The 1-Page Marketing Plan Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd Allan Dib Copyright 2016 Successwise ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher. ISBN: 978-1-941142-98-1 successwise.com Table of Contents 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 Acknowledgements “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” - Isaac Newton I wish I could tell you all ideas in this book were my inventions and that I’m some kind of marketing and business genius. The truth though is 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, many of the direct response marketing concepts that make it work are the invention 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 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 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 and credit them in footnotes throughout this book when, as far as I know, an idea I’m presenting has originated from 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 to be 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 in their business. The plan is literally reduced to a single page. 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: Download your copy of the companion resources for this book at 1pmp.com Resources include templates and samples of the 1-Page Marketing Plan as well as links, videos and articles referenced throughout this book. INTRODUCTION What’s This All About? If 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 eartickling 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. 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 “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, etc. 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; a. you can’t help anyone else, and even worse; b. we now have to deploy scarce resources to come and help you, otherwise you’ll soon be dead. Knowing What To Do In his book titled, The Book of Survival, Anthony Greenback 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 at anything less than 50%. That means that if we’re being superoptimistic 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 only take into account 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 to never 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. 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 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. While 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. That is they are a technician, e.g. plumber, hairdresser, dentist etc., 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. 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 not knowing exactly what to do on the business of what you do is familiar to you, then don’t worry, 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. 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) 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. How would you feel about engaging the services of any of the above professions where the practitioner says 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 where you hadn’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. 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 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. 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 result 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 with less work. The 64/4 Rule If you think the 80/20 is exciting, the 64/41 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 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 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. The Best Kept Secret Of The Rich In my observation of and work with numerous business owners around the world there’s one thing which 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 the 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 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 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 created and ran 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 which 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 is 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 in a single page which can take as little as thirty 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 improve. Small business owners who would have never had the time, money or knowhow 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 which 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. 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 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 a fundamental shift has occurred in the last decade and things will never be the same. 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 absent-mindedness, 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 truck load of money and your marketing for the year was done. Now you have Google, social media, blogs, websites and 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, etc. They get caught up with tools and tactics and never figure out the big picture of what they’re trying to actually do and why. Let me show you why this will lead to a world of pain. 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 brick layer, carpenter, plumber, electrician, etc. 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, “OK the blueprint is now good, we’ve got all the necessary approvals to build so let’s get started.” Tactics without strategy lead to “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 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. I Have 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 “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 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. 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 most 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 looks 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: 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 to 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. 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 e.g. TV, print, radio, Internet, etc., 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, 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 at 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 who are 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. 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 to 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. 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 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, onesize-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. 