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

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

Back to my earlier story about the wrong type of business plan. While my business plan document ended up being a useless mess of management speak and nonsense, the part of the business planning process that proved hugely valuable to me was creating the marketing plan.

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

This has been the case in every business I’ve started and run since then. With this in mind when I started coaching small business owners, a large

part of my focus was getting them to create a marketing plan. Guess what? Very few of them ever carried through with it. Why? Because

creating a marketing plan was a complex, laborious process that most small business owners simply won’t do.

So, again, laziness becomes the mother of invention. I needed a way to take the core essence of the marketing planning process and make it simple, practical and useful to small business owners. The 1-Page Marketing Plan was born.

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.

Even more exciting is that it becomes a living document in your business. One that you can stick on the wall of your office and refer to and refine over time. Most of all, it’s practical. There’s no management speak or jargon to understand. You don’t need an MBA to create it or understand it.

The 1-Page Marketing Plan has been a marketing implementation breakthrough. I’ve seen compliance rates among coaching clients significantly

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improve. Small business owners who would have never had the time, money or know-how to create a traditional marketing plan now have one. As a result, they’ve reaped the massive benefits that come from having clarity around their marketing.

I’ll introduce the 1-Page Marketing Plan shortly, but first I think it would be valuable to start at the beginning and not assume anything. Marketing itself is a vague term that is poorly understood even by so-called professionals and experts in the industry.

So let’s quickly get a quick and simple understanding of what marketing actually is.

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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.

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The Answers Have Changed

Albert Einstein was once giving an exam paper to his graduating class. It turned out that it was the exact same exam paper he had given them the previous year. His teaching assistant, alarmed at what he saw and thinking it to be the result of the professor’s absentmindedness, alerted Einstein.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the shy assistant, not quite sure how to tell the great man about his blunder.

“Yes?” said Einstein. “Um, eh, it’s about the test you just handed out.” Einstein waited patiently. “I’m not sure if you realize it, but this is the same test you gave

out last year. In fact, it’s identical.” Einstein paused to think for a moment, then said, “Yes, it is the

same test but the answers have changed.”

Just as the answers in physics change as new discoveries are made, so too do the answers in business and in marketing.

Once upon a time, you placed an ad in the Yellow Pages, paid them a truckload of money and your marketing for the year was done. Now you have Google, social media, blogs, websites and a myriad of other things to think about.

The Internet has literally opened up a world of competitors. Whereas previously your competitors may have been across the road, now they can be on the other side of the globe.

As a result of this, many who are trying to market their business become paralyzed by the “bright shiny object syndrome.” This is where they get caught up in whatever the currently “hot” marketing tactics are like SEO, video, podcasting, pay per click advertising, and so on.

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They get caught up with tools and tactics and never figure out the big picture of what they’re actually trying to do and why.

Let me show you why this will lead to a world of pain.

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Strategy vs. Tactics

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

Strategy is the big-picture planning you do prior to the tactics. Imagine you’ve bought an empty block of land and want to build a house. Would you just order a pile of bricks and then just start laying them? Of course not. You’d end up with a big old mess that likely wasn’t safe.

So what do you do instead? You hire a builder and an architect first and they plan everything out from the major stuff like getting building permits, down to what kind of tap fittings you’d like. All of this is planned prior to a single shovel of dirt being moved. That’s strategy.

Then, once you have your strategy, you know how many bricks you need, where the foundation goes and what kind of roof you’re going to have. Now you can hire a bricklayer, carpenter, plumber, electrician and so on. That’s tactics.

You can’t do anything worthwhile successfully without both strategy and tactics.

Strategy without tactics leads to paralysis by analysis. No matter how good the builder and the architect are, the house isn’t going to get built until someone starts laying bricks. At some stage they’re going to need to say, “Okay, the blueprint is now good. We’ve got all the necessary approvals to build so let’s get started.”

