7 Stages to a Complete Marketing Operating System

0:10John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today, I am going to do a solo show. Might be one of my last solo shows of 2025 when you're listening to this. I'm going to call this why your business needs a marketing operating system. So if you've been listening for any amount of time at all, you've certainly heard me say marketing is a system. It starts with strategy before tactics. I've been saying that for 30 years. And in some ways, we have brought a systematic approach to marketing. Have we brought a system? Probably not always.

0:49John Jantsch:It's probably been more of a concept because we just really haven't had the tools necessary to do it. But I believe we are approaching that point where we do have the actual tools to create a tangible, installable marketing operating system in a business. And I'm very excited about that. That's really going to be the next chapter of duct tape marketing, if you will. We are going to go very heavily into that, what I think is a needed innovation in marketing. I will still say that we encounter every single day businesses that feel chaotic, disconnected, even if they look outwardly like, yeah, they're succeeding.

1:27John Jantsch:They're growing. Internally, when you get in there, there's a lot of things going on that nobody's really sure of. There's not a lot of planning. There's certainly tactic of the week still going on. And every now and then you get lucky and some of that stuff works, but it certainly makes it difficult to scale a business in that way. And that's really what I want to tackle today. kind of the common pain points that we encounter. Random tactics, too many tools, inconsistent results, no clear message or direction. Boy, that one's a killer. A lot of businesses, when I talk about marketing as a system, I mean, they have financial systems, they have hiring systems, they have systems, whatever it is they make out the door.

2:05John Jantsch:But then when it comes to marketing, it just feels like such a foreign concept. And I think it's just a normal concept we've been taught to really think differently about. So So before I get into the stages of the system, what the system might look like in your world or in any business's world, it has to be built on something that is strategic. And so we've been using for the last couple of years something I call the marketing pyramid. So it's really a lot of ways the spine of the system, that it's the structure that really informs kind of how we build. And a lot of times when people talk about strategy, certainly when they talk about marketing strategy, it's like they do it in a vacuum.

2:49John Jantsch:I mean, a lot of times when they're talking about a marketing strategy, they're really just talking about how we're going to get business. And that's a gross strategy, maybe, but that's all. Here's the idea behind the pyramid is that you need to build from the bottom up. And that first rung of the strategy pyramid begins with business strategy. What is the vision, values, goals? What's even the business model? I mean, if you're talking about, well, we need to grow 20%, well, why? How is that going to happen? And so without a conversation about that or at least some analysis of that, it's very difficult for you to think in terms of like, here's going to be our marketing strategy because your marketing strategy is supposed to solve for all of that, right?

3:31John Jantsch:It's like, if these are our objectives, if this is where we're trying to go, the marketing strategy is going to just support that. It's not going to just be this thing that we operate and hope we get to where we're going. And inside of the marketing strategy, there are really three layers. It's not just about getting the phone to ring. It's not just about getting leads. The three layers are brand strategy, growth strategy, which I mentioned, and customer experience strategy. Those are all a combined whole, really, that go into a marketing strategy. And so many people leave out the first one and the third one.

4:05John Jantsch:So that brand strategy is, what's your message? What's your identity? What's your positioning? What's your proof? What do you want the market to be thinking about you out there? And do you have a defensible competitive difference that you can really go out there and understand who your ICP is, your ideal client profile, and understand who you're competing with for that ideal client profile so that you can send the right message and really have a strong brand strategy. Now, after that, this is the part most people understand is the growth strategy. And that's really the offers, the channels, how you're going to generate leads, ultimately how you're going to convert leads as well.

4:44John Jantsch:And then the third part that I see people quite often missing and not thinking about is the customer experience strategy. How are we going to retain customers? How are we going to generate referrals? How are we going to wow our customers so that they are out there actually talking about us and advocating for doing work with us. Those all need to just be planned things. So we need to build now, start building objectives around what we want to accomplish in each of those strategies. Now, if we're going to build a true marketing operating system, one of the core pieces that this is going to be built on is a system strategy.

5:22John Jantsch:So what's our tool stack look like? What are the processes? How do we create automation? Increasingly, what role is AI going to play in our creating systems. Because this is really how you get this repeatable system in place is by actually having a plan, having that business and marketing strategy that is then going to be executed by who's doing things. And then of course, that's the final tip of the pyramid. And that's the team strategy. What are the roles? What's the rhythm? How is AI going to be integrated into your team? So that's the spine. That's ultimately what we want to have a plan for.

5:58John Jantsch:And then we build the marketing operating system in stages to actually execute on that. There isn't any way for me to put a pyramid down and structure in front of you and say, here, fill out all of this and we'll have this. That's the ultimate goal to actually have this completed marketing pyramid that's going to be our guide. We're going to build each of those pieces in stages. So, hey, it's John Janice. And I got a quick question for you. Does your marketing ever feel like a jumble of tactics without a real plan? Well, you're not alone. That's why we just released a free on-demand workshop called The Clarity Engine.

6:35How small businesses can turn random acts of marketing into a scalable growth system. Where our CEO, Sarah Nae, walks you through building a marketing system that actually scales. And you'll get our exclusive marketing strategy pyramid worksheet to map out your own path for the year ahead. Just head on over to dtm.world slash clarity. Again, that's dtm.world slash clarity. Let's make next year the year you finally own your marketing for good.

