MBA1883 Extended Interview: John Jantsch- Build Your Ultimate Marketing Engine

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that always got your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 20 and today's episode is a special extended interview episode. In these episodes we go a little deeper. We go a little longer than our typical shorter episodes, but for good reason. I sit down with an expert and extract the juice, the meat, the gold that is in their brains and share it with you to help you and your business today we have John Jantz, a marketing leader in our space, the founder of Duct Tape Marketing and the author of the newly released book the Ultimate Marketing Engine. When I sat down with John, I wanted to find out how you too all of us can build our own marketing engine. So I asked him a whole bunch of questions about what's the purpose of marketing in our business? How do we prevent ourselves from spinning our wheels and spend tons of money and time and effort on marketing that doesn't work? How to understand our customers a little bit better so that we're actually giving them the messages they need to hear and how to go beyond a bunch of strategies or hacks but build a cohesive system and a whole lot more. This one is packed with solid gold. Can't wait to share it with you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's extended interview is with John Jantz. I've been wanting to sit down with John for some time because he's incredibly practical when it comes to marketing, which means you can actually use the advice he gives you. He's a Wall Street Journal best selling author. He's written several books that have helped so many entreprene big and small businesses across the world. I've known John for, I would say seven years now. I've heard him speak in person at conferences. He's a really good speaker, really sought after speaker in the speaker space. But that's because in my opinion, he's a good teacher. And you'll see in today's episode how down to earth and easy to understand he is. He's just really one of those people that just allows things to click in your brain. So I'm going to move into the discussion I had with John, but I'll be back to, to wrap up today's episode. But for now, let's jump into that talk with Jon Jantz and build our ultimate marketing engine.

Jon Jantz, so awesome, so awesome to connect with you. We've known each other at conferences, mutual friends, for, so for some time now. But I'm so glad to bring you onto the podcast to share your awesome wisdom and knowledge with our crowd. Great to have you, man.

Yeah, well, thanks so much. It's great to be here and it's been way too long since you and I have had a chance to chat, so this is awesome.

Totally. And I want to start with a question I've been wanting to ask you for so long. Every time I've seen you at a conference or seen you on stage or we're having some sort of speaker dinner somewhere, I've seen you wearing Chuck Taylor's and I want to, I love a good pair of Chuck Taylors. But I want to know the story behind that.

You know, there's no huge story behind it. I just really, you know, I'm old enough to that, that was like, those were like basketball shoes in high school before they became retro trendy. And so, you know, I' always worn them, you know, for many, many, many years. And I just, I continued to wear them and they, you know, they kind of ebbed away and they weren't very popular, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago. And so people start commenting on them all the time. So I just thought, well, I just keep wearing these. People just kind of, it's sort of like a thing to stand out a little bit. Now of course, you know, every high school 14 year old girl's got them on, you know, and so I've I've actually. To tell you the truth, I hope. Hope I'm not letting you down, too. I really have stopped wearing them a couple years ago because they don't look like I was trying too hard to be cool. It was like, no, I wore these before. They were cool.

It's hard to prove that in the moment. Well, I mean, I always thought you rocked them pretty well, so. Thank you.

Thank you.

We got a lot I want to talk about when it comes to marketing. You're somebody I really love hearing, reading your books, just because you're all about the fundamentals, the things that you write about, you know, last the test of time, regardless of what's happening online or what trends are happening. But I want to start with a little bit of perspective. Our audience are hardworking entrepreneurs, and I recently watched your ted talk, your TEDx talk, and you talk about the difference between entrepreneurs that feel successful and those who don't. Yeah. And you pose a question to the audience, which is what makes work worth it. Can you get into that a little bit and talk about what you learned along your studies when it comes to that?

