What Most Businesses Get Wrong About Marketing

0:10John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and another solo show. I'm just going to ramble at you for a bit. Again, I'd love to hear your feedback. I get feedback from a lot of folks that they enjoy these shows where I just kind of share some things that I have in mind. And so I'm just going to start off with no shocker here. I'm going to talk about strategy. I'm going to talk about strategy before tactics. I'm going to talk about marketing as a system. These are things that if you've been listening for, I don't know, even a couple of weeks, let alone a couple of years, you've heard me say repeatedly something I've written about in pretty much every one of my books.

0:50And it's a challenge or a problem that I haven't cracked yet. I haven't gotten the entire world, even the marketing world, to really come fully on board. But I will tell you this. I've worked with hundreds now of business owners, and I have seen the impact when they will step back and look at their business from a strategic point of view, and certainly their marketing from a strategic point of view, and really proceed to develop the tactics that they are going to develop around that strategy first. First, nobody's short on marketing activity.

1:25John Jantsch:I mean, there's more to do from a marketing standpoint than there seems to be more every day that we can get into more channels, more platforms, more tactics that we can get into every day. So that's not really the challenge. The real challenge is that they're short on the clarity that actually might let them do less, right? I mean, they're doing a lot of things. Maybe you're doing a lot of things that feel like marketing or under the heading of marketing, but those things don't always connect. And so my experience is there's a great deal of inconsistent messaging, shifting priorities, right? It's like, well, let's try this month.

2:04John Jantsch:Teams, vendors not allowed, not aligned, I'm sorry. I've come into a lot of organizations. They have five, six people or five, six companies even doing stuff, but they're not actually even coordinating with each other, which I certainly find rather difficult to imagine. But it gets wasted. Time gets wasted. You burn your people out. But let's face it, the promise of AI is it was supposed to automate all this stuff. And I keep talking to people to say they're working harder because they're now trying to figure out all this new stuff. And so growth gets really harder to do when we're really just, it's like we're running on the hamster wheel.

2:41I've said I've worked with hundreds of businesses over the years. And I have many examples, case studies where we have doubled, tripled, quadrupled. We'd worked with them for years and we've doubled, tripled, quadrupled their business. But it really started with a pretty significant change.

2:57John Jantsch:We did strategy first. We helped them identify who was an ideal client, who is an ideal client for the business. And maybe more importantly, who's not. Because most businesses are content to say, hey, I do X service, X product, and anybody who has money is my ideal client and not only is that inaccurate it's really costing a lot of growth because we are accepting or chasing the wrong clients we're not actually being very narrow in our messaging to say here's who we can help and here's the value we deliver to help those folks so it's it really creates a lot of lost opportunity even if you feel like well you know we got a client out of it it wasn't the right client or it was a not a profitable engagement certainly that happens all the time.

3:42Probably the biggest thing that I find from no strategy

3:45John Jantsch:is there's no real point of differentiation. There's no message that clearly communicates to somebody, here's what we do, and we do it better than anyone else. In fact, we've got proof that we do that thing better than anyone else that ever thought about. And when you get that, when you clarify that message, it says, here's who we're for. And your ideal client reads that message and says, finally, you're talking about me, aren't you? As I said, this is something that we have done for many years. It's not new. I mean, it's continued to evolve, but it's continued to be something that we've licensed now to well over 400 agencies and consultancies who also get the power of this systemized approach that we've been able to create to develop strategy.

4:31John Jantsch:But today, I want to tell you about a new way that we are going to deliver it. And this may have some appeal. In the past, ideally, it took 30 to 45 days, quite frankly, to do this because we do a lot of in-depth research. We actually interview your clients as part of it and really then develop the messaging, develop the ICP, develop the customer journey, develop the priorities that are going to be really, you know, the next 90 days worth of work to kind of restructure the foundation and really get the business pointed in the right direction. And while businesses that understand the idea of investing in strategy sometimes would grumble about 30 to 45 days, it's like, why can't we do it now?

