Quick overview

So much more than a “marketing” book, it is how to market and structure a business that is profitable and doesn’t rely on one person.

Great for describing small and medium business marketing as well as how to become a business vs a job. The marketing is strategic to produce sales and profit after customers start with or buy from you. Awesome book for any entrepreneur who wants to bootstrap a company.

My notes

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.

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 a waste of time (comparatively).

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.

If you want more success, you need to start paying attention to and expand the things that give you the most leverage.

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 your bottom line.

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 you and trust you enough to become a customer. All the stuff you usually associate with marketing are tactics.

Strategy vs. Tactics

Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is absolutely key to marketing success.

Good, even great products are simply not enough. Marketing must be one of your major activities if you’re to have business success.

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 they’ll 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.

Small and Medium Business Marketing

• It’s trackable.
• It’s measurable.
• It uses compelling headlines and sales copy.
• It targets a specific audience or niche.
• It makes a specific offer.
• It demands a response.
• It includes multi-step, short-term follow-up.
• It incorporates maintenance follow-up of unconverted leads.

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 quickly and easily create the key elements of a direct response campaign for your business.

ACT I. The “Before” Phase

Chapter 1. Selecting Your Target Market

To be a successful small business marketer you need laser-like focus on a narrow target market, sometimes called a niche.

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.

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.

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 give each market segment you serve a rating out of 10.

Chapter 2. Crafting Your Message

My rule of thumb is one ad, one objective.

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.

If you haven’t first clarified in your mind why your business exists and why people should buy from you rather than your nearest competitor, marketing will be an uphill battle. You need to develop your unique selling proposition (USP).

The entire goal of your USP is to answer this question: Why should I buy from you rather than from your nearest competitor?

If You Confuse Them You Lose Them Understand that your prospect has essentially three options:

1. Buy from you
2. Buy from your competitor
3. Do nothing

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 complex business. A great way of distilling your USP is by crafting an “elevator pitch.”

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.

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 about 30 seconds? The best formula I’ve seen is: You know [problem]? Well, what we do is [solution]. In fact, [proof].

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?
2. Of all the products and services you offer, which do you enjoy delivering the most?

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.

Create an Irresistible Offer

Value: first you need to think, what is the most valuable thing you could do for your customer?

Language: if you’re not a member of your target market, you need to learn the language and jargon used within your target market.

Reason why: when you have a great offer, you need to justify why you’re doing this.

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.

Upsells: when your prospect is hot, and in the buying frame of mind, it’s the perfect time to offer a complementary product or service.

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.

 

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 and pain reliever and to turn any comparison with your competition into an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Copywriting for Sales: You Can’t Bore People into Buying

Almost no other skill will reward you as richly as being able 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 emotion and motivates them to action, is the master skill of marketing.

Emotional direct response copywriting uses attention-grabbing headlines, strong sales copy and compelling calls to action. It’s what’s known as “salesmanship in print.”

Copywriting is salesmanship in print. You need to write your sales copy as though you were talking directly to a single person.

There’s really only one opinion you should be worrying about—that of your customers and prospects. Frankly, no one else’s opinion, including yours, should figure in what you put in your sales copy. Testing and measuring response is the only true way of judging the effectiveness of your copy.

Always remember, people buy with emotions first and then justify with logic afterwards.

The five major motivators of human behavior, especially buying behavior, are:

1. Fear
2. Love
3. Greed
4. Guilt
5. Pride

If your sales copy isn’t pushing at least one of these emotional hot buttons, then it’s likely too timid and ineffective.

 

Part of the job of good sales copy is to tell potential prospects who your product or service is NOT for. There are three very good reasons you should do this.

First, it filters out people who aren’t part of your target market or those who wouldn’t be a good fit for what you have to offer.

Second, it immediately makes it more credible when you tell them who this product is for. It feels much more evenhanded when you cover both angles by telling them who it is for and who it isn’t for.

Last, the prospects who your product or service is for will more strongly feel it is tailored to their needs than if you had said it’s for anyone and everyone. It feels more targeted and exclusive.

Chapter 3. Reaching Prospects With Advertising Media

Lifetime value and customer acquisition cost are two of the key numbers you need to know to measure marketing effectiveness. The other statistics, like response rates and conversion rates, in themselves are useless. We just use them to determine these two figures, which give us a true picture of how our marketing is performing.

A successful marketing campaign has to get three vital elements right: Market (covered in Chapter 1): the target market you send your message to Message (covered in Chapter 2): the marketing message or offer you send Media (covered in this chapter): the vehicle that you use to send your message to your target market; for example, radio, direct mail, telemarketing, Internet, TV and so on

The only time to set a marketing budget is when you’re in the testing phase. In the testing phase, I advise that you fail often and fail cheap until you have a winner. Test your headline, your offer, your ad positioning and other variables. Then, cut the losers and optimize the winners until you finally have a combination that gives you the best possible return on investment.