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, e-mail, fax, and phone are made. Often there is a time or quantity limit on the offer. Maintenance follow-up of unconverted leads. People who do not respond within the short-term follow-up period may have many 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 create the key elements of a direct response campaign for your business quickly and easily. The 1-Page Marketing Plan The 1-Page Marketing Plan template 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 template of the 1-Page Marketing Plan looks like: 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 template at 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 After2 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 a 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 enters his email address. During We label people going through the during phase as a 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 offers Tom a free Twenty-onepoint 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 Tom a heavily discounted offer where they’ll send a technician to fix all the problems identified during the audit. Tom takes them up on this offer. After We label people in this phase as customers3. At the beginning of the “after” phase, customers have already given you money. The after 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. In summary if we were to describe the three phases in table form, it would look like this: Now that we’ve got a good bird’s eye view of the overall structure, it’s time to dive in and look in depth at each of the nine squares that make up your 1-Page Marketing Plan. Important: Download your copy of the 1-Page Marketing Plan template at 1pmp.com ACT I - The “Before” Phase The “Before” Phase Section Summary In the “before” phase you’re dealing with prospects. Prospects are people that may not even yet know you exist. In this phase you’ll identify a target market, craft a compelling message for this target market and deliver your message to them through advertising media. The goal of this phase is to get your prospect to know you and respond to your message. Once they’ve indicated interest by responding, they become a lead and enter the second phase of your marketing process. Chapter 1 - Selecting Your Target Market Chapter 1 Summary Selecting your target market is a crucial first step in the marketing process. Doing so will ensure your marketing message resonates better, which in turn will make your marketing far more effective. By focusing on the right target market for your business, you’ll be able to get a better return on the time, money and energy you invest. Highlights covered in this chapter include: Why targeting everyone with your product or service is a terrible idea. Why mass marketing can be harmful to your business and cost you far more than it makes you. How to use the “PVP index” to select your perfect target market. Why you should focus on a niche and become a big fish in a small pond. How to make price irrelevant. Why you should stop advertising a long list of products and services. How to go deep into the mind of your prospect so you can understand exactly what they want. It’s Not Everyone When I ask business owners who their target market is, many tend to respond with “everyone.” In reality this means no one. In their zeal to acquire as many customers as possible, many business owners try to serve the widest market possible. On the face it of it this seems logical. However, it’s actually a huge mistake. Many business owners worry about narrowing down their target market because they don’t want to exclude any potential customers. This is a typical newbie marketing mistake. In this chapter we’re going to examine why excluding customers is actually a good thing. As discussed in the previous chapter, most large company advertising falls into a category called mass marketing, sometimes also referred to as “branding.” With this type of marketing, business owners are like an archer in the middle of a dense fog, shooting arrows in every direction in the hope that one or more of them will hit the intended target. The theory behind mass marketing is that you want to “get your name out there.” I’m not really sure exactly where “there” is or what’s supposed to happen when your name arrives “there.” Regardless the theory is that if you broadcast your message enough times, you’ll by chance get an audience with your prospects and some percentage of them will buy from you. If that sounds a lot like our disoriented archer, flailing about in the fog, shooting his arrows in random directions and hoping for the best, then you’d be right. However, you might be thinking—if he just shoots enough arrows in all directions, surely he’s bound to hit his target. Right? Maybe, but for small to medium sized businesses at least, that’s the stupid way of marketing because they’ll never have enough arrows (i.e., money) to hit their target enough times to get a good return on their investment. To be a successful small business marketer you need laser-like focus on a narrow target market, sometimes called a niche. Niching—Harnesses The Power Of Focus Before going any further let’s define what a business niche is. A niche is a tightly defined portion of a subcategory. For example think of the health and beauty category. This is a very wide category. A beauty salon can offer a wide variety of services including tanning, waxing, facials, massage, cellulite treatment and much more. If, for example, we take one of these subcategories—let’s say cellulite treatment, this could be our niche. However, we could tighten it up even further by focusing on cellulite treatment for women who’ve just had a baby. This is a tightly defined niche. Now you may be thinking why on earth would we want to limit our market so much? Here’s why: 1. You have a limited amount of money. If you focus too broadly, your marketing message will become diluted and weak. 2. The other critical factor is relevance. The goal of your ad is for your prospects to say, “Hey that’s for me.” If you’re a woman who’s just had a baby and are concerned about cellulite, would an ad targeting this specific problem grab your interest? Most certainly. How about if the ad was a general ad for a beauty salon which reeled off a long list of services, one of which was cellulite treatment? Likely it would get missed in the clutter. A 100 watt light bulb, like the kind of light bulb we normally have in our homes, lights up a room. By contrast a 100 watt laser can cut through steel. Same energy, dramatically different result. The difference being how the energy is focused. The exact same thing is true of your marketing. Take another example of a photographer. If you look at ads from most photographers you’ll often see a laundry list of services like: Portraits Weddings Family photography Commercial photography Fashion photography etc. The technical way photography is done may not change very much from situation to situation, but let me ask you a question. Do you think someone looking for wedding photography would respond to a different ad than someone who’s after commercial photography? Do you think a bride-to-be looking for a photographer for her special day might be looking for something radically different than a purchasing manager from a heavy machinery distributor looking to photograph a truck for a product brochure? Of course. However, if the ad just rolls out a broad laundry list of services, then it’s not speaking to either prospect, therefore it’s not relevant, therefore it will likely be ignored by both market segments. That’s why you need to choose a narrow target market for your marketing campaign. Being all things to all people leads to marketing failure. This doesn’t mean you can’t offer a broad range of services, but understand that each category