Well, that particular talk I was giving was that it was a moment in time when I had been talking to a lot of entrepreneurs. I was actually working on a book that was really more about purpose. In your entrepreneur journey. Entrepreneurial journey. And I was just really taken back by the amount of entrepreneurs that, you know, I would look at them outwardly, a lot of people would look at them outwardly and think, God, I guess, got to figure it out, you know, he's got 50 people or whatever. She, you know, looks like they're doing millions of dollars worth of business. And all of that may have been very true. But for whatever reason, they hadn't gotten to where they wanted to go, you know, or they. That horizon, which was the goal, you know, sort of, you know, moved away, continued to move away. And I think that that's actually. I think that's actually a real thing with entrepreneur. A lot of entrepreneurs, you know, they never feel satisfied because there's always somebody doing better or there's always something that they, you know, I myself, I mean, I have everything that I could want. I've had a great career. I would never change a day, you know, but there's certain things I haven't finished, you know, that I'm like, darn, I want to get that part done, or I could have done that part. With age, you sort of start letting some of that stuff go because you realize how unimportant and how useful it is. And so I'm at a point now where I don't feel that same pressure, I don't think. But I do know a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly starting out, really put themselves under a lot of stress that probably has nothing to do with their own journey, quite frankly.

I love that because I feel that a lot of entrepreneurs that I work with, I speak to feel like they're in a rush, like they're just, like they have to get to where they're going so fast. And I realize, I try to remind them, hey, life is a long journey. Most professions don't expect to be experts or reach all the milestones in two or three years. I look at a doctor, it takes them 10 years before they could touch a patient, before they even can consider themselves somebody worthy to practice medicine. Where does that pressure come from? Because, you know, you shared a story in the TEDx talk about, you know, the janitorial company, and like, for all intents and purposes, they should feel successful. Is it because we're always looking forward and not at our accomplishments?

I think unfortunately, it's. We're quite often looking at other people's accomplishments too often. And boy, social media has just made that easier to do. So whether they're valid or true or not, you know, peers, they are. So I think that that's a lot of it is, is that, you know, we see what other people are doing and thinking, thinking, gosh, I should be able to do that. That person's not that smart. How, you know, how come they figured it out?

You know, we put a lot of pressure myself.

Yeah, we put, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves that way. I do also think that this, you know, you talk about this idea of being in a rush. I think that what that has a tendency to do is, is try to make us control things that are totally out of our control. And that to me is a. To pressure. You know, we, we think it's supposed to go a certain way. The meeting was supposed to happen. I was supposed to get this thing and, and that I think, you know, trying to control those things, you know, cause it's probably the greatest sense of stress I know. I know that I've been in this a long time, and I know that one of the things that, that I have seen happen time and time again is that if you actually just stop back and witness what has happened, as opposed to trying to control it, many times what occurs is something that was supposed to happen later or something that was actually better that happened. I Can't tell you how many times I've lost something that I thought I was supposed to get or a deal or something, and then two days later, a whole something that I wouldn't have been able to get had that other thing occurred. And I think that that happens enough times and you start going, wait a minute, I didn't get this for a reason, or this isn't working out because something else was supposed to. And when you start taking that mindset, it does ease some of the pressure. But I'll be the first admit that it sometimes feels. Feels pretty, in the moments, feels pretty tragic if something doesn't happen that you thought was supposed to happen a certain way.

Yeah, that's. That's a solid perspective. Yeah. So I want to get into a little bit of your brand of marketing, your ideology of marketing, because, you know, I love to read anything get my hands on. I've read your book Duct tape Marketing. I'm reading now you're the ultimate marketing engine, your latest book. And I want to talk a little bit about how many entrepreneurs that I work with. I speak with people that I maybe even look up to in some regard, especially in the tech and SaaS space. They deprioritize marketing in their business. They focus totally on the product and think the best product will always win. Why is this a dangerous mindset or is it true?

I would say that there's so many, you know, stories of the world littered with the best products nobody ever heard of that it would be hard for me to say that's true. But I think that it's not just, you know, it's not just product makers. I think business owners, entrepreneurs in general, we fall in love with our idea, what we think it's going to do for the world. And, you know, we forget that, you know, nobody really wants what we sell. They want what they think they're going to get because they bought it or because they engaged us. They want their problem solved. And that to me is. If I were going to boil down kind of my point of view of differentiation, it's figure out what problem you solve or can solve and then help people understand that. Promise to solve their problem with your solution as opposed to here, you need this because you have to first understand and be able to articulate the problem they're trying to solve, and then you can go about helping them tell the story that they've already got in their head.