ACT II. The “During” Phase

Chapter 4. Capturing Leads

The goal of this phase is to get your leads to like you and what you have to offer enough to buy from you for the first time. Once they’ve bought from you, they become a customer and enter the third and final phase of your marketing process.

Here’s the other big reason you want to avoid selling directly from your ad: at any given time (on average) about 3% of your target market is highly motivated and ready to buy immediately. These are the prospects most mass marketing hopes to convert. However, there’s a further 7% who are very open to buying and another 30% who are interested but not right now. The next 30% are not interested and finally the last 30% wouldn’t take your product, even if it were free.

If you tried selling directly from your ad, you’d be targeting only the 3% who are ready to buy immediately and losing the other 97%. By creating a lead-generating ad, you increase your addressable market to 40%. You do this by capturing the 3% who are immediate buyers but also by capturing the 7% who are open to talking, as well as the 30% who are interested but not right now. By going from a 3% addressable market to 40%, you’re increasing the effectiveness of your advertising by 1,233%.

Chapter 5. Nurturing Leads

In marketing, the money is in the follow-up. Based on this, we build the irresistible lead nurturing model.

That’s what the shock and awe pack is all about. If you can outspend your competitor wooing and wowing prospects, you’ll run rings around them. Of course you must know your numbers, particularly numbers like customer lifetime value, otherwise you will go negative. You can’t substitute good marketing for bad math.

It’s critical you do the same for your marketing infrastructure. Get systems into place (we talk more about systems in Chapter 7). Come up with the marketing ideas, or better still, shamelessly steal the ones in this book; hire graphic designers, web developers and copywriters to make it real; then get admin help or use fulfillment services to make it recur. As discussed earlier, much of this can be automated and what can’t be automated should be delegated. It’s just too important to neglect. Lack of a functional, running marketing infrastructure will harm, or possibly kill, your business.

Even if your business is currently small, hire admin help in the form of a manager type who will “run the factory” for you and make sure your scheduled and event-triggered marketing activities recur.

As entrepreneurs we have a “can do” mindset. This often means that when something needs to be done, we are tempted to just roll up our sleeves and just do it. However, spending a lot of time doing things that aren’t your area of expertise or aren’t a good use of your time can quickly become a very expensive exercise. Remember, money is a renewable resource—you can always get more money but you can never get more time.

Another common concern with outsourcing or delegating tasks is quality. Will they get the job done as well as you would? The answer is, probably not. But a rule of thumb I like to use is if someone else can do it 80% as good as you can, then you should delegate it.

Chapter 6. Sales Conversion

“it’s all about the product,” so if you have a better product or service people will automatically be more likely to buy from you and pay more for it. While this is true to some extent, the law of diminishing returns comes into play when your product or service reaches a “good enough” level. After all, how much better can your IT support or accounting services or bread be than that of your competition? Once you’ve reached a level of competence, the real profit comes from the way you market yourself.

Pricing Strategy Setting price on your products or services is one of the weightiest decisions you’ll make in your business. It will touch every part of your business, from the financials to how you are perceived in the marketplace. Yet, often scant attention is paid to the psychology and marketing potential of price.

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that the more choice you offer, the more sales you will make. However, this has been proven totally false time and time again.

It’s one of the most powerful ways to win more business and it’s based on the magic of “try before you buy.” Using this technique can dramatically boost your sales. First, it breaks down sales resistance, making the prospect feel less like they’re committing to something irreversible. Second, it puts the onus on the buyer to reverse the sale, which puts inertia back on your side. Lastly, a genuine customer is highly unlikely to return a good product that is meeting their needs. Implement the “everyone’s in sales” mindset in your business and couple it with a “try before you buy” offer and you’ll see dramatically better conversion rates.

Your job is to make it easy for customers to buy from you. Signs that say “Cash Only” or “$10 Minimum for Credit Cards” or “We Don’t Accept Amex” are the sales prevention department at work. These businesses may be saving money on merchant fees but are almost certainly losing far more in terms of lost sales, lost customers and lost goodwill. They’re stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

Look for other things that could be roadblocks to sales conversion. Are you requiring prospects and customers to jump through hoops, fill in useless forms or conform to processes that aren’t really necessary? How could you remove these roadblocks or at the very least make them much easier?

ACT III. The “After” Phase

Chapter 7. Delivering A World-Class Experience

Most ordinary businesses stop their marketing efforts once they’ve converted a prospect into a customer (in other words, the prospect buys from them). This sort of transactional thinking keeps them stuck and puts a firm lid on their business growth. By contrast, truly remarkable businesses get exponential results because each customer they add is not just revenue once but it’s revenue over and over again because this person becomes an evangelist for the business.

