Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

If you’ve ever struggled with a lack of focus in your business, you’re not alone. In this episode, we’ll uncover how you can beat Shiny Object Syndrome once and for all with a simple, practical system for marketing: The 1-Page Marketing Plan.

Today we’re talking to Allan Dib from Successwise.com. He’s a serial entrepreneur and marketing expert who wrote the Amazon bestseller, The 1-Page Marketing Plan. Allan has come up with a breakthrough method for marketing your business in an easy, 9-step process that he reveals in the interview.

Topics covered:

How to Write a One-Page Marketing Plan

It’s called the 1-Page Marketing Plan because you can fit your direct response marketing plan for your small business on a single page. 

It covers three marketing phases: before lead generation, during lead generation, and after the prospect becomes a customer.

Each phase has three steps, totaling 9 steps on the page.

The beauty of the 1-Page Marketing Plan is in its simplicity.

If you can’t fit your plan on a single page, it’s too complicated.

While you don’t have to fit every detail of your plan on the page, you can outline each step of the plan in simple fashion so that you, your team, and your clients can understand your marketing plan clearly. 

This is probably the most crucial step in your marketing plan because it sets you up for success without marketing bullshit.

It begins with this step.

The key is to find a target market that’s in pain. 

If you think about the last time you had a bad headache, the pharmacist didn’t have to hard sell you on pain relief medicine. You probably picked something up from the corner store without even looking at the price because you’d do whatever it took to relieve that pain.

Likewise, you want to pick a target market that’s in pain, and if you can solve that pain, you’re in business… without sleazy marketing.

It’s also important that your target market is narrow and deep. 

As Howard Gossage says, “People don’t read ads. They read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”

If people feel like they’re reading something that was written for them, they’ll be more likely to continue reading, which is a lot easier to do if your target market is very narrow.

In short, specialists eat generalists’ lunch.

So, how do you come up with your target market?

There are two ways to start.

First, if you’ve been one of your target market, then you intuitively understand their challenges and worries, so you can start there.

Otherwise, you’ll need to start with an educated guess and do some market research. Find books they read and forums where they ask questions to get a feel for their pain points. Next, evaluate the PVP, which stands for personal fulfillment, value to the marketplace, profitability. Does this target market bring you joy, money, and have a deep pain? Finally, test your idea on the target market by seeing if they actually pay money for it.

To craft your message, start with an offer that converts.

For example, Allan Dib knew that the 1-Page Marketing Plan converted from his experience as a keynote speaker at events, so he repackaged it as a book and sold it.

Then it’s just about getting into the conversation that’s already happening in your target market’s mind.

To get into their mind you’ll need to interview them, preferably via Zoom so you can record the call and transcribe it.

Get to know what’s happening in their lives/industry.

Find out what keeps them awake at night. 

Then use their exact words from the transcript in your messaging.

When the person reads your message, they should say, “Hey, that’s for me.”

First of all, don’t think of yourself as a digital marketer, because “digital” often equates to lazy.

Digital doesn’t mean magic.

Digital is just a medium.

Digital is exposed to all the same factors that make or break your marketing, like having a powerful headline and a strong call to action. 

The point is that you can reach your customers through digital media if they spend their time online; however, if they are more responsive to direct mail, for example, then it suits you to send them direct mail instead.

Reach your target market wherever they spend their time.

It could be at an in-person conference, for example.

Once you identify the media to use, unless you’re already an expert in that field, you’ll likely need to pay a specialist to handle paid outreach for you.

For example, trying to do AdWords by yourself with no experience is likely a waste of time and money.

This is the most expensive part of direct response marketing, so make sure you can do it right, or otherwise hire a specialist that can do it right.

“Lead capturing” sounds like such a yucky term, doesn’t it?

Think of it less like using lead magnets to capture leads, and more like connecting with real human beings on the basis of making their lives a little better with a nice gift.

Ultimately, you’ll want to collect their contact information so that you can stay in touch and continue to contribute to their lives, which leads to step 5...

You’ll need to have a good follow-up method that makes people feel less like a number and more like a welcome guest.

For example, the Everyone Hates Marketers podcast nurtures listeners with high-value content.

Daft Punk nurtured their listeners by obsessing over their craft to produce outstanding music.

When you nurture your leads with genuinely valuable content, they’ll be much more likely to be open to whatever you offer down the road.

It’s about building trust, not burning bridges with incessant requests to pay you money before they forget who you are.

This phase is where you go from a prospect only knowing about you to trusting you — and then spending money on your product. 

Once you deliver value, you can make an offer that is much more likely to convert, and you can do it without being pushy.

Our goal in marketing is to take a step beyond the transaction. 

With an endless amount of options, people are seeking something special today. 

They want to buy from a company who can deliver a “wow” experience.

It’s much easier to convert an existing customer than a brand new customer. 

Increasing your lifetime value is about finding ways to increase the amount of money someone spends with you. 

But it’s not about scamming people — this step comes back to delivering genuine value to your audience.

You can’t sit and hope for referrals. 

Instead, you need to create a specific system where people expect that you have to give them referrals (or you have a defined process for requesting those leads and referrals).

No, that’s just a suggestion, but you do need something to bridge the gap between your target market and your message. 

Ads are a form of outbound marketing.

You could do other forms of outbound marketing as well.

However, it often makes sense to focus exclusively on building an audience organically with inbound marketing instead.

For example, instead of using ads, I created a podcast to build my audience.

Then I was able to move onto step 4 just as well.

A pharmacist doesn’t have to hard sell you on pain medicine when you have a severe headache.

Likewise, if you’ve done step 1 correctly, you won’t have to hard sell your customers at all because they have a pain that you can solve.

It’s less of a sales pitch and more like a conversation with a friend.

Like, “Bro, my head hurts.”

“Oh yeah? I got some pain meds if you want ‘em.”

“Yes, please.”

In marketing, there are only three activities you should be working on at any given time:

Anything else is a waste of time.

Increasing the lifetime value of a customer speaks to the latter two bullet points.

You can either increase the average transaction size, or you can increase the number of transactions a given customer makes.

How you go about doing that will vary depending on whether you’re an e-commerce business or a consulting business, for example.

Regardless, at the heart of marketing is listening to what customers need.

If they could use an add-on to make their purchase even better, perhaps you could increase the average transaction size by bundling products together.

If their needs change a year after their initial purchase, you could offer them something different to increase their transaction frequency.

Resources mentioned: