Book Review:
Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch is a book that outlines a systematic approach to marketing. If you’re completely new to marketing, then this book is for you. It’ll teach you most of what you need to know in a step-by-step manner. You’ll go through identifying an ideal target market, crafting a compelling message to appeal to this market, designing a great business identity, creating products and services for every stage of client development (John calls this the marketing hourglass), choosing the right channels to reach your prospects, creating a great website, automation, etc.
My favorite section was definitely the one about generating referrals. John has a systematic and active approach to go about this instead of just waiting for people to refer others whenever they feel like it.
I also liked the writing style, it’s so simple and clear. However, make sure to get the latest edition of the book, the one I read has some outdated information.
Book Summary:
The following summary of Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch is meant to be concise, reminding me of high-level concepts and not trying to recreate the whole book. This summary is basically a bunch of notes and lessons paraphrased or quoted directly from the book and does not contain my own thoughts.
• Marketing is getting people who have a specific need or problem to know, like, and trust you. It is an all-encompassing outlook that must inform every activity of your business.
Part 1. The Duct Tape Foundation – The Way to Sticky Marketing (Help Them Know, Like, and Trust You More!)
Chapter 1. Identify Your Ideal Client
• When you properly target your clients, you will discover that you no longer have to work with jerks.
• You can choose to attract clients that value what you offer, view working with you as a partnership, and want you to succeed, but only if you have a picture of what that ideal client looks like.
• One of the reasons we focus so much attention on this notion of defining an ideal target client is that all clients were at one time prospects. So, in effect, what we are really doing here is getting you to define and focus on your Ideal Prospect.
• Much of your marketing focus, at least initially, will be on creating more and more Ideal Prospects or leads. You will eventually come to the point where you can predict with a fair amount of accuracy that if you generate a certain number of Ideal Prospects, you will, in turn, convert a predictable number of those prospects to customers.
• One of the easiest ways to start to get this picture of who or what makes an ideal client is to take a close look at the customers your business has attracted to date. You may find that some segment of your existing business makes up a very focused market.
• As a rule of thumb, at this point, you should consider firing about 20 percent of your past customers simply on the basis that they no longer fit into the picture of your current business. That may sound a bit harsh, but I suspect that neither you nor they are profiting from the relationship at the moment. Set them up with another supplier and everybody wins.
• You’ll need to understand the physical characteristics of your market. For consumers, demographic characteristics include: Age; Employment status; Gender; Occupation; Income; Education level.
For commercial or business clients, demographic characteristics include: Industry; Number of employees; Type of business; Geographic scope of business; Revenue levels.
• You want to keep an eye on characteristics that your best or ideal clients have in common. Look for patterns that never occurred to you previously.
• The characteristics that fall to the emotional side are what market research firms would call psychographics. The study of psychographic characteristics gets at the emotional makeup of prospects that may give clues to how they make decisions and whom they will ultimately like and trust.
What you are looking for here are things like values, fears, desires, and goals. What do they want out of life? What are they not getting? What do they need to know to feel comfortable? What’s holding them back?
• Without a need or problem, you don’t really have a market. So, what’s the problem? What are your customers attempting to solve when they buy your products or retain your services?
• You have to identify and acknowledge what you are really selling. Here’s the cold hard truth—no matter what you think you are selling or providing, it is the customer who ultimately determines what you are selling.
• It can be helpful to plot on a map the location of your current clients to determine if you have a trading pattern or if certain geographic areas are more desirable in terms of target market concentration.
• It’s important to understand how your ideal clients come to a buying decision for your product or service. Is it by committee, bid, RFP, gut feeling, referral, impulse, or some other process? Perhaps there is no real pattern here, but if you can understand a little more about how your ideal clients buy, you can focus on setting up your education system to address their decision-making process.
• One of the considerations, when defining and ultimately narrowing a target market, is to be confident that you can actually reach them to help them know you and learn to like and trust you and your company.
• You cannot make a market out of people who should need what you offer, even if they desperately do need what you offer.
• When making the final determination of whether you should narrow your focus on a given market niche, you must determine if this market values what you have to offer enough to pay a premium for your expertise and understanding of this given market.
• By this point you should have discovered all there is to know about your Ideal Prospect. Now you’ve got a decision to make. Is this a viable market?
- Is the market large enough to support your business growth goals?
- Can you easily promote your business to the decision makers in this market?
- Does this market value what you do enough to pay a premium?
• By focusing on a very specific market niche you are free to develop products and services tailored to its specific needs. Your language and processes then can send a very clear signal that you do indeed understand those unique needs.
• Niche markets can be easier to communicate with. A specific industry will likely have a trade association, publication, or mailing list readily available. Personalizing your marketing to this easily identifiable group and identifying them by name (construction company owners, salon owners, or chronic headache sufferers) will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your communications.