That is a really good advice because a lot of us as entrepreneurs, like you said, we fall in love with our Product we often think we are the customer. When we know the product way too well, we know the problem way too well and we often market to ourselves rather than thinking about, hey, somebody who I'm trying to sell to my target market doesn't have the experience, doesn't know the know how I do and I need to speak a different language. What's a good way to kind of reverse that or gain the language of a customer? So you can use that in your marketing.

Sure. So I'll give you an example that it may not ring true for your audience, but I think it'll help illustrate the point we're trying to make here. I essentially sell marketing strategy but not a single one of my customers has ever woken up and said I think I'm going to go buy. Some marketing strategy never, never, never happened. But they do wake up and say how come every time the phone rings they want a deal or how come my chief competitor shows up in the Google map pack? And I don't, I mean those are the things that they, I sometimes in my cynical moments say those are the things they whine about and that's what you need to start understanding. And you know, one of the things we've done forever is we interview our clients, clients and really get at, you know, getting them to tell stories about. And always the stories, the emotional themes that come out, they're really starting to talk about, well, here's what I really get from working with that company or from buying that product. And increasingly because there are all these review sites now that are become so important in the world of marketing. Google Review. If somebody's got 25, five star Google reviews, I can almost guarantee you that I can find what their core message should be based on what their reviewers are saying. Because if somebody goes voluntarily and talks about the problem you solved, the thing they got that they didn't expect, that's, that's what you need to sell. And we've made almost an art out of being able to pick those apart. And boy, it's going to show up above the fold on their website. Probably before we start talking about all the great features and how long we've been in business and how many people we've helped, it's do you show up on time and do you clean up the job site that's going to show up ahead of time? Because that's what people are not getting.

Yeah, that's, that's really spot on. You remind me of a boutique hotel that has a few, few locations here in Australia called Oval Onishi and the things they market like as a hotel are. It's literally what people say on TripAdvisor. It's literally great shower.

Yeah.

Late checkout, fun snacks. You know, like, it's the things that people say. And it's just like, this is brilliant, yet it's.

So true. I mean, the example I started to allude to there is, you know, we did these interviews and looked at reviews for a tree service. They cut down trees. And every single one of their reviews said they showed up when they said they were going to and they cleaned up the job site. Nobody said, like, they took the tree down, you know, beautifully. They got a chainsaw, they got a truck. Of course they could take a tree down. But. But will they show up, you know, when they told me they were going to come and, you know, that's the kind of stuff, it's the experience itself. It's the kind of stuff that people aren't getting.

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So I know that a lot of people are listening. They've tried a lot of things in marketing. You know, I've tried this, I tried that. When marketing doesn't work, what are the most common mistakes?

Well, the biggest one is, and you know, you alluded to my upcoming, forthcoming, most recent book. A great chunk of that book really extols people to actually look at their top 20% of their clients, their most profitable clients. And I'm not saying forget everybody else, but eventually I'm saying forget everybody else. Sometimes you got to pay the bills, so you take some work. But as cliche as the 8020 idea is, it's because there's A lot of truth to it that most businesses I've worked with, the top 20% of their clients are really where most of their profits come from. That's where they deliver most of their value. That's where they're the right match for the right client. That's probably where they're getting their referrals, if they're coming in. And so what if looked at those folks and said, okay, let's figure out who they are? I mean, let's, let's really identify. And it's beyond like industry and things like that. I mean, it's like their behavior, what makes them ideal, how do they want to solve their problem, what are their beliefs even how do they invest in getting their problem solved? Those kinds of that level. If you're going to understand that, then the first job is to say, okay, how do we go find more people like that? But ultimately the job is to say, well, what else could we do for them? You know, again, going back to the 80 20, I'm a firm believer that if you find that 20%, 20% of them want to do 10 times the business with you, and 20% of them want to do 100 times more business with you. So go to work on figuring out how to take them from where they are today to where they want to be and build your entire business around that. And you'll. That's why I call the book the ultimate marketing engine. You'll never have to go look for business again.

