Building your One Page Marketing Plan with Allan Dib

Agency Podcast, where we're interviewing highly successful digital marketing agency owners and marketing thought leaders from across the country. And today I'm super excited to be joined by the Allan Dib, author of The One Page Marketing Plan, one of the, if not the top books on marketing available on Amazon today. He's also recently launched a brand new book called Lean Marketing, which is a game changer. So Allan, thanks so much for being here.

Hey Josh, it's a pleasure.

So Alan, tell us a little bit. Obviously I've read and studied The One Page Marketing Plan, got so many great insights from it. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved in marketing and what kind of brought you to write that book in the first place.

Yeah, look, I think the reason the book really resonated with so many people is because it's a book written from not intellectual or theory or academia. It's the book I wish I had when I was first learning marketing and My background is not at all in marketing, it's not at all in business. I was a dead broke IT geek. I was just trying to get clients. I was trying to get clients in the door. And so, you know, I went to every seminar, I read every book, I had mentors, you know, I got little bits of value from each of those, not to put anyone or anything down, but there was just nothing that I felt was really comprehensive that took me from just being a dummy, knowing nothing about marketing, to having a marketing plan and having clarity around what to do and clarity and structure really, because Like I said, I'm a tech geek by nature, and for me, structure and following a process is, you know, really common in that space. And so I wanted something where I didn't have to be some creative person trying to invent something or whatever. I just wanted to be able to follow a simple process and be able to get clients in the door. So that's really where it started. I think that's why it's resonated with so many people, because so many other people are in that position where they're a agency owner, they're a doctor, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, whatever it is, and they just want to figure out how do I get more clients.

So good. And like you said there, I think you were at the conferences with Dan Kennedy and all of these guys studying and learning about marketing. And I love kind of at the beginning of the book, you say, look, nothing under the sun with marketing is new, right? I'm taking the best of what I've learned from various places. And really it's a breakthrough in simplification, right? And saying like, let's make this easy, let's put it on one page. I love that about the book and kind of the way that you've structured it.

That's exactly it. And, you know, I studied Dan as many, many of you do, you have. And I read the Seth Godin books and The Purple Cow and all of this sort of stuff and all, you know, tons of value from Dan, tons of value from Seth, tons of value from everybody. But I just wanted something that, you know, How could a dummy just start with a blank page and just go from zero to marketing hero, to really not knowing anything, not knowing what to get started, even to the point of where in the book I literally define what is marketing, right? So, and take people through that whole process. So, you know, it took me a good decade to really figure this out, and it was a decade of intense study, of experimentation, of doing all of this stuff. And I thought, how can I compress and shortcut this process for everybody else? Really take, take all of that, distill it in a simple way and really do it in a way that in a single page you could really have clarity around what to do from a marketing perspective.

Yeah, I love that. And even as a sophisticated marketer myself, which I think I am, there's elegance in taking all of those big ideas and all those abstract concepts and boiling it down. It's the simple tracking mechanism. Just so we know, we know you're an author. We know it's one of the best most read, most reviewed books on marketing. But like, what was your— what were you implementing it for back in the day, like as you were learning these concepts?

Yeah. So I ended up growing that IT business. I ended up exiting that. Then I started telecommunications business. We were 4 years later one of the top fastest growing companies in the country. And then, you know, I kept having people basically pick my brain. What did you do? How are you doing it? All of this sort of stuff. So that's why I started Lean Marketing as a consultancy business. And we're not an agency, but we're kind of the opposite of an agency. We help people develop their own marketing capability. We also work with agency owners to get them Lean Marketing certified in our methodology and One Page Marketing Plan certified. But really, for me, it was really all all about how do you simplify this for, for others. And so when I started my, uh, my consulting, I started wanting my clients to put together a one-page marketing, a marketing plan. And, you know, I got all the usual pushback: too difficult, don't know where to start, not sure, need to hire a consultant, all of that sort of stuff. So I created that process, and that process was a process long before it was ever a book. And then I, when I put it into book form, it really caught fire. And, um, And a lot of people from every single industry on the planet, from almost every country on the planet, have been readers. I mean, the book's been translated into over 30 languages, including Mongolian, which I would never have imagined.

Wow.

Super cool.