of service is a separate campaign. Targeting a tight niche allows you to become a big fish in a small pond. It allows you to dominate a category or geography in a way that is impossible by being general. The type of niches that you want to go after are “an inch wide and a mile deep.” An inch wide meaning it is a very highly targeted subsection of a category. A mile deep meaning there’s a lot of people looking for a solution to that specific problem. Once you dominate one niche, you can expand your business by finding another profitable and highly targeted niche, then dominate that one also. Now you can have all the advantages of being highly targeted without limiting the potential size of your business. Niching Makes Price Irrelevant If you had just suffered a heart attack, would you prefer to be treated by a general doctor or a heart specialist? Of course you’d choose the specialist. Now if you had a consultation with the heart specialist, would you expect them to charge you more than a general doctor? Of course. Your bill with the specialist would likely be much higher than with your general practitioner, yet you’re not shopping on price. How did price suddenly become irrelevant? That is the beauty of serving a niche. Whether you do heart surgery or offer cellulite treatment, you can now charge far more for your services than by being a generalist. You’re perceived differently by your prospects and customers. A specialist is sought after, rather than shopped on price. A specialist is much more highly respected than a jack of all trades. A specialist is paid handsomely to solve a specific problem for their target market. So figure out the one thing your market wants a solution to, something that they’ll pay you handsomely for. Then enter the conversation they’re having in their mind, preferably something they go to bed worrying about and wake up thinking about. Do this and your results will dramatically improve. Trying to target everyone in reality means you’re targeting no one. By going too broad you kill your “specialness” and become a commodity bought on price. By narrowly defining a target market that you can wow and deliver huge results for, you become a specialist. When you narrow down your target market, you naturally decide who you’re going to exclude. Don’t underestimate the importance of this. Excluding potential customers scares many small business owners. They mistakenly believe that a wider net is more likely to capture more customers. This is a huge mistake. Dominate a niche, then once you own it, do the same with another and then another. But never do so all at once. Doing so dilutes your message and your marketing power. How To Identify Your Ideal Customer Given that you’ve now seen the power of choosing a narrow target market it’s time to select yours. As with most businesses, you may currently serve multiple market segments. For example back to our photographer friend, he might do: - Weddings - Corporate photography - Photojournalism - Family portraits These are vastly different market segments. A great way of figuring out your ideal target market is to use the PVP index4 (Personal fulfillment, Value to the marketplace and Profitability) and giving each market segment you serve a rating out of 10. P - Personal fulfillment: How much do you enjoy dealing with this type of customer? Sometimes we work with “pain in the butt” type customers just because of the money. Here you rate how much you enjoy working with this market segment. V - Value To The Marketplace: How much does this market segment value your work? Are they willing to pay you a lot of $$$ for your work? P - Profitability: How profitable is the work you do for this market segment? Sometimes even when you are charging high fees for your work, when you look at the numbers it may be barely profitable or even loss making. Remember it’s not about the “turnover,” it’s all about the “left over.” For our photographer example, his PVP index may look as follows: The ideal customer for the photographer is people wanting family portraits. They are the most fun, most profitable, highest value and best paying types of customers. There’s likely to be a standout market segment for you too. This doesn’t mean that you can’t take on work outside your ideal target market; however, for now our marketing efforts will be directed at one ideal market segment. We want to be laser focused. Once we dominate this market segment, we can go on and add others. If we are too broad initially and target a laundry list of market segments, then our marketing efforts will be ineffective. Who is your ideal target market? Be as specific as possible about all the attributes that may be relevant. What is their gender, age, geography? Do you have a picture of them? If so, cut out or print a picture of them when you think about and answer the following questions: What keeps them awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling? What are they afraid of? What are they angry about? Who are they angry at? What are their top daily frustrations? What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives? What do they secretly, ardently desire most? Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (Example: engineers = exceptionally analytical) Do they have their own language or jargon they use? What magazines do they read? What websites do they visit? What’s this person’s day like? What’s the main dominant emotion this market feels? What is the ONE thing they crave above all else? These questions are not theoretical, pie-in-the-sky questions. They are absolutely key to your marketing success. Unless you can get into the mind of your prospect, all your other marketing efforts will be wasted—no matter how well you execute. Unless you bin depthelong to your target market, then a large part of your initial marketing efforts should be directed to indepth research, interviews and careful study of your target market. Create An Avatar One of the best tools for getting into the mind of your prospect is to temporarily become them by creating an avatar. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all woo woo on you here. An avatar is a detailed exploration and description of your target customer and their lives. Like a police sketch artist you piece together a composite which creates a vivid picture of them in your mind. It helps tell their story so that you can visualize life from their perspective. It’s also important to create avatars for each type of decision maker or influencer you might encounter in your target market. For example if you’re selling IT services to small companies in the financial services industry you might be dealing with both the business owner and their assistant. Here’s an example of avatars for Max Cash, the owner of a successful financial planning firm and his personal assistant Angela Assistant. Max Cash: Max is 51 years old. He owns a successful financial planning business which has grown steadily over the past ten years. Previously, he had a career working for KPMG and some other large corporates before he went out on his own. He has a bachelor’s degree and an MBA. He’s married has two teenage daughters and younger