Transcript of The Importance of SEO in Marketing Today written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: You may never want to become an SEO consultant and expert, but I’m here to tell you, search engine optimization is such an important part of marketing and important part of growing your business today that you better at least know enough to know how to buy it. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dan Shure. He is with Evolving SEO and we talk about search engine optimization and its importance in marketing today and how you need to begin to think about search engine optimization really at the strategic level. Check it out.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is sponsored by Ahrefs, the SEO tool set that I use every single day. And listen in to this episode because I’m gonna tell you how you can win a full year subscription, over $2,000 value on this amazing tool. Check it out.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Dan Shure. He is an SEO consultant and founder of Evolving SEO. So guess what? We’re gonna talk about search engine optimization today. So Dan, thanks for joining me.

Dan Shure: John it’s a pleasure to be on your show.

John Jantsch: So I like to talk about how SEO has evolved and since it’s right in the name of your company, give me your take on how has search engine optimization evolved say over the last five years or so?

Dan Shure: Sure. And John I’d first like to say it’s a huge honor to be on your show. I listened to this podcast back in like 2009 or something when I was first getting into the world of online marketing. So it’s a huge honor to be actually a guest on the show now, so thank you for having me.

John Jantsch: Well thanks. And I guess I’ve been doing this a while.

Dan Shure: So SEO has really changed a lot in the last five years because of how Google has been able to innovate how they return results, meaning they’re returning results at a higher quality now, a higher relevance, less dependent upon the old spammy links that we used to see with their Panda, their Penguin updates. That really cleaned up their search results and it forced us as marketers and SEOs to really do actual, believe it or not, real marketing, real content marketing in order to win in Google. That was really the big first step in an evolution.

And then the second one in the last few years has really been their advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence, meaning that Google can now take search queries that they very rarely see or have never seen before and actually able to interpret those and rewrite those queries in a way where they can understand the intent behind them.

And then finally attached to that is just their extreme innovation with things like the knowledge graph and entities. If you search like Steve Carell, right? He’s an actor. They know what movie’s he’s been in, what shows he’s been in, what other actors and actresses he might have relationships with. So those innovations in a broad sense are huge in the world of SEO, but I myself as like a true creative and a true marketer that wants to do great marketing, I love that because it really is pushing everyone to actually do great marketing. And so to me all those advancements are a huge positive.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I’ve often, you hear people whine about, “Why does Google keep changing what they want?” And it’s like, “No, they’ve never really changed what they want, they’ve just gotten better at finding it.”

Dan Shure: Exactly, exactly. And their whole mission statement as a company is to organize the world’s information. So their goal, people have conspiracy theories and they think Google’s just trying to make money and et cetera, but their goal is really to return the best result to the user and get them off of Google.com as quickly as possible. Now there are ways that they try to keep people within Google properties, and that’s a huge balance they have to strike. But they really are trying to deliver the highest value of results to users.

John Jantsch: Yeah, so let me dig in there because I have some concerns. Frankly I think Google, as we said, they always want to return the best for the searcher, that’s their customer. And the end result is that they make more money if they do a better job at that. But I wonder if Google is actually trying to do more of keeping the whole knowledge box. And you can get an answer to a lot of your questions without ever leaving because they’ll put all that content there in those knowledge boxes in the first result. The Google local search results, boy to get to somebody’s website now takes about four clicks off of the knowledge graph or the knowledge panel for their listing. And so it does feel to me like they want us to inform them but not necessarily send them to us.

Dan Shure: It’s a huge dilemma, right? Because as soon as you put a site on the web Google can crawl it, scrape your data, and then put it in their search results with really no repercussions on their part. I think a lot of where they’re heading with the knowledge box, with the featured snippets is mobile. They’re really trying to find a way to deliver answers as quickly and easily and efficiently as possible in a mobile environment. They’ve been thinking mobile first for years now. So I think that’s where they’re going with a lot of that, but, and what I’d love to touch upon in some of this conversation, is some of the opportunities that there still are in search results I believe for businesses large and small.

John Jantsch: And you kind of mentioned this already, and I think a lot of SEO folks are coming around to this, and really a lot of marketing folks. I have a network of marketing consultants and a great deal of the draw I think to folks that join us that maybe are web designers or content people or SEO is they realize they actually can’t do their job anymore without connecting all those things. The days when you’d go hire a web designer to design a nice site and then you’d find somebody to fill it up with content and then you’d turn to an SEO person to SEO it, those days are really over because I think that SEO and content and even design of your website has really risen to the strategic level.

Dan Shure: People ask me all the time, “When should I start SEO?” And my answer, there’s no starting or stopping. I have this thing I say where SEO is happening whether you want it to or not. For anybody listening out there, go to Google, type your name or your business name, and you’re going to find things on the web that maybe you didn’t put there or didn’t intend for there to be there. And in some cases there’s been businesses where you type their brand name in Google and then it says scandal after that in auto suggest. Those are never fun situations. So SEO is like this living, breathing thing that’s happening all of the time. There’s no beginning or not end, so to your point John, and it’s great, is everybody needs to be thinking about SEO from the very beginning. The second you have the idea to put a website online you need to bring in the SEO consultant or educate yourself on SEO to make sure you’re at least covering your bases.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And that was kind of my point. When we design websites today it’s after we’ve done keyword research, at least in my world, because the structure of the website is probably going to be dependent on how I want to show up long term in the content game.

