Writing A Brilliant One Page Marketing Plan
Does your business have a marketing plan?
The fact is that most businesses do not. But, what also is a fact is that they sure would make a lot more money if they did!
A marketing plan is a blueprint that outlines your company’s marketing efforts for the coming year. It describes the business activities involved in accomplishing specific marketing objectives within a set time frame. Not only does it help businesses reach their monthly sales and marketing goals, but it also helps them know what is working and what isn’t.
The notion that a business needs pages and pages of complicated information and numbers in order to have a good marketing plan is not necessarily true. In fact, a one-page marketing plan can just as well give everything you need. It works in the same way the 80:20 rule works. 20% of all the things that we do bring us 80% of the results. A one-page marketing plan can be thought to be focusing on the 20% of the most powerful steps that bring us the biggest results.
William U. Pena outlines his strategies on writing an effective one-page marketing plan. It’s a very crisp way to include everything you need to, without the need of making it lengthy or boring. It focuses on the following key aspects
1. Ideal Customer Description
Customers are the premise on which people run businesses. If it were not for their customers, businesses would dry up. So, it makes the utmost sense to base your business’ marketing plan on your customers. This section of the marketing plan emphasizes on
# 6 basic needs of customers — Certainty, Variety, Significance, Love/Connection, Growth, Contribution — These are based on the teachings of Anthony Robbins and other psychology and self-development experts. These 6 basic needs drive most of what we do, and more so what customers do. Here, we prioritize these needs of our customers with numbers from 1 to 6.
# What our customers want — Keeping your customers’ ideal description in mind, fill this section up with what they are looking for most.
# Buying criteria — With respect to what you’re trying to sell to your customers, fill this section up with what qualities in your product will make your customers buy it.
# Marketing Message — This section needs to be filled with the Big USP, Big Promise, Big Benefit, Big Proof that you plan to offer in your marketing message to the customers you are targeting. These should ideally correspond to what your customers would like to see.
2. Finding your Optimal Marketing Strategy (OMS)
Marketing Stage: ☐ Filling Pipeline OR ☐ Follow up
Filling the pipeline would refer to getting new leads and customers. Follow up would refer to working on retaining existing customers. Check against the one your business is more bent at working towards. Since most business activity is motivated by filling the pipeline, the OMS list that follows is focused largely on that.
# What Always Works — Check the marketing activities that you feel always work for a business like yours.
# Competition OMS — Check the marketing activities your competitors in the market follow successfully.
# What’s worked in the past — Check the marketing activities which have worked well in the past for your own business to get clients and make sales.
# New OMS — Check for new marketing activities that you would like your business to adopt as a part of the marketing plan.
3. Setting your marketing goals
Write your 12 Month Main Marketing And Sales Revenue Goal = A
Divide that by 12 to get your Monthly Revenue Goal = B
Write the average price of your product/service = C
Write your monthly sales goals = B/C = D
Write the lead to sales multiplier = E (which translates to — for every E persons that visit, 1 person buys your product)
Write the monthly lead goal = D * E
4. Defining your key marketing action steps
Fill this section with your list of Marketing Tactics, Action Steps (in each tactic), Average leads per month, Average sales per month (characteristic of the specific marketing tactic and the platform you have), and Sales per month (based on action steps and average sales per month)
5. Planning your marketing calendar
A monthly break-down of the promotions and campaigns you wish to do as a part of your business’ marketing strategy for the coming year. This kind of planning helps you leverage your marketing from special holidays and campaigns that can motivate your customers to purchase.
6. Evaluating your market ROI
Fill in your marketing tactics and respective revenue goals for now. Add the rest of the columns at the end of the quarter, like Revenue Actual, Expenses, and Return on Investment (ROI) for the quarter.
If it’s still getting difficult to understand how some sections of the marketing plan should be filled, here’s a sample marketing plan by William for a business focused on Creating Training Videos for Entrepreneurs. This sample will help you moonwalk your way through writing yourself the perfect one-page marketing plan!
Now, what makes this one-page marketing plan so effective? It’s because we focused on the most impactful efforts we can make that will bring us the biggest results. You don’t have to do a lot of work, you just have to do the right work. Your one-page marketing plan is a very concise document that is as exhaustive as it can be. It’s much easier to keep our sight at the goals that matter the most through a concise document like this, instead of getting lost in endless complicated information that can’t help you figure out why your marketing efforts are/are not working.
So, go ahead and make your business the perfect one-page marketing plan today, and watch your business make you more money than ever.
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