Here at PosterMyWall we’re all about giving you the tools you need to create knock-out marketing collateral. From posters to flyers, signage, videos, and more, our goal is to help promoters, marketers, and champions like yourself build awareness around your community project, small business or event.
But we want to take it a step further in 2019 and give back to our loyal community.
To show our thanks, we’ve partnered with Allan Dib, a rebellious marketer, successful entrepreneur and author of The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money And Stand Out From The Crowd, Amazon’s #1 global marketing book.
Allan was an IT geek who, through necessity, became a marketer. He spent 10 long and expensive years trying to learn the secrets to marketing success. It paid off, and he’s since started, grown and exited several successful businesses before going on to write the book he wished he’d had when he started.
We read it and thought “This is information that will really help our readers.” So we reached out to Allan, and here we are.
Allan took us through nine steps to create a practical marketing plan that works for small businesses. This is something that is going to change the way you approach your marketing.
What Allan’s done for us is to take his teachings from the book, and condense it into six value-packed emails. He’ll shed some light on the following:
- How to choose your target market
- How to create a compelling message so prospects will actually respond
- How to capture and nurture leads
- How to close deals and deliver a world-class experience
- How to increase customer lifetime value
- How to orchestrate and stimulate referrals
Now, over to Allan.
The riches are in the niches
A mistake many small businesses make is to think they’re in the business of selling what they do, and that could be music, food, community events, whatever – this just isn’t true.
You’re actually in the business of marketing what you do. This is a significant mindset shift that you need to make before tackling marketing.
It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is – before your customers buy from you; they only know how good your marketing is. Maybe read that again a few times.
So now that we’ve made this critical mindset shift, we can start marketing right?
Well, hang tight for a sec… While I love a “just get it done” kind of approach, there are nine essential steps that we need to cover that will enable you to start scaling your business or organization rapidly. Here’s what you need to do.
Identify your audience
First and foremost, you need a plan. Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to show you how to create a marketing plan. It’s going to ensure that anything you create on PosterMyWall, is hyper-targeted to grow your business.
To follow along, download the 1-page marketing (1PMP) Canvas, it’s an implementation tool that I created specifically for people like you. If you follow along and fill it in with the guidance in these blog posts, you’re going to end up with a sophisticated marketing plan for your business or event which literally fits on a single page.
Creating a strategic marketing plan starts with figuring out who your niche target market is. You can think about your ideal target customer and create an avatar for them.
- What is his or her name?
- Where does he or she live?
- What do they wear?
- What’s their age?
- What keeps them up at night?
- What are their daily frustrations or desires?
- Where do they live online? Do they know that you even exist?
Remember, it can’t be everyone, because that is a costly exercise and you don’t want to be wasting your time and resources on disinterested people.
Try to get into the mind of your prospect. What makes them tick? It’s only by really delving into who you are marketing to that you can create a business message that resonates better and delivers a high return on investment.
And remember, targeting a niche lets you become a big fish in a small pond. Before targeting everyone, target one niche, dominate that niche and then move on to other niches.
Stay tuned in for the next blog post. I’m going to walk you through how to write a compelling message to your market.