son. He lives in an upper-middle-class suburb in a five-bedroom house which he’s been in for about four years. He drives a two-year-old Mercedes S-Class. He has eighteen staff members and operates from an office building which he owns. His office is a fifteen-minute drive from home. The business has an annual turnover of $4.5M which is predominantly servicebased revenue. He has no IT support person on staff and delegates most of the IT and tech responsibilities to his PA, Angela Assistant. He spends about four thousand dollars per month on the various pieces of software used in his industry which give him access to the most current financial data. He knows the software helps him and his clients but he also knows that there are many features that are going underutilized. His office server and systems are a hodgepodge of various computers mostly installed by his software vendors and which have had very little maintenance since installation. The backup systems are archaic and have never actually been tested. He’s a golf nut. His office is decorated with golf memorabilia. There are photos of him playing golf throughout. The desktop background on his computer is a beautiful panoramic photo of Pebble Beach Golf Links. In his spare time, unsurprisingly, he likes to play golf with his friends and business associates. He reads The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek and his local newspaper. He uses an iPhone but it’s mostly used for phone calls and a little bit of email. See how this can give us a valuable insight into what the life of our prospect looks like? Now let’s look at the avatar for another influencer within our target market: Angela Assistant: Angela is 29 years old. She’s single and lives in a two-bedroom rented apartment with her cat Sprinkles. She takes public transport to work and commutes daily for about thirty minutes. Angela is organized, always smartly dressed and very enthusiastic. Angela has been working for Max as his PA for the last three years when the growth of the company had really started to accelerate. She’s his right hand and he’d be totally lost without her. She organizes Max’s calendar, sets up his laptop and phone, makes and takes calls on his behalf and much, much more. She’s the glue that holds Max’s business together and she does a bit of everything from ordering stationary to IT to HR. Although her title says PA, she’s more than that. She’s really the office manager and probably even to some extent the general manager. She’s the one that staff go to when something needs to be fixed, ordered or organized. She’s tech savvy but really out of her depth when it comes to the more technical and strategic aspects of IT systems. After work, she usually hits the gym for a workout and loves to watch new shows on Netflix. On weekends she catches up with friends and loves the nightlife. She spends a lot of time online reading beauty, fashion and celebrity gossip blogs. Angela spends most of her discretionary income on going out, entertainment and online shopping which is like an addiction for her. Even though Angela is quite well paid, she always runs short of money, which has resulted in her having about $10,000 worth of credit card debt. She knows she needs to be better with money but there always just seems to be too many temptations for her to resist. She’s always glued to her phone, constantly texting and using social media apps. To take a step further, find an actual image to visually represent your avatar and have it in front of you whenever you’re creating marketing material for them. Hopefully by now you can see how powerful avatars are. They are the marketing equivalent of method acting. They get you right into the mind of your prospect which is going to be absolutely crucial when it comes to crafting your message to your target market. Chapter 1 Action Item: Who Is Your Target Market? Fill in square #1 of your 1-Page Marketing Plan Chapter 2 - Crafting Your Message Chapter 2 Summary Most marketing messages are boring, timid and ineffective. To stand out from the crowd you need to craft a compelling message that grabs the attention of your target market. Once you have their attention, the goal of your message is to compel them to respond. Highlights covered in this chapter include: Why most advertising is totally useless and what to do instead. How to stand out from the crowd even when you’re selling a commodity. Why you should never compete solely on price. How to craft a compelling offer for your target market. Examples of some of the most successful advertising headlines in history. How to enter the mind of your prospect and join the conversation going on in there. How to effectively name your business, product or service. An Accident Waiting To Happen I spend a lot of time looking through various forms of local and national media—not for articles but for advertisements. Having done this for several years, with very few exceptions, I’m absolutely amazed how boring, similar and useless most advertising is. The waste going on is staggering. Wasted money and wasted opportunity. You could summarize the structure of most ads from small businesses as follows: Company name Company logo A laundry list of services offered Claims of best quality, best service or best prices Offer of a “free quote” Contact details It’s basically name, rank and serial number. Then they hope and pray that on the very day their ad runs, a prospect in immediate need of their product or service stumbles across it and takes action. This is what I call marketing by accident. A qualified prospect happening upon the right ad at the right time sometimes results in the happy accident of a sale taking place. If these “accidents” never happened then no one would ever advertise. But as it happens the occasional random sale or lead will come from this type of advertising. It tortures business owners to death because while the ad generally loses them money, they fear not running it because some dribs and drabs of new business have come out of it—and who knows, next week it may bring in that big sale they’ve been hoping for. It’s like these businesses are visiting a slot machine in a casino. They put their money in, pull the handle and hope for a jackpot—but most of the time the house just takes their money. Occasionally they’ll get a few cents on the dollar back which raises their hopes and emboldens them to continue. It’s time to start marketing on purpose—treating advertising like a vending machine where the results and value generated are predictable, rather than like a slot machine where the results are random and the odds are stacked against you. To start marketing on purpose we need to look at two vital elements: 1. What Is The Purpose Of Your Ad? 2. What Does Your Ad Focus On? When I ask business owners what the purpose of their ad is, I usually get a list like: Branding Getting my name out there Letting people know about my products and services Making sales Getting people to call in for a quote These are all very different and you cannot possibly do all of these with one ad. In typical small business style they’re trying to get maximum bang for their buck. But by trying to do