And obviously having a huge ripple effect because as people do it and they get the results after reading the book, they're winning, right? And they're coming to you for more. So kudos and congratulations on the success of that. When you think about marketing and the typical small, medium-sized business owner, what are some of the biggest mistakes you're seeing these companies are making when it comes to their marketing specifically?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of really common ones. So target market is a massive challenge for most entrepreneurs, you know, really defining their target market. When I want someone to define their target market, You know what people, people think they've niched down, but often they're nowhere near niched down. So for example, people will say, oh yeah, my niche is women over 40 years old. Okay, well, that's 2 billion people on the planet, right? So, so really getting their, their target market nailed because that, that's a foundation for everything. It's a foundation for your messaging. It's the foundation for your media strategy. It's a foundation for your retention strategy. Because if we know who our people are, We know where to find them. We know what message is going to resonate with them. We know what offer is going to really convert well with them. Whereas if we say, "You know what? We're everything for everyone," that's not a message that's really going to resonate with anyone. So as an example, if you look at your own web browser history, we're not going to ask anyone to reveal their web browser history, but it's usually very specific. You know, you're not just typing in "car." You're not just typing in "lawyer." You're you're typing in BMW X7 versus Range Rover, or you're looking for a dermatologist in downtown Brooklyn or whatever. So, and your clients are doing the exact same thing. And when, when someone, even though what you do can serve a lot of people, and that doesn't mean you can't take people outside of your niche, but who are we going to actively go after? You know, who are we going to do like a Dream 100 strategy for? Who are we going to reach out to with our cold email or called LinkedIn or whatever else, who are we going to pay for ads to reach? So we want to be really, really super targeted. We don't want to be broad and just general and, hey, we just do anything for everybody. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, everything in your— every fiber in your being is going to be like, let's widen the net, let's add another product, let's add another niche, let's add another target market, um, let's reach more people. And it's very counterintuitive because everything in our being as an entrepreneur wants us to widen that net But as counterintuitive as it is, the more narrow and the more targeted you are, the more success you're generally going to have. So that's one of the biggest mistakes I see entrepreneurs make. The other big mistake is they're always thinking about new, new, new. How do I get a new client? How do I get more clients? And all that. And that's great. That's a super important part of the marketing and marketing strategy and what we do. We want to get more, more clients in the door. But most businesses that I've worked with and that I've seen can probably double their revenue from their existing customer base by selling them more services more frequently at a higher level. So really mining that gold that you've got in your target market, in your customer base. And there are so many ways to do that. But it's also not from a selfish perspective. It's also to help them in a more full way. So a lot of, you know, if you're super thirsty, you know, I think Jay Abraham uses this example, it's a great example, but you know, if you're dehydrated and I give you, you know, a quarter of a glass of water, well, that's nice, but you know, we want to get you properly hydrated. We want you to have as much water and hydration as you actually need. So in a similar way, a lot of our clients are maybe not buying the level of service that they need to really get that result that's really going to help them grow, or maybe they need to buy more frequently or buy a higher quality version or whatever it is. So most most businesses, it can double their revenue just from their existing client, not adding a single new client.

Love that. So just really getting clear on that target market and then not just looking at new client acquisition, but the, the entire journey. Uh, I think that's one of the, you know, the great things you talk about in the book here, which is around, you know, getting on one page, the, the before, the during, and the after. Kind of talk us through the thought process behind that and how you would explain that to a a business owner.

Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a reason that I used words before, during, and after, because anyone can understand that. You know, I know in, um, in especially marketers, they'll use words like attract, convert, retain, which is, which is fine too, they're, they're acceptable. But I wanted basically anyone to be able to understand this, because like I said, I was writing this book for myself when I was completely clueless, dead broke, had no idea about marketing was. And so Before is like before someone even knows that you even exist. So that's kind of that attract phase. You know, we want so someone to go through that, uh, phase, and then at the end of that be aware that we exist and maybe raise their hand and say, hey, that's something that I'm vaguely interested in. And when I say raise their hand, it could be call your office, it could be respond to your LinkedIn, it could be opt in on your website, could be click on your ad, whatever it is that we want them to do, the next physical visible action that we want them to take. Then In the during phase, we want to take them from vaguely interested in what they've got to offer, you know, having raised their hand to buying from you for the very first time. So that includes capturing those leads, nurturing them, converting them. A lot of people feel like, hey, marketing's over after we've converted the lead. And really that's where the, the after phase comes in. The after phase is about taking someone who's bought from you from, for the very first time, delivering an outstanding experience. You know, I call it a world-class experience, then sending them to higher levels of service or more frequency, whatever it is, really increasing that customer lifetime value or, or maybe just retaining them longer because there's only two ways to grow a business. There's new clients, which everybody knows, but then there's growing your existing client base. So your LTV, that's the metric that matters above all else. If your LTV is high, then you can afford to spend more to acquire a client. You can, you can afford to wow them. But if your LTV is low, you're going to scrimp and save to figure out how do we get a client as cheaply as possible? How do we service them as cheaply as possible? And that rarely leads to amazing experiences, which is really that, that last and final square of the one-page marketing plan, which is all about referrals. So if you, if you've delivered a world-class experience, if someone's had an amazing result by using you, their higher LTV, they're going to refer other people who are like themselves. So again, it comes full circle because someone's going to refer others who are like themselves, and if your target market is poorly defined or not really what you want to work with, well, that's going to be a cycle that you don't want to repeat. Whereas if you've targeted your— if you've got a target market that you really love working with, that pay you a lot of money for what you do, that respect you and your team, well, that's going to be a virtuous cycle and you're going to get more and more of those clients. So it really comes full circle from target market right through to referrals.

Love it. It, it's a flywheel. And when you're really creating a world-class experience and you understand that, that concept, that whoever can pay the most to attract the client is gonna win, not just because you can pay more to acquire the client, but because you can create a better experience on the backend. You can afford to do those little things that make you stand out. It accelerates that flywheel that makes all of your other marketing so much more effective.

And the other thing that I found, high-value savvy clients don't want someone who's really cheap, like, so myself included. So when I hire someone, I don't want to hire the cheap guy because I know he or she can't deliver. I know that they're going to give me a bad experience. I know I'm going to have to follow up and there's going to be issues and all of those sorts of things. So I know I'm going to pay one way or another. I'm either going to pay with their fee or I'm going to pay in the micromanagement and the follow-up and work done poorly. So a savvy client will know that if your pricing is very, very cheap, that you can't deliver. It's only the naive clients, the worst clients that are going to think they got a great deal.

So true. Yeah, it's such a powerful insight. You're going to attract a different level of client by charging appropriately. —than trying to be the lowest cost, right? Amazing stuff. So, that's the one-page marketing plan. I think— I love the fact that it applies to agency owners. So, as an agency owner, you need to have a one-page marketing plan for yourself, right? And I know you like— if you're watching this, you're a student of marketing. You've read the books. You've studied it. But working with enough of you, I realize a lot of you guys have abstract concepts, tons and tons of tactics, but the big picture strategy isn't under control. And implementing this and thinking through the before, the during, the after, having it on a simple one-page sheet and putting some tracking behind it can make a world of difference in terms of how effectively you attract clients. So I think it's powerful for that perspective. Just read it for yourself, and you could go to the one-page— look up One Page Marketing Plan on Amazon to find that. But I also think it has a ripple effect in terms of how you can provide better results for your clients. Because yes, it's one thing to know how to do SEO and know how to do pay-per-click and know how to generate leads and sales for your clients. But if you can level up the understanding of marketing as a whole and you can say, how, how could I go deeper with before, during, after for our clients? Maybe we could put a one-page marketing plan in terms— in place for our clients and help them grow. That's going to make you a better agency. It's going to make it so you can charge a higher fee. It's going to make it so that you're more sticky and so that you get more referrals. So for those reasons, I really think this is something you should study and go deeper with Alan on. Anything you want to add on that, Alan?

