How to Create a One-Page Marketing Plan w/ Jason Weaver

UX Marketing

You can check out Jason's site over at fixmarketer.com.

The free book and 1-page marketing plan template is found at: fixmarketer.com/bonus

And finally, the conversion calculator mentioned is located at: fixmarketer.com/conversion-calculator

Now here's the interview!

Blake: [00:00:00] on the podcast today, I've got Jason Weaver here to discuss something that most of us probably aren't doing, or at least doing very well, which is creating a marketing plan, specifically a one pager. So Jason, let's start off with how you're doing, and then we'll get into the specifics.

[00:00:20] Jason: [00:00:20] I'm doing great. I live in the great state of Idaho and it's been freezing cold and snowy all the time, and it just basically stopped. I don't know if it's going to continue or not, but I am very grateful not to be shoveling every day.

[00:00:36] Blake: [00:00:36] I'm a, I'm from Utah originally, so I get a little bit of that, but Idaho is definitely worse for the weather.

[00:00:42] Jason: [00:00:42] Yes, most definitely.

[00:00:46] Blake: [00:00:46] All right, so let's, let's get some quick context on you first, just so people know who they're dealing with. I want to start out with your story, just a brief story on where your career started to where you are now.

[00:00:57] Jason: [00:00:57] Well, I was going to college and there was this class called internet marketing, and so I was lucky to be in one of the few colleges that actually cared about that 10 years ago. And, I took the class, had to build a website and a, the infrastructure to sell product and everything from scratch within less than three months and advertise it.

[00:01:16] So of course, Google ads was the gold standard back then, and still is pretty good right now. And, so I started selling HCMI cables for $5. Including free shipping. And I broke even during that class. And little did I know if I just kept selling them more stuff, I'd be a millionaire by now. But I got scared.

[00:01:35] It's all like, how do I spend other people's money to learn this thing called Google ad words and websites. And so I went and got with the hotel company that did online bookings. And you know, I got to spend $15,000 a month in other people's advertising on Google. And I learned a lot and it just went from there.

[00:01:52] So the last 10 years have been. What's called traditionally in house, where you're inside the business, working for that business, doing the marketing, running it. And then for a little over a year now, I am now doing my own internet marketing agency, more specialized on those, you know, newer upstarts, smaller companies, especially local small business, which the book I wrote is all about small business because you can apply just about everything, even to the big eCommerce company that, that's in my one page marketing plan as well.

[00:02:20] But. I have a passion for local small business, and that really started back when I worked for a company called monkey bars. I, they've rebranded now. It's a gorgeous garage. A monkey bars is one of their lines, but they actually go in and organize your garage for you, if you can believe that. And they had 120 dealers throughout the United States and Canada.

[00:02:39] And I got from the ground up, spend five years building their internet marketing, building the team, helping students, which is a huge passion of mine, helping them get internships. And, that's where I really, weren't a lot and started and then it, it grew from there. I've been with big eCommerce companies now, 20 million a year in sales, and, you know, but like I said, the small businesses still where my heart is at.

[00:03:03] Blake: [00:03:03] And that you're, you're addressing an audience of the smallest businesses, which is a, the micro-influencer side hustler genre of people. So this is going to be super helpful for a bunch of people, and I want to dive into the marketing plan, but first, before we get into that one final context question, if I had to ask you what you think your number one professional superpower is, what would you say.

[00:03:26] Jason: [00:03:26] Oh, that's intriguing. I would say my ability to create. This one page marketing plan so that any business owner can understand enough to say, Oh, I can hire this out. Or, Oh, I can go start this and try, and if I do a little do a little bit and I make some money, then I can, you know, afford to put more effort into it.

[00:03:47] A lot of people, they, they say they, they, they spent boatloads of money. They get with the wrong crowd, they get overwhelmed. And, you know, the last 10 years has certainly taught me how to. The simply break it down for you because in my opinion, it's, it shouldn't be very overwhelming. It's just one, you know, other source you can go to to bring people to your core offers.

[00:04:09] And, if you have that framework, it makes it really simply, that's why I call it fixed marketer. the F stands for a framework. The, I stands for identity and the extends for X factor. How you take it to the next level.

[00:04:23] Blake: [00:04:23] So I'm, I'm thinking a lot of the people listening, myself included, do not have their own marketing plan. This is going to be really helpful. So everybody take notes. I'm going to be taking notes on this, but let, let's just dive into that. First and foremost. Marketing plan. why does somebody, especially a founder of a really small company or just somebody building a personal brand, why does somebody need it?

[00:04:45] Okay,

[00:04:46]Jason: [00:04:46] well, I, I found that it's hard to know where to start. And if you don't know where to start, then you just do nothing. Right. And you become like most businesses where you have feasted famine cycles where it's just getting referrals and that's 100% your new source of traffic. You're not getting any. you have no control over that other than maybe you can, you know, influence it a bit, but it's not consistent and reliable.

[00:05:12] You can't go into a new market with referrals, right? You can't expand into new places. Can't expand into new products with just referrals per se. You can of course, sell to your existing customer base, but if people actually went and looked like, how much of my revenue this year. Came from, you know, a new product or a new market or a new expansion or anything.

[00:05:32] How many came from referrals and how many came from repeat? I think they'd be really scared. They'd realize, I have no control over the faucet of my leads and business and growth. And if you break it down with a marketing plan like I have here, I start with reviews. That's something, you know, you don't need an internet marketer to do.

[00:05:52] You don't need a huge budget. But it influences every bit of the buying cycle that a customer goes through or your, your ideal customer persona person that's gonna buy from you. At some point they're going to read reviews. you know, if, if, if your product is more than $10, somebody's gonna read a review.