too much, they end up achieving none of their objectives. My rule of thumb is one ad, one objective. If something in the ad isn’t helping you achieve that objective then it’s detracting from it and you should get rid of it. That includes sacred cows like your company name and company logo. Advertising space is valuable and these things taking up prime real estate in your ad space often detract from your message rather than enhance it. Rather than trying to sell directly from your ad, simply invite prospects to put their hand up and indicate interest. This lowers resistance and helps you build a marketing database— one of the most valuable assets in your business. Once your objective is clear, you need to communicate it to your reader. What exactly do you want them to do next? Do they call your toll free number to order? Do they call you or visit your website to request a free sample? Do they request a free report? You need a very clear call to action—not something wimpy and vague like “don’t hesitate to call us.” You need to be clear on what they should do next and what they will get in return. Also, give them multiple ways to take that action. For example if the call to action is to order your product, give them the ability to do it online, over the phone or even via a mail-in coupon. Different people have different preferences when it comes to modality of communication. Give them multiple means of response so they can choose the one they are most comfortable with. Have you ever been to a party or gathering and been seated next to someone who just spends the whole night talking about themselves? It gets old pretty fast. You keep giving halfhearted smiles and polite nods but your mind is elsewhere and that exit sign is calling your name. Similarly, most advertising by small businesses is inwardly focused. Instead of speaking to the needs and problems of the prospect, it is focused on self-aggrandizement. The prominent logo and company name, the laundry list of services, the claims of being the leading provider of that product or service. All of these things are shouting, “look at me!” Unfortunately, you’re in a crowded market and with everyone shouting “look at me!” at the same time, it just becomes background noise. By contrast, direct response marketing focuses heavily on the needs, thoughts and emotions of the target market. By doing this you enter the conversation already going on in the mind of your ideal prospect. You will resonate at a deeper level with your prospect and your ad will stand out from 99% of other ads that are just shouting and talking about themselves. Don’t be the advertising equivalent of that guy at the party obliviously talking about himself the whole night while his uninterested audience looks for the exit. Also, don’t leave anything to chance. Know exactly what you want your ad to achieve and the exact action you want your prospect to take. Developing A Unique Selling Proposition Many small businesses don’t have a reason to exist. Take away their name and logo from their website or other marketing material and you’d never know who they were. They could be any of the other businesses in their category. Their reason for existence is to survive and pay the bills of the owner who is usually only just getting by or possibly not even. From a customer’s perspective, there is no compelling reason to buy from them and any sales they do make is just because they happen to be there. You see a lot of these businesses in retail. The only sales they get is through random walk-in traffic. No one is seeking them out. No one actively desires what they have to offer and if they weren’t there no one would miss them. Harsh but true. The problem is that these businesses are just another “me too” business. How did they decide on price? How did they decide on product? How did they decide on marketing? Usually the answer is they just had a look at what their nearest competitor was doing and did the same thing or slightly changed something. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong in modeling something that’s already working. In fact that’s a very smart thing to do. However, it’s likely the competitors they are modeling are in the same boat they are in—struggling to win business with no compelling reason why you should buy from them. They based their most important business decisions on guesses and on what their mediocre competitors are doing. It’s the blind leading the blind. After some time of torturing themselves to death – making just enough money to survive but not enough money to do well, many of these businesses finally decide to “try marketing.” So they start marketing their “me too” business with an equally boring “me too” message. As expected, it doesn’t work and any extra sales it does bring in often doesn’t even cover the marketing costs. Here’s the thing – the chance of you getting your marketing perfectly right – message to market and media match on the first go is impossibly small. Even the most experienced marketer will tell you they hardly ever hit a homerun on their first go. It takes several iterations. It takes testing and measuring to finally get your message to market and media match right. Yet these guys can’t afford the time, money and effort needed to get it right. Worse still with a “me too” style of offer they don’t have a hope. Think of marketing as an amplifier. Here’s an example. You tell one person about what you do and they don’t get excited. You then try telling ten people about what you do and they don’t get excited either. If you amplify this message through marketing and tell 10,000 people, what makes you think that the result will be any different? Marketing is an uphill battle if you haven’t clearly clarified first in your mind why your business exists and why people should buy from you rather than your nearest competitor. 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.” Really? Then why aren’t we all just getting our $1 coffee from 7-Eleven? Why do we queue up to spend $4 to $5 to buy our coffee from some hipster that looks like he’s in urgent need of a bath? Think about it. You regularly pay 400%-500% more for the same commodity. Think about water—one of the most abundant commodities on earth. When you buy this commodity, in bottled form at either a convenience store or from a vending machine, you happily pay 2000 times the price compared to getting it from your tap at home. See how the commodity in both examples hasn’t changed, but the circumstances and things around the commodity have changed or the way they are packaged and delivered has changed? 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 people go wrong with developing their USP is they say “quality” or “great service” is their USP. There are two things wrong with that: 1. Quality and great service are expectations, they are just part of good business practice—not something unique. 2. People only find out about your quality and great service after they’ve bought. A good USP is designed to attract prospects before they’ve made a purchasing decision. You know you’re marketing your business as a commodity when prospects start the conversation by asking you about price. 