The One-Minute Marketing Plan (that you can use)
The only way to hit your goal is to have a plan
Is there any reason for you not to have a plan behind your marketing execution? Plans take too long to do? Marketing plans expire a day after they’re written? Not sure where to start? Actually, a marketing plan can mean the difference between you hitting your goals, and you wondering why you didn’t.
Here’s a basic, effective one-minute marketing plan (one minute to read, not to execute) that will address the objections above and help drive a much more robust sales funnel for your business. I’m going to break this post into two parts. Today’s post will be on “setting-up”. Next week’s post will finish off the One-Minute Marketing Plan, and will cover specific “attraction and pursuit” marketing tactics that you can use to drive new business.
Let’s have a look…
A. Set-Up
1. Establish your goals (number of sales leads, average dollar value per deal, cost per lead, cost per sale).
2. Interview a handful of your best customers and develop a Best Customer Profile so you can more easily find others like them. Your criteria for “best customer” might be gross margin.
3. If you don’t have any customers yet, develop a profile of who you think will be your best customers, and see if you can find a handful of people who match that profile who are willing to talk to you. Confirm your assumptions with those individuals. Repeat until satisfied.
4. Use the people you interview to refine your value proposition. Your value proposition should answer these three questions:
Pain: What significant business pain do your best customers have that they are willing to pay to have resolved?
Promise: How does your product or service uniquely address that pain, in a way that is superior to your competition?
Proof: What three facts about your product or service prove that your promise is true?
5. Make sure all your communications from this point forward reflect your value proposition.
6. Use your Best Customer Profile to identify the top 50 companies/prospects that should, by all rights, be customers of yours. This will be your starting “batch” of best prospects. You can come back and develop subsequent batches of 50 as you go.
7. Research the key contacts at your best 50 prospects. Bear in mind that there may be several people on the “decision-making team”. Use your interviews above to identify the usual team members.
8. Build or buy a contact list of the decision makers at your best 50 prospect companies. Web research and the phone can most often fill-out a list. You could also try buying contact information quite affordably at services like Jigsaw.com.
9. Here’s the hardest part. Content. You need to develop at least three offers that your best prospects would be willing to trade their contact information for (via a webform, which we’ll discuss in the next installment). This action of trading their contact information for one of your offers is the equivalent of your best prospects putting up their hands and telling you that they may be interested in purchasing your solution.
a. The first offer should a be white paper or an analyst report that describes your type of solution at a high level, and not specific to you. This document is to provide your best prospects with “solution education”… i.e. answering the question “what’s possible?”.
b. Your next offer can be a document about you (case studies or a webinar with a credible guest who validates you) that provides your best prospects with “vendor education”. Now that they understand what’s possible, they need to understand what you specifically have to offer (remember your value proposition above).
c. The last offer should help encourage your best prospects to include you on their short list for purchase consideration. This is where you want to let your best prospects get more involved in your solution, through a demo, a trial, an ROI calculator, or maybe even video testimonials from your best customers.
Now that we’ve outlined the blocking and tackling, we’re ready to use all the above elements in your marketing execution. As promised, next week’s post will go into specific tactics you should plan from an Attraction (helping your best prospects find you) and a Pursuit (you going out and finding your best prospects) perspective.
About Drew Williams
My name is Drew Williams. I’m an author and marketing entrepreneur. “A what?”, you say. I call someone who’s passionate about building businesses a marketing entrepreneur. So that’s me. Full Profile | Google+
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