Build A Tribe Of Raving Fans

Allan Dib is a serial entrepreneur, a rebellious marketer, technology expert and the bestselling author of a book called The 1?Page Marketing Plan. He has started and grown multiple businesses in all kinds of industries around telecommunications and IT. One of his previous business where he faced competition from a big billion-dollar company and he was still able to grow this startup. He was later named by Business Review Weekly as one of Australia’s fastest growing companies and got on their Top Fast 100 list. He’s passionate about helping new businesses find new ways to leverage technology and he is a business coach and consultant and speaker and he is here with us.

I love hearing people’s story of origin. If you wouldn’t mind taking us back to whatever you want, as far back as childhood, high school, college, university where you said, “There’s got to be a better way to market things and what’s going on.” How did you get interested in what you’re doing?

John, I’m not at all from a marketing background. I’ve got no education in business or training in marketing, whatsoever. It came about by necessity, as many good things do. I was a dead broke IT geek. I was good at what I did. I was running an IT business. I would always try and learn the new technology. Our clients loved what I did, they loved my service. They loved my products, they love our team and everything like that. For the life of me, I could not grow this business. It was stuck and any business that came our way was business that either came by referral or by chance or by some other similar means. It grew out of absolute frustration. That put me on a path to trying to learn marketing for the better part of a decade. Long story short, I learned all I could. I discovered direct response marketing and my life was never the same. It sounds like an overnight success story, but it’s certainly not it. It was probably a decade from start to end.

Let’s figure out if we could have the big takeaways from using The 1?Page Marketing Plan. Usually marketing plans are known for being thousands of pages if not hundreds. There are three takeaways. You’re going to get new customers, which then you make more money. The big one that I want to jump into is how to stand out from the crowd. One of the things you talked about Allan is why getting your name out there is a losing strategy. That’s such a common thing as like, “We’re starting a company and we’re going to get our name out there and get all kinds of brand awareness and spend money on Facebook and social media. Then when we’re ready to open the floodgates, people will know who we are.” Why does that not work?

“Build it and they will come,” is a great movie plot. It’s not such a good marketing strategy. It comes about because people think that, “I can see Pepsi or Coca-Cola, Apple doing this brand awareness stuff. They’re super successful companies. That sounds like a great strategy for me.” If you’re working on property investment, there are property investors who build skyscrapers and they invest hundreds of millions of dollars in their investment. Then there are investors who buy a single small property somewhere out in the suburbs and rent it out. If the guy who’s trying to do the small investment strategy, who’s working on a small scale, if he tries to do the skyscraper strategy where he’s only got enough money to build one level of the skyscraper that’s not going to work. He needs a strategy that’s going to work on a small scale, not a strategy that works on a large scale.

It comes about because of some of the different motivations behind marketing at a large scale and marketing in a small scale. At a small scale, the only thing that matters is can we get a profit? Can we get a client? At a large scale, large companies, they have completely different motivations. Making a profit is somewhere within there, but I would put to you that above that is things like placing the board of directors, satisfying superiors, biases, winning creative awards, things like that. Things that are completely useless for small businesses. Small businesses need a small business strategy that works and that comes down to direct response marketing.

Let’s walk people through each of your nine grids on The 1?Page Marketing Plan.

It’s a single page. Where this came about early in my business career, I thought, “I need to hire a consultant to help me put together a business plan.” I did. I paid him thousands of dollars that I couldn’t afford at the time, but I thought, “This is important. All good businesses have a business plan and a marketing plan.” He did what most consultants do. He put together a beautiful looking plan. It was hundreds of pages. It had beautiful graphs and charts and projections and things like that. I took that plan, flick through it, put it in the top drawer of my desk and the next time that I saw it was when I was moving out of our office and we were taking all the things out of the drawers. I looked at it and throw it in the trash and thought, “What a waste of time and money that was.”

I did recall that there was one part of that process, the creating that plan that was very valuable to me. That was the part inside it called The Marketing Plan. It wasn’t the plan itself that was super valuable to me, but it was the process that me and the consultant went through to do that. Part of what we did was look at, “What’s the target market that we’re going after? What’s the message that we’re going to go to that target market? How are we going to reach them? How are we going to position ourselves? How are we going to price ourselves?” That was a super valuable process because it crystallized to me the things that we needed to do as a business and how we needed to present ourselves and how we needed to pitch out our product and our service to differentiate ourselves from some of the competitors that were in the marketplace. That was a super valuable process to me. That stuck in my mind for many years.

Then when I became a coach, one of the things that I started to do with my clients, I started to say, “Let’s do you a marketing plan.” That’s when clients would freeze up and they would procrastinate on that. It feels like something so overwhelming, such a big thing to do. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money. That’s where I needed to come up with a plan that was fast, that was effective and that followed direct response marketing principles very closely because that’s the marketing that would move the needle for my clients. Out of that, they say necessity is the mother invention and I certainly found that to be the case.

From that was born The 1?Page Marketing Plan. I wanted a process that would be easy for my clients to fill in and literally a single page. I divided that into nine sections. The first three sections are called the before phase, the next three sections are called the during phase, and the last three sections of the after phase. What do we do before we were acquired a client, what do we do during the time that we’re trying to acquire a client, and what do we do after we try and acquire a client? Then within those three major sections, we’ve got three subsections.