• When you focus on a narrow target market, you will often encounter much less competition and hold a competitive edge over generalists who claim to also serve this market.
• In some cases, you may need to segment your market into several very distinct markets. This may be because your ideal target markets have different needs for your product, or it may be because different products or services that you offer appeal to different, distinct markets.
• If you don’t know enough about your existing clients to answer that question, then you need to create a Client Profile Tracker. The Client Profile Tracker is a sheet or form that you create to keep track of as much information about your client as possible.
Chapter 2. Discover Your Core Marketing Messages
• The most powerful marketing strategy has little to do with advertising, direct mail, websites, or referrals. Before any of those things will really have any impact on your business, you’ve got to uncover and communicate a way in which your business is different from every other business that says they do what you do.
• You must discover and commit to something that allows your firm to differentiate itself in the minds of your prospects. This claim must be powerful and intentional—even if you must alter some aspect of your business to achieve it. Once this is done you must create a Core Message that allows you to quickly communicate this difference, or you will never be able to break from the grip of the commodity business.
• If your prospects can’t identify some specific way in which your firm is unique, they will default to the only thing they can measure—price.
• Find something that separates you from your competition; become it and speak it to everyone you meet. Quality isn’t it, good service isn’t it, fair pricing—not it. These are all expectations.
• Being different for difference’s sake isn’t enough. An identifiable target market must value the difference for it to be a candidate for your Core Message.
• In some cases, you may have already become known for a certain type of work or position. In those cases, your task may be to simply communicate what you already know. In most cases, however, it is not that obvious, so the best way to get at your positioning is to ask your clients. It is amazing how often your clients will be able to articulate the best positioning for your firm, even if you can’t.
• Many times you can find a unique position to claim by simply discovering gaps that no one else is filling. Study your competition as thoroughly as possible to see if you can find opportunities to stake your claim.
Chapter 3. Wake Up the Senses with an Image to Match Your Message
• When it comes to your business, a properly executed identity can set the expectation for your client or potential client’s experience with your firm.
• First impressions are vital, and when it comes to making them, the eyes are the first participants. The eyes consume vast amounts of information and relay it the brain unconsciously. It’s this process that allows humans to (right or wrong) make snap judgments about whether something appeals to them or not. In many cases, this snap judgment is all that your firm will ever receive.
• Businesses become successful by practicing systematic approaches to marketing, selling, manufacturing, implementing, consulting, delivering, and customer service. When I say systematic, in this case, I often mean unconsciously systematic. A business or salesperson finds a strategy or tactic that works and repeats it, at least to some degree. Really successful businesses take this a step further—they document this successful system so that it can be accurately duplicated by many other people.
• Every one of your marketing, fulfillment, delivery, and customer service processes or systems should become a marketing element. Give each of your systems and processes names, and they will become valuable marketing assets.
Chapter 4. Create Products and Services for Every Stage of Client Development
• Too often, businesses develop one core offering and hope to sell that and only that to a target market. This all-or-nothing approach is limiting from a marketing standpoint. Marketing is really much more like dating—first a movie, then dinner, perhaps dancing, and then, maybe, marriage, raising children, and spending the summers in your mountain hideaway.
• Businesses need to move their target prospects along a logical path toward a group of offerings geared to address the various stages of client development. This gradual, trust-building approach allows businesses to charge much more for their products and services while enjoying a much greater relationship with their clients. And the process of marketing becomes much easier.
• Once you define your Ideal Prospect and determine your target market characteristics, you really only have what I like to call a group of suspects. You suspect that they may need what you have to sell, but that’s it. The point of your initial marketing to this group is to get them to identify themselves as a true prospect so that you can gain permission to market to them. Eventually, through continued systematic efforts, some number of these prospects become clients and then become repeat, premium clients and, eventually, champions and a prime source of referrals. But each stage is attained by applying specific marketing strategies and offers to gain an identified action.
• A marketing or sales funnel is a model where you attempt to generate leads on a broad scale and then “funnel” them toward becoming a client with increased contact and content. This funnel concept is incomplete when it comes to the small business, as it leaves out the entire notion of what you might do with your clients once you get them to make a purchase.
• The greatest opportunity for real growth in most businesses comes from selling your existing clients more products and more expensive services and from the referrals generated from those clients. The marketing hourglass takes the idea of funneling suspects into your marketing machine and adds the intention of expanded product and service opportunities—thus the hourglass.
• Almost every small business doesn’t charge enough for their products and services. This is due in part to a lack of confidence, part to a feeling of competition, and part because they have never strategically educated their clients as to the value of what they have to offer.
• For the most part, your premium products will only be marketed to highly qualified clients who already know, like, and trust you. They will expect to pay a premium for these premium products and if presented correctly, they will feel privileged to do so. That’s not a statement of arrogance as much as a statement of what people choose to do when they are allowed to appreciate value.