I love that so much because it works like what you just said works, because we've tried it in our own business. Our webinar software, Webinar Ninja, we actually went into stripe. We looked at the top 100 customers, meaning the top hundred customers who have spent the most money with us. Right? And we went on an interview spree. We called them up, we got on zoom calls. We just wanted to learn, like, what are their favorite websites, what do they do, what are the pain points in their work, what they love about our software. They don't. All that kind of stuff. And what we learned is that that whole demograph were a specific niche in our market, a niche that we're kind of ignoring, like, kind of not really. We're trying to attract all these different kinds of businesses. And it changed our business for the last couple years because now we just focus on those people which are creators, writers, you know, speakers, trainers, teachers that are looking to do webinars. And these people are the best of the best in our cohort. And it doesn't mean we're saying no to everybody else. It just means we're going to just talk directly to these people, and it just helps us. First of all, it's a huge relief. First of all, I'm like, oh, I don't have to talk to everybody now. I can just talk to my people, you know? Second of all, it just. It's actually really cost effective to market to only a specific group. And that kind of leads me to my next question, is that once I do that exercise, once I know who I'm talking to, what's the next step? How do I get them to come to my door?

You bet. So it goes back to that whole problem solving. You know, once you really start understanding them at that level, then you have to figure out what their journey is to solve their problems. And so we profess something that I developed quite a long time ago called the marketing hourglass. And the marketing hourglass has seven stages. No, like trust, try, buy, repeat, refer. And those words are chosen specifically because I believe they're the behaviors that we as buyers all want to go on or interact. The companies that we do business with, we want to come to know businesses. We certainly want to like them. We're not going to buy from them unless we feel like we can trust their solution. It's always great if we can have a way to try them. We want the buying experience to stay high as everything they promised, the onboarding, the communication, all that kind of good stuff. We certainly, once we're happy, we're not going to go anywhere. They're solving my needs. I'll stay with you forever, as long as it keeps working and you do what you say you're going to do. And then I think as human beings, we're all wired to talk about companies that exceed our expectations, that surprise us, and so that turns into the referral bucket. So if those are truly the seven stages, it's more about. It's less about creating demand for our products and services, more about organizing that behavior. And so that really starts with that deep understanding of the problems that they're trying to solve. And a lot of times that early part in the journey, they certainly aren't connecting their problems they're trying to solve with our solution. And so when we try to say you need a webinar solution, and they haven't even realized that their problem is they don't talk to enough people or they can't, you know, they can't, you know, they can't reach people in certain ways. They can't grow their Business, because they're not, you know, building a tribe. I mean, all those kinds of things are the problems they're trying to solve. And if we talk to them, helping them understand how to solve that, we eventually are going to get the opportunity to say, oh, by the way, did you know that this. You know, now that you understand what your problem is, and now that you understand some of the symptoms and some of the ideas, here's a perfect solution that really addresses that problem. And so that's why content, of course, is such an integral part of that guiding the customer journey. It's really the voice of strategy more than a tactic today. But if you pair that with content and processes and campaigns, with sort of gently moving people through those seven stages, that's how you attract ideal clients. That's how you keep ideal clients. In some ways, that's how you teach somebody, you know, how to be an ideal client.

I love this because you're really getting.

Beyond the idea of, like, I need to do Facebook ads. I need to do, like, let's back up a little bit. Let's understand who you're targeting, let's understand who you're talking to. The solution they're looking for, what is going to attract them to that solution. Like, you know, you know, what are the words they need to hear? I think Dan Martell calls it chocolate broccoli, where he put chocolate on top of the broccoli so they eat the broccoli. I gotta ask you about one. You have a new book coming out, the ultimate marketing engine, but you've written several books. You're a Wall Street Journal bestseller. You are a prolific author when it comes to marketing and business and sales. Why did you decide to write another book? I know writing a book is a lot of work. I know that it takes a lot of time. What was your goal with writing this book? You obviously had to have some driving force to force you to write another one.

