The Ultimate Marketing Engine

5 Steps to Ridiculously Consistent Growth

John Jantsch

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400224784
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

A step-by-step system for creating customers and clients for life.

In a world that's difficult for business professionals to cut through noise to create relationships with their customers, organizations that focus on converting their customers to members and helping them achieve lasting transformation rather than simply offering the transaction of the moment are winning.

The Ultimate Marketing Engine teaches you how to develop a system to take every customer from where they are to where they want to be by building on the innovative principles first brought to the marketing world in Duct Tape Marketing and honed over three decades of working with thousands of businesses.

In this book, you will learn:

• Why strategy must come before tactics.
• How to narrow your focus and choose only ideal customers.
• Why no one wants what you sell – and what they actually want.
• How to use story and narrative as the voice of strategy.
• How to construct the perfect customer journey.
• How to grow your business with your customers.

This bookintroduces the Customer Success Track, an innovative new approach to marketing strategy that will transform how you view your business, your marketing and how you view every customer.

The Ultimate Marketing Engine will help you take control of your marketing while creating ridiculously consistent business growth.

TWO

Where Your Best Customers Want to Go—Step 1

“Never has there been a map, however carefully executed to detail and scale, which carried its owner over even one inch of ground.”

—OG MANDINO

The customer journey is a well-accepted concept in marketing circles. The idea is that if a company can figure out how a customer buys, how they make buying decisions, what they expect from the companies they buy from, and what keeps them coming back for more, then they can create marketing campaigns, messages, and processes designed to guide this journey in a way that creates growth and stability.

A customer’s journey passes through stages with names like “awareness,” “interest,” “consideration,” “intent,” “purchase,” and so on. And it leads to shapes and graphics that display the journey as a funnel that increasingly narrows toward a purchase.

Though this has long been an accepted approach, you will soon see that it is the wrong approach, or at least a terribly limiting one.

Here’s why.

In mapping the traditional customer journey, most businesses and marketers consider only what is effective for the company, not the customer.

Some time ago I set out to reframe the traditional funnel-like journey because I’ve always felt that the secret to long-term marketing success is referrals, not leads. (I wrote about this idea both in Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.) In fact, to my way of thinking, referrals are the ultimate measure of marketing success—more so than customers. (The two are certainly related, but referrals provide a multiplier spark to all things marketing.)

The Marketing Hourglass Is Born

This thinking led to the creation of what I call the Marketing Hourglass. To illustrate what happens after someone becomes a customer, think not of a funnel but of an hourglass (a traditional funnel and an upside-down funnel sitting on top of each other). With this shape in mind, the question becomes, “What would it take to turn every customer into a referral source?”

Further, this suggests a focus on behavior through a set of stages rather than action steps. The seven behaviors of the marketing hourglass are: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.

These seven behaviors represent logical stages of the customer journey as well as activities that customers want to engage in as they decide whether or not to do business with an organization.

We want to know who can solve our problems. We want to like what they have to say. And we won’t even consider buying from them if we don’t trust that they will deliver. We often want the ability, if possible, to try what it might be like to work with this company or acquire their products.

A crucial side note: Most marketing is an attempt by a business to go from the know stage, when they run an ad or post in LinkedIn, directly to the buy stage, when customers come calling. Not only is this highly ineffective, but even if it works, it sets you up for failure.

The primary purpose of the like, trust, and try phases is to educate your prospective customer on the value of doing business with you over others, on how your business is uniquely suited to solve their problems, on self-discovery of whether or not they are an ideal customer, and if so, why.

Ultimately, the like, trust, and try phases help you weed out non-ideal customers and appeal to ideal ones who, because they now understand more about your value, are not as concerned about working solely with the lowest price offer.

And now, back to the hourglass stages.

We want the buying experience as well as the entire experience of working with a business to hold up to what was promised during the courting phase. We want to count on a solution and feel confident going back to this company over and over again rather than constantly looking for a new source.

Finally, as human beings, we are wired to talk about and refer companies that surprise us and exceed our expectations.

These seven behaviors make up a solid list of human desires experienced throughout our relationship with the companies we love. So, by building on the desire for trust, for example, a business would develop marketing campaigns, messages, and signals that conveyed this stage and triggered this desired behavior.

Instead of organizing demand for the consideration stage as in the traditional funnel journey, a business can organize behavior by appealing to the prospective customer’s desire to know that this is a business they can trust.

It may seem like semantics, but the hourglass stages actually force us to pay more attention to what the customer is trying to achieve and less to what our business is trying to achieve.

This important distinction is at the heart of the Ultimate Marketing Engine.

