Duct Tape Marketing Revised and Updated

John Jantsch

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781595554666
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

In his trusted book for small businesses, John Jantsch challenges you to craft a marketing strategy that is as reliable as the go-to household item we all know, love, and turn to in a pinch: duct tape.

As a renowned marketing guru and small business coach, John Jantsch has become a leading advisor on how to build and grow a thriving business. Duct Tape Marketing shows you how to develop and execute a marketing plan that yields more revenue and ensures the longevity of small businesses.

Taking a strategic, systemic approach to marketing rather than being constantly won over to a "marketing idea of the week" helps small business leaders establish a solid foundation of trust with their customers that only grows stronger with the application of more metaphorical tape.

In Duct Tape Marketing, you will learn how to:

• turn your marketing efforts into a lead generation machine
• create long-term plans for your business's continual growth
• implement marketing strategies that make your business thrive

Plus, this revised and updated edition includes all new tools, rules, and tactics that respond to the ways social media and digital developments have shifted and evolved the marketing landscape.

Let's face it: as a small business owner, you are really in the business of marketing. This practical, actionable guide includes fresh ideas that stick where you put them--and stand the test of time.

Part I

The Duct Tape Foundation—The Way
to Sticky Marketing

(Help Them Know, Like, and Trust You More!)

In Part I we are going to focus our attention on all the things you must do to get your marketing business off on the right track. Completing these foundational steps is much like laying the foundation of a building. The ability of the building to stand strong in good times and bad is dependent on the strength of the foundation. These steps involve creating the strategies and tools needed before you ever go out there and attempt to generate a lead or a customer.

These nine chapters cover everything from identifying your ideal client to getting your entire team involved in marketing. Each chapter will help you leverage your ability to get your customers to know, like, and trust you more. When you get all nine of these foundational areas working in concert, you will have the absolutely necessary foundation in place for truly sticky marketing!

Chapter 1
Strategy Before Tactics

Anyone who has heard me speak or read my blog knows that I believe that marketing strategy is far more important to the small business than marketing tactics. And yet, the tactical idea of the week gets most of the attention from the business owner.

Strategy and tactics must go hand in hand in order for a business to achieve a measure of true momentum, but an effective strategy must be in place before any set of tactics make sense.

The following Sun Tzu quote, borrowed from The Art of War and adapted in the title of this chapter, pretty much sums up my feeling on the subject—“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

The reason strategy gets mostly lip service when it comes to marketing planning is that most people misunderstand what a marketing strategy really is. So, let me start with what it’s not. Strategy is not a wish list, set of goals, mission statement, or litany of objectives. What is it, then?

A How, Not a What

A marketing strategy is a clear explanation of how you’re going to get there, not where or what “there” is. An effective marketing strategy is a concise explanation of your stated plan of execution to reach your objectives.

To become the market leader is not a strategy—it’s an objective. To serve customers with honor and dignity is not a strategy either—it’s a mission. To double the number of new customers is not a strategy—it’s a goal.

Goals, missions, and objectives are nice, but how you plan to achieve them—otherwise known as strategy—paired with a logical set of tactics, is the surest route to victory.

To become a market leader, you may find that an effective strategy is to carve out one very narrow market niche and dominate it. To serve your customers with honor and dignity, you may discover that an effective marketing strategy starts somewhere in your hiring process. To double the number of new customers, the most effective marketing strategy may be to build a formal network of strategic referral partners.

Each of these strategies will have a corresponding list of tactics and action steps, but the action plans and campaigns will all have your stated strategy as a filter for decision making and planning.

After working with thousands of small business owners, I’ve developed a three-step process for developing a marketing strategy. I must warn you, though, that market conditions, competitive environments, and trending opportunities all play wild-card roles in the process. A company considering a marketing strategy in a mature market with entrenched players will have a much different view of things than a company trying to bring a new technology to a market with no proven purchase habit.

When developing a marketing strategy for your business the following steps come into play.

1. Decide Who Matters

For any strategy and corresponding set of tactics to work, they must appeal to someone. The first element, and in some cases the primary element, is deciding who. Develop your marketing strategy around a narrowly defined ideal client above all. (More on this in the next two chapters.) This step alone may actually prove to be your strategy—to get good at serving a niche market.

Using your ideal client profile as the basis of your strategy also allows you to think very personally about how you will serve your clients and how you can use your tactics to attract them. Without this concentration on an ideal segment, your marketing strategy will often lack focus.

2. Be Different

After developing a profile of an ideal client it’s time to find a way to appeal to this group. In my experience, the only sure way to do this is by discovering or creating an approach, product, or service that clearly differentiates you from the rest of the market. The market needs a way to compare and contrast, and if you don’t give them one, they’ll default to price comparison.

You need to dig in and find the way of doing things that your customers truly value. What’s going on in your industry that frustrates people? How can you turn the way they have “always done it” into an opportunity for innovation? In some cases, you may be doing something truly unique; you just aren’t communicating your core marketing message effectively.

If you don’t take this step seriously, everything else you do in terms of marketing will be far less effective. That’s how serious being different is. (Complete details on this step in chapter 3).

3. Connect the Dots

The final step in the marketing strategy game is to take what we’ve done previously—defining an ideal client and creating a core differentiator—and turning it into your stated strategy.

When I created Duct Tape Marketing, my stated strategy was to create a recognizable small business marketing brand by turning marketing for small businesses into a system and product. This strategy contained a narrowly defined ideal client and a clear point of differentiation.

Our mission was to radically change the way small business owners thought about marketing and our “marketing as a system” strategy became how we would do that.

Like most effective strategies, the gap in current offerings and positioning was what offered the clear opportunity. Connecting your strategy will also include a careful study of the competitive environment—and that of other unrelated industries—in order to fill a need with your innovation or differentiation.

Let me return once again to Sun Tzu and The Art of War—“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

Now, before you determine whether Facebook is better for your business than LinkedIn or if direct mail is still an effective way to generate leads, start at the point where you will ultimately create the greatest possible impact—strategy!

Fuse Online and Offline to Drive Ultimate Engagement

From a marketing strategy standpoint, one of the things that must be considered is how prospects and customers have come to adopt the Web and social media. Firms that are taking full advantage of this transition are fusing offline tactics with online tactics to do much of the relationship building required to engage customers.

As I continue to watch this phenomenon, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s one of the primary strategies that every local business needs to adopt as an intentional, overarching marketing strategy. It’s not a matter of looking at the Internet and social tools with an eye on sales. It’s one of tuning your entire marketing process in a way that fits how offline buyers make decisions and grabbing that piece of business.

See, Zappos or Dell or Amazon can’t really create the engagement and experience that you can in your high-touch, in-person business. That’s your competitive advantage. Don’t think about making a sale online; think about getting a chance to make an impression. The primary way to do that is to become an online warrior for creating awareness for your products, services, brand, content, and expertise. When a local shopper or information gatherer turns to a search engine, drive that surfer offline for the total package.

Creating customers offline will, in my opinion, always (okay, for the next few years, anyway) be the most profitable way for a small business to build long-term, high-profit revenue. But those revenues will never appear if you don’t master the online information space first.

The online-to-offline mind-set involves a healthy dose of what many would refer to as SEO, but its success actually hinges on how you intend to engage online visitors once you’ve got them. There are three phases to the development of your fused approach.

1. Discovery: In this phase, you lay the groundwork for understanding what your local prospects are looking for and how you can use this data to create awareness for the products and s...