Chapter 4: Writing the first version of your marketing plan
If you are looking at your freshly printed one-page marketing plan you’re likely thinking, “These nine questions look intimidating. Why do these questions particular questions matter? Why this order? And how the hell are we going to finish this project in less than one day?”
Let’s tackle each question one at a time.
Why do these particular questions matter?
The goal of the one-page marketing plan is to get you to focus on the most important ingredients of a thoughtful and actionable strategic plan. The nine questions spread across the Before, During, and After sections of the plan, represent the most important ingredient for your plan.
Why this order?
The marketing plan is not just a strategy. It’s your hypothesis about the journey your prospective customers will take to become your paying customers. Answer these questions in the order we suggest will help you focus on understanding what your company needs to deliver at every stage of your prospective customer’s journey.
How the hell are we going to finish this project in less than one day?
You can and will finish this exercise in less than a day if you commit to keeping your efforts focused, practical, and repeatable. Remember, your plan is not etched in stone. It’s a living, breathing organism. So treat it like a lab experiment that you will repeat and refine over and over again until you achieve breakthrough.
Marketing Plan Section 1: Before
The goal of the Before is to get your prospects to know you and respond to your message. A prospect represents a potential customer in your target audience. Once they’ve shown interest by responding to your message, they become leads (the During, or second phase of the marketing process). You may be asking what’s a target market, a message, and a lead? We’ll answer two out of three of these in this section of the Before Phase. The third, the lead, is someone who you’ve convinced to consider buying your product. We’ll discuss them further in the During Phase of the marketing process.
The three steps of the Before Phase
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My target market
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My target market message
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The paid channels I will use to reach my target market
My target market
Identifying your target market is the first step in designing your marketing program. Identifying the right audience will ensure your outreach falls on receptive ears. When you achieve positive reception you know your marketing will be effective. Your end goal in defining your target market is to maximize your return on the time, money, and energy you invest.
Questions to focus your answer
- What criteria define and delimit our ideal target customer (demographic / firmagraphic / geographic / technographic / psychographic)?
- What do they think / feel / believe?
- What are they interested in?
- What products and services do they consume?
- What are their habits?
- What are their challenges and needs?
My target market message
Once you have the right market you need to craft a message in language that will appeal, entertain, and make them think. This is a tricky balancing act. If you are too formal, you risk coming off as boring. If you are too conversational or outlandish, you could come off like a bad used car salesperson. Don’t risk your business’ credibility. Make your message direct, frank, and relatable. Be trustworthy. A great way to do this is to cast your business in the role of your prospect. You are just as frustrated with their problem as they are. In fact, you’re so frustrated, you decided to fix the problem in a revolutionary way. You care about their success.
Questions to focus your answer
- What value does our product or service deliver to our Target Persona?
- How does our solution meet their primary need?
- Why is it better than what they’re currently using or doing at the moment?
- Why is it better than what else is out there that they could use?
- How are we remarkable?
The paid channels I will use to reach my target market
Once you’ve selected your target market and dialed in your message, you’re ready to spend money to put your message in front of your audience. Advertising via paid channels is how you will do it.
Advertising is usually the most expensive piece of your marketing, so it needs to be managed carefully. You need to maximize your return for the budget you invest. You want to create an advertising program that makes it easy for you to measure the return on investment (ROI) for each ad you put into the market. Measuring each campaign will help you answer an important question? How much does the cost to acquire prospects eat into your profits from actual sales?
As you get started, be aware that your first few campaigns may not deliver sufficient ROI. To minimize the impact of this reality, we recommend you devise small inexpensive ad tests to figure out what works quickly. Once you know what works, you can start to increase your advertising investment which will let you scale lead acquisition from your target market.
Questions to focus your answer
- Which channels and vehicles will we use to communicate our Value Proposition to your Target Persona?
- How does our focus and budget break down against these channels?
- What is our target duration for each campaign?
- How will we measure the success of our campaigns?
