One-Page Marketing Template for Small Businesses

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The 1-Page Marketing Plan" by Allan Dib. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Are you looking for Allan Dib’s one-page marketing template? Why is having a marketing plan crucial for the success of your business?

The purpose of a business is to make money and grow—and for a small business, the surest way to make money is to have a simple, clear marketing plan defining who you’re targeting as prospects and customers and how you’ll reach them. However, many small businesses fail to market effectively, which is where Allan Dib’s one-page marketing template can help.

Keep reading for Dib’s one-page marketing template from The 1-Page Marketing Plan.

Allan Dib: One-Page Marketing Template

In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, business coach and entrepreneur Allan Dib tells small business owners how to create a marketing plan using a simple template that guides you through three customer-focused phases of marketing: awareness, familiarity, and enthusiasm. Dib’s popular one-page marketing template defines a process or “customer journey” of interactions that you’ll walk your prospects through. They’ll start out not knowing anything about your business and ultimately become superfans who will drive your business growth. This article outlines Dib’s one-page marketing template.

Dib’s one-page marketing template guides small business owners through three customer-focused phases of marketing: awareness, familiarity, and enthusiasm. Each phase has three steps. In sequence, the nine total steps define a process or “customer journey” of interactions that you’ll walk your prospects through. They start out not knowing anything about your business and ultimately become superfans. Download Dib’s one-page marketing template free or design your own by creating three rows of three squares each and filling them in sequentially as you go through the steps in each marketing phase described in our comprehensive summary.

(Shortform note: You can view Dib’s books and training materials on his website successwise.com; or email him at allan@successwise.com.)

Dib’s Approach: Marketing Really Simplified

Inexperienced small business owners often hire a consultant to draw up a business plan, which usually has a section on marketing. The problem, Dib contends, is that these plans are so generic as to be useless in guiding your daily operations, and the plans end up being shelved and forgotten. Alternatively, some business owners try but soon give up on learning the myriad complexities of marketing, which mushroomed from the simple idea of moving goods from producer to consumer in the late 1700s, to a multifaceted professional discipline with an array of theories, practices, metrics, and ever-evolving jargon.

In contrast, Dib touts his one-page marketing template as a “marketing implementation breakthrough” allowing any small business owner to immediately grasp and customize the few key marketing concepts she really needs.

Dib’s template is reminiscent of the Business Model Canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder and later described in his 2010 book Business Model Generation, which sketches nine building blocks for starting a business. Others have developed similar spinoff templates for marketing plans, such as the Marketing Canvas, but they’re more detailed than Dib’s one-page plan and aren’t designed specifically for small businesses. In comparison to others’, Dib’s template streamlines creating a marketing plan.

In summary, the three phases and nine steps of Allan Dib’s one-page marketing template are: