7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success - Episode 1

0:00John Jantsch:You know, most small businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a strategy problem underneath the marketing. I wrote a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success that walks through exactly how to fix it. From getting clear as a founder, all the way to running marketing like an operating system. 20 years of working with small businesses condensed into a framework you can actually use. And right now, it's only five bucks. Go grab it at dtm.world slash seven steps. That's dtm.world slash seven steps. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Ductate Marketing Podcast.

0:39This is Jon Chance, and no guests today. I'm actually going to do a bunch of solo shows, so I'm still going to have a guest. So if you're listening in line, you will hear the occasional guest still. But I'm doing seven shows as a series. So if you want to, I'll tag them all and I'll remind you, this is episode number three of the seven. But I wrote an ebook about 20 years ago called The Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success. It was extremely popular, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. It was a talk that I gave dozens and dozens of times because it really took all of the issues that a lot of small business owners were experiencing with marketing and identified them, but also then put them in order to correct them.

1:25So over time, that became less relevant. However, the fundamentals of marketing have not changed. So for 2026, I completely updated this. And so there is a brand new version of the seven steps of small business marketing success, and I'll tell you how you can get a copy of it. It's more a workbook, I think, than ebook. Certainly, it has great information in it for you, but it also asks you to do some things, to think about some things, to take action on things. So I've really been referring to it as more of a workbook. So this is episode number one, which is step number one. It's something I call the founder portrait,

2:04John Jantsch:why clarity comes before a strategy. So quite often marketing fails upstream, if you will, in the tactics, when they're being done, how they're being done. But the founder is often the variable that nobody talks about. And that's what this episode is really about. I've had this conversation many times with founders. They want to hire a new agency, build a new website, do new campaign. Six months later, nothing's really changed. So the first question I always ask is, I mean, when did you last look at your business? Honestly, When did you last look at your relationship with that business, honestly?

2:47And frankly, that doesn't sound like a marketing question, but it really is at the heart of a marketing question or really at the heart of the challenge with marketing that a lot of small business owners face. So, and what happens is, you know, a founder starts a business, they start growing successfully,

3:06John Jantsch:maybe 10 years in, business feels okay, but it doesn't feel the same. It doesn't feel right. It's maybe drifted a little bit from what they thought it was going to be. It's funny with drift, it goes very slowly and then all at once you find yourself somewhere that you didn't think you wanted to be. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that as a business grows, which decisions and how decisions are made actually needs to change also. And I think that what I've discovered is that's one of the toughest ones. Maybe you're hiring people to do a task that you used to do, but the decisions for how they're held accountable, the decisions for what it is that you do now as the founder, is a thing that really never changed.

3:53And this definitely is not a story about failure, because a lot of times it's that thing you just can't identify. Things seem to be going okay, but you just can't identify the position that you're in. So here's what I want you to do.

4:08John Jantsch:And if you need to stop this, I hate to tell you to stop it because I want you to come back. But if you need to stop this, go grab a pen and paper or a pencil even and paper and come back here. Because I'm going to ask you to give some thought to four pretty intense questions. And you may not know the answers to them, but I want to get you thinking about them because I think that they can actually unlock some things that maybe you haven't been able to identify in your marketing. All right. So I'll pause. You can pause now. Go get that paper. Or if it's right there. And we're back, right? Okay.

4:46John Jantsch:You're back with your pen and paper. All right. So here are the four questions. Number one, and you can pause this to answer the questions and come back and I'll read the other questions as well. What's actually working in your business and how do you know? This can be a pretty broad question, but I am certainly talking about marketing for the most part. Or, you know, there's a difference between activity, you know, like what we're doing a bunch of and what's working. And I think a lot of times we conflate activity with what's working. So working means it produces revenue or it reduces your cost to acquire a customer.

5:31John Jantsch:I mean, a lot of times everything else is just activity. All right. So that's number one. What's actually working and how do you know? You know, I've spent over 20 years. watching good businesses waste money on marketing that doesn't add up. And usually the problem isn't the tactics. It's the missing foundation underneath them all. So I put the whole system in a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success. Seven steps, the right order with everything you need to build that actually compounds. You can pick it up right now for five bucks at dtm.world slash seven steps. So that's dtm.world slash seven steps.

6:15John Jantsch:Okay, number two. This is where it starts getting a little interesting for you. What are you doing out of habit, guilt, or maybe even optimism that you should stop? Now, maybe nobody's ever asked you that. Maybe you've never even thought about that idea. But boy, especially out of habit. things that we just do because, hey, we've always done them or everybody in our industry has always done them that way. So as you think about this, think about all the elements of your business. Is there a service line that never quite worked, but you can't give up on? A channel that you've been on since 2021 and haven't really considered.