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 (USP). Something that positions you differently, so that prospects are forced to make an apples-to-oranges comparison when comparing you with your competitor. If they can do an apples-to-apples comparison of you and your competitors then it comes down to price and you’re toast. There’s always someone willing to sell cheaper than you. There’s Nothing New Under The Sun Very few if any businesses or products are truly unique, so a common question is, “There’s nothing unique about my business, how do I develop a USP?” 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 and answer are: Why should they buy? Why should they buy from me? These are questions that should have clear, concise and quantifiable answers. Not wishy-washy nonsense like “we are the best” or “we have the highest quality.” What is the unique advantage you are offering? Now the uniqueness doesn’t have to be in the product itself. In fact, it would be fair to say that there are very few truly unique products. 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, like they do with Apple products. Getting Into The Mind Of Your Prospect We want to get into the mind of our prospect. What do they really want? It’s rarely the thing you are selling, it’s usually the result of the thing you are selling. The difference may seem subtle but it’s huge. For example someone buying a $50 watch is buying something very different from a person buying a $50,000 watch. In the latter case they are likely buying status, luxury and exclusivity. Sure they want it to tell the time just like the buyer of the $50 watch but that’s unlikely to be their core motivation. 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 you do need to change how you position yourself. 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 think business cards and brochures are going to do for their business. So you could sit down with them and say, “What are you trying to accomplish? Let’s do a printing audit and evaluate all of the things you’re trying to use printing for.” By taking them through the process, you can charge them to do a printing audit. Then if they end up hiring you to do their printing, you can apply that consulting fee towards printing. This way you’re no longer viewed as a printer anymore. You’re now viewed as a trusted advisor that’s serving their needs. If You Confuse Them You Lose Them Understand that your prospect has essentially three options: Buy from you Buy from your competitor Do nothing You may think your competitors are your biggest problem, but in reality it’s more likely to be a fight against inertia. Therefore you need to first answer the question of why they should buy and in addition to why they should buy from YOU. We live in a sound bite, MTV generation which has to deal with thousands of messages each day. The importance of crafting your message in an immediately understandable and impactful way has never been more important. 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. This is especially so when you have a complex product. Many business owners erroneously think that a confused customer will seek clarification or contact you for more information. Nothing could be further from the truth. 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 Selling A Commodity How do you charge high prices for your products and services while having your customers thank you for it? In short, by being remarkable. When given this answer, the first thing many business owners do is mutter under their breath something like, “easier said than done”—perhaps it’s because being remarkable evokes visions of being unattainably unique or creative. Something that others far more talented do. The cafe owner says, “dude I just sell coffee, how am I supposed to be remarkable?” That raises a common question, how can you be remarkable when you sell a commodity? Let’s look at a few examples. When I talk about being remarkable, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the product or service you sell is unique. Far from it. In fact being unique is a dangerous, difficult and expensive place to be. However, you must be different. How can our cafe owner be different? Check this out: How much extra did it cost the cafe 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 cafe owner charge 50¢ more per cup than the cafe 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. Yet is the product unique? Not by a long shot—just slightly different. Different enough to be remarkable. 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.” Instead 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!! This order confirmation email has been forwarded thousands of times and posted on countless blogs and websites. Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby credits this remarkable order confirmation message for creating thousands of new customers. 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. 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 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. Apple was by no means the first portable music player on the market or even the best, but they were by far the most successful because of their ability to quickly and easily convey the reasons why you should buy. Notice in all three of the examples the actual product being sold is a commodity and what makes it remarkable is something totally peripheral to what you are buying. Yet the seller can, and does, command premium pricing because they are selling a remarkable experience. Not only is the customer happy to pay the premium but in fact rewards the seller by spreading the message about their product or service. Why? Because we all want to share things and experiences that are remarkable. What can you do in your business that’s remarkable? Your clarity around this will have a huge impact on the success of your business. 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. There’ll always be someone willing to go out of business faster than you. I suggest you not play that game. So a USP that says “lowest prices on some things, some of the time” is not quite so compelling. The fact is if you’re a small or medium business, you’re unlikely to beat the big discounters at the lowest price game. Truth be told, you probably don’t want to. By charging higher prices, you attract a better quality client. As counterintuitive as it may seem, you get far less grief from high-end customers than you do from low-end ones. I’ve seen and experienced this in multiple businesses across multiple industries. 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 Elevator Pitch As a business owner, being able to succinctly convey what problem you solve is a real art, especially if you’re in a business that is complex. 