😃 Simplifying Success: What is a One-Page Marketing Plan?

Ever felt overwhelmed by the thought of crafting a marketing plan? You're not alone. The good news is, there's a streamlined solution that could transform your approach to marketing and business growth. It's called What is a one-page marketing plan? This concept, pioneered by Allan Dib, simplifies the process into something far more manageable for small businesses and large companies alike.

Embarking on this journey, we'll explore identifying your target audience, crafting a distinctive offer that distinguishes you, making informed choices between online and traditional marketing avenues, converting prospects into devoted brand champions, and evaluating achievements to keep the energy alive. By the end of this read, creating content that captures leads won't just be possible; it'll be part of your toolkit for rapid business growth.

Why Simplicity Wins in Marketing

Understanding how a focused approach can lead to better results.

An overview of Allan Dib's system for streamlined marketing efforts.

The essence of this plan lies in its simplicity and its three-phase structure. This approach walks you through pinpointing who your ideal customers are, to creating engaging narratives that connect with them deeply, and then onto evaluating triumphs to polish upcoming tactics. The beauty? It does so on just one sheet of paper.

To get started with this game-changing approach, check out Allan Dib’s work on Amazon. By getting a grip on this method, you're setting yourself up for enhanced business expansion as it aligns every facet of your marketing approach with achievable objectives.

Crafting Your Message and Targeting Your Audience

Selecting Your Niche Market

Finding your ideal customer is like hitting the bullseye in darts. It's all about precision. Pinpointing your target market means understanding who exactly is most likely to buy what you're selling. This entails closely examining the age, hobbies, and actions of those who might be interested in your offerings to really grasp what makes them tick.

Once you've got a clear picture of your audience segment, everything else falls into place more easily. Messages resonate better, products fit needs more closely, and marketing efforts hit home harder.

Developing Your Unique Selling Proposition

Your unique selling proposition (USP) sets you apart from the crowd. That one-of-a-kind flair you possess is the reason folks opt for your offerings instead of going with the other guys. Delving into the essence of your business to sculpt a message that highlights its distinctiveness demands thoughtful exploration.

This could be anything from unparalleled customer service to an innovative product feature nobody else offers. The key here is clarity – make sure it’s easy for folks to see why they should pick you at a glance.

Channels for Reaching Your Audience

Finding the right mix of advertising media to connect with your prospects is more art than science. Digital avenues such as social media platforms, Google Ads, and Facebook promotions are vying for attention against traditional giants like email marketing campaigns. Each has its pros and cons, depending on who you're trying to reach.

Digital vs. Offline Media Strategies

In today's market, knowing whether to go digital or stick with offline strategies can feel like choosing between a rock and a hard place. Digital platforms offer unparalleled targeting capabilities thanks to data analytics—think pinpoint precision in reaching your ideal customer segment through Facebook ads. Yet, there's something undeniably compelling about the tangibility of offline methods like an expertly crafted email blast that lands directly in your target audience's inbox.

But here’s where it gets spicy: blending these worlds opens up avenues previously thought impossible. Imagine coupling the wide net cast by social media marketing with the direct hit only achievable through personalized emails or even local print advertising. That’s when you start seeing real engagement skyrocketing beyond what isolated tactics could ever achieve alone.

From Leads to Loyal Customers

Nurturing Leads into Customers

Transforming leads into customers isn't just about making a sale; it's about building a relationship. The adventure begins by snagging their interest with savvy lead-snaring tactics, followed by captivating them through enriching material that fosters confidence. Whether you're using social media or email blasts, the goal is to make every prospect feel valued and understood.

The real magic happens when this engagement turns into a conversion. It's more than just tallying up; it's about crafting answers to dilemmas and simplifying existence. For insights on crafting compelling content that converts, Seth Godin's Blog is an invaluable resource.

Cultivating Customer Loyalty

Once they've made a purchase, the next step is turning new buyers into repeat customers and raving fans of your brand. Excellent customer service plays a crucial role here but think beyond resolving issues quickly. Ponder incentivizing your current patrons with perks for sharing the buzz about what you're selling or providing.