Tactics without strategy leads to the “bright shiny object syndrome.” Imagine you started building a wall without any plans and then later found out that it was in the wrong place, so you start pouring the foundation and then you find out it’s not right for this type of house, so you start excavating the area where you want the pool but that isn’t right either. This clearly isn’t going to work. Yet this is exactly how many business owners do marketing. They string together a bunch of random tactics in the hope that what they’re doing will lead

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to a customer. They whack up a website without much thought and it ends up being an online version of their brochure or they start promoting on social media because they heard that’s the latest thing and so on.

You need both strategy and tactics to be successful but strategy must come first and it dictates the tactics you use. This is where your marketing plan comes in. Think of your marketing plan as the architect’s blueprint for getting and retaining customers.

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I Have a Great Product/Service, Do I Really Need Marketing?

Many business owners fool themselves into thinking that if their product is excellent, the market will buy. While the concept “if you build it, they will come” makes a great movie plot, it’s a terrible business strategy. It’s a strategy that’s expensive and comes with a high rate of failure. History is littered with technically superior products that commercially failed. A few examples include Betamax, The Newton and LaserDisc, to name just a few.

Good, even great products are simply not enough. Marketing must be one of your major activities if you’re to have business success.

Ask yourself, when does a prospect find out how good your product or service is? The answer of course is—when they buy. If they don’t buy, they’ll never know how good your products or services are. As Thomas Watson from IBM famously said: “Nothing happens until a sale is made.”

Therefore we need to clearly understand an important concept: a good product or service is a customer-retention tool. If we give our customers a great product or service experience, they’ll buy more from us, they’ll refer other people to us and they’ll build up the brand through positive word of mouth. However, before customer retention, we need to think about customer acquisition (AKA marketing). The most successful entrepreneurs always start with marketing.

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How to Kill Your Business

I’m about to reveal to you one of the easiest and most common ways to kill your business—in the earnest hope that you won’t do it. It’s absolutely the biggest mistake made by small business owners when it comes to marketing.

It’s a widespread problem, and it’s at the heart of why most small business marketing fails.

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve no doubt given some thought to marketing and advertising. What approach are you going to take? What are you going to say in your advertising?

The most common way small business owners decide on this is by looking at large, successful competitors in their industry and mimicking what they’re doing. This seems logical—do what other successful businesses are doing and you will also become successful. Right?

In reality this is the fastest way to fail and I’m certain it’s responsible for the bulk of small business failures. Here are the two major reasons why.

#1 Large Companies Have a Different Agenda

Large companies have a very different agenda when it comes to marketing than small businesses do. Their strategies and priorities differ from yours significantly.

The marketing priorities of a large company look something like this:

1. Pleasing the board of directors 2. Appeasing shareholders 3. Satisfying superiors’ biases 4. Satisfying existing clients’ preconceptions 5. Winning advertising and creative awards 6. Getting “buy in” from various committees and stakeholders 7. Making a profit

The marketing priorities of a small business owner look something like this:

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1. Making a profit

As you can see, there is a world of difference in the marketing priorities of small and large companies. So naturally there would have to be a world of difference in strategy and execution.

#2 Large Companies Have a VERY Different Budget

Strategy changes with scale. This is very important to understand. Do you think someone investing in and building skyscrapers has a different property investment strategy than the average small property investor? Of course.

Using the same strategy simply won’t work on a small scale. You can’t just build one floor of a skyscraper and have a success. You need all 100 stories.

If you have an advertising budget of $10 million and three years to get a profitable result, then you’re going to use a very different strategy compared with someone needing to make a profit immediately with a $10,000 budget.

Using a large company marketing strategy, your $10,000 is going to be a drop in the ocean. It will be totally wasted and ineffective because you’re using the wrong strategy for the scale that you’re operating at.

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Large Company Marketing

Large company marketing is also sometimes known as mass marketing or “branding.” The goal of this type of advertising is to remind customers and prospects about your brand as well as the products and services you offer.

The idea is that the more times you run ads from your brand, the more likely people are to have this brand at the top of their consciousness when they go to make a purchasing decision.

The vast majority of large company marketing falls into this category. If you’ve seen the ads from major brands such as Coca-Cola, Nike and Apple you’ll have experienced mass marketing.

