The 1-Page Marketing Plan

# The 1-Page Marketing Plan

Chapter 1: Selecting Your Target Market

Your target market is never "everyone," because targeting everyone means targeting no one. Small businesses can't afford mass marketing, which is like an archer firing arrows into a fog. They need laser-like focus on a niche.

A niche is a tightly defined slice of a subcategory, such as cellulite treatment for women who've just had a baby. Aim for one that is "an inch wide and a mile deep": narrow enough that your ad makes the reader say "Hey, that's for me," yet with plenty of people hungry for the solution. Dominate one niche, then move to the next. A specialist is sought out, not shopped on price, just as you'd pay more for a heart specialist than a general doctor.

To choose your niche, score each market segment you serve out of 10 on the PVP index (a concept from Frank Kern):

Personal fulfillment: how much you enjoy these customers.

Value to the marketplace: how much they value your work and will pay for it.

Profitability: what you actually keep.

Allan Dib's photographer scored family portraits 26, weddings 21, and corporate and photojournalism 18 each. Family portraits win.

Then build an avatar, a detailed portrait of your ideal customer, to get inside their head. Dib's examples are Max Cash, a 51-year-old financial planner who loves golf, and his assistant Angela Assistant, who handles the IT. Capture what keeps them awake at night, what they fear, what they secretly desire and what they read. Create an avatar for each decision maker or influencer. Then fill in square #1 of your canvas.

Try this: Score every market segment you serve on the PVP index, pick the top scorer, and write a one-page avatar for it.

Chapter 2: Crafting Your Message

Most small business advertising is marketing by accident: company name, logo, a laundry list of services and a hope that the right prospect shows up on the right day. Instead, market on purpose. Run one ad with one objective, make a clear call to action, and speak to the conversation already going on in your prospect's mind.

Develop a USP. Answer "Why should I buy from you rather than your nearest competitor?" "Quality" and "great service" don't count, because customers only discover them after buying. Be remarkable instead. CD Baby's playful order confirmation email and Apple's "1000 songs in your pocket" turned commodities into apples-to-oranges comparisons.

Use the elevator pitch formula. "You know [problem]? Well, what we do is [solution]. In fact, [proof]."

Build an irresistible offer. Combine value, language, a reason why, value stacking, upsells, a payment plan, an outrageous guarantee and scarcity. Never offer a lazy "10% off."

People buy with emotion and justify with logic. Push at least one of the five motivators: fear, love, greed, guilt, pride. Target existing pain rather than features. Address the risks that trigger the prospect's amygdala, tell them who your product is *not* for, and use the enemy in common, such as the "greedy tax man." Name your business so it needs no explanation: "Fast Plumbing Repairs" beats "Aqua Solutions." Remember that if you confuse them, you lose them.

Try this: Write your elevator pitch using the three-part formula, then rewrite your main ad around one objective and one specific call to action.

Chapter 3: Reaching Prospects with Advertising Media

Media is the vehicle that carries your message to your market, and it is usually your most expensive marketing cost. Judge it by one test: did the campaign make more money than it cost? Response rates mean little on their own.

The ROI game. John Wanamaker said half his ad spend was wasted and he didn't know which half. With toll-free numbers, analytics and coupon codes, there is no excuse for that today. Dib's example: mail 100 letters for $300, get 10 responses and 2 buyers, and your customer acquisition cost is $150. At $100 profit per sale, you lose money. At $600 profit, you win. Add lifetime value (front end plus back end) to see the full picture.

Market, Message, Media: all three must match. Social media is a medium, not a strategy. It is a poor place to sell, it can drain your time, and you don't own your audience. Dib would rather have 1,000 people on his own email list than 10,000 Facebook "likes."

Own your assets: build an email list through opt-ins and use a commercial platform. Send three value emails for every offer email. Postal mail is less cluttered than email and complements it.

No budget for what works: set a budget only while testing, and fail cheap. Once a campaign has a positive ROI, spend as much as you can on it.

Beware "the most dangerous number is one": a single point of failure, such as Google rankings, can wipe you out overnight. Aim for at least five lead sources, mostly paid, because paid media is reliable and forces ROI discipline.

Try this: Calculate the customer acquisition cost of your main lead source, then list every single point of failure in how you get leads.