- How will we prune campaigns that don’t work and focus on campaigns that do?
Phase 2: During
In the “during” phase, you’re dealing with leads. Leads are simply people who know you. They have raised their hands to signal they are interested in what your business is selling. In this stage you’ll capture these interested parties (also known as prospects) in a customer database. Then, you’ll engage in a value-building dialogue, and convert them into customers. Your end goal is to get them to trust you enough to buy from you once. When they’ve bought from you once, you’re ready to enter Phase 3: After.
The three steps of the During Phase:
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My lead capture system
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My lead nurturing program
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My sales conversion strategy
My lead capture system
You need to capture and track all of the leads you acquire in a database in order to conduct future follow-up. You capture all leads in order to create journeys for leads who are ready to do business now and to stay in touch with leads who may want to do business later.
Questions to focus your answer
- How will we identify high probability leads from low probability leads?
- How will we manage and track low probability leads?
- How will we sequence your marketing activities to convert leads into customers?
- What database will we use to store and manage your leads?
My lead nurturing program
Lead nurturing focuses on taking leads who are maybe interested in your product/service and making them very interested in your product/service.
Questions to focus your answer
- How frequently will we contact our leads?
- How many times will we communicate with our leads?
- Do we have a marketing calendar or do we need to create one?
- What value will our leads get from hearing from us?
- What channels will we use to reach them and what assets will our leads receive?
- How will we automate our follow up to our leads?
- How will we communicate with our leads vs. our customers?
- Do we have the right people to deliver our lead nurture program?
My sales conversion strategy
Questions to focus your answer
- How will we position our product/service so that it resonates with our leads?
- How will we address objection handling from our leads?
- How will we educate, consult and advise our leads and prospects?
- How does our product or service deliver compared to each and every competitor in our category?
- How will we generate trust and credibility when selling?
- How will we price our products or services?
- How will we present our business in a larger and more professional manner?
- What is our outrageous offer?
Phase 3: After
In the after phase you deal exclusively with your customers. These people like, respect, and trust your product / service enough to buy from you once. In this phase you’ll turn your customers into raving fans by delivering a world-class experience. You find ways to increase the amount of business they do with which increases their lifetime value. And you’ll foster an environment that leads to customer-referrals continue to come your way.
The three steps of the After Phase:
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How we deliver a world-class customer experience
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How we increase customer lifetime value
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How we orchestrate and encourage referrals
How we deliver a world-class experience
Delivering a world-class experience turns customers into raving fans who buy from you repeatedly. To achieve a world-class experience requires smart use of systems and technology.
Questions to focus your answer
- How will we market to our customers?
- How will we wow our customers?
- How will we sell our customers what they want but give them what they need?
- Who will we create lifetime relationships with our customers?
- How will we make it easy and fun to work with us?
- How will we create a sense of theater around our products and services that entertains our customers?
- How will we innovate around our customer experience?
- What systems will we use to reliably and consistently deliver a great experience?
- How can we use technology to remove friction from our customer experience?
- How will we position ourselves as an authority?
How we increase Customer Lifetime Value
You won’t start making money from your customers until you figure out how to increase their lifetime value, the total amount of money you make from each customer.
Questions to focus your answer
- How will we make more money from our existing customers?
- How will we win back lost customers?
- Which methods should we use to increase customer lifetime value?
- How can we reactivate customers who stopped using our product or service?
- How will we sort our customers into categories that are the most valuable to our business?
How we orchestrate and encourage referrals
Encouraging referral business from your raving fan customers is an active process. You can make the flow of referrals a more reliable part of your marketing process by implementing a few simple tactics.
Questions to focus your answer
- How will we ask our customers for referrals?
- What problem do we want to solve for the referred prospect?
- What value will we give our customer in exchange for asking them for a referral?
- What customers do we want to concentrate on for our referral program?
- How will we profit by referring our customers to other businesses?
- Who should we partner with for customer referrals?
- What businesses do business with our customers before they come to us?
- How will we build brand equity?