In essence, cultivating loyalty means keeping your brand at the top of their minds in positive ways—making sure they come back for more because they genuinely enjoy dealing with you.

Maintaining Momentum with Measurable Success

Keeping your marketing efforts on the fast track means regularly checking under the hood. Evaluating your marketing strategies is pivotal, acting as the heartbeat for the continuous expansion of your enterprise.

Conversion rates aren't just numbers; they're like the pulse of your campaigns, indicating how well your messages resonate with audiences and convert prospects into loyal customers. Understanding these metrics helps you tweak tactics for better performance. For more insights on leveraging conversion rates for campaign assessment, Seth Godin’s blog offers valuable perspectives.

Establishing precise goals upfront is essential for accurately gauging the triumph of any initiative. This way, you can compare actual outcomes against expected ones. It’s not about celebrating early victories but ensuring that every win is a step towards larger business goals. Continuous improvement based on data-driven insights ensures that momentum doesn’t slow down but rather builds over time for long-term achievement.

Conclusion

By now, you've got the gist of what a one-page marketing plan is. This simple yet powerful tool paves the way for clearer, more focused marketing strategies that truly resonate with your target audience.

Remember, identifying your niche market and crafting a unique selling proposition are crucial steps. Laying the groundwork, they become the bedrock upon which every aspect of your promotional endeavors is built. Whether through digital or offline media, choosing the right channels to connect with your audience makes all the difference.

Nurturing leads into loyal customers isn't just about capturing their attention; it's about building relationships. Navigating expansion, the key to staying aligned with your objectives lies in meticulously gauging triumphs.

Start small but think big. Adopt a streamlined strategy to navigate decision-making and craft content that genuinely engages, propelling your business toward swift expansion.

Tactics of Marketing #001

Plus, from the archives… a timeless piece

What is Lifetime Value?

Thinking about your customers or clients transactionally might be correct of they only ever buy from you once, but in all other situations where repeat purchases happen or are expected, lifetime value (or LTV) is a more accurate measure of what a customer or client is worth to your business. The calculation for LTV is different than just figuring out the costs and profits associated with a transaction, and often, each transaction has different profitability.

What is Lifetime Value? 

Lifetime value is a metric to show how valuable a client is during the time they are purchasing things from you. As you can imagine, a customer who comes to a restaurant multiple times is more valuable than someone who only comes once. The incentive to focus on lifetime value in that situation is the understanding that getting a customer to come back for a second or third time is easier and cheaper than finding a second or third customer to try the restaurant once. 

If you think about this as loyalty, you’d be on the right track… And loyalty is often rewarded with free products, exclusive incentives, discounts or cashback. Those loyalty programs are designed with LTV in mind, it’s cheaper to give you your 5th coffee for free than to get a new customer in the door.

Often, LTV explains the many “sign-up now” promos where the math simply doesn’t make sense. One of those are cable companies offering a $1000 TV when you sign up for a $49 per month package. Wait… That doesn’t add up–or does it? If the cable company believes that you’ll be a customer for long enough, they’ll cover the cost of the TV and be profiting off your business (more on the math later).

The customer thinks they are getting a sweet deal and the cable company is betting on long-term profitability, although they are hedging their bet with a contract term.

In what situations does LTV apply?

Not all businesses can benefit from using LTV as a metric. Usually, this is because the second transaction is not typical or much too far in the future. For example, the average span between real estate purchases is over 7 years. While there might some who are buying a home more frequently, post-sale marketing is designed to get another transaction through referrals. 

LTV is applicable for businesses that offer:

• subscriptions (like Netflix or Amazon Prime)

• on-going services (social media marketing agency or cleaning companies)

• Utilities (internet service provider or electricity)

• retainers (lawyers, advertising agencies)

• Products that run out and you buy again (vitamins or skincare, paper or toner for your printer, gas for your car).