Chapter 4: Capturing Leads

The purpose of your ad is not to sell. It is to capture leads: find interested people and put them in a database so you can follow up. Most businesses hunt, chasing an immediate sale every day. Direct response marketers farm, planting seeds and nurturing them until harvest.

Selling directly from an ad targets only the 3% of your market ready to buy now. The rest looks like this:

3% ready to buy now

7% open to buying

30% interested, but not right now

30% not interested

30% wouldn't take it even if it were free

A lead-generating ad captures the first three groups. That lifts your addressable market from 3% to 40%, a 1,233% increase in advertising effectiveness. Buyers who are ready now also see you aren't desperate.

To find those people, offer an ethical bribe: free, valuable information in exchange for contact details. Allan Dib's photographer runs the headline "Free DVD Reveals the Seven Costly Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Photographer for Your Wedding Day." Anyone who requests it identifies as a high-probability prospect. You can then spend $10 wooing each of 100 people instead of $1 across 1,000. Educating also positions you as an expert and authority.

Capture only works inside a system. Most businesses commit random acts of marketing: an ad here, a brochure there. Build marketing infrastructure instead, with a CRM at its center as your marketing nerve center, so a cold lead enters one end and a raving fan comes out the other.

Try this: Write one free report or video offer that solves a specific problem for your niche, and make it the only call to action in your next ad.

Chapter 5: Nurturing Leads

Most leads aren't ready to buy when they respond, so lead nurturing means staying in touch with value until they are. The money is in the follow-up, and your goal is to be a welcome guest, not a pest.

Joe Girard, listed in the *Guinness World Records* as the world's greatest salesman, sold 13,001 cars between 1963 and 1978. His edge was constant contact. Every month he mailed customers a personalized card saying "I like you," in varied envelopes that dodged the junk-mail bin. Meanwhile, a widely quoted statistic says 50% of salespeople quit after one contact.

Become a marketing farmer:

Advertise to find interested people by offering free, relevant information.

Add them to your database or CRM.

Nurture them regularly with value, with only an occasional pitch.

Build a marketing infrastructure of newsletters, email and mail sequences and auto-responders, automated through your CRM wherever possible.

Then stand out with lumpy mail, envelopes containing "grabbers" that get opened first. Go further with the shock and awe package (credited to Dan Kennedy): a box holding a book, DVD, testimonials, samples and a handwritten note. It should give unexpected value, position you as the authority and move prospects further along the buying cycle. Competitors rarely copy it because they don't know their numbers.

Nurturing fails without people to run it, so cover three roles:

Make it up (entrepreneur)

Make it real (specialist)

Make it recur (manager)

Use a marketing calendar for scheduled and event-triggered tasks, and delegate through geoarbitrage.

Try this: Write a marketing calendar with one daily, weekly and monthly nurturing action, and assign a person to each.

Chapter 6: Sales Conversion

Sales conversion is about earning enough trust to turn interested leads into buyers, and positioning does most of the work. Prospects are cynical and start in negative territory, like people who assume every dog bites.

The Joshua Bell experiment shows what positioning is worth. The same violinist, music and violin earned $32 in a *Washington Post* subway stunt and over $60,000 per hour in a concert hall. People take you at your own appraisal.

Key moves:

Pest to welcome guest: Stop closing and start educating, consulting and advising, like a doctor who diagnoses first. Avoid hopeium, the false rush from a "send me a quote" lead who never buys.

Outrageous guarantees (risk reversal): Replace "satisfaction guaranteed" with a specific promise that addresses the prospect's fears, such as refunding double the money.

Pricing psychology: In Iyengar's jam study, 24 flavors converted 3% of tasters versus 30% for six. Offer a standard and premium option (premium about 50% higher, twice the value), an "unlimited" option and an ultra-high-ticket item. Resist discounting and add bonuses instead.

Remove friction: Use the puppy dog close (try before you buy). Make everyone in your business a salesperson. Close down your sales prevention department by accepting customers' preferred payment methods and offering payment plans.

Small businesses also fight a trust bias. A professional website, an email address on your own domain, a toll-free number and a CRM help you look as credible as larger rivals.

Try this: Write one specific risk-reversal guarantee that answers your prospect's biggest fear, and add it to your offer this week.