I’m introducing the idea here, but don’t worry: in chapter 3 there is more information and practice steps for creating the Marketing Hourglass.

Customer Experience as Department

Over the past decade or so, the concept of customer experience has eclipsed the simple idea of customer service.

This is mostly due to the fact that the greatest change in marketing is the way our customers buy. The customer has access to everything that anyone says about an organization through review sites, online forums, social platforms, and entire YouTube channels dedicated to showcasing bad experiences.

There is no way to escape the collective opinion of everyone who has come into contact with your brand. This includes terribly happy customers along with your aunt Betty’s second cousin Vinnie’s ex-girlfriend who angrily blogs about your company although she has never actually purchased anything from you.

And so, creating the most positive customer experience has grown in importance as an essential aspect of the customer journey.

A Big Win for Customers

Entire books and practices are now dedicated to this topic. Jay Baer’s Hug Your Haters and Joey Coleman’s Never Lose a Customer Again are examples of important deep dives into the topic of customer experience.

Creating elegant new customer onboarding experiences, overdelivering on your promises, and surprising customers with thoughtful and personal gifts of appreciation (no, not a coffee mug with your logo on it) are just a few of the practices that many organizations now routinely bake into the customer journey.

Thankfully, many organizations have grown to realize that consistently delivering a great customer experience requires building an internal culture of service wired to deliver an experience that wows customers over and over again.

While this approach has led many businesses to advance their goals in acquiring and retaining loyal customers, I would like to suggest it’s still not enough.

Organizations that adhere to the practice of building and guiding a great customer journey move their customers through the stages, but often ignore the ultimate promise of a customer relationship. The customer is attracted then converted, and the agreed-upon goods and services are delivered in a pleasing manner. End of the story. Transaction completed.

Now, I’m not suggesting that practitioners of this proven and effective way of attracting and serving their clients are doing anything evil (well, maybe some are). I’m simply suggesting they aren’t doing anything close to what’s possible.

Fully embracing your marketing engine requires a major shift in how you think about marketing and, frankly, about customers.

Customers as Members

The shift I’m suggesting asks you to reframe the customer journey less as a company process and more as a customer process.

The clothing brand Members Only became somewhat of a cultural sensation back in the ’80s. The tagline for the company’s line of apparel is, When you put it on, something happens. Yes, I had a Members Only jacket, I admit it.

What if you could come to think about your customers, clients, patients, or whatever you call them as members?

Please know right off the bat that I am not suggesting you create a membership aspect to your business. It might be a great model for you, but that is not my point. I’m suggesting that you think this way about your customers because the main reason someone seeks to be a member is fundamentally different from the main reason they seek to be a customer.

If every organization adopted this thinking, it would change how they innovate, iterate, and support every aspect of their business.

In a stable membership relationship, the goal is to help every member get the transformation they are seeking, not the product you are selling. The difference can be staggering. What if you actually cared more about your customers’ transformation than about your own transaction?

Now I’m not suggesting that you don’t already care about results for your customers. I am suggesting that you could build your business around that concept from the ground up.

Let me be clear here before we go deeper into this “customers as members” idea. It’s not about creating a Facebook Group and adding a membership feel to your offerings. It’s not about membership models you’re familiar with, like Costco or Amazon Prime, which you join so you can get a better deal. It’s about shifting your point of view

This is not about the typical extrinsic rewards that often accompany a membership program and confer a sense of entitlement. It is not about free parking, product perks, branded merchandise, or special event invitations.

It is a point of view more closely aligned with the intrinsic rewards people often associate as part of their involvement with any mission-driven organization.

Again, I am not talking about true membership, but about a sense of belonging that comes from a relationship that’s built on engagement, investment, and evangelism rather than transaction.

In the point of view I am proposing, the customer is not sold or even offered a membership; they simply are transformed into members.

TOLO as a Point of View

I was listening to a podcast as I was writing this book. One of the features of this show is questions and comments from listeners. During this particular episode, Howard, a teacher from Hillsborough, New Jersey, described the common expression YOLO (“you only live once”) in the context of a question: If you knew you only had a week to live, what would you do, what would you change, how would you live that last week?

Howard went on to comment that as a high school teacher, he hears his students invoke YOLO as an excuse for doing something that is somewhere between foolish and brave. Then he mentioned that he often challenges his students to turn this concept around to something he calls “TOLO” (they only live once).

What if you knew it was someone else’s last week, but they didn’t know, and you couldn’t reveal it? In this case, that person, whoever they are, only lives once.

How would you treat that person?

Let’s apply this to customer relationships for a moment. I know it may seem a bit p...