[00:06:11] And, and I used to start with just like Google ads, but, I'm sure you've experienced this too, Blake. If the company doesn't have some compelling reasons to buy from them over somebody else, no amount of traffic will solve the problem.

[00:06:25] Blake: [00:06:25] Oh yes, absolutely. So diving into it more specifically then let's, let's get into it. How can, how can we do, Oh, I guess just take us through your framework of, Oh, one page marketing plan. What goes into it and how can people actually do this themselves?

[00:06:41] Jason: [00:06:41] Well, like I said, you start with online reviews. And so I worked with a B2B software company and, unfortunately they only had, I think, 10 people I could find that would give them a five star review. So they had some internal problems. I didn't find out until I started working with them, but. Online, we were able to make them look like they were amazing because none of their competitors had review.

[00:07:02] So, you know, I just went and searched for, you know what? You need to understand the journey that your customers are taking. At some point, they're going to a little online. Sometimes they're going to look for your brand name. Most of the time they're going to search for generic search terms, you know? So in that case, they were looking for a specific problem to be solved or software.

[00:07:19] And then of course, along that journey there was, you know, a site, like a software advice. And that one also feeds into cap Tara, so it was a win win. You get a review on one of those sites. It goes to both. For the local small business owners I work with, it's always Google, Facebook, and maybe one or two industry specific.

[00:07:40] So if it's your hotel, it might be TripAdvisor. You know what I mean? There's, there's always one or two you're going to find when you look. So in the book, I break that down, how to go look, and then how to actually reliably and consistently ask for reviews. And then of course, the X factors and reviews people don't understand.

[00:07:58] Google is incredibly smart. They can read the context of the wording that's in those reviews. And so if you are a, you know, a taco place and everybody is talking about your burritos, you might not rank for tacos. Right. and so one of my X factors I break down in the book is just make sure that when people are leaving your reviews, you encourage them to talk about the services they received, as well as just leaving you a positive review.

[00:08:24] And that's just a little, you know, like icing on the cake, the X factor, you just do a little extra mile, just a teeny bit, but it can have an exponential impact for you. I also mentioned reply to every review, especially on Google. That's huge. I have a friend that is the internet marketer just as hotels, and he, he speaks volumes to having less backlinks on his website, less people actually linking from their website to, to yours.

[00:08:49] And a lot of other factors that are less. But he, he responds to every review. He ranks highly in Google maps. He ranked highly in organic search. So the free clicks that everybody wants. Right. And then, You know, Blake, you stopped me. But, I roll into the next one. A lot

[00:09:06] Blake: [00:09:06] Go for it. Yeah.

[00:09:07] Jason: [00:09:07] the roofers that I work with are, you know, I would love for somebody just to basically call me and, turn into a leader, a sale.

[00:09:15] I don't want to go and do anything. So back when I was helping those garage storage professionals, that was very common for us to basically spoil our, our dealers. Right. They used to do home shows and have to stand for 12 hours a day and you know, multiple days in a row. And then we just give them a whole handful of beautiful ready to buy leads.

[00:09:36] And they say, well, I'm not doing these home shows anymore. I'd rather give a huge percentage of my market share over to my competitor because I've just, ha, ha, you know, fat and happy. Right? And so that kind of mentality is actually really hurts small business in my opinion, because Google has now created.

[00:09:51] Home services, and it's actually better than a lot of those home advisors, or, you know, You know, thumb tacks or these, or even Yelp in some cases. Cause sometimes you can pay per lead and sometimes you can pay for exposure. That leads to a lead. Like Yelp is more exposure base. Thumbtack is more per lead based.

[00:10:09] Same with home advisor. So Google wanted it on that action and they've been expanding out to a lot more categories, plumbers, roofers, et cetera. Right. For these home services. And the nice thing is it's an exclusively that comes to your business, right? But the bad thing is you look like everybody else. In fact, they don't even show how many reviews you have until people click in further versus somebody else.

[00:10:31] So you literally look the same as every other competitor or worse because you have more reviews and now you're a 4.9 and they have one review in there, a five point. Oh, you know, I'm sure eventually it will get better, but this idea of just give me this beautiful lead right there on my lap has has resulted into the industry changing.

[00:10:49] Google is going to take more of that market share, and in some ways that's good and other ways. How do you stand out, right? You can continue to do Google ads, which is a step we'll talk about here in a minute, which is great. Right? But, if, if the very first thing people are seeing is that area, the three, three, three, guaranteed Google results, then of course people are going to click on it and you look the same as everybody else.

[00:11:11] And so that's actually going to hurt you a bit. But if you don't have a good website, you don't have good marketing, you could just do reviews on that and that might be enough business for you. You might not have to move on to the next category, which is, in my opinion, Google paid search.

[00:11:28] Blake: [00:11:28] Yeah. So let, let's just go and dive into that. Cause I think this is where. Well, so, so for people just starting personal brand or, or things like that, maybe Google ads isn't necessarily wearing then to start putting all of their money towards, but it's good to have an idea of how they can propel themselves to get to that point.

[00:11:45] So yeah, let's dive in with Google ads.

[00:11:48] Jason: [00:11:48] Perfect. So with, with like a local small business, there are what's called Google smart ads and campaigns. And so when you actually sign up for Google ads now, it forces you kind of down that path. You have to click in the right spot to go to what's, what's, what's more advanced, right? And so if you're a dog grooming truck.

[00:12:10] Business in Denver, like I represent mobile pet shine, just a unique business that was given to me through referral, that I work with and I love, they're doing amazing. Get them crazy amounts of leads a month, I guess just in Denver. They just love their pets so much. Even during the winter, which kinda surprised me.

[00:12:26] I would've been...