7:04John Jantsch:What are the seven stages? I like seven as a number. Seems like I've used a lot in the things that we've created. So the first one is the strategy first core. This is something we've been doing for 25 years, and it's still a crucial element. I don't care what we're developing. it's a crucial element always will be tools come platforms come and go ai is here this week who knows what's here next week strategy the strategy core and fundamentally what we're here to do as marketers i don't think will ever change so we have to build that we have to diagnose the gaps we have to clarify the message we have to define the client journey and we have to tie those back and really part of the first part before we'd ever get started is we would have an in-depth analysis with your help, of course, as the business owner, on what the business strategy is.

7:56John Jantsch:And quite frankly, that may be a discussion that we have to start because you've never really looked at a long-term approach to your overall business strategy. So we may start there before we actually start, or maybe as the discovery phase of the strategy first core. The second component then is what we call the campaign builder system. So, I mean, this is where we're going to play in. what 90-day campaigns would look like. But we're going to start here with building your brand engine and your growth engine and your customer experience engine, because those are going to be the things that we're going to launch really out there.

8:33John Jantsch:We have to have those built in order to build campaigns. Stage number three, the third component is what we are calling the work stream engine. So this is where we're going to assign roles, SOPs, rhythms for execution, probably build OKRs, which is an objective key result tool that I think Google was, or people at Google were most noted for developing that. It's a great tool for actually breaking things down into small chunks so you can get to it. Then the next stage we're going to go to really is the AI-powered marketing hub. I believe that a lot of people are still looking at AI as a tool or they're looking at it as a platform or as a way to do automation or as a way to do things faster and more efficiently, I ultimately believe that it's going to be just baked into how we work as a company.

9:24John Jantsch:So let's say you have Google Workspace or you have Microsoft Teams. Today, a lot of the communication across organizations, even outward communication, say via Gmail, things of that nature, is all just baked into those kind of tools. I mean, they basically are workplace tools that everybody uses in the organization. They all communicate with each other. They all collaborate. Well, AI is going to be baked. Increasingly, it is being baked into those tools. But what we're going to build is the AI marketing hub. So you'll have playbooks now for what is the newsletter going to be written? What are blog posts going to be?

10:01John Jantsch:How are we going to do social? What are our ads going to look like? I believe we can use the AI tools to build a framework inside of an organization so that No matter who's operating the system inside the organization, they will actually have the playbooks to do it correctly and to use AI in a way that's branded and in-your-voice trained, but can also produce a lot of output that is part of the marketing plan. Now, the fifth stage is actually what we're calling scorecards and signals. So this is going to be your dashboard. It's going to be how you track performance without really getting into the vanity metrics.

10:36John Jantsch:It's going to be we're going to measure what matters, right? Now, this comes in the fifth stage, but frankly, we are using data throughout. I mean, when we are looking at an ICP, we're looking at data. When we're looking at core messaging, we're looking at data. So data becomes this fifth stage where we're going to build the ultimate output tool, but we're going to be baking data into the culture and the DNA of the organization. I think that's a real gap for a lot of organizations. They don't know what to measure. They aren't measuring anything or they're measuring stuff that's so complex, it doesn't really give any insight.

11:12John Jantsch:And so we're going to make it into every stage, but then you're going to have actually the dashboard as part of that. Now, one of the things that's really important is no system is set up, forget it. We've got to tune it. We've got to maintain it. We've got to give it oil, all the metaphors you want to use there. And so we're going to actually have what we call the momentum meeting. So it would be a very structured monthly check-in that's going to drive accountability and alignment and reassign ownership, reassign responsibility on what's going on, assess where you are on meeting the system output.

11:49John Jantsch:And then the last piece, I think any good system, you're basically building the thing and hoping you got it right. And so constant optimization. It's probably, many of you probably experienced that in your own business. I mean, we're every 90 days tweaking something or maybe changing direction almost in a large way or to some degree or in a new product offering or something. So there's this constant feedback and review to refine and improve what's working that we call the optimization loop. So once we build that, what happens after that? It's our belief that clear strategy is something that doesn't change every month, but your marketing systems run consistently.

12:36John Jantsch:Campaigns generate results, not noise. And the key is inside the organization, I think everybody knows what their role is. Everybody knows what their objectives are. Everybody has visibility into what's working, what's not working. And I think that confidence across the team should really soar, even if the team includes outside folks that are third-party suppliers, partners, vendors. It really gives them confidence to know that there is a plan that they're not just doing their one little part out there. So what's next? This is something that we are building now for clients. And it's something that if it makes sense for you, we would love to show you this system and have a strategy call with you to really hear how it might fit in your world.

13:30John Jantsch:I'm going to suggest that you book a strategy call at dtm.world slash chat. That's dtm.world slash chat.

13:50If your marketing in 2025 felt more like a scramble than a system, well, I've got something for you. If you're a small business owner running a service-based business and you've been busy all year but still aren't sure what's actually driving results, our CEO at Duct Tape Marketing, Sarah Nay, is opening a limited number of year-end strategy sessions. These one-on-one conversations specifically for owners who already have clients, but know their marketing isn't as clear, consistent, or aligned to the goals as it needs to be heading into 2026. Well, you'll look at where things are breaking down and the simplest way to create a system you and your team can actually follow when you book with Sarah.

14:33So spots on Sarah's calendar are limited. Does this sound like you? Head on over to dtm.world slash year end. That's right, dtm.world slash year end to grab a time.