Sell Them What They Want but Give Them What They Need.

Plain and simple the purpose of any new technology in your business is to eliminate friction.

Now may be a good time to rethink the various ways you use technology in your business. Are they reducing friction? Are they doing what they were hired to do?

While this is now appreciated, originally there was a lot of negative consumer opinion about the length of time required to correctly pour a pint of Guinness from the tap. During the mid-1990s Guinness turned all this around with a marketing campaign that sold this negative attribute as a positive feature. Essentially, they started telling people how much effort went into pouring the perfect beer. They emphasized this by saying, “It takes 119.5 seconds to pour the perfect pint,” and “good things come to those who wait.”

Here’s the lesson: tell your audience about all the effort that goes into delivering your product or service. In your sales copy and even in your packaging, give them the details of how you painstakingly prepare or manufacture your product.

Products Make You Money, Systems Make You a Fortune

There are four main types of business systems you need to create, regardless of what type of business you’re in. You’re almost guaranteed to make a fortune, if you can create scalable and replicable systems in these four areas of your business:

1. Marketing system: generate a consistent flow of leads into the business
2. Sales system: lead nurturing, follow-up and conversion
3. Fulfillment system: the actual thing you do in exchange for the customer’s money
4. Administration system: accounts, reception, human resources and so on; support of all the other business functions

Many small businesses get bogged down with fulfillment and administration while neglecting their marketing and sales systems.

If you start thinking about structuring for exit at the time you need to exit, you’re toast. It’s way too late and you’re very unlikely to achieve a favorable result. You need to start with the end in mind. Start thinking about your ultimate customer and what would motivate them to write you the check that becomes your biggest payday.

Chapter 8. Increasing Customer Lifetime Value

By not increasing your prices over a long period of time, you’re effectively giving yourself a pay cut.

Ascension is the process of moving existing customers to your higher-priced, and hopefully higher-margin, products and services.

Reminders. People live busy lives. They don’t always remember to do things in a timely manner even when it’s of benefit to them. Send reminders by post, email or SMS to remind them to do business with you again.

Give them a reason to come back.

If you’re delivering extra value in the way of convenience, your customers likely won’t even care that you’re charging them more. People understand that convenience has a price and for the most part they’re okay with that.

You need to know and continually improve your numbers. In a moment, I’ll demonstrate to you why this is so powerful, but for now, here are some of the key numbers you need to know:

• Leads: calculate the number of new leads that come into your business (lead capture and lead nurturing were covered in Chapters 4 and 5).
• Conversion rate: calculate the percentage of leads you converted into paying customers. (We covered sales conversion in Chapter 6.)
• Average transaction value: know the average dollar amount that customers spend with you. (We looked at several ways of increasing this number earlier in this chapter.)
• Break-even point: identify the dollar amount you need to make to keep your doors open. It encompasses such things as rent, staff, utilities and any other ongoing operating expenses.

 

The main point is that measuring, managing and improving your key marketing numbers, even by an incremental amount, can have a massive impact on the end result. Small hinges swing big doors.

Here are some of the key metrics you need to measure and manage in a subscription or recurring business model:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue: this is your total recurring billings. You want this number to be growing over time. If it’s flattening out or declining, you may have either a churn problem or a customer acquisition problem.
• Churn Rate: this is the percentage of recurring customers that cancel subscriptions or stop buying from you. Filling the bucket is great but not if it’s leaking at a rapid rate.
• Customer Lifetime Value: this is the key metric that this chapter is focused on. Increasing this number is where the money is.

Chapter 9. Orchestrating And Stimulating Referrals

Brand

So, here is my definition: a brand is the personality of a business. In fact, you can use the well-understood word “personality” as a direct substitute for “brand.” That instantly clarifies the meaning.

Think of your business as a person. What attributes make up its personality?

• What’s its name?
• What does it wear? (i.e., design)
• How does it communicate? (i.e., positioning)
• What are its core values and what does it stand for? (i.e., brand promise)
• Who does it associate with? (i.e., target market)
• Is it well-known? (i.e., brand awareness)

As a small business your best hope for emulating this is focusing on sales and then turning your customers into a tribe of raving fans. This is the advice I give to any small to medium business wanting to work on branding.

Conclusion

Remember, it’s all about implementation. I’ll reiterate—knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing.

Your ultimate competitive advantage is in anticipating change and taking action accordingly. It’s going to take guts; you’ll have to take risks and you’ll have to invest in research and new technology. You need to constantly be pondering questions such as:

• What business do I need to be in?
• What technologies are coming that are going to disrupt my industry?
• How can I take advantage of the coming changes in technology rather than fight them?

You need constant strategic innovation—innovation that your customers care about.

No one knows how good your products or services are until after the sale. Before they buy, they only know how good your marketing is. Put simply, the best marketer wins every time.