Your Marketing Doesn't End When Someone Buys | 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success - Episode 6

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 Jansen. Again, another solo show. I'm doing this seven show series called the Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success. and you are listening today to step number six. So if you missed all the past episodes, go to ducttapemarketing.com and you can catch up if you are just now catching up. If you've been following along with me, I'm so thankful that you're here. So today I wanna talk about the half of your marketing that you are ignoring. Here's a budget question. What percentage of your marketing budget goes towards getting new customers versus the ones you already have, getting them back, turning them into referral sources?

1:27John Jantsch:Honestly, for most founders, it's probably 90-10 or worse, meaning they spend 90 % getting that new customer and only about 10 % on activating, reactivating, retaining, turning that existing customer into a great source of advocacy. And frankly, a returning customer is probably worth three to 10 times what a new one's worth. And so that math just doesn't really make any sense, but I get it. All right. Why this customer engine, if we will, customer experience engine gets ignored? I think a lot for a lot of people for many years. It's why I developed a marketing hourglass, because a lot of people think that marketing ends at the end of the funnel, right?

2:14John Jantsch:At the sale, you know, everything after that is operations. But this is a really expensive assumption. I mean, the back half of the hourglass has the highest ROI marketing available to most small businesses. Just as a reminder, the seven stages of the marketing hourglass are no, like, trust, try, buy. That's where most people stop. And then there's repeat and refer. That's where the real value, that's actually where the momentum in any business growth really comes from. I mean, acquisition gets all the budget, the meetings, the attention, customer experience for a lot of organizations gets the leftovers.

2:53John Jantsch:And yet the customer who buys comes back and refers again is worth three to 10 times. Quite often that person that just buys one time because you offered them a deal or something. So, I mean, I think the ratio shows up in the data to really prove this easily. So how do we actually address it? There are four components to this idea, and it starts really with experience. So I call this the customer engine, but it's not about customer acquisition. It's about customer retention. So we might call this the customer experience engine for this step. So onboarding, repeat engagement, referral system, and reactivation.

3:35John Jantsch:These are core components that need to be intentional parts of your marketing, of how you build your business, quite frankly. And most of the attention in marketing goes to that. How do we get a new client? How do we get eyeballs? How do we run ads? So the four components, onboarding. The first 90 days, frankly, is where a relationship gets established. If you're one of those businesses that can retain, I mean, we're in a monthly retainer type of business. So every single month we're having to earn that experience, but we keep clients for years. And I think a lot of it has to do with a very professional onboarding experience.

4:11John Jantsch:a structured sequence that they can understand, that you communicate to them, that you tell them this is how it's going to be. And really, this is a part so many people skip. The marketing is orchestrated to a T until they say yes, and then it falls apart. So walk through what a real onboarding sequence looks like for your business. Like all the touch points, the timing, each step should have a goal of what it's trying to accomplish. And you can obviously take this and make a crazy onboarding experience, but even if you just actually step back and said, how do we, or do we do it consistently? Or are there some tools we should develop around making sure that we communicate expectations?

4:59John Jantsch:I mean, just having a 30-minute conversation with whoever, frankly, does the sales, but then also who does the customer onboarding or customer service, whatever you want to call it. Just having a conversation with your team or thinking about creating an experience that you would like to go through. And in fact, that's always a great place to find ideas on that. You know, if you're a customer of somebody, what's their onboarding look like? Did you like it? Did you not like it? Were there parts of it that you were like, yeah, we should do that? or parts of it that you were like, oh, we're doing that and we shouldn't.

5:32John Jantsch:You know, those are things that you need to think of. Repeat engagement. This is one where, and I get it, we're all busy, but this is one where we just kind of rely on the customer to remember to return, right? And you've really got to develop, you know, maintenance plans, seasonal triggers, anniversary touch points, check-ins anchored to, you know, natural moments in a customer situation. Even if it's really just checking in to say, hey, I just want to make sure you're happy with everything, right? So the landscape business, introduced seasonal maintenance plans, converted about 40 % of the projects to customers.

6:04John Jantsch:We helped show them that they could create meaningful recurring revenue by just making sure that they were hitting those clients at a time when they probably needed something and the timing was right. And then you just made it easy. That's one of the real keys. Part number three, I've already talked about this, but the referral system. Actually having a very systematic approach to going back and asking, going back at moments of truth, identifying when a client's going to be happy. When you do that new installation and all of a sudden they're like, man, this looks incredible. That's a point to say, do you know others that would need this?

6:45John Jantsch:Here's what you could do to actually introduce us to them. Here's how to do it. Those are all parts of it. And then just reactivation. Sometimes a customer doesn't have a need. You think about the typical real estate agent, the client buys a house and it's not like they're going to come back next month and buy a house, right? But they probably will in three to five years. So what are you doing to actually reactivate that past customer that you know that if you just stay top of mind, they may actually have a need at some point. it's probably the highest ROI that you can achieve. And it's also one of the quickest wins.

7:25You know, sometimes we come into businesses and, you know, they have 1200 past clients

7:31John Jantsch:and some of them are existing clients, but, you know, a large percentage of them haven't really done anything for a while. Don't really know why. Wasn't anything wrong. They just kind of drifted away. Maybe they're, somebody else is serving them. Maybe they just decided, I can get along without that product or without that service. Who knows? And it's amazing what just having a campaign, even that you say, look, these 800 people, let's make them an offer to come back. Let's remind them of something new that we have. And it's incredible. In some cases, 15 % to 20 % of them will immediately purchase.

8:07John Jantsch:And all of a sudden, that was one easy thing that would have been next to impossible to achieve to activate that many new clients. So sometimes just actually going back and saying, look, we haven't touched these people in a long time. Let's create a campaign. It can be really one of the quickest wins that you can have in your marketing. 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.

8:44Seven 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. So the last piece is what I would call the application effect on this.

9:09John Jantsch:And what I mean by that is, if you have a great customer experience, you're going to get reviews. You're going to be able to build case studies from those happy clients. you're going to be able to do things that really allows you to produce content that is real content that ai can't produce because it's about the results it's about the problems that you've solved it's about the roi that you've gotten for clients and if you can actually then start to take and routinely use that content in your new customer acquisition all of a sudden it becomes even more, hopefully it becomes even more obvious why you should have that approach for a customer experience that is going to make these clients really happy to talk about your business.

10:03John Jantsch:AI will reward you for clients that are willing to talk about your business. So it becomes this cycle that really helps to build momentum in your business. So you create the incredible onboarding experience. You can create the reactivation and the referrals, but you also create these moments, intentional moments as part of your system where you are going to acquire content. You're going to acquire assets from your happy customers that you can then use in all of your marketing. So that's really, as much as anything, that's one of the reasons to focus on this. The reasons to focus on this are obvious from a business growth standpoint, but then it amplifies itself when you're able to take these happy customer stories and then use them in your marketing.

10:51So what

10:53John Jantsch:percentage of your marketing budget goes towards customers you already have? That is the real uncomfortable question that is going to get you to the point where you will start to understand how important this idea is. So thanks for tuning in again. You can get the entire ebook that this is based on at dtm.world slash seven steps. Or if you're ready to talk to one of our advisors, ductapemarketing.com slash consultation. So thanks for tuning in. Love to hear from you. Love to hear your feedback on this series. It's just John at Duct Tape Marketing. If you want to do that, share this with friends, neighbors, colleagues, other business owners as well.

11:33John Jantsch:If you think that they can use this type of information for their business and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.