Chapter 5. Produce Marketing Materials that Educate
• Your marketing materials can do the job of selling if you focus on creating a set of materials that provide education for readers—an education that compels them to buy.
• Most small business owners can’t really articulate why someone should buy from them. This is a place where Copycat Marketing—looking at competitors and copying their marketing—is at its worst. Lacking a compelling argument, many small business owners attempt to fill brochures with nice sound bites or product descriptions. This type of marketing, typically housed in the tri-fold brochure, does little to help you stand out in a crowd, let alone educate.
• Create a toolkit of marketing materials that are flexible, affordable, personal, practical, and, most importantly, educational. The very process used to create these materials will provide you with a valuable education as well. The simple process of documenting your organization’s most compelling features can, in itself, help bring clarity to the real benefits your firm has to offer.
Chapter 6. A Website That Works Day and Night
• If you don’t already have a website, heed this warning: harness the Internet or prepare to become obsolete.
• The primary purpose of a website is to act as a tool to integrate and connect all of your marketing communication and education.
Chapter 7. Get Your Entire Team Involved in Marketing
• If you accept that your business is essentially a marketing business, it’s not much of leap to grasp that marketing is, to some degree, everyone’s job.
• Everyone in your organization that comes into contact with your clients or prospects is performing a marketing function. The question is whether they are performing it with a marketing intention or not.
• No amount of training for your staff will help if you don’t take responsibility for owning the marketing function in your business. You’ve probably come to realize that your staff will do as you do more readily than as you say.
• While the primary marketing function may necessarily fall to you or some other person in your organization, you need to raise the level of marketing awareness systematically through focus, emphasis, and education.
• It’s imperative that you choose vendors and partners who share your definition of customer service, but you can and should take it one step further and include them in some formal training. In some cases, it can be as simple as outlining and communicating your expectations. Over time, this simple step will help you define and attract your ideal strategic partners and vendors.
Part 2. The Duct Tape Lead Generation Machine – Turning Stickiness into a System That Works for You (Help Them Contact and Refer You More!)
• One of the great ways to build momentum is through lots of exposure. And for the small business without a big, fat budget, exposure is delivered by coming at your market from many angles. You can’t rely on one form of advertising or communication to get the job done. You need to deliver a Core Message through as many vehicles as you possibly can.
• You must have a referral promotion, an advertising promotion, a public relations promotion, a strategic partner promotion, an e-mail promotion, a speaking promotion, a writing promotion, a newsletter promotion, etc.
• How will you know you’ve pulled off momentum? When you walk into a prospect’s office to make a sales presentation and they are already sold. Marketing momentum does away with the need to sell!
Chapter 8. Run Advertising That Gets Results
• Most small businesses, particularly those adept in the art of Copycat Marketing, run advertising that rarely produces results and, therefore, conclude that advertising is not a good way to generate leads or sales.
• Advertising is salesmanship in print. I’m certainly not the first to define advertising as such, but I think that definition fits perfectly and should help clarify how to use advertising as a lead generation tool. So think about that. If advertising is your salesperson in print, what does your ad need to do to be an effective salesperson?
• Most advertising you see is image advertising. In other words, the ad does nothing to motivate people to act, it simply attempts to present an image that represents the company and provides them with some basic contact information should they accidentally choose to contact the company because they have nothing better to do with their time.
• Your ads, your salesperson in print, must stand up and represent your best sales presentation times one thousand. So, how do you do that? From this day forward do not even think about placing an ad unless you are placing a direct response ad.
• When it comes right down to it, most small businesses are really in the information business. Properly serving your customers requires exchanging information, even if that information is simply showing a customer how to use your product. Documenting and sharing the information you communicate, use, distribute, or otherwise employ to serve your clients just makes perfect sense.
Chapter 9. Direct Mail is an Ideal Target Medium
• There are two principles when it comes to analyzing any form of advertising:
- Does it allow you to specifically target your Ideal Prospect?
- Does it provide a high return on investment?
Properly executed, direct mail offers a resounding yes to both of the above questions.
• Start with direct mail campaigns, focus on creating letters and offers that deliver a predictable response, and then, and only then, look to add other forms of advertising to expand and enhance your message. It is unreasonable to believe that a marketing message that does not pull any response in a direct mail letter will fair much better in a half-page ad in a newspaper. However, it is often the case that an offer that does well in direct mail will also do well in other forms of media.
Chapter 10. Earned Media Attention and Expert Status
• According to the Duct Tape Marketing system, public relations activity for the small business consists primarily of gaining positive mention of your company or your products in newspapers, magazines, news shows, newsletters, websites, and journals read by some portion of your target market.
• Successful placement of a feature story about your firm may produce more actual customers and business than an entire year of Yellow Pages advertising.