This last category is what is most interesting to us. The other categories above have a distinct business model that requires recurring revenue for the business to function. That last category doesn’t have a standard practice of marketing for the long-term, instead, many marketing campaigns are aimed at new user acquisition. The most expensive way to grow your business IF customers could be buying repeatedly from you. 

If you have an online store and you’re not seeing a high number of repeat purchases, let’s talk. We’ve got solutions for that. Your customers should be coming back!

E-commerce is where we see LTV most misunderstood. I’m not sure why this is. New Users are valuable and you certainly shouldn’t turn off that pipeline. However, you’ve got customers already that you’re not pulling back to your store.  In fact, there are products that make so much sense not to change that a customer making a decision to buy from you is already thinking that they are going to be purchasing for a year or more.  Think about any part of your morning routine, when was the last time you switched something up?  In the bathroom – same shampoo, same soap, same toothpaste. You get it, those things are rarely changed unless the person is purely shopping on price.

Well, that’s where it gets interesting.  

You can easily increase your LTV by offering discounts so people will continue you buy from you.  For example, If it costs you $25 to acquire a new customer, then you’re still ahead with a $24 discount.  While this is a drastic tactic, it proves the point that even the thriftiest customers can be loyal – you just need to know what buttons to push.  

On a $100 product, that $24 might convert better as “getting the 5th one free” because then you don’t need to discount each transaction and you can count on 4 purchases before opening up the discount discussion again.

If you have an online store, look closely at how your customers divide.  How many have only purchased once? How many have purchased more than once?

Here’s your immediate action items in both scenarios:

1. For customers who have only purchased once, send them a coupon code immediately for their next purchase, ask them how they liked what they bought-no matter how long ago it was.  This gives an incentive to come back.

2. For customers who have purchased more than once, send them a coupon code for a product that complements what they have already been buying from you as a thank you and as a recommendation to something you think they’ll like.  We’ve seen this have an interesting effect where they buy the product you’re recommending and what they have been already purchasing from you.  This creates a personalized shopping experience that increases their value per cart.

While you’re in your customer dashboard looking this up, also take a look at those customers who have bought from you multiple times and see how frequent it is.  

Are they coming back each month?

Each year? 

Now, set up a follow-up email reminder for 2 weeks before that time frame (that’ll cover the shipping time to get there before they run out).

Here’s how to calculate LTV.

First, Understand the difference between CAC and LTV:

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): Attracting customers isn’t free. Between advertisements, content marketing, and other strategies, businesses sink a lot of funds into gaining new customers. Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is the cost of gaining each new customer. Read more here.

LTV (Lifetime Value): Life Time Value or LTV is an estimate of the average revenue that a customer will generate throughout their lifespan as a customer. This ‘worth’ of a customer can help determine many economic decisions for a company including marketing budget, resources, profitability and forecasting. 

Churn: The rate of customers who stop buying from you (or that you lose, in the case of subscriptions) 

It’s easy to understand how they work together, and why they are both independently important.  You need to understand what your CAC is, mainly because you cannot always see your LTV.  For example, you may expect a customer to stay with you for 5+ years, but since you’ve only been in business for 3 years, with little churn, you cannot say exactly what your LTV is. However, you can use CAC and Churn to make a compelling case that you’re building strong retention and that you’ll be keeping customers happy for years.

Focus on your Lifetime Value, your bottom line will thank you.

This article is actually based on a conversation that we have with many of our clients when we discuss how to increase sales.  It is still amazing to us that email isn’t dead, people want to come back to places they have bought at before, and yet stores are not actively bringing people back to buy.

Take the opposite approach and get focused on what happens after the first sale, you’ll be impressed with the results and the work you put in will pay dividends for years to come.

This post was written by Chris Milton, who worked in retail during high school selling sneakers and has been taking that in-store process and applying it to our client’s stores. Old habits die hard-like knowing how to take care of someone coming to your store, no matter if it’s a brick & mortar shop or an online store.  Let’s build a great customer experience for your store-traditional or digital.