I will tell you that this is my seventh book. And when you have fairly successful book sales, publishers put a lot of pressure on you to write another book. I'll be flat honest, that is part of the driving force, because I could ride off into the sunset probably without writing another book.

However.

However, I signed the contract for this book, actually not really knowing what I was going to write about. And that's another luxury of having a track record is publishers are like, sure, you wanted to write another book. We don't need a proposal. But the bad thing about that was I really didn't go into this with, like, I've got the perfect idea. And I signed the contract for this in the first part of March in 2020. And I don't know if some of your listeners remember where they were in March of 2020.

What a pivotal time.

Short after the world went into lockdown, at least where I was, the actual city itself went into lockdown. And one of the things that happened over there. So I didn't want to write a book like how to Market in the Time of COVID because nobody wanted that book. But there's no question that what I saw go on informed and colored a lot of what I ended up writing about. And what I mean by that is I had a lot of clients that by no fault of their own, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, wrong industry, really got wiped out in some cases. But I also saw a number of our clients not just survive, but thrive. And the key characteristic was that in almost all cases they. I won't say they benefited, because that sounds so wrong, but they thrived during this really tough time because they were meaningful in the lives of their customers. Their customers wanted them to.

They made the cut.

Yeah, I mean, they wanted them to be around. They were like, what can we do to make sure we're going to stick with you? I mean, and I think that that's always been true. But sometimes in really good times, businesses just benefit from being in the wake. But in tough times, the businesses that really survive and thrive are those that are meaningful in the lives in some way to their customers. And so that really became kind of the great mantra of this book. How could we start viewing our customers more like members? And I don't mean a membership model. I mean, that can be a good model, but I mean more along the lines of instead of looking for a simple transaction, how could we actually bring. Bring a transformation in their lives? And how can we build our business and make that our mission for a business as opposed to, oh yeah, I wanted to have 50 employees and $100 million or whatever the goal might be that it be. How can I build a strategy where I could take every one of my customers from where they are to where they want to be? How could I be that measure of transformation in their lives? You may not have the answer, but I do introduce something that we've been using for a number of years called the Customer Success Track that really tries to get at. Teach how to look at these stages and the characteristics and the challenges of their customers at each of those stages, and then develop milestones and tasks and offerings that could actually help them move through those stages.

This is so true. The whole membership idea, seeing your customers as not just customers now, but customers for life. And it doesn't matter what you do, because I used to be in the business consulting world, and I remember hunting for new clients constantly, the hamster wheel. And now that I run a SaaS business, it's so clear to me. It's so easy to sell to your existing customers like they're already sold on you. In fact, sometimes I run like paid webinars to teach a concept. We get more registrants on the paid webinar than the free ones, and people don't understand why. And I want you to talk a little bit more about why is it so easy to. To sell to your existing customers and see them as members and see somebody that you're just going to continue to give value and solve more problems for them?

Well, I think you hit on the number one word, and that's trust. I mean, they already trust you. In some cases, they feel as though they've gotten far more value than they've paid for. Because if you are running your business with this mindset that we're talking about, you're constantly giving them value. You're constantly doing things that they didn't expect. You're providing more education, you're adding features that they didn't pay for originally, they didn't know they were going to get. You're responding to their requests for things. And so I think that that has a lot to do with it. You've got this, maybe in some cases, long track record of being somebody that's served them. I shudder to try this idea, but I sometimes wonder. I mean, I've written about 4,500 blog posts and over the years, and most of the time, those blog posts are just telling people how to do stuff. And I get, I don't know, a dozen a week emails from people just saying, you've made a difference in my life. You've been, I'm blown away by some $100 million companies that said that, like, Duct Tape Marketing was the first book they bought and that that's what they built their sort of model around. And you're just like, holy crap. That kind of impact is so humbling. But it's also just. It's what makes doing this, you know, so meaningful. And I think that, that, you know, people that have that kind of mindset, like, I know you do, you know, it's much easier to then go out. You could probably go out to your client base and say, look, we had a really down month. You don't you mind paying us 10 bucks extra this month? And I'm. I'm guessing some percentage of them would say, hey, Omar, I'm on. You know, here's is.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's definitely where everybody wants to be with our customers. I just want to touch on something that you mentioned in your book that I got to. When I was, you know, getting started with it. You encourage every business to ponder some visionary and strategic problems. One of them is, are you struggling to stand out from competitors? Yep. Okay. Why is this so hard for so many small business owners? This idea of like. Like thinking about the competition standing out, differentiating. I feel like this is, like, I hear this all the time. Like, I'm not different enough. You know, my competitors are eating me alive. Why is this such a big problem?

