Book Review — Ultimate Marketing Plan

“The Ultimate Marketing Plan” is a solidly written guidebook useful for all marketers. Author Dan Kennedy goes through the familiar marketing basics: finding your unique selling point, targeting your customers based on different criteria, utilizing testimonials and reviews.

The plan he presents is carefully created and based on his own experience in the field of marketing and sales, which reinforces its credibility.

Below are the some of the ultimate marketing success factors Dan talks about in the book, that I found to be truly insightful:

1. Success Factor #1 — The Right Message

In today’s incredibly cluttered, competitive environment, you need a truly great marketing message that represents what follows behind it. Marketing begins not with any particular media or strategy; it starts with putting together the best, most promotable message that truly represents what you’ve got.

A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is a way of explaining your position against your competition and all other choices. Think: Which coffee is “mountain grown”? Where is “The Happiest Place on Earth”? These examples show that a USP can be based on just about anything: price, product positioning, place. As you concentrate on developing a new USP for your enterprise, you’ll be newly aware of the USPs of other businesses, and you can learn from them.

2. Success Factor #2 — Right Presentation

Understand that the customer has to be led up 5 steps to a buying or action decision, and they are the same for every product or service:

• Awareness of need/desire
• Picking the “thing” that fulfills it
• Picking the source for the thing
• Accepting the source’s price/value argument
• Finding reasons to act now

Being boring is one of the biggest marketing sins. It is important to ignite interest in the customer’s mind and heart, intellectually and emotionally. There is always a way to present your message in a truly interesting manner.

Always be well organized. The right presentation of the right marketing message touches every base, every time.

Showing the guts to ask for action every time, in every presentation, is extremely important. Zig Ziglar once said that the difference between being a professional salesperson and a professional visitor is asking for the order. Zig also said: “Timid salespeople have skinny kids.”

3. Success Factor #3 — Right Targets

Every product and service either appeals or has the potential to appeal much more strongly to a certain definable group of people than it appeals to all people.

The most commonly used target marketing is geographic targeting. Make sure that the apparent nature of the people living there works for you. And once you find a geographic target market that works for you, work It to death.

In every business, there are must-buy-now buyers. Most business owners make no special attempts to identify them, find them, and sell to them differently than they sell to everyone else. The pertinent question, then, is who is your must-buy-now + can-buy-now buyer? The better and more complete your answer, the better able you’ll be to find him.

4. Success Factor #4 — Prove Your Case

What others say about you, your company, your products, and your services is infinitely more credible than anything you can say on your own behalf. When you make a statement, it’s a claim. When your satisfied customer makes the same statement about you, that’s a fact.

Collect and heavily use as many good testimonials as you can possibly get, in as many places and ways as you can, you’ll have a strong competitive advantage from that alone.

Use pictures often. We think the eye doesn’t lie, so offering visual evidence of “safety in numbers” can be compelling.

Statistical evidence can also be very persuasive. It’s up to you to identify every stat you’ve got and to present them in interesting ways that demonstrate something meaningful and reassuring.

5. Success Factor #5 — Right Perception

The customer’s understanding of you and your business is affected by input brought in through all five senses, consciously and subconsciously, thoughtfully and intuitively. You cannot define yourself for your customers merely by what you assert — no matter how eloquently, persuasively, or aggressively you assert it.

Every piece of your marketing “puzzle” should be strategically crafted to reinforce a single, central perception. Incidentally, “successful” should be part of the image you choose to convey. In most businesses, customers prefer dealing with successful businesses and business people.

6. Success Factor #6 — Heat

If you want to keep your customers, keep your customers interested, and keep getting your customers to tell others about you, you’ve got to keep coming up with good answers to the question “What’s new?”

One of two things is happening with every business, minute by minute, hour by hour, daily, weekly, monthly — either the business is hot, generating lots of heat and getting hot, or it is quickly cooling off and in danger of going cold.

Probably the best example, though, is McDonald’s. Hardly a two-week period passes without something new or something different going on at McDonald’s: a new product, an incredible offer, a new game, a new free gift. “We can invent,” Ray Kroc once said, “faster than the others can copy,” and that they do. So should you.

7. Success Factor #7 — Always Take Action

Far too many business owners sit and wait. If they invest in advertising and marketing, they may feel that is enough, and such investment entitles them to success. Others are resource-strapped and may feel they are handicapped and unable to effectively promote their businesses. Both are wrong. There is always something that can be done — now. And regardless of how much or how little monetary investment is being made in marketing, there are things that can be done personally or by direct delegation, using manual labor in place of money, improving process.

8. Success Factor #8 — Equity

In every exceptionally successful business, the customer is, is perceived as, and is treated as the most important asset. To really get to that point and own that belief, you have to figure out what your customer is or can and should be worth to you.

Although it may sound simplistic, getting maximum total value from your customers begins with valuing them — then translating that attitude of gratitude into action. Finding ways to express simple gratitude individually and en masse and publicly to your customers must be part of your Ultimate Marketing Plan.

“The Ultimate Marketing Plan” is a must-read for novice marketers who are just starting out their careers, as well as people from other professions interested in a basic overview of marketing. Even though the book was originally written in 1991, Dan has published a new edition that covers the basics of digital marketing as well. The book provides a perspective on what marketing has always been, so that we can cut the jargon and truly understand what has to be done.