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, i.e. 30-90 seconds. Yes it’s cheesy and you may not even really use it often as an elevator pitch but it can really help you clarify your message and your USP. This will become extremely valuable when you get to crafting your offer, which we’ll cover shortly. The thirty seconds that follows the “what do you do?” question is one of the most commonly wasted marketing opportunities. The response is almost always self-focused, unclear and often nonsensical. This is where many people reply with the highest-sounding title they can get away with, as they feel the inquirer’s judgment of their worth will depend on the answer. “I’m a waste management technician,” says the janitor. I once asked a lady what she did for a living to which 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. While it’s true some shallow people judge a person’s worth by their job title or line of business, there’s a much better way to respond to this question. A way that doesn’t require you to raid a thesaurus in order to inflate or obfuscate what you really do. The next time someone asks what you do for a living, it’s your queue to deliver an elevator pitch. It’s a perfect opportunity to convey your marketing message on a regular basis and in many different settings. Obviously, you don’t want to come across as a pushy, obnoxious salesperson, so it’s important to structure your elevator pitch properly. 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, and that’s exactly how we want our elevator pitch to be. We want to be remembered for what problem we solve rather than for some impressive but incomprehensible title or business. Good marketing takes the prospect through a journey that covers the problem, the solution and finally the proof. Your elevator pitch should be no different. So how do you effectively communicate these three components in the space of thirty or so seconds? The best formula I’ve seen is: You know [problem]? Well what we do is [solution]. In fact [proof]. Here are a few of examples: 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 ensuring their insurance coverage always matches their current circumstances. In fact, just last week a client of mine was robbed, but he was able to recover the full cost of the items he’d lost because his insurance coverage was up to date.” 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. In fact, I installed the system at XYZ Bank which has resulted in them having 100% uptime since the system was installed.” 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. In fact, I installed the software for one of my clients recently and they saved $2,000 a year in web development costs.” This gives you a reliable formula to craft your elevator pitch while being customer/problem focused rather than you/product focused. Crafting Your Offer This part is absolutely crucial and this is where a lot of people get lazy by offering something boring, price discounting or copying what their nearest competitor is doing. Remember if you don’t give your ideal target market a reason why your offer is different, they will default to price as the main criteria for making their decision. After all if vendor A is selling apples for $1 and vendor B is selling the same apples for $1.50 which would you buy based on the information you have on hand? It’s your job to create an offer that is exciting and radically different from that of your competitors. Two great questions to think about when you’re crafting your offer are: 1. Of all the products and services you offer, which do you have the most confidence in delivering? For example, if you only got paid if the client achieved their desired result, what product or service would you offer? Phrasing it another way—what problem are you sure that you could solve for a member of your target market? 2. Of all the products and services you offer, which do you enjoy delivering the most? Some supplemental questions that can help you craft your offer include: What is my target market really buying? (e.g. people don’t really buy insurance, they buy peace of mind) What’s the biggest benefit to lead with? What are the best emotionally charged words and phrases that will capture and hold the attention of this market? What objections do my prospects have and how will I solve them? What outrageous offer (including a guarantee) can we make? Is there an intriguing story we can tell? Who else is selling something similar to my product or service, and how? Who else has tried selling them something similar, and how has that effort failed? One of the main reasons marketing campaigns fail is because the offer is lazy and poorly thought out. It’s something crappy and unexciting like 10% or 20% off. The offer is one of the most important parts of your marketing campaign and you need to spend much of your time and energy on structuring this correctly. What Does My Target Market Want? Putting the right stuff in front of the wrong people or the wrong stuff in front of the right people is one of the first marketing mistakes made by business owners. That’s why the first and arguably most important square of the 1-Page Marketing Plan is all about identifying a specific target market for our marketing efforts. Now that we’ve laid that groundwork, we want to structure an offer that will excite this target market. One that will have them ready to whip out their wallet and one that will stand out from all the boring, lazy offers from our competitors. One of the easiest methods of finding out what your prospects want is simply by asking them. You can do so through a survey or through more formal market research. It should also be noted that most people don’t know what they want until they’ve actually been presented with it. Also when people are doing surveys or responding to market research, they do so with logic; however, when it comes to actual purchasing, this is done with emotions and justified with logic after the fact. So you need to supplement asking with observing. If you asked those in the market for expensive luxury cars as to what they wanted, you’d typically get logical (and untrue or half true) answers like quality, reliability, comfort. In reality what they really want is status. A quote often attributed to Henry Ford puts it well: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” One of the ways I’ve done and recommend doing market research is by analyzing what your target market are actually buying or looking for. Look at products and categories that are trending on marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay. Analyzing search engine queries can be a great using a tool like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool is another method. Lastly see what topics are trending on social media and industry news sites. What are people commenting on and reacting to? Using these tools is almost like tapping into the global consciousness and will give you a good idea of what is currently in demand and being talked or thought about. Create An Irresistible Offer Now that you know what your market wants, you need to package it up and present it as an irresistible offer. Here are some of the essential elements: Value: First you need to think, what is the most valuable thing you could do for your customer? What is the result which takes them from point A to point B that you can take them through while making a good profit? This really is the crux of your offer. Language: If you’re not a member of your target market, you need to learn the language and jargon used within