The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd by Allan Dib
Allan Dib is a serial entrepreneur, rebellious marketer and technology expert.
He has started and grown multiple businesses in various industries including IT, telecommunications and marketing.
One of his previous businesses was in the telecommunications industry where he faced heated competition from multibillion dollar, multinational competitors.
Allan grew his business from startup to four years later being named by Business Review Weekly (BRW) as one of Australia’s fastest growing companies – earning a spot in the coveted BRW Fast 100 list.
And, interesting fact – as a kid he was a big fan of the TV show “The A-Team!”
The Host’s Perspective:
Let’s talk about leverage.
Struggling business owners will spend time to save money, where as 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.
If you want more success, you need to start paying attention to and expand the things that give you the most leverage.
There are various areas of your business where you can start looking for leverage points.
You may look at getting 50% better at your negotiation skills.
This, in turn, may help you renegotiate 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 still just improve your bottom line incrementally.
That is not what you would call massive leverage. You 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 your bottom line.
Willie Sutton was a prolific American bank robber.
During his 40-year criminal career he stole millions of dollars and eventually spent more than half of his adult life in prison–and also managed to escape 3 times.
Sutton was once asked by a reporter why he robbed banks. According to the reporter, Sutton replied, “because that’s where the money is.”
When it comes to business, the reason smart, profitable companies focus so heavily on marketing is the same–because that’s where the money is.
Ok, so what should a company do to really leverage their marketing? The first thing necessary is to have a plan.
But that’s where things go sideways for many companies.
Marketing planning is too often a tortured, laborious process that produces a document that is hundreds of pages long.
It has graphs, charts, projections and much, much more.
Marketing plans usually are awesome looking documents but are far too often a bunch of nonsense.
Afterwards, the plan is shoved on a shelf only to collect dust.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Nor should it be.
The book shows how everything in a modern marketing plan can be put onto one of 9 sections on one piece of paper.
If you need more room than that, you’re probably complicating things unnecessarily.
The book is organized into three sections: “before,” “during,” and “after.”
The “before” section deals with strategic planning and the positioning of your firm, the “during” phase covers how to acquire new customers and finally, the “after” section” outlines how to give your customers a great experience, get them to buy more from you and how to get them to tell others.
Now, in order to understand what needs to go in those blocks you do need to read the book.
But it’s extremely well written and a joy to read and, for business owners and others who have been thrust into a marketing role, if they only read one marketing book, this would be a great one to read.
Listen to the Interview:
Show Notes
The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib
Allan Dib (Twitter)
Allan Dib (LinkedIn)
The E Myth by Michael Gerber
The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
What the Dog Saw by Malcom Gladwell
The Elements of Style by William Strunk
12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort
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