The 1-Page Marketing Plan

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

You may look at getting 50% better at your negotiation skills. This in turn may help you re-negotiate 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.