You don’t have any revenue coming in and you’re trying to figure out what your prospects are. Then after you’ve got that, those three things done. Your next level is, “How do I capture these leads with my sales funnel?” Then the final one is, “Now, I’ve got a customer, how do I keep them and get referrals and all that good stuff?” I always love to give examples with content and structure because it brings this incredible tool to life.

I am a Co-Founder and CMO of a startup myself and we’re using your tool. I’m a testimonial for you on this podcast. We are helping homeowners who have equity built up in their home and want some cash out, but do not want to take out a second loan and besides selling the house the only way they get access to that cash. That’s our target market. We know that there’s a huge amount of people that want this and either can’t qualify or can’t afford to have a second mortgage payment by taking some cash out to remodel or send their kid to college or whatever they want to do with it.

The message to the target market is we’ll give you the cash in exchange for owning 10% of your house and you can stay in the house as long as you want, and then when you sell the house, that’s when we get our money back based on the percent of the house that we own. Then the third part of this strategy is you talked about what kind of media are we going to use? This is where I want your expertise to come to life is we’re using Facebook ads. 

We’ve got an explainer video that explains how to do that. We’re going to be running ads to promote that, to build up an email list of people that are interested. We’re obviously doing PR as part of our marketing with the CEO being interviewed on podcasts and that type of things. That’s our strategy. Is there anything within those three buckets under your before section that you could amplify and say, “You’re good here,” not quite defined enough?

I like to get as niche as possible and it seems counter-intuitive to a lot of people, especially when you’re starting out. Maybe you’ve got a startup, you think, “I’ll cast the widest net possible because I don’t want to miss anyone.” What ends up happening is people say, “Yes, of course I can help you. I can help anyone. My product is for anyone and everyone.” That feels logical, but when you say it’s for anyone, you’re saying it’s for no one. It’s funny, you see so many ads that are a laundry list of products and services. “We do this, we do ABC. We do so on and so forth.” They’re trying to cast the widest net possible. The human brain it has so many stimuli coming at it every day, each day, every minute of the day that it has a filter.

The filter is, “Is this relevant for me?” It tries to actively filter out things that are not relevant for it. If you’re coming at people with a very general message, people’s brains are automatically going to filter that out because your brain wants to find things, “That’s relevant for me,” and then hone in on that. That’s exactly what we want to do. I’ll give the example, if you’ve got a knee problem, do you want to go see a general doctor or do you want to see a knee specialist? Let’s say I’m driving and I see a sign, knee specialist, that’s going to catch my attention. Whereas I might drive past ten signs that tell me about a general practitioner or a general doctor. We want to get hyper specific because we want our message to be so specific that when people read it they say, “That’s for me.” It commands attention.

I’ve had that experience myself where even sometimes in an email marketing. I’ll get an email and it’ll be like, “Are you in my head? This is exactly what my problem is.” I like to tell people that the riches are in the niches, which is a summary of what you said. That’s our challenge sometimes actually is we have found our ideal target market, avatar, whatever you want to call them as a middle-class family who has some teenage kids about to go to college and have been in their homes five plus years or more.

The house has gone up in value 30%, 40% where they could take out $50,000 $100,000 and still have quite a bit of equity left. They don’t want to pay interest rates or have a second mortgage on top of their current mortgage to get that money out. The other target market we could help are senior citizens who have paid their house off, but need some cash but don’t want to reverse mortgage. I said from a marketing standpoint, “Let’s pick one niche and focus on them and not try to have multiple messages going out.” Do you agree with that strategy?

I agree with that. The other thing that you can do is when you do have two obvious markets is have a one-page marketing plan for each. Treat them as completely different segments because the people who are retired who have paid off their house have different worries, they have different things keeping them up at 3:00 AM than the young family who have got a little bit of equity. We want to speak to them very differently.

The big takeaway everybody is have a one-page marketing plan for each of your niche markets. That is gold right there. Let’s go to the second stage, which is, “We’ve focused on people. We’ve got people clicking on our ad. They’re opting in for more information.” You’ve got these great things of what is your lead gen capture system, how do you nurture it, and then how do you convert that to sales? Do you have any examples of how you’ve done that either for your own business or one of your clients?

It comes down very much to who your target market is. In your example, for the older people, I would say things like Snapchat and Instagram may not be the best choice. You’ve got to be thinking about the target market, but when it comes to messaging, you want to hit some of the emotional triggers that people have. Some of the major ones that are universal, things like fear, love, greed, guilt, pride. We want to touch people emotionally in our marketing message. What a lot of people do is they list features and benefits, “This is going to be a low interest rate and this and that.” People think that they make decisions intellectually, but that’s absolutely untrue. People make decisions emotionally.

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John Livesay, aka, The Pitch Whisperer, is a keynote speaker to brands and shares lessons learned from his award-winning sales career at Conde Nast. His keynote talk '"Getting To Yes" shows companies' sales teams how to become irresistible so they are magnetic to their ideal clients. After John speaks, the sales team becomes revenue rockstars who form an emotional connection and a compelling brand story with clients. Listen to his TEDx talk: Be The Lifeguard of your own life which has over 1,000,000 views. He is also the Co-Founder CMO of QuantmRE which helps homeowners get cash for the equity in their home without taking on more debt.

Get your FREE copy of John's book "Getting To YES" and learn how to climb the ladder from invisible to irresistible! Download the Free Book here- https://bit.ly/2BbJ5kH