your target market. If you’re selling BMX bikes you need talk about “endos,” “sick wheelies” and “bunny hops,” not features, benefits and specifications. If you’re selling golf clubs you need to talk about “hooks,” “slices” and “handicaps.” Reason Why: When you have a great offer, you need to justify why you’re doing this. People are so used to being short-changed that when someone makes a strong, value-filled offer, they become skeptical and look for the catch. I’ve personally experienced this in one of my businesses where we were offering a much better service at a price that was about half the price of our competitors. People kept ringing into the sales line to recap the offer that was on the website and to ask what the catch was. I don’t suggest you fabricate reasons for your offer but be ready to have a solid reason why you are offering a great deal, e.g. clearing old stock, damaged inventory, overstock, moving your office or warehouse, etc. Value Stacking: Packing in many bonuses can make your offer seem like a no-brainer. This is a very smart move and can dramatically increase conversions. In fact I advocate where possible to make the bonuses more valuable than the main offer. Infomercials do this very well. “We’ll double your offer,” “That’s not all..” etc. Upsells: When your prospect is hot and in the buying frame of mind, this is the perfect time to offer them a complimentary product or service. This is where you have the perfect opportunity to tack on a high margin item even if the primary product you are selling is low margin. It’s the fries with the burger, the extended warranty, the car rustproofing. It gives the customer added value and gives you more profit per transaction. Payment Plan: This one is absolutely critical for high ticket items and can mean the difference between the customer balking and walking away or making the sale. If something is $5,000, presenting it as 12 easy payments of $497 makes it a much easier pill to swallow. People generally think of their expenses on a monthly basis and $497 per month feels much easier than $5,000 in one lump sum. Also notice that 12 x $497 adds up to more than $5,000. In fact it makes it almost $6,000. The first reason you want to do this is to cover your finance costs if you’re financing the sale. Second, you want to incentivize the people who can pay in a lump sum to receive a “discount” by paying upfront. Guarantee: As discussed previously in this chapter, you need an outrageous guarantee. One that totally reverses the risk of doing business with you. People have been disappointed so many times that they don’t trust any of the claims you make. It’s nothing personal, just the way it is. You need to make dealing with you a risk-free transaction. In fact one where the risk is on you should you fail to deliver on your promises. “Satisfaction guaranteed” is weak and ineffective. Scarcity: Your offer needs to have an element of scarcity. A reason why people need to respond immediately. People respond much more to a fear of loss than the prospect of gain. However, again you need a good “reason why” the scarcity exists as you don’t want to be disingenuous with your scarcity claims. You have a limited supply, limited time, limited resources. Use this to your advantage in your marketing. If you can have a running countdown of time or available stock this can further turn up the heat on the fear of loss emotion. As you’ve seen there are many components to crafting a compelling offer. Taking the lazy, ill-thought-out road of “10% off” or similar crappy offers is akin to throwing your marketing dollars in the trash. Take the time to craft a compelling, well-thought-out offer. Your conversion rate will skyrocket and so will your bottom line. Target The Pain You’ve got a splitting headache. You open your medicine cabinet and start rifling through your museum of half-used tablets, creams and vitamins only to realize you’re totally out of pain relief medication. So you rush down to your local pharmacy in the hope of getting the tablet that’s going to give you the relief you so desperately need. Do you worry about the price? Does it even enter your mind to shop around and see if you can buy the same product cheaper at another pharmacy? Unlikely. You’re in pain and you need immediate relief. In fact even if the tablets were priced at double or triple the normal price, you’d probably still buy. The usual ways of shopping get thrown out the window when we’re in pain. The exact same is true for your customers and prospects. So many times businesses talk about “features and benefits” rather than speaking to the pain that the customer already has. How much selling does a pharmacist need to do to sell pain relief medication to someone with a splitting headache? Very little I suspect. The same is true whether you sell TVs, cars or consulting. You have prospects and customers who are in pain. They want pain relief, not features and benefits. If you’re selling me a TV, you could sell me features and benefits by telling me it’s got four HDMI ports and 1080p resolution. This will mean very little to most people. Imagine instead you target my pain point which is bringing it back home, unpacking it and spending an infuriating number of hours trying to get it working properly with all my other devices. Instead of price discounting and positioning yourself as a commodity, why not offer to deliver it to my house, mount it on the wall, ensure the picture quality is spectacular and make sure that it works perfectly with all my other peripherals. Now you’re giving me pain relief and price becomes less important than if you’re selling me a commodity with a list of features and benefits. In the above example, even though you might be selling the exact same TV as your competitor, if you package it up in a way that takes away my pain—then you’ve won my business. It’s also much more likely I’ll become a raving fan and refer others to you because you weren’t just the vendor of a commodity. You were a problem solver. Now it’s an apples-tooranges comparison. How do you compare this to “it’s got four HDMI ports and 1080p resolution”? Selling features and benefits is the best way to turn your prospects into price shoppers who view your product as a commodity bought solely on price. Your goal is to be a problem solver, pain reliever and turn any comparison with your competition into an apples-to-oranges comparison. Remember people are much more willing to pay for a cure than for prevention. Targeting existing pain rather than promising future pleasure will result in much higher conversion, much higher customer satisfaction and lower price resistance. Look for pain points in your industry and become the source of relief. Copywriting For Sales—You Can’t Bore People Into Buying Almost no other skill will reward you more richly than the ability to write compelling words. Being able to clearly articulate why a prospect should buy from you rather than your competitors in a way that creates an emotion and motivates them to action is the master skill of marketing. Earlier in this book we touched on the fact that direct response marketing u...
Purchase answer to see full attachment