Chapter 11. Ramp Up a Systematic Referral Machine
• Many business owners have built thriving businesses entirely upon referrals. Almost all businesses get started this way. The business lands a client, does some good work, and that client tells his or her family and friends. Before you know it, this kind of word-of-mouth marketing creates a steady stream of projects. The sad thing, though, is that many of these same businesses never realize they could generate even more business if they actively participated in the generation of referrals
• Some professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, and accountants, are particularly suited to referral marketing. Very few people feel comfortable hiring a doctor based on that doctor’s ad in the Yellow Pages. When looking for a professional of this nature, most ask someone they trust for a referral.
• As a rule of thumb, the more personal or the more expensive a service is, the more likely it is that a potential client will seek the advice of another. A window washing company, for example, whose crew may spend a great deal of time going from room to room in a client’s house, will benefit greatly from referrals.
• There are two things that often hold small business owners back from taking full advantage of referral marketing: the lack of a system and the presence of fear. When I say fear, I mean things like fear of being rejected, fear that you will appear to be begging for business, or fear that your existing clients don’t really care about helping you build your business.
• Get over it. If you provide a product or service that helps people solve problems and meet needs, then you are doing a disservice to your customers and the world in general if you don’t actively seek referrals.
• When designing a referral marketing system, it almost always comes down to answering this simple question: what would motivate someone to refer you? The good news is—the answer is always the same: people refer businesses, services, products, people, movies, barbers—you name it—if it makes them look and feel good. The bad news—designing a system that gets at this answer can be tricky.
Chapter 12. Automate Your Marketing with Technology Tools
• One of the surest ways to kick your marketing efforts into high gear is through the use of tools that help automate various marketing and follow-up activities. Few things will benefit your marketing systems approach more than the ability to consistently follow up with prospects.
• The trick in employing marketing automation tools is to strike the correct balance between person and machine. Where possible, you want a personal touch that’s automated.
Chapter 13. Turn Prospects into Clients and Clients into Partners with an Advanced Education System
• The only reason why a company would need a sales department and a marketing department is if the marketing department is doing such a lousy job differentiating the business and products, the sales department has to hit the streets and do the educating for them. This is why selling can be such a tough job.
• In the same way that you have systematic steps applied to every aspect of your marketing, your lead conversion process should also be systematic.
• So you’ve managed to make the phone ring. It’s a hot prospect on the other end—now what? It’s amazing how few small business owners consider this question.
• The goal is to create a system that will allow almost anyone to succeed, even with average lead-conversion skills. Maybe you’re a gifted presenter, but does that mean that everyone in your organization is? Creating a system is like taking the most successful salesperson in your organization and successfully duplicate her.
• If you want your customers to come back for more and tell the world all about how wonderful you are, you’ve got to make certain that your actual product, process, service, or result matches what your marketing promised. Again, it’s all about meeting and exceeding expectations—and moving your customers way beyond satisfied.
• Analyzing and improving your processes in areas such as status notification, ordering, estimating, scheduling, proposals, delivery, returns, claims, changes, and billing can pay handsome rewards in marketing terms and may allow you to create competitive advantages you didn’t know existed.
Part 3. Getting on a Roll! (Find Out What Works and Do More of It)
Chapter 14. Commit to Your Marketing with a Plan, Budget, and Calendar
• Before you can move toward the completion of an integrated plan, it is important to set a series of goals that are tied to your marketing plan, activities, and, eventually, budget.
• The ability to achieve any goal is greatly impacted by the goal’s power to motivate you to action, so the more powerful the goal, the more likely it is that you will achieve it.
• Here are ten elements that can make any goal more achievable:
- You must really want to accomplish the goal. If not, then you must find a way to make it so.
- You must believe that it is possible to accomplish the goal.
- You must put the goal in writing.
- You must list in detail all of the benefits of achieving the goal.
- You must set a deadline for achieving the goal.
- You must list what stands in your way of achieving the goal.
- You must list what skill, knowledge, and people you will need to assist you.
- You must have a plan to accomplish the goal.
- You must constantly revise your plan.
- You must make a commitment.
• Small business owners are so busy shoveling coal and doing the work of the business that this glimmer of a long-term vision they have for the business hardly gets any light. If you have some idea of where you want your business to be in a year—in five years, someday—I say, put it out there for the world to see. Let your clients and prospects know your ultimate goal—even if you have no idea how you will achieve it.
• You’ll find that quite often the world will conspire to help you reach your goal, but only if you make it known. One of the most compelling things about being a small business is this notion of clients and networks coming together to help each other be something greater. It’s what makes your story so worth hearing.
• In order to meet your marketing goals, you must aggressively track your marketing progress. You should create a wall-sized poster that keeps your critical marketing goals out front for all to see. Your marketing chart, the process that allows you a daily visual of what’s important, what’s on track, and what’s off track, wields a powerful force of focus on your marketing goals.
