The 4 Marketing Channels You Actually Control | 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success - Episode 5

0:00You 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.

0:45John Jantsch:Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz, and again, no guest. I'm doing this series of seven steps to small business marketing success. This is actually episode number five. So go to the show notes. You can find all the other episodes if you are behind on this, but I'm going to dive into episode or step number five. And this one really talks about pipeline. Having a great, healthy pipeline is awesome, isn't it? Unfortunately, many people don't own their pipeline, and this is going to be easy to test. That's what I'm going to talk about today.

1:21John Jantsch:But let me ask you this. If your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, platform shuts down, algorithms change, cost doubles, how long before your pipeline would dry out? to be honest, most of the folks that I encounter, 30 days or less. And that's really risky. And that is the cost of renting versus owning your pipeline. And I want to talk a little bit about those terms. If you own it, that means you control it. You decide who's on it, what reaches them. No platform's really going to change that is going to really make that go away. That's the true idea of owning. So, I mean, you own your website, you own your email list, you own your social media to some degree, although those are really controlled as well.

2:10John Jantsch:So I want to get into some of the things that I believe if you want to truly own your pipeline, you have to actually own all the assets that drive your pipeline to the extent that you can. Now, when you hear marketers talk about owned media, earned media, paid media. When I'm talking about renting, really that's what paid media is. And to some degree, earned media, which is great, the publication writes about you, search platform sends traffic to you, the social media platforms, people follow you on YouTube or something, and then click over to your website. Those are all things that you earn mentions.

2:50John Jantsch:But again, those are really not even under your control. I mean, those are things that could theoretically go away tomorrow. YouTube changes their algorithm and you no longer get any traffic from it. So that's why I want to focus on this idea of own. You know, someone else on most pipeline, rented pipeline, somebody else owns it. You pay for access to it. You play basically by their rules. And the beauty of that, of course, is that can happen instantly. If you're a new business and you go to Google AdWords and you open an account and you start advertising, I mean, you can actually generate pipeline immediately.

3:26John Jantsch:But as many people have experienced, that pipeline can get more and more expensive every single year, less and less profitable every single year. They change the rules and all of a sudden you can't talk about your product or service in the way that you want to in your ads. I mean, there are all kinds of things that are there. And the challenge is this rental model is very fragile, but it can be invisible too, right? A business can look very healthy, should be chugging along, but it's 70 % of their pipeline, 70 % of their customer growth comes from rented channels. And all of a sudden, they disappear overnight because something changed.

4:10John Jantsch:So here's an audit that I would tell you, dude, you can do this live. List every lead source that's produced revenue for you in the last 12 months. And I know sometimes that's hard to attribute where the revenue came from, but spend some time thinking about where your revenue comes from, what lead source, and start marking is this owned? Is this rented? Or, you know, rented is the same as paid, you know, and really kind of look at what's the ratio. All right. Right. So I want to talk, now that you've done that, I want to talk about the four own channels and why you need to really put more emphasis, probably need to put more emphasis on those and less on the rented ones.

4:52John Jantsch:So the first one is email. I've been around for a very long time. We started, I think, heavily using email right at the end of like in the nineties, 97, 98, 99, all of a sudden email became a thing. Everybody was really adopting it. And I swear, once people learned the marketing value of having an email connection with somebody, of course, they started abusing it. And that's why a lot of people have then declared almost every year from about 2000 and, well, let's say 2004 or so when social media started cropping up, The email was dead. How many times have you heard that one? Right. At least for 15 years.

5:35John Jantsch:But it still works. It's still one of the most valuable channels. And I contend that it probably will remain now has gotten harder to make effective. And that's really more because people have abused it and because people have other options that they've spent on. And, you know, there's so much spam and cold, you know, outreach to come through those that have actually made people not like email, if you will, but a qualified email list that you have built over five years, a direct, reliable, owned, is really one of the most efficient channels that you can have. But again, qualified, nurtured, not abused, members of that list can be really one of the most valuable marketing assets that a business has.

6:25John Jantsch:Key word, again, qualified. People asked to be on it. It was not scraped. It was not bought. It was not added. This is actually your first layer of content, if you think about it. Principles that make content work apply. Genuine point of view. Useful, specific. So when you're sending email out, that is part of your content plan, right? So genuine point of view. Built on one of your core principles. Built on one of your hub page. One of your... elements that you're using in all of your marketing, all of your content, email in a lot of ways is a content channel. It's not necessarily a sales channel.

7:05John Jantsch:It certainly can be. You can earn the right to sell very directly in email, but it is first and foremost, it is a content channel.

