Allan Dib, The 1-Page Marketing Plan - Get new customes, Make more money, and Stand Out from the crowd.
Look at any profession where the stakes are high and you’ll see a well-thought-out plan being followed. Professionals never just wing it. Doctors follow a treatment plan. Airline pilots follow a flight plan. Soldiers follow a military operation plan. How would you feel about engaging the services of any of the above professions if the practitioner were to say to you, “Screw the plan. I’ll just wing it.” Yet, this is exactly what most business owners do.
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. This is called leverage and leverage is the best kept secret of the rich.
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. We’ll talk more about strategy vs. tactics in a moment.
Strategy vs. Tactics Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is absolutely key to marketing success. Strategy is the big-picture planning you do prior to the tactics. Imagine you’ve bought an empty block of land and want to build a house. Would you just order a pile of bricks and then just start laying them? Of course not. You’d end up with a big old mess that likely wasn’t safe. So what do you do instead? You hire a builder and an architect first and they plan everything out from the major stuff like getting building permits, down to what kind of tap fittings you’d like. All of this is planned prior to a single shovel of dirt being moved. That’s strategy. Then, once you have your strategy, you know how many bricks you need, where the foundation goes and what kind of roof you’re going to have. Now you can hire a bricklayer, carpenter, plumber, electrician and so on. That’s tactics. You can’t do anything worthwhile successfully without both strategy and tactics. Strategy without tactics leads to paralysis by analysis. No matter how good the builder and the architect are, the house isn’t going to get built until someone starts laying bricks. At some stage they’re going to need to say, “Okay, the blueprint is now good. We’ve got all the necessary approvals to build so let’s get started.” Tactics without strategy leads to the “bright shiny object syndrome.” Imagine you started building a wall without any plans and then later found out that it was in the wrong place, so you start pouring the foundation and then you find out it’s not right for this type of house, so you start excavating the area where you want the pool but that isn’t right either. This clearly isn’t going to work. Yet this is exactly how many business owners do marketing. They string together a bunch of random tactics in the hope that what they’re doing will lead to a customer. They whack up a website without much thought and it ends up being an online version of their brochure or they start promoting on social media because they heard that’s the latest thing and so on. You need both strategy and tactics to be successful but strategy must come first and it dictates the tactics you use. This is where your marketing plan comes in. Think of your marketing plan as the architect’s blueprint for getting and retaining customers.