Why More Content Is Making You Invisible | 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success - Episode 4

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.

0:44John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. And again, another solo show, no guests today. I'm doing the seven steps to small business marketing success. So if you haven't caught the past, I think I'm on episode four here. If you haven't caught the past three, go check them out at Duct Tape Marketing. But this is a series of seven podcasts. This is number four. Why more content is making you less visible. How's that for a topic? So here's the AI content trap. Most founders I talk to are really excited about AI content tools. And frankly, they should be nervous.

1:21John Jantsch:And that is because the market is being flooded with generic, readable, but forgettable content like crazy. And I think adding that pile doesn't help you. It kind of buries you. Here's the problem. And this has been the problem all along. Content or AI didn't necessarily change this. It just made it worse in a lot of ways. Most content that small business owners have produced, somebody convinced them to write a blog post every week. But it's just kind of the idea of the week. It has no spine. There's no thought behind it. Maybe the topic seemed interesting that week, but two years down the road later, it actually serves zero purpose.

2:02John Jantsch:So the thing about AI is it makes it easier to publish a lot of content, but that doesn't really fix this problem. It just amplifies the problem that the content was not that valuable or useful anyway. And I think that customers, prospects are definitely going to, they already are, recognizing AI content and ignoring it, tuning it out completely. And to some degree, that's actually hurting the brand when they see that's what you're producing, that's all you're producing. So there are three principles. When it comes to really content, less is more content, or at least the right content, I guess, is probably a better way.

2:42John Jantsch:I'm not necessarily saying you don't need content. I'm saying you need content to do a job and a very specific job. And that requires a couple of principles. Number one is picking pillars. So you want your content to actually compound and you want it to be around some things that make total sense to you. If you're an architect and you do residential work, you do hospitality work, and you do commercial work, you want to actually start thinking in terms of the pillars of those three types of work that you do, those three types of use cases, those three types of probably buyers, what would be the pillars that would actually drive those folks or at least let those folks understand you better and start developing topics around a collection of pillars as opposed to as opposed to just, hey, I'll write about this week because it seems interesting or because I can get a lot of engagement and social media over it because it's a hot topic.

3:47John Jantsch:I think, again, there may be a case for that if you've got lots and lots of extra time, but you really want your content to do a job. So you want to pick three pillars at most that are really going to be anchored on your ideal client, or at least I should say your ideal client's problems. every single piece of content should point to one of those. If you can't make it, if you can't tie it or have an angle that ties it to one of those, you shouldn't be doing. This is a discipline, quite frankly, because especially a lot of organizations that just tell junior marketers to create content without giving them those pillars.

4:25John Jantsch:That's one of the best things you can do. If you have people in your organization producing content or an agency producing content for you, you should develop strategically as the founder, as the owner, you should develop what those three pillars are. And again, that's a discipline that maybe starts with the founder sometimes because sometimes the founder wants to write about the cool topic or the thing that hit them that week. If you're bored with a topic, you can use this as a three-year test, I'll call this. If you're bored with a topic in six months, it's not a pillar. It's a theme. Pillars are really what you're still the authority on or what you're driving to be the authority on two, three, four years from now.

5:07John Jantsch:Now, you won't always get that right, but it certainly should make sense to say, yeah, long term, this is going to be important for my ideal client and the problems they're trying to solve. And I think three is the sweet spot because it allows you to have a lot of range. It allows you to be seen as an authority. It doesn't get diluted. I mean, it forces you to make decisions about your content. All right, so that's the starting point, having that frame, those three pillars. The next is, I've written about this for years, but I talked about it in the last episode as well. You then want to organize that content under hub pages.

5:44John Jantsch:So every one of your pillars gets a page that you're going to then start building more and more content on. So as you pick a theme or you pick a topic that goes or a subtopic that goes under one of those pillars, you start organizing them as pages. Headpages have so many uses. First off, it's the way to organize your content so that the search engines, AI understands that this is a broad topic, that you have lots of authority, that there's lots of information here, that your expertise, that you have actually put your client case studies and real proof into this entire topic, which has a ton of value just from being foundable.

6:28John Jantsch:Foundable? Findable. There we go. But it also, don't forget, human beings want to consume this content as well. Think about your sales team if you have one. These hubpages really allow your sales team to be able to say, oh, if you are, you know, thinking about buying a business and you need to understand what the tax implications of buying that business are, here's the entire topic around that we have written on. So it allows folks to actually, it allows you to share and, you know, have really a useful tool or home that you can send people to that demonstrates that you're a real expert. You know, I've spent over 20 years watching good businesses waste money on marketing that doesn't add up.