7:17John Jantsch:And again, you know, a lot of, I think a lot of people, partly because of spam and things that have gone on, you know, feel like, you know, email doesn't feel that exciting anymore, right? And I think that's a lot of times the edge, you know, the real, and again, I'm not talking about necessarily all the ways that people are using it and abusing it. I'm talking about the ways that you have the ability to have a direct conversation. And that's, you know, that's probably one of, it's one of the things I forget all the time, but it's probably one of the core principles of email is we feel like, okay, this email is going out to 20 ,000 people.

7:54John Jantsch:So we're writing it like it's going out to 20 ,000 people. What if you wrote it like it was going out to one person, that you told a personal story, that you were vulnerable, that you shared a point of view that might not be accepted by everyone? That's how you have to think about all of your writing. You're writing it to one person, whether it's a YouTube video, an email, a social media post. It's not, hey, guys, hey, everyone listening. It's, hey, you one person, I wrote this directly for you, or at least you're going to feel like I wrote this directly for you. That's how you make email certainly a potent channel.

8:31You 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. That's dtm.world slash seven steps.

9:07John Jantsch:I wrote an entire book about this second channel called The Referral Engine. And I'm happy to say that book has remained evergreen because referrals are not some hack that come about because of the next platform. They are genuinely earned if you actually focus intention. Obviously, you've got to do good work to get referrals. But after that, if you are intentional about how they are created, referrals are probably for most of us. They are the best leads. They already arrive kind of pre-trusted. They close faster. They're less price sensitive. They're more likely to refer other people because that's how they came to you.

9:50John Jantsch:Most small businesses, I think most small businesses, hopefully you do, receive some referrals, but they happen accidentally. That's hope. That's not a system. There are three parts to an effective referral system. There is a specific ask. There is a specific moment. And there is an easy path. Here is who I serve and what I would like you to do. You do that at a moment when the client or the, yes, the client or the person, it's the right time to ask them. It's the moment of truth, as I've called it before. And then you make it very easy for them. Most businesses are missing two and three. I mean, they think about like, yeah, okay, I'm going to go out and ask people for referrals, but I'm not going to do it.

10:35John Jantsch:I'm not going to have it as a planned moment. I'm not going to have it make sense. I'm not going to actually make it really easy for them to do. You add those two pieces of it. And, you know, right after their customer experiences something good, you make that ask land right then and you make it easy for them to do. The third channel is a branch of referrals to some degree, not exactly. And that's partnerships, strategic partnerships. I don't know why more people don't spend more time on this particular channel. Non-competing businesses serving the same ideal client are probably the most underutilized, underused lead source that any small business can have.

11:13John Jantsch:It's not even close. I built in the early days, my entire following, my entire business, my entire platform around these strategic partnerships because it was so easy for me to take the fact that I was early on producing content and others, people started realizing we need content. We need to educate. We need to bring our communities together. And all of a sudden I was a ready to tap source. And so they put me in front of their audiences. So the ideal client, every one of your ideal clients needs other professionals. Every one of your ideal clients has other needs. If you're in the home services business and you are an electrician, they also need a painter and a plumber and a roofer and a person to do landscaping.

12:00John Jantsch:So if you could start to develop relationships with all the people that also serve your ideal client and you can activate those relationships. relationships. If you have a podcast, have them on your podcast. You be on their podcast. Write content for each other. There's lots of ways that you can actually start developing these relationships so that these strategic partners then have a real reason, but also you're top of mind when it comes to referring you. And then the fourth one is still just direct relationships. The more AI becomes invasive, is that the right word? In our lives, in our businesses, the more human element is going to become important.

12:42John Jantsch:So if you're using AI to actually become more efficient and to free up time, take that extra time, take your team's extra time and start doubling down on networking, on speaking, on associations, on in-person industry participation. spend more time doing those kinds of things because those still pay off and they they're going to pay off i think even more as people try to automate and have you know robots theoretically doing their content i still don't know that we're ever going to actually get to that point but i think the real opportunity right now is to double down on the human content so do that owned versus rented audit.

13:23John Jantsch:Do it this week. If rented is more than half, then really the owned growth engine is really the work that you need to focus on. So this is step number five of the seven steps to small business marketing success. Hopefully you're enjoying this series. You can go to our website at Duct Tape Marketing to find the rest of the episodes or the rest of the steps in this and obviously six and seven are coming. These are all if you just want to get the ebook all in one shot, that is dtm.world slash seven steps. You can get it for five bucks. If you want to actually talk to one of our consultants, it is ducttapemarketing.com consultation.

14:06John Jantsch:So if these are making sense, that actually next step might make sense for you. Go grab the ebook or go grab a strategy call with one of our advisors. All right. Thanks for tuning in and hopefully we'll see you one of these days out there on the road.