Chapter 7: Delivering a World-Class Experience

The marketing process only begins once a prospect becomes a customer. A world-class experience turns customers into a tribe of raving fans, people connected to you and your idea (Seth Godin's definition in *Tribes*) who amplify your message and buy again. Small businesses have the edge here because they can personally manage each relationship.

Sell what they want, give them what they need. Sell ripped abs, deliver health. Package implementation in bite-sized steps, because customers who don't get results call your product a scam.

Create theater and innovate. Peter Drucker said marketing and innovation are a business's two basic functions. Innovation needn't be in the product: Blendtec's *Will It Blend?* videos made ordinary blenders a viral hit. Tell the backstory of your effort, as Guinness did with "119.5 seconds to pour the perfect pint."

Use technology to reduce friction. Treat each tool like an employee with a specific job and KPIs. Fire the ones that don't deliver.

Build systems. Every business has four: marketing, sales, fulfillment and administration. Identify each role, define its tasks and write checklists, creating an operations manual like McDonald's. Systems deliver consistency and let you "fire yourself" as the bottleneck.

The payoff of systems is a business you *have* rather than one you *are*. That makes it saleable to your ultimate customer, the buyer who writes your biggest check. Plan that exit from the start.

Try this: Pick one role you currently perform and write a step-by-step checklist for its core task this week.

Chapter 8: Increasing Customer Lifetime Value

Existing customers are a diamond mine, and customer lifetime value is where the real money is made. Dib's "Acres of Diamonds" lesson: dig first on your own property. The back end is where profit lives, and people are far more likely to buy from you again than from a stranger.

The five ways to raise lifetime value:

Raising prices: customers are less price sensitive than you think. Give a reason why, and consider grandfathering existing customers.

Upselling: add-ons feel cheap after the main purchase, thanks to Cialdini's contrast principle. Offer them while the customer is still in buying mode.

Ascension: move customers up to higher-priced options, with at least a standard and a premium tier.

Frequency: use reminders, give people a reason to return, and move consumables to subscriptions, as Dollar Shave Club did.

Reactivation: win back lapsed customers with a strong offer and a "We Miss You" message.

Know your numbers. Track leads, conversion rate, average transaction value and break-even point. In Dib's online store example, improving leads, conversion and transaction value by just 10% each lifts net profit from $10,000 to $43,100, a 431% improvement. For recurring revenue, watch monthly recurring revenue and churn rate.

Not every dollar is equal. Dib borrows from Richard Tripp's concept of polluted revenue and sorts customers into four types: the Tribe, the Churners, the Vampires and the Snow Leopard. Grow the Tribe and fire problem customers, because the right customer is always right.

Try this: Pick one of the five levers and run it on your existing customers this month, starting with a reactivation offer to everyone who hasn't bought in a year.

Chapter 9: Orchestrating and Stimulating Referrals

Referrals must be orchestrated and stimulated, not hoped for. Passive word of mouth is slow, unreliable and a single point of failure you can't control.

Joe Girard built his system on the Law of 250. Most people know about 250 others, enough to fill a wedding or funeral. Each customer is therefore 250 potential referrals if you do a great job, or 250 enemies if you don't. Girard followed up after each sale and asked for referrals.

Three tactics make referrals deliberate:

Just ask. Frame it as giving, not begging. Offer a gift card the customer can hand to a friend, or set the expectation during onboarding that most of your business comes from referrals.

Beat the bystander effect. "Somebody refer me" means nobody does. Name the specific problem you solve, a specific referrer and a specific trigger. A financial planner might email real estate agent clients a special report for people nearing retirement, so the agent looks good while passing it on.

Build joint ventures. Someone had your customers before you, and someone will have them after. A vet could give new clients a $50 voucher for Mike's Pet World, which wins the vet goodwill, gives the customer a discount and gives the store a customer worth $5,000. You can also sell leads, exchange them, resell complementary products or become an affiliate partner. Always get customer permission before passing on details.

A brand is the personality of a business. Branding happens after the sale, so the best brand building is selling. Brand equity is what makes customers cross the road to buy from you. Apple shows it: no one has to ask fans to tell their friends.

Try this: Pick one customer group, write a specific referral request naming the problem, the trigger and the referrer, and send it this week.