Yeah, we work with a lot of agencies where they implement the one-page marketing plan in their own process for a couple of reasons. So first of all, it really shows that you've got a structure that you're working with. There's nothing worse as a client than you're thinking, 'Okay, where is this going? Does this guy really have a structure or plan, or are they just winging it?' And, you know, you may have a great structure and a great plan and you know what you're doing, but the visibility of that to a client is so important. And the one-page marketing plan is a great way to get that visibility. It's like, 'All right, we're going to work together over the next 12 or 24 months or whatever. Here's the target market we're going to work with. Here's— let's work on our messaging. What's the message that really resonates with your audience and all of that. And you may already do that in the background, but it's important that this be really visible for a client. The second thing that I will say is the best kind of client is the informed client. You know, the client who shows up and knows their target market, knows their messaging, they know what media works well. They're the best agency client. The clients that come prepared, that have a plan, that have assets, that have their target market well-defined, that have got all of those things in place. The worst type of client is like, you know, I don't know anything, yeah, our clients are everybody, and I expect miracles from you, and I don't want to really pay a lot, right? They're the worst type of clients. So if you can work with a client that, you know, either comes with the plan, or maybe you help them put together that plan, they're going to be the best type of clients. They're going to be— they're going to value what you do. They're going to know that there's a structure. They're going to be confident in that there's a roadmap that you're going to take them on in a journey, versus 'You know what, this guy's charged me another $2,000 this month and, you know, I don't know, is this going to work? Maybe it's going to work, maybe it's not. They sent me some report with link building that they're doing, but I don't really know, is that working or not?' So, um, there's a, there's a huge difference between, uh, you delivering a result and you showing that visibility to the client as well. So good.

Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot more meat on the bone that that you could be putting in place for your client base. And if you're not doing it, it will help you think that through. And so super powerful stuff. So I want to shift gears. So, you know, One Page Marketing Plan, one of the top marketing books on the market, thousands and thousands of reviews on Amazon. But now you've published this new book, Lean Marketing. Tell us a little bit about Lean Marketing and kind of what, what, what it is and how it's different.

Yeah. So I view the One Page Marketing Plan very much around strategy. There were some tactical things in, in the book, but it's really about getting clarity around your marketing plan, putting a structure around it, having a, a process. Lean marketing is very much about implementation. How do we take that plan and implement it? And we take a very important concept from the world of lean. Now, lean has a very, very long heritage in the manufacturing space, in service businesses. Some of the biggest and most successful companies have implemented lean in their, in their businesses. And, you know, when I looked at what are the best and most sophisticated marketers in the world doing, they have a very lean marketing infrastructure. They're not doing 10,000 things. They're usually doing a few things very, very well. So, and those few things are providing them massive leverage. And when I looked at what are the biggest leverage points in these people's marketing infrastructure, myself included, It came down to 3 things. So we looked at tools, assets, and processes. So tools are things like your CRM system. Now with AI, there's tools that give you massive leverage, right? So that things that would have taken forever are now things that you can do with a few clicks. And I'm talking way beyond just ChatGPT. There are video editing tools, audio tools, things that would have just taken a long time, being very labor-intensive, been very expensive, things that that you can get to, maybe not 100% right now, but maybe get to you to 80 or 90% and you add that last 10%. So really, really powerful. You know, I kind of like it like if I had to break down a brick wall, well, maybe I could do it with my bare hands, but I'd have very sore hands. It'd take a long time. It'd be very painful. Whereas with a sledgehammer, I could just do it in a couple of minutes. So that's how I kind of think about marketing tools as well. Then there's assets. So when we look at the difference between people who are really wealthy and people who are kind of struggling or just middle class, the difference is often assets, right? Because assets generate income. So very similar from a marketing perspective, um, uh, marketing assets generate lead flow, they generate clients, they generate revenue. So for example, a marketing asset in my business are my books. And because of my books, I get invited to a podcast like this. I get invited to speak. I get in, uh, people come to me. There's a lot of inbound into our business as well. So that's an asset that's generating new lead flow, new prospects, new customers every single day. And so that's another thing that world-class marketers do really well. They have powerful marketing assets. And finally, processes. Processes I think of are like compound interest when it comes to our marketing, because the marketers who win are the ones who do the common stuff uncommonly well. They do the daily, weekly, monthly. So the daily processes, the weekly stuff, the quarterly stuff, they do that consistently and it compounds over time. So those 3 things I found were the biggest leverage points in any marketing infrastructure that works really, really well. And so I cover those in 3 main sections of Lean Marketing.

Love it. And where does tracking fit into that and kind of like the Lean Marketing philosophy? Yeah, so I've got a whole chapter on tracking and metrics.