5:18John Jantsch:But once they were through the process, there's no question, the value that they received and they gush about the value they received. They gush about, it's not just, I mean, in 30 to 45 days of doing strategy first, all of a sudden the phone's not ringing off the hook now with new business, but all of a sudden the team has some clarity. Certainly the founder and the owner has some clarity about, oh, here's why things haven't been working. Here's why we're spinning our wheels. Here's how we have to actually get very clear about who we serve and who we don't serve. And frankly, just having that has a tremendous amount of value and frankly relieves a ton of stress for the business owner.

6:01But what we decided is or asked ourselves or challenged ourselves is, how can we do that faster? How could we actually deliver strategy first in a day? That is something that I'm introducing

6:15John Jantsch:today. That is something we're going to lean in very heavily because I believe there are some distinct advantages to actually compressing that time. We have the ability, let's face it, we have the ability with a lot of the AI tools that we've mastered to actually do the research, to actually do the analysis in a way that allows us to do this in a much faster timeframe. But here's probably the biggest, I think, advantage to doing this. Quite often, we would do this over a series of meetings that were required. Two weeks maybe would go between those meetings and quite often it would really just be the founder.

6:55But imagine if we could come

6:56John Jantsch:into your business, especially if you have a team, and we could bring everybody that you thought needed to be in that room for an entire focus day. Now, we will certainly do a lot of work on the front end. We're not just going to show up and say, tell me about your business. We are going to do a lot of work on the front end, the research that we can do on your industry and on your specific business and what we see out there that you've been doing in marketing already. But then we are going to spend a very focused day with you and your team creating what I would say is as much an experience as it is a strategic exercise or strategic engagement.

7:40John Jantsch:This is not a workshop. This is not consulting. This is actually with your team building the components that we know will really kind of launch your business or launch your marketing in a much more effective way. So as I said, we do tons of prep ahead of time to get the context. And then we need all of your key decision makers or frankly, people that are doing stuff on behalf of your business in the name of marketing to be in the room. people that you want to level up, people that you want to actually experience as a group, what it's like or what it means to develop marketing strategy and to have the discussion around that.

8:18John Jantsch:And frankly, it's going to be as much a learning experience for them as it will be a deliverable for the business itself. So we're going to identify where there's friction. We're going to identify the business objectives that you need to go. We're going to to find that ideal customer and customer journey. We're going to tighten your positioning. We're going to actually create and sharpen messaging and really set the priorities for the next quarter or next two quarters as a big part of this. Some of the other advantages have the output in this fashion in one focus day is that, yes, you're going to get a clear strategic foundation.

8:57John Jantsch:You're going to actually understand your business probably better than you ever have. You're going to have a shared language. Some of the tools that we're going to give you and impart during this are going to be tools that you'll now be able to continue to work with your team. And it won't just be, oh, you went off to another thing and read a book and brought it back to the business. Everybody's going to be on the same page. And you're going to have a roadmap, a very practical roadmap in the short term for the next 90 days. And I think that this focus, the lack of delay, the lack of overthinking.

9:31John Jantsch:I mean, getting people aligned, I think it's going to have tremendous value. Now, this won't be for everybody. Ideally, this is strategy in this fashion actually works better for a business in a$1 to$25 million range, for example. I mean, you've got traction, but you've also got growing complexity. And so it's time to professionalize your marketing in a way. You know, the ad hoc marketing is just not going to really cut it anymore. Maybe you've already started to feel that. And you've got teams or people or even outside vendors that really need more alignment instead of more activity necessarily.

10:06So if your growth feels messy, the problem may not be effort. Usually isn't actually effort. In fact, you're probably working harder than ever. It's the absence of a shared strategy inside the business. And that's really what strategy first was completely designed to solve. And strategy first day, I believe, solves that in a very unique kind of shared experience way. So if you want to learn more about this, if this kind of lights you up a little bit, we have a page you can go read all about the very specifics. It's just dtm.world slash one day, all one word, one day. DTM is like duct tape marketing.

10:48So it's dtm.world slash one day. Love to come to your business, learn about how we can build this for you and really kind of have your marketing take off, not just this quarter, but really in a one day experience. So take care.

11:09John Jantsch:Thanks for tuning in and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

11:22We'll see you next time.