The 1-Page Marketing Plan is author Allan Dib’s first book. It details a direct response marketing framework aimed at helping small business owners quickly take control of their marketing activities to drive results. The promise of this framework is to give readers a step-by-step plan to help generate and capture sales leads to convert them into long term customers After reading the book, you should be able to describe your personal plan on 1 page.
This book provides a wealth of valuable content for the small and medium business owner just starting out or struggling to put together an effective marketing strategy for their business. As you can see from my high-level outline of the book below, many key marketing questions can be answered with the content from this book.
High Level Outline
Introduction
- Failing to plan is planning to fail
- Even having a rudimentary marketing plan will put you in a better spot than not having one at all.
Chapter 1 – Finding and defining your niche
- List of questions to help define a market
- Create an Avatar to get in your customer’s shoes
Chapter 2 – Defining your message
- Marketing needs to be about how to improve your customers life, not how great your products and services are.
- “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.”
- Thinking critically from within vs. simply copying competitors (developing a unique selling proposition)
- Great exercise to create an effective elevator pitch
- Great questions to define your offer and messaging (copy)
- Put yourself in your customer’s “inner talk”
- How to name your product or service
Chapter 3 – Media Choice
- The concept of campaign ROI (customer acquisition cost vs. profit)
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Using Social Media correctly
- Email vs. Snail Mail
- Setting a Marketing budget
- Diversification
Chapter 4 – Capturing Leads
- Hunting vs. Farming (one-touch point vs many touchpoints)
- The Ethical Bribe
- How to manage your leads – infrastructure (CRM)
Chapter 5 – Nurturing Leads
- How to Market like a Farmer
- How to build your marketing infrastructure
- The power of original snail mail
- The “personalities” needed in your business to make it work and delegation
- The marketing calendar (periodic to dos)
Chapter 6 – Converting Leads into Sales
- Leveraging the trust you’ve developed with prospects
- Having the right mindset to do this effectively (pest vs. welcomed guest)
- How to ensure your external facing material enhances trust with prospects (email, website, guarantees, pricing, offering
- Sales tactics (ie. Try before you buy)
Chapter 7 – Build your fan base
- Get customers by giving them what they want, keep them by giving them what they need
- Create experiences instead of products
- Use technology to reduce transaction friction, not create it.
- Great Line – “Think of technology as an employee. […] What are it’s key performance indicators (KPIs)?”
- How to become the “voice of value” for existing customers
- Demonstrate the effort that goes into your product
- Create “Business Systems”
- This essentially means defining managing your business processes, automating where you can.
- Having an exit strategy for your business in mind at the start
Chapter 8 – Strategies to Increase Customer Lifetime Value
- Raising Prices
- Upselling
- Ascension (repeat buying of products with increasing margins)
- Frequency (repeat buying of the same product)
- Reminders, subscriptions
- Reactivation of old customers (data needed)
- Measures to guide your decision making
- Types of customers and knowing when to fire customers
Chapter 9 – Stimulating Referrals
- Don’t just wait for new business
- Examples of how to ask for referrals
- How to make your ask very targeted
- Mutually beneficial business referral strategy
- Building your brand
Conclusion
- Build your business based on the future, not the pas
- Examples of businesses which have struggled recently
- Go from business owner to marketer with the framework from this book
Initial Thoughts
Although this book has lots of valuable content which can and should be used to develop a small business marketing plan, I did not feel it fulfilled its promise of guiding me towards a 1-page marketing plan. If you have been following Allan’s blog on https://successwise.com/blog/, you will have noticed that a lot of content from his blog (generated from 2011-2018) has been leveraged, repackaged and included in the book. This is a great way to write a book as it chunks out the process into much smaller, manageable pieces.
The flip side is that it becomes a challenge to keep a clear, concise thread throughout the book. The content becomes a collection of topical ideas rather than a single complex idea broken down into logical pieces and steps. Therefore, I often found myself wondering how a section, although interesting, would help me craft my 1-page marketing plan. If the aim was truly to get a business owner to a 1-page marketing plan, I think including something like a concrete case study where a 1-page plan was completed as we read the book would have been very helpful.
Best Passages
That being said, I found the book has some very entertaining and enlightening passages. Here are a few of my favorite ones:
- “People only find out about your quality and great service would keep them coming back to the book as they implement their marketing plan after they’ve bought. A good unique selling proposition is designed to attract prospects before they’ve made a purchasing decision.”