7:13And 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.

7:44John Jantsch:And here's the real beauty of, and this is really kind of the third principle, which is repurposing. Once you have these pillars, once you build these pages, or once you start to build these hub pages, quite frankly, you don't have to wait till they're done. Once you start producing content that is focused and has a purpose around these pillars, then you can actually start leveraging every piece of that. In fact, we actually, what we will often do is we will work with a founder and we will just sit with them for an hour, maybe a couple of times, and just ask them questions. Let them talk about their products, their services, the problems, actual customer case studies, really develop a point of view and a voice about what they do.

8:31John Jantsch:And we're actually able to take that video transcript and turn it into 50 to 100 pieces of content, including social media posts, over a period of time. And it's really the easiest way today to leverage authoritative expertise, human content in the voice of the founder or the voice of the technical expert that's going to talk about something that your business does. And frankly, AI can't do that. And that's really the beauty of then using these AI tools is once we have that authoritative content, we can actually easily use the AI tools then to repurpose that content. And I think that's really one of the best uses, quite frankly, of AI when it comes to content.

9:20John Jantsch:So the next thing I want to talk about is that's really the foundation structure, right? You've got the pillar pages or the pillar topics, I'm sorry, the hub pages for each of those pillar topics, and then the mechanism to repurpose a lot of that content. That's what we have to do today to make sure that we're putting it in places like LinkedIn and Reddit and all the places that are going to send authority signals back about our content and about our business to the AI tools. But the missing ingredient for most businesses is a point of view. So we're thinking in terms of this content that is certainly AI driven in a lot of cases.

10:04John Jantsch:It's very generic. It's very balanced. It's very readable. It's a collection of what everybody else wrote. And frankly, it's forgettable because there's nothing that makes somebody stand up and say, yeah, that's different. Why isn't anybody else in our industry saying that? Everybody else is saying the same thing. Or why are we actually doing this the same way that we've always done it? How can we develop a point of view in our writing that actually demonstrates that we have some unique thinking? AI doesn't develop points of view very often. It develops the point of view of the collective mass, right?

10:41John Jantsch:And so if you can actually think Think in terms of those people that, and I'm not suggesting this, but think in terms of those people that write very polarizing stuff. I mean, a lot of the stuff that's gone on in politics of late is really people recognizing that writing something very polarizing repels a lot of people, but it also attracts a certain people who are very attracted to that point of view. And I'm not suggesting that. I'm just saying use that as an example. that if you can develop a point of view about a position, something the customer hasn't heard before, something that no one else in the industry is saying, it doesn't have to be that controversial.

11:21John Jantsch:It just has to be different. And I will say that asking the right questions of AI can actually help you start to develop some of that point of view. You don't necessarily have to lock yourself in a room and think, what's different? Looking at the average, having a conversation with an AI tool about what everybody in your industry is typically doing. I mean, literally asking you questions like, what is a generally accepted best practice in our industry that no one is actually pushing back on? Things like that can actually then start surface some of the ideas, or at least surface some of your thinking about actually putting a point of view into your writing.

12:03John Jantsch:So here are your next steps. I want you today to think about three content pillars that would make total sense for your ideal client, that would address either segments or problems that your ideal clients are actually having. and then think in terms of, and again, you can use it. AI tools are great for research to get your thinking going, but plug those themes in or those pillars in and start asking questions about what would be all the subtopics? What would be a way to write the ultimate guide to this particular pillar topic? And you'll start to get some ideas. Hopefully you'll dismiss some of them.

12:43John Jantsch:Hopefully you'll add to them. Hopefully you'll think about this idea of a point of view that you can bring to each of those topics that others aren't saying. And a lot of times that point of view exists, you just believe it and believe that your customers will appreciate it and understand it and know it when they see it. And you're not actually surfacing it. And that's a real key difference. So today's podcast was really built on this new ebook that I produced called The Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success. You can pick it up for less than$5 at dtm.world slash seven steps. If any of this is resonating, go get the whole thing.

13:23John Jantsch:If you actually want to talk to one of our advisors about how we do some of the things I'm talking about today and we could do for a business like yours, it's just ducttapemarketing.com slash consultation. So thanks for tuning in and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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