So that's really a process. So that's something that falls into that process bucket is what metrics are we going to look at? And I break that up into leading metrics and lagging metrics. So lagging metrics are kind of what people think of metrics generally is like, you know, how much did we make in revenue or how many clients have we got and all of that sort of stuff. That's historical that you can't really do anything about last month's revenue. So We definitely want to look at that and we want to pay attention to that. But then there are leading metrics, like, for example, a leading metric on our, in our business is what are our, how, what are our website opt-ins? You know, if that suddenly plummets one day, we've got a problem because that's going to affect revenue next month, the month after that. So we've got to check it out. Is there a problem with the web form or is there a problem with the website or has something gone wrong or whatever? And we want to fix that before it becomes revenue-affecting. So we look at leading metrics and lagging metrics. So that's something that we want to look at over time. But As I sort of alluded to earlier, the metrics that really— the two metrics that really matter most, and these are the metrics you should know. If I wake you up at 3 AM, you should know what your lifetime value is and you should know what your cost of customer acquisition is. They're the two metrics that really, really matter the most. How much is a client worth to us over their lifetime? How much does it cost us to acquire that client? So they're really the two metrics that matter most. And almost every other metric is like a subset of those two, trying to, you know, the click, the opt-in, the bounce rate, all of that. That's really to help us figure out, okay, how do we acquire that client? And then how do we retain that client for longer and get a higher lifetime value?

So good. And I think it's so important that you track the metrics, that you know these numbers for yourself as an agency owner, as well as for the clients that you serve. If you can level up in your understanding their lifetime customer value, their cost to acquire a customer or a client, um, you are gonna be differentiated. You're gonna be a better agency for it. Um, I thought there was one thing that stood out to me, you know, in, in your trainings that I've been through that I, I thought was powerful was looking at the cost to acquire a client. Some people will say it's just your marketing spend divided by the number of clients that you got. Others will say it's your marketing spend plus the cost of your sales team and your marketing assistant. I think in your formula, It's everything that goes into acquiring clients divided by the number of new clients acquired.

Is that right? Yeah. So it's all of the incremental costs that you would have incurred. So obviously it's not your fixed costs, it's not your rent and all of that sort of stuff. So you want to separate out your fixed costs, but then credit card processing fees. What did your sales team cost? What did it cost to nurture them and all of that sort of stuff? So all of those sorts of things you would account for in the cost of customer acquisition. So you want to be very clear about that. And like you alluded to earlier, rightly, whoever can spend more to acquire a client will win. So we don't want to scrimp and save and get the lowest cost client because they're usually not the highest quality clients. So we want to be able to spend a lot to acquire a client because they have a very high lifetime value.

For sure. And you can't, You can't make those decisions if you don't track it right. If you don't know right now what your cost to acquire customer is and what that lifetime value is, and you're not optimizing to improve lifetime value by improving retention, by adding upsells and cross-sells, you know, you can't, you can't really play that game.

And so, yeah, I mean, there's one of three scenarios. You either know your metrics and you're, you're losing money on clients. You know your metrics and you're making money on clients, or the most common scenario is you don't really know. Uh, looks, you know, we seem to be doing pretty, pretty well, but we don't really know our numbers. And often you'll find there's one or two clients that are like carrying almost everybody else. There'll be a ton of, uh, losing clients where you're actually losing money by servicing them, and then there's a bunch that are really carrying that cost. And, you know, if you refocused on the ideal fit clients, your business will have massive, massive uplift.

So good. And so guys, the, the, this new book Lean Marketing is, is a game changer. It just came out on Monday, brand new release. What's the best place for them to grab a copy, Alan?

Yeah, it's available wherever books are sold, on Amazon obviously. It's very strong on audio, audio, so we're on Audible. And you can visit leanmarketing.com. We've got all the opt-ins and links for that. You can download the One Page Marketing Plan Canvas for free, which you can use for yourself and with your clients.

So good. No-brainer if you're a marketing agency owner that you need this book, right? This is required reading to level up, to improve your confidence, to grant— like, land better clients for your own agency, and to be more world-class in the delivery that you do for the clients that you serve. So go grab a copy, grab it right now on Amazon. Alan, if there was 1 or 2 takeaways that you would expect an agency to be able to take away in reading Lean Marketing, what would those be?