6:58John Jantsch:I think naming it is, quite frankly, is the hard part to really dig in and think, we're on TikTok because everybody said we should be, but we hate it and we don't know if we're getting anything out of it. So naming it, I think sometimes then gives you the permission to stop doing it. And a lot of times effective marketing or marketing strategy starts with figuring out the things that you're doing today that you should stop doing. Okay. Answer question two and we'll move on to three. where is your business actually making money versus where are you pretending it is? Pretending might feel like a strong word, but I do think a lot of times we just assume, you know, that might be a better word, that certain elements or certain things that we're doing are actually making money for the business.

7:49And every now and then, especially if you're one of those business owners like me, that, you know, the finance part of the business is something that I just feel like, oh, we hire a bookkeeper and they take care of it. I don't really study it. But if you're ignoring that element of your business and you're not really seeing where profit is, you're not really tracking the inputs like labor that go into things, quite often we can convince ourselves or kid ourselves that something's making money because it's generating revenue. And revenue and profit are certainly not the same thing. So some of the things that we stick to and continue to do are because we like them or because we like doing them or because we feel good about them or because we've always done that.

8:31You start doing this math on your P &L or really digging into expenses and you start realizing we should stop focusing on this. And I'll tell you one of the areas that I always find, and this is true for a lot of businesses, is that we're focused on the wrong client. Or we've taken clients because maybe it was slow that month and it wasn't a good fit. We're losing money on that. We should just stop doing that altogether. We should stop offering that service altogether because even though we can attract clients, it's actually holding us back. It's actually costing us an opportunity to actually be able to grow the business or scale the business because we won't let go of that for fear of the fact that, well, gosh, we're going to take a$100 ,000 hit or something if we quit doing that line of business.

9:20When more often than not, that's what's going to lead to the 20, 30, 40 % growth in the really profitable business.

9:27John Jantsch:All right. So that was question three. Question four is quite possibly the hardest for some because we've stopped thinking about this. what do we actually want this business to give us? What do you, in your particular case, want this business to give you? Now, most marketing work completely skips this category. And I think that a lot of times when we work with business owners, and that's why I'm asking these questions, is because this is how we start a strategy-first engagement, is getting into this founder's portrait, as I like to call it. because a lot of decisions are made because they are to grow revenue or because you saw somebody else doing their marketing a certain way.

10:11And they're not necessarily based in, well, this is actually what I want this business to give me. I just want to do meaningful work. I want to have a certain exit. I want to have a certain lifestyle. And if we're not making decisions based on that, quite often we'll make decisions for the wrong reasons. So they won't be bad decisions necessarily, but they'll just be made for the wrong reason.

10:32John Jantsch:So there's a difference between, I think, how you would actually view marketing in general based on that. If you don't know the answers to that question to number four, really no marketing strategy is going to serve you or you'll get lucky, I guess, if it does. All right. So I hope you took some time. If not, please go back and listen to this when you're at a place where you can actually give some thought to those questions and actually record your thoughts on those questions because you'll get a lot clearer if you do. So what we're trying to do is create what we call the founder's portrait. So this is not a document that you would ever share.

11:14John Jantsch:It's just the ground you stand on. It's like, okay, it's the filter. You know, without it, I think everything downstream, everything you ask people to do sort of inherits the blur, if you will, that's created. With it, I think, who you attract as a nice, you know, a core client, who you attract from a messaging standpoint, the channels that you go on. I mean, everything gets built on something that I think is real because of this founder's portrait. So this process might take you an hour, one blank page, four questions, no team, no advisors, no AI. Don't use AI to answer these questions. And don't try to turn this into a plan.

12:00John Jantsch:See where it takes you. See if it opens up questions for you. See if it is challenging in a way that makes you rethink everything about your business. And again, maybe you've got the answer. Maybe you've got clarity. But quite frankly, that can actually be just as potent. Knowing that can be just as potent as actually coming up with a plan because of it. So one of the things I'd ask you to do if you're up for this challenge is if you answer these questions, I'd love it if you would just email. It's just john at duct tape marketing. Email me your thoughts on question number four. I would love to collect some of those.

12:35I'd really love to see what you want the business to give you. I want to see really personal responses. And certainly I will reply, there's no wrong answer. So I'm not going to tell you, oh no, you need to redo this. But I'd love to hear what you're thinking. I'd love to hear how deep that you got in those. So that's all I have for today. I will tell you, if you want to get a copy of the ebook that I referenced, this is step number one. I'm going to do seven episodes based on obviously a session on each step. It's dtm.world. So that's DTM, like duct tape marketing, dot world slash seven steps.

13:14It's five bucks just so you have some skin in the game. But I think you will find the workbook aspect of this. Lots of great information, but also lots of great action steps and things to ask you to do. So take care. And hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road.

13:39you