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Secrets of Small Business Marketing from Duct Tape Marketing – John Jantsch

John Jantsch • Aug 05, 2021

Today's Guest

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker, and best-selling author of Duct Tape Marketing, Duct Tape Selling, The Commitment Engine, The Referral Engine, and SEO for Growth. He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System and the Duct Tape Marketing Consulting Network that trains and licenses small business marketing consultants around the world. John explains the Duct Tape marketing system that helps small businesses be more successful.

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Episode Summary

Marketing has pretty much been my life for 30 plus years now. I worked for a few years out of college for an ad agency before venturing off and starting my own marketing consulting business. After a bit of trial and error, I decided to create a systematic approach to marketing that takes a lot of the guesswork out of marketing and enables the business owner to understand the expected results. That was the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing and today that approach has been used to help thousands of businesses around the globe achieve their desired outcomes.

 

The marketing success system we use takes the approach of strategy before tactics. What that means for our clients is we help them identify their target market and then create messaging to solve a specific problem. We then build a complete customer journey framework to help us understand the customer experience through their lifecycle. Only after we have done all of that do we evaluate what tactics we should pursue to best reach those specific customers and let them know about our solution to their problem. You stand out from your competition when you are known as the best solution to solve a specific problem for a particular type of customer.

 

The most common mistake we see business owners make is they hire an ad agency or marketing firm and then direct them on how to market their business. The business owner starts by saying they need a website that does this or a Facebook ad campaign that does that, maybe they do but maybe they don’t. That is why it is foundational to our process to pause and back up a bit to understand who that target customer is and what problem we’re solving. For most of our clients that approach is music to their ears because they understand their strengths and marketing is just one component to running a successful business.  

 

If you are not using a CRM or marketing automation tools in your business you are missing the boat. Because that personalized approach to your customer experience is what helps get people in the door but it also keeps them coming back and sharing with their network about how great you are. The one word of caution I give people though is, technology is not a replacement for actually talking to your customers. It is more of a tool to help make your life easier and your customer’s experience more personalized. Use technology to make the experience better but don’t use it as a wall to isolate you from your customers.

 

There has been a lot of disruption in the market over the past 16 months which for many businesses has created a lot of opportunities. Right now is a great time to try something new or refresh a marketing campaign that worked well in the past that you might have paused over this past year. What I’m seeing and hearing from my clients is there is a willing market out there and lots of consumers are open to trying something new.



Resources Shared

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