Yeah, so it's something you alluded to. It's really intentionality. So, so many agencies are like, hey, we'll just work with anyone. They're very flexible on price and all of that sort of thing. But the agency that I've found work really, really well are the ones that have really productized their service. They really know who they are and what they deliver. They're very, very highly targeted, not only in their target customer base, but in what they do and what they deliver. Because if you have to keep doing original work all the time, that's going to be very, very expensive to service, and you can't really systemize your business. You know, if you're, you're working on SEO for doctors one day, and then you're working on copywriting for lawyers another day or whatever, You can, you can do that, but it's, there's gonna be so much original work that's gonna be very, very hard for you to systemize your business. You wanna, you wanna think of it kind of like a, a production line. And I don't mean that in a way that you're not gonna have great customer service and things like that, but you find that you get the best customer service from businesses that are highly systemized that, you know, if you've done the same thing 1,000 times, chances are you're gonna be so much better at it. So you wanna be highly, highly specialized as the company that, you know, does this little thing for this very target— targeted, targeted market. So as an example, I mean, I saw— I can't remember the name of the business, but I saw one that where all they do literally is, uh, video testimonials for— I think it was for the medical space. So they will help doctors and chiropractors and whatever get video testimonials. And because they're highly regulated industries, there's certain things that you can't say. They they know the process, they know the, the bits that they can say and they can't say and all of that sort of thing. So, um, that's an example. Um, there's another example I saw from Dean Jackson. He, he found a photography agency that just does, uh, photographs of cans and bottles, you know. So, uh, and, you know, chances are if you're a photographer, sure, you can do cans, bottles, you can do weddings, you can do portraits, you can do all of that. But, you know, if I'm launching a new brand of chili or whatever. I want the agency that's specialized in taking photographs of bottles because I'm going to be spending millions of dollars on marketing, on billboards, on all of that sort of stuff. So I want the, the perfect shot of the, the bottle. So whatever you're doing, you want to be very, very clear as to what the deliverable is and who the deliverable is for and just become awesome at it.

So good, love that. You're talking my language, right? Choose your niche, position yourself as the expert, systematize your program, become world-class, become the agency that's the best in that particular thing. And I think that that's exactly what you were just saying.

That's, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. Because, you know, if you, if you systemize it, then you can remove yourself from the business. If someone's going to come up with original work every time, it's going to be very hard for you to extract yourself from the business. You're going to have to be involved in pricing. You're going to have to be involved in negotiations and all of those sorts of things. So you want to really build that customer factory. So how do we move someone from signing up right through to delivery, right through to customer service? And how do we— knowing all the roadblocks that you're eventually going to hit along the way and having things prepared in, in place rather than flying by the seat of your pants, solving problems as they arise. You know, that's cool and fun to do as an entrepreneur, but it just really puts such a lid on your growth.

No, no doubt. Well, Alan, this has been great. Congratulations on the new book. Thanks for taking the time to to unpack this for us. I'm really excited for 7 Figure Agency members that are watching. Alan's going to be joining us live in Miami for our intensive, which is going to be amazing, all the way across from Australia.

I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be amazing.

So with that said, if you had one last piece of wisdom for that agency owner that's watching or listening and trying to get to the next level, to wrap up, what, what would that be?

Uh, I would leave you with one word, is clarity. I want you to figure out, and that's part of what we're going to be talking about in Miami, the part of the workshop. I want you to get just extreme clarity around your business, like extreme clarity around who your target market is, or extreme clarity about what message will really convert with your target market, extreme clarity around what we're going to do to do not just outbound but also inbound marketing. What assets are we going to build? What are we gonna be famous for? So, right, what I find is that's lacking with a lot of agency owners. They, they kind of got a kind of muddy approach to what they do. They've got kind of some idea of, okay, we do SEO, we do this, we do that, we'll do a whole bunch of things for a whole bunch of people. But I want you to have extreme clarity about who you are, what you do, who you do it for, what your value proposition is, what your messaging is. Extreme clarity, because then you can just execute and run really hard towards that.

So good. Alan, thanks so much for taking the time. Go grab a copy of Alan's book on Amazon. Actually grab both of them while you're at it. And Alan, I'll have you— I'll let you have the last word here to send us off.

I can't wait to see you in Miami.

Awesome, man. Looking forward to it. Thanks for watching, everybody.