This type of marketing is effective; however, it is very expensive to successfully pull off and takes a lot of time. It requires you to saturate various types of advertising media, for example, TV, print, radio and Internet, on a very regular basis and over an extended period of time.

The expense and time involved are not a problem for the major brands as they have massive advertising budgets and teams of marketing people, and product lines are planned years in advance.

However, a major problem arises when small businesses try to imitate the big brands with this type of marketing.

The few times they run their ads is like a drop in the ocean. It’s nowhere near enough to reach the consciousness of their target market, which is bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each day. So they get drowned out and see little or no return for their investment. Another advertising victim bites the dust.

It’s not that the small businesses aren’t good at “branding” or mass media ads. It’s that they simply don’t have the budget to run their ads in sufficient volume to make them effective.

Unless you have millions of dollars in your marketing budget, you have a very high probability of failure with this type of marketing.

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Branding, mass marketing and ego-based marketing is the domain of large companies. To achieve any kind of cut through requires an enormous budget and the use of expensive mass media.

Following the path of other successful businesses is smart, but it’s vital that you understand the full strategy you’re following and that you’re able to execute it.

Strategy from an outside observer’s perspective can be very different to the reality. If you’re following a strategy that has different priorities than you, or has a vastly different budget, then it’s highly unlikely it will generate the kind of result you’re hoping for.

Now let’s look at what successful small to medium business marketing looks like.

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Small and Medium Business Marketing

Direct response marketing is a particular branch of marketing that gives small businesses cut through and a competitive edge on a small budget. It’s designed to ensure you get a return on investment that is measurable.

If $10 bills were being sold for $2 each, how many would you buy? As many as you could get hands on, naturally! The name of the game with direct response marketing is “money at a discount.” For example, for every $2 spent on advertising, you get $10 out in the way of profits from sales.

It’s also a highly ethical way of selling. It’s focused on the specific problems of the prospect and aims to solve these problems with education and specific solutions. It is also the only real way for a small business to affordably reach the consciousness of a prospect.

When you turn your ads into direct response ads, they become lead generating tools rather than just name recognition tools.

Direct response marketing is designed to evoke an immediate response and compel prospects to take some specific action, such as opting in to your email list, picking up the phone and calling for more information, placing an order or being directed to a web page. So what makes a direct response ad? Here are some of the main characteristics:

It’s trackable. That is, when someone responds, you know which ad and which media was responsible for generating the response. This is in direct contrast to mass media or “brand” marketing—no one will ever know what ad compelled you to buy that can of Coke; heck you may not even know yourself.

It’s measurable. Since you know which ads are being responded to and how many sales you’ve received from each one, you can measure exactly how effective each ad is. You then drop or change ads that are not giving you a return on investment.

It uses compelling headlines and sales copy. Direct response marketing has a compelling message of strong interest to your chosen

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prospects. It uses attention-grabbing headlines with strong sales copy that is “salesmanship in print.” Often the ad looks more like an editorial than an ad (hence making it at least three times more likely to get read).

It targets a specific audience or niche. Prospects within specific verticals, geographic zones or niche markets are targeted. The ad aims to appeal to a narrow target market.

It makes a specific offer. Usually, the ad makes a specific value-packed offer. Often the aim is not necessarily to sell anything from the ad but to simply get the prospect to take the next action, such as requesting a free report. The offer focuses on the prospect rather than on the advertiser and talks about the prospect’s interests, desires, fears, and frustrations. By contrast, mass media or “brand” marketing has a broad, one-size-fits-all marketing message and is focused on the advertiser.

It demands a response. Direct response advertising has a “call to action,” compelling the prospect to do something specific. It also includes a means of response and “capture” of these responses. Interested, high- probability prospects have easy ways to respond, such as a regular phone number, a free recorded message line, a website, a fax back form, a reply card or coupons. When the prospect responds, as much of the person’s contact information as possible is captured so that they can be contacted beyond the initial response.

It includes multi-step, short-term follow-up. In exchange for capturing the prospect’s details, valuable education and information on the prospect’s problem is offered. The information should carry with it a second “irresistible offer”—tied to whatever next step you want the prospect to take, such as calling to schedule an appointment or coming into the showroom or store. Then a series of follow-up “touches” via different media such as mail, email, fax and phone are made. Often there is a time or quantity limit on the offer.

It incorporates maintenance follow-up of unconverted leads. People who do not respond within the short-term follow-up period may have many

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reasons for not “maturing” into buyers immediately. There is value in this bank of slow-to-mature prospects. They should be nurtured and continue hearing from you regularly.

Direct response marketing is a very deep topic with many facets. The 1- Page Marketing Plan is a tool that helps you implement direct response marketing in your business without needing to spend years studying to become an expert.

It’s a guided process that helps you quickly and easily create the key elements of a direct response campaign for your business.

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The 1-Page Marketing Plan

The 1-Page Marketing Plan (1PMP) canvas is designed so that you can fill it in in point form as you read this book and end up with a personalized marketing plan for your business. Here’s what a blank 1PMP canvas looks like:

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There are nine squares split up into the three major phases of the marketing process. Most great plays, movies and books are split up into a three-act structure and so too is good marketing. Let’s take a look into these three “acts.”

Download your copy of the 1-Page Marketing Plan canvas at 1pmp.com

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http://1pmp.com
The Three Phases of the Marketing Journey

The marketing process is a journey we want to guide our ideal target market through. We want to guide them from not knowing we exist right through to being a raving fan customer.

Through this journey there are three distinct phases that we guide them through. These phases are the Before, During and After phases of your marketing process. The following is a brief overview of each of these phases.

Before

We label people going through the before phase as prospects. At the beginning of the “before” phase, prospects typically don’t even know you exist. The successful completion of this phase results in the prospect knowing who you are and indicating interest.

Example: Tom is a busy business owner and is frustrated that he can’t keep his contacts in sync between his laptop and smartphone. He searches online for a solution and comes across an ad with the headline “Five Little- Known Strategies That Unlock the Power of Your Business IT System.” Tom clicks on the ad and is taken to an online form where he must enter his email address in order to download a free report. Tom sees value in what the report has to offer, so he enters his email address.

During

We label people going through the during phase as leads. At the beginning of the “during” phase, leads have indicated some interest in your offer. The successful completion of this phase results in the prospect buying from you for the first time.

Example: Tom gets a lot of value from the report he downloaded. It has some genuinely good tips that he didn’t previously know and implementing them has saved him a lot of time. In addition, the IT company that wrote the report has been emailing him additional valuable tips and information and

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offers Tom a free twenty-one-point IT audit for his business. Tom takes them up on this offer. The audit is thorough and professional and reveals to Tom that his IT systems are vulnerable because a lot of the software on his computers is out of date. Also, the backups he thought were happening actually stopped working six months ago. They offer to send a technician to fix all the problems identified during the audit, at a heavily discounted rate. Tom takes them up on this offer.

After

We label people in this phase as customers. At the beginning of the “after” phase, customers have already given you money. The after phase never ends and, when executed correctly, results in a virtuous cycle where the customer buys from you repeatedly and is such a fan of your products or services that they consistently recommend you and introduce you to new prospects.

Example: Tom is extremely impressed with the professionalism of the technician that came in and fixed his IT problems. The technician was on time, courteous and explained everything to Tom in plain English. Importantly, he follows through on his company’s promise of “Fixed First Time or It’s Free.” Someone from headquarters follows up with Tom the next day to ensure he’s satisfied with the service he received. Tom indicates that he is very satisfied. During this follow-up call, Tom is offered a maintenance package where a qualified technician will look after his IT systems for a fixed monthly fee. It also includes unlimited technical support so if Tom is stuck at any time, he can call a toll free number and get immediate help. Tom takes up this offer. The support line alone is of huge value to him as he frequently gets frustrated with his IT system and loses productive time trying to figure out a fix. Tom even refers three of his business friends from his golf club to this company because of the great service he’s experienced.