You know, I think that. I think it's ingrained in society, quite frankly. Let's go back to grade school. Did you want to be that different kid? You know, I still see that every single day with entrepreneurs. It's like, no, we're an accounting firm, and this is what accounting firms do. You know, we can't say something crazy. You know, they'll laugh. They'll all laugh at us and that, you know. And so, you know, that's part of it. And the other part is I see so many entrepreneurs that. Or business owners that, you know, they don't want to turn anybody off. They, you know, they want to, you know, we sell this, and anybody who, you know, anybody who needs this is our customer, you know, as opposed to, you know, we do this like nobody thought of doing with actually the goal. I mean, I say this outwardly, that the reason to define and narrowly describe your ideal client is so that you can actually chase away the people who are not ideal clients. But that thought is so terrifying to a lot of business owners because it's like, wait, but what if they buy from us? And the problem is, sometimes they do.

That's true. That's true. They do buy because you are an option in the market. They might not be your ideal client, but, you know, you are an option. You remind me of a story that our mutual friend Matthew Kimberly shared with me, that he used the word yo yo in his subject line in his.

Email, and people were outraged.

Like, you're not going to please everybody. And this is something. I feel like this is kind of a blessing in disguise for me growing up. You know, I grew up as a. My Parents were immigrants. I came to the States. I was born in the U.S. but they came to the States, the 60s. And I grew up feeling different. I felt, you know, my, you know, I would go to Egypt for summer vacation while my friends would go to, you know, Disney World. And, and they would ask me, oh, how was your camel ride? And you know, I just immediately knew I was not like everybody else. So early on I actually remember it like I think I was 11 years old when I just decided, okay, I'm different. That's it. Like, I can't change people. I can't please everybody. You know, like some my friends will be my friends and those are not my friends. I can't. And I never kind of thought about it. But that translated in my business life where it's just like, I'm not interested in trying to please everybody because I already have so much data to show me. I can't do that. You know, and if social media has taught us anything, even the most beloved people, like, I have to talk about this. I watched the documentary won't you be my neighbor? Which is about Mr. Rogers. How could you not love Mr. Rogers? In the documentary, he, he's got thousands of haters, people that hate Mr. Rogers.

How is this possible?

But you know, it goes to show, like, you know, you only have a finite amount of energy. You know, focus it on the people that are. You're meant to serve, that you can serve the best.

Yeah. Yep. But part of the key though is make sure they know it. I mean, that's the, that's the challenge. There's actually. And I don't, you know, I've never necessarily done this, but there is sort of a strategy of being a bit polarizing that has worked for a lot of people. I mean, definitely make sure that people that don't appreciate your approach or your point of view are not attracted. Because like I said, I was actually kind of kidding saying, because sometimes they become customers. My worst customers were always the ones that I took that were not a fit. I mean, they didn't want to go through our strategic approach. They wanted to rush things. They didn't value the long term view. But hey, they said they'd pay us, you know, and so you. But those are always the worst engagements, you know, so you're, you're better off making sure that those people are not attracted to you, frankly.

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I'm a business owner. I'm listening to this podcast episode. I'm like, okay, John's the man. I'm gonna read his books. I'm gonna read the ultimate marketing engine. But I got $5,000 in my budget. I want to be able to spend this on marketing. Where do I start? Do I get an ads guy? Do I get a team to help me, you know, put together some social media marketing? A lot of people just don't know what to do. They have a budget and they're like, what do I do?