- “People will generally take you at your own appraisal – unless proven otherwise”
- “To be truly effective when using this technique [outrageous guarantees], you must avoid the vague crap that everyone says; for example, satisfaction guaranteed […]. Your guarantee should be very specific and address the fear or uncertainty that the prospect has about the transaction.”
- “Think of each piece of technology as an employee. What am I hiring this employee to do? What are its key performance indicators (KPIs)?”
- “I finally found myself in the last aisle of the supermarket, holding a shopping basket heavy with the broken promise of “just a couple of things.”
- “Tell the audience about all the effort that goes into delivering your product or service.”
- “One of the best strategies for getting what you want in business and indeed in life – just ask.”
References to Other Works:
- Robert Cialdini – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- Russel Conwell – Acres of Diamonds
- Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
- Anthony Greenbank – The Book of Survival
- Seth Godin – Tribes
- Dean Jackson – “Before, During After” Concept
- Frank Kern – “Personal Fulfillment, Value to Marketplace, Profitability Index (PVP)” Concept
- Neil Rackham – SPIN Selling
- James Schramko – SuperFastBusiness Live event (64/4 Rule)
- Derek Sivers – CB Baby order confirmation e-mail
- Nassim Taleb – The Black Swan
What I liked About the 1-Page Marketing Plan
- The book structure; Allan respects what I believe to be a cardinal rule in non-fiction writing and presenting. Credited to the original author, Aristotle, this rule is, loosely quoted (I unfortunately don’t speak Ancient Greek…): “Say what you are going to say, say it and then tell them what you’ve just told them. Allan does a great job of stating his objectives and key takeaways before getting into the content, respecting the structure he had defined originally and wrapping up with the same key themes mentioned at the outset but by calling back the key lessons taught in the book.
- Great illustrative examples in the first part of the book which gives you tools to concretely apply the principles discussed in your particular situation.
- Partner website which adds rich content to the book
- After diving into the framework at the beginning of the first chapters, Allan tries to preemptively address questions and/or issues readers will inevitably have when applying the framework in that section. For example, “how to be remarkable when you are selling a commodity”.
- The “first act” (3 first chapters) of the book is very strong, Allan does a great job of giving you actionable content to define your market, message and media.
- There are several good gems in this book that either are references (CD Baby order confirmation e-mail) or come directly from Allan: “Once you’ve reached a level of competence, the real profit comes from the way you market yourself.”
- The book is filled with quotable quotes, little nuggets of wisdom.
What Could Have Been Better in The One-Page Marketing Plan
- In some passages, the author has a very demeaning tone towards the reader: “go from working for an idiot boss to becoming an idiot boss” which unfortunately lessens the weight of his claims.
- End of section “action items”. I really like the concept of calling the reader to action based on the material they just read. However, I found Allan’s use of the mechanism to be very shallow. In essence, these boxes simply restated the title of the chapter in different vocabulary.
- There is lots of repetition and redundancy. Example: I think we were reminded that trying to execute marketing like a big business when you have a small business budget is a recipe for disaster 5 times in the book. We also revisit defining the customer’s viewpoint (developing empathy) multiple times from different but redundant angles.
- While the “first act” of the book is strong, the two following acts “chapters 4-9” are a lot less concrete in their examples and in their actionable content for the reader. For example, in chapter 4, there could have been a concrete example of how to create a lead funnel on a popular social media site or at a live event.
- References to “made up” statistics. For example: “Fifty percent of all salespeople give up after one contact, 65% give up after two and 79.8% give up after three shots”. Allan always explains in the reference that the stat itself is not important but only the point demonstrated is important. I would simply make that point without the statistic or reference to keep things lighter and to the point.
- I didn’t feel fully equipped to write a “1-page marketing plan” at the end of the book.
Rating: 3/5
Conclusion
Overall, after reading the book cover to cover, I felt like it may have been published quickly under deadline. For me, it has many of the makings of a great business book but lacks polish which would have me coming back to it.
Personal Library Worthy? No. Although there are quite a few great nuggets in this book which I have noted and will refer to in the future, I don’t see myself referencing this book. However, I think it does have that potential should the author remove redundancy, streamline the message and bolster the actionable content in later chapters to help readers explicitly get to their 1-page marketing plan.
*Disclosure: I want to thank Allan and his team for sending a complimentary copy of his book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan, for me to read and review. My opinions are my own and in no way do I profit from the sale of this book.
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What were your thoughts on the book? Which tool or example was most useful to you and why? What questions did you have that remained unanswered? Let me know in the comments.
Last Updated on December 22, 2020 by Joël Collin-Demers