How to Grow Your Business with an Essentialist Marketing Plan
What if I told you that marketing doesn’t have to be complicated or overwhelming?
I believe that yes, you can grow your business with an Essentialist Marketing Plan, without spreading yourself thin or breaking the bank.
Do less, better is one of my core principles, inspired by Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
In business, I don’t get much pushback on essentialism when it comes to keeping a lean staff, money in the bank, and minimal debt—but when it comes to marketing, all bets are off.
Today’s marketing world demands you be everywhere, all the time, with everything on the line. Essentialism is a stark contrast to live-streaming, paid ads, and “stories” on a half dozen social media platforms—yet, it works.
In this article, I’m going to break down a step-by-step plan to grow your business through an essentialist lens. Essentialist Marketing may seem simple, but that’s exactly what the world needs. As Greg McKeown said,
Essentialism is an idea whose time has come.
Find Your People: Not All Prospects Are Valuable
Before you get into any marketing mechanics, you need to have clarity on your objective. What are you trying to accomplish?
Do you want to gain more clients, get more sales, and generate wealth for your family? An Essentialist Marketing Plan can help with that if you start with the end in mind.
If you had the attention of 1,000 people right now, what would you offer them? How would you know if they were the right people to have in the room?
We live in an exciting time. If you know what to do with it, you have access to the attention of anybody, anywhere in the world. So, who are you going to serve?
You need to consider who your business is designed to help, what problems you’re prepared to solve, and who actually wants help with their problem(s) at all. Those ingredients should help you start to define your Target Customer.
Before you go down any marketing path, you must decide what problems you are prepared to solve, and who your Target Customer is. The more detailed, the better.
Countless businesses make the mistake of spending time and money to waste the attention of people who aren’t their Target Customer, which does no one any good.
Once you’re clear on your Target Customer, step back a bit and identify what makes a good prospect, which is someone who could become a customer in time.
The reality is, every person on the planet is a prospect, but not all prospects are equal. Get clear on your Target Customer. When this is done, getting in front of the right people with the right information becomes clear.
Get Your First “Yes”: The Journey from Prospect to Lead
Your goal in the first stage of the Essentialist Marketing Plan is to filter out prospects and identify people who will move on to the second stage of your plan and become leads.
A lead is a prospect who has given you their first yes to move on in the business relationship, but not yet become a customer by making a purchase.
Once you know the right prospects to pursue, you need to offer a clear sample solution that gives people a chance to tip-toe into transformation with your business. This could be a free download, some kind of high-value content that doesn’t require a huge investment, or a sample version of your product itself.
You need to collect some kind of information, like a name and email address, to contact people in this group and nurture the relationship until they become paying customers.
Get Your First Dollar: The Path from Lead to Customer
As you collect leads for your business, your goal is to convert these leads to customers as they make their first purchase and move on to the next stage of the Essentialist Marketing Plan.
The key to success here is to think win-win, and clearly communicate opportunities where you can take the sample solution that people have experienced and offer a deeper transformation in exchange for payment.
Rather than going straight from “free sample” to life-changing transformation that costs thousands of dollars, you want to make the first purchase painless, and immediately blow customers away with the value they receive in exchange.
People are willing to pay you money only when they value the transformation you offer more than the money in their hands, but don’t stop there. Look for opportunities to exceed expectations by providing transformation that is at least 10 times as valuable as the price people pay!
Essentialist Marketing Growth: Invest in Remarkable Relationships
Once you have a customer, your relationship has only begun. This is the final stage of the Essentialist Marketing Plan, but it’s where essentialist growth really kicks in.
Research shows that existing customers are far more profitable than new customers. If you can offer a strategic sales sequence that allows customers the opportunity to buy more (and more often) in exchange for greater transformation, you’ll truly begin to generate wealth.
Create Superfans that will grow your business for you, by sharing the love for the transformation you’ve given them, in addition to the purchases they make themselves.
When I used to work for Chick-fil-a, we trained new employees to look for opportunities to be remarkable. That word choice was intentional because remarkable relationships are worth remarking about.
If you think of your marketing model in these stages, the purpose of each step becomes clear. Ask yourself,
- Who is my Target Customer, and how do I get their attention where they already are?
- What sample solution can I offer, to filter out bad prospects and get my first “yes”?
- What kind of painless purchase can I offer where I can exceed the customer’s expectations ten-fold?
- What should my sales sequence look like, to take customers from one product to the next with greater transformation (and price)?
The Essentialist Marketing Plan is my approach to help you Master Your Marketing which is one of three steps in my approach to systemizing a thriving business.
Want to get a pulse on how you’re doing so far? Take my assessment to get your business ThriveScore.