You know, I, obviously this is, I'm trying to make this statement so it's as universally applicable as possible. But I would do customer discovery before I would ever get an ad. And so go out and start finding some warm bodies and talking to them and asking them, does this work? How would you do this? I mean, even if, I mean, if you've, obviously, if you've got customers, that's a great place to start. But if you don't just make some assumptions about who would be a customer and start finding groups where they hang out and just start saying, look, I'm just being totally transparent. I'm starting out this new thing. I got this idea for this thing. People love to help Wednesday. They when they believe that you're not trying to pull the wool over their eyes, you know, and so that, that's how I would spend a lot of time. I know that somebody wants to like, go get a Facebook ads person and give them $5,000 and Magic Presto happens. But that's a quick way to lose $5,000.

Yeah, totally. Because if you ever hired a Facebook ads guy or gal, they will ask you, who are your customers, who we're targeting here? Like, like what are their interests? And if you don't have answer an answers, they're not going to know how to spend the money. They're just going to try to be as conservative as possible. And like you said, it's going to be a waste of money. And I'm speaking not from a high horse, from experience. I've wasted tons of money on ads in my career because of not doing what you said. Market research, understanding your customers. And if you have money burning in your pocket in terms of a budget, hire an ea. Hire an EA to help you transcribe some of these conversations, organize the language, come up with some summaries. There's actually a great app called Spoke that I found that actually helps you with, it has AI transcriptions, but you can actually come up with little sound bites so that, you know, we do this because we do a bunch of customer interviews and then we don't want to just have them for ourselves. As founders, we want to take the most important bits and share it with the rest of our team. Product people, engineers. This is, this is who you're building for, that kind of thing. Um, so, okay, so I, I, I, I'm a business owner. I'm now going to do customer discovery. I, I have a good profile of who I'm going after. This is a question I, I, I want to really be sensitive about because I know people don't like messing around with their website. But do I change my website before I start trying to build out my marketing and outreach? Do I change the language? Do I change all that kind of stuff? Or do I just go ahead and start marketing? Marketing.

I want to try to get the message nailed. I mean, that's the first thing we do with people. I mean, if it takes us three months, it's like we're going to get this message nailed. We are going to narrow who your ideal client is and start talking in the language that they want to hear, start telling the story that they're already telling themselves. We want to get that part done. Then we start piling on some SEO. We start piling on content that's going to actually attract based on intent of a buyer. But the one thing that I think business owners can't ever abdicate is strategy. I mean, no consultant that you hire, no service that you hire is going to understand your customer or your secret sauce better than you do. And that doesn't mean you can't get help. That doesn't mean that you can't hire, especially when it comes down to doing tactics. If you need somebody to write content, just be able to direct anybody you hire. Don't just hire a Facebook person and say, yeah, do the magic. Be able to direct them with a strategic approach, or otherwise you're going to get burned. And I'm not saying they're bad people. It's just you got to help them. And so never abdicate strategy.

Definitely. You wouldn't get a builder to come and renovate your house without some blueprints. Same thing. Before we wrap up our conversation, Don, I want to ask you a question about your favorite brands, your favorite businesses. When it comes to marketing. I know as an entrepreneur, I know for myself and as a marketer, you're always, like, taking note of, wow, that's a slick ad. That's a nice promotion. That's whatever. What are some brands or businesses that you think really do marketing well?

Well, I tell you my absolute favorite. And this is, you know, we were talking before we got started here. I live in the mountains in Colorado, and my absolute favorite brand is Patagon. Just, I love their stuff, which is obviously a big part of it. It works, it looks good, you know, it lasts forever. But I just love what they do, too. I mean, if I. You send anything back and they'll fix it. You can send anything back and they'll give you money for it. They'll buy it back. They actually want you to fix it as opposed to go out and buy something new. They, you know, all of their sustainability things that they do. The founder of the company, you know, is just, you know, is sort of a God in the world of outdoor pursuits. And, you know, I just. That's. I can't. I can't rave enough about that brand.

I definitely agree. One of my favorite founder stories is that founder story of Patagonia. I think it's on how I built this podcast. And he really shows. You also wrote your marketing.

He also wrote.

I'm sorry.

He also wrote a book called Let My People Go Fishing.

Let My People Go Fishing.

Yeah. Which is just an amazing book. And it really gets into the whole. It's really cool because it's basically his management philosophy told through sort of the ups and downs of the brand. And they have had some ups and downs, for sure, but they're certainly in pretty good shape right now.

And there's something about a brand that they're not trying to build for today. They're trying to build for a lifetime, for generations, like they set out to do that. Another brand that reminds me of that is Burton boards like Burton, and they basically invented the sport. But when they started their company, they were not like, oh, we're going to just try this thing and make a few dollars and then bounce.

They basically said, hey, we're going to be here forever.

And I think that mentality is helpful as an entrepreneur to think big, to think long term so that you don't feel like you have to, to make cheap sacrifices on your brand and on your values. And I love that you chose that brand because that to me, at the end of the day, if you have that mindset, it's going to inform all your marketing. You're not going to get the person from the office, from Cameo to do a little snippet for your Facebook ad because it's going to get you some clicks.

Well, I think what you're talking about is just that long term mindset. And what that does is allows you to, to make investments in people, investments in ideas. And that's what really pays. I mean, if you're out there, if you sell a $10,000 product, not everybody can afford your $10,000 product, but maybe someday they will. And so you invest in those people with free stuff and with low cost stuff and with no strings attached help. And that's how you build those people. That's how you turn those people into your $10,000 buyer.

And that's real. I know a lot of people that have actually went through that experience. I know a buddy of mine who went to Mastermind Talks, which is an expensive event. It's seven to $10,000 or something for this event. Jason Gaignard is a great event, but he told me that a few years ago. I thought that was crazy. I would never be able to afford that. And then his business was successful, he's able to grow. But because Jason was on his radar and gave him value prior to that, I think Jason actually spoke at an event and he was like, man, I want to go to this event. Yeah. And it's pretty, pretty inspirational.

Yep, absolutely.

John, thank you so much for being here, sharing your wisdom, sharing your knowledge. Of course, of course. I'll be in a moment telling everybody where to find the ultimate marketing engine so they can pick it up, read it. I always say if you have an opportunity to find a book that's going to get you anything in terms of acceleration in your business improvement, it's well worth it, the value is incredible and John is the best of the best when it comes to marketing. Thanks John. Really appreciate you being here.

I appreciate that. And I will second that idea of 15 bucks or something. On a book you get one idea, It's the best buy that's out there. I mean there's all these 1400, fifteen hundred dollar courses that people offer that sometimes for fifteen bucks you can get just about as much out of it.

Totally.

Thanks John.

I appreciate it.

Oh, it was great catching up with you, Omar.

Thank you so much, John James, for being on today's podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. I remember hanging up from that call and saying to myself, I got to have more calls with John. I got to stay in touch with him. He's a good guy. He's just somebody that can help so many people, so many entrepreneurs. And that's why I was so happy that he was able to be a part of our podcast, the 111pa Show. If you love today's episode, then learn more about John and his work and his books at duct tape marketing.com Also, if you want to put this into action, go ahead on Amazon right now and pick up John's latest book, the Ultimate Marketing Engine. I see it's already climbing to the top of the Amazon charts and for good reason. John brings home the goods. As I always say, a book is one of the best bang for your buck value when it comes to professional development, improving your business, improving yourself as an entrepreneur. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe and you'll get our next episode automatically on your device. So hit that subscribe button or follow button on whatever podcast app you like here using. You keep listening, we'll keep giving you amazing business lessons. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Anytime you can systematize any part of your business, product, engineering, support or marketing, the easier it is for you to tweak it, improve it, and scale it so you can continually to get regular positive results. Try one thing here, do one thing there. That's not a system. That's you shooting in the dark. That's why I highly recommend you check out John's book, the Ultimate Marketing Engine and carve out your own marketing system to continually get new customers. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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