Dan Shure: That’s exactly right. You nailed it. [inaudible 00:07:30] research dictates the architecture. If you’re trying to determine, if you sell services and you’re not aligning your landing pages for your services with the way your consumers are actually searching for them, this is a common thing I see with all business owners, they want to call their product or their service what they want to call it, not what their market’s calling it. And so to your point John as well, that keyword research is going to help you figure out how your market is talking about the thing that you’re selling and then be able to create the pages around them.

John Jantsch: So when you get a client, it’d be great if you started with the blank piece of paper, but I’m guessing 99% of the time you’re unraveling something somebody’s been working on for a while. What are kind of some of the first places you start in kind of a typical engagement where somebody says, “Hey, we’re not ranking and we don’t know. We’ve got a website, we’ve been blogging. Come help us.” How do you start unpacking that?

Dan Shure: Yeah, there’s two fundamental cornerstones. One is what you just mentioned, the keyword research. Everything has to begin with what do you want to rank for? So many people come wanting SEO advice and they have no idea what the goal is, what they’re trying to rank for. So number one is a solid in depth keyword research and analysis process where we are trying to find the keywords that align to their products and services. So that part of it’s number one. Then making sure they have the pages, the content, et cetera to align to align with that and actually drive traffic for those keywords.

But number two’s a solid site audit. It’s a common service now, it’s not fun, it’s not super sexy, it doesn’t necessarily always drive your rankings up, but it’s important, it needs to happen. A site audit is going to fine tune your website to make sure that when you do create content, when you do maybe acquire some back links or do some good PR campaign or something, that your site is set up for success, and that you’re not doing something by accident like blocking Google from accessing your site with your robots.txt file, which I’ve seen happen before. So all of these things are really like the two fundamental areas that I always begin an SEO engagement with.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think sometimes, I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to tell people this stuff is not that complex, that a lot of people try to make it complex, but there are elements that are important. Just to your point, I had somebody come to me and say, “We’re not ranking for anything, I don’t know why. Will you take a look?” And so I took a look and yeah, nice website, nice structure, nice content. Somebody had done a lot of on page work. They had some links back to their site. A lot of the things you normally look for, and yet they weren’t ranking for anything. And you went into their search console, no penalties of any kind that I could find. It finally came down to their site just loaded so darn slow that Google just was whacking them really big time. And fixed that one thing and almost overnight they start ranking again. So in your view, I know everybody’s looking for the silver bullet that doesn’t exist, but in your view what are kind of in most cases the handful of really important ranking factors?

Dan Shure:  So for ranking factors I want to separate it from product and service pages versus content. They’re two very different things. So let’s talk about product and service pages first. Number one, my opinion is you need, this is a common mistake with all e-commerce site, they want to rank for something but they literally don’t have a page targeting that thing. I was working with a client that sells men’s clothing and they want to rank for men’s winter jackets. Guess what? They didn’t have a category page for that. So it’s kind of common sense but that’s step number one is you need the page to target that topic or that product or thing that you want to rank for. That’s number one.

Once you have that page a lot of people think like, “Oh, should I stuff keywords on it or put a paragraph of text above the product listings?” None of that really matters in the grand scheme of things. What I would say is once you have a page that you know what you want it to rank for, winter men’s jackets, in your title tag have that keyword in the URL, have the keyword, and then beyond that which I love, it’s about having a great page that really engages and satisfies the user when they land on it from that search intent. And that’s a lot there, so I’ll unpack that a little bit.

You have to trace everything back to what is the intent of what the user wants to accomplish when they perform a search. So if somebody’s searching winter men’s jackets that could be a transactional search but it might be a browsing search where they’re researching what the best winter men’s jacket is. So guess what? If you’re an e-commerce site but you educate people when they land on your category page, if you educate them to what makes a great winter jacket, is it light weight, does it have the best insulation, whatever that is, that’s a great page that helps engage that user with that intent when they land on it. So Google’s looking at that, Google’s trying to look at things like goal completions, people returning to the site. So all of those UX factors are super important for products and services.

Number two believe it or not is how much Google perceives your brand to be an authority around your topic. And there’s one very strong way that I think they’re doing this and that is with brand search volume, and then brand search volume with your keyword after it. So my company’s Evolving SEO. If people are going to Evolving SEO, if people are going to Google, they type Evolving SEO audit as a search in Google, that’s a strong signal to Google that they’re actually looking for the service that I provide and that I’m a brand that’s reputable around that. So there’s a lot of ways we can get into to actually influence search behavior to do that. Offline ads are huge, Instagram ads are huge. Which is funny because to your point earlier John, that’s not like SEO necessarily, that’s advertising in social media, but it all feeds back into the SEO. So it’s kind of a long winded way to say that all these other factors surrounding your products and services really help that page rank. We could do hours on that.

But let me shift a little and talk about content ranking. And I’d love to chat about content marketing and SEO for a few minutes after that if we have a few minutes. If you have a blog post that you want to rank in Google, again you need to know what keyword you want to rank that post with to begin with. That’s number one. The mistake people make is they have no idea what search term they actually even are targeting. But once you have that determined then there’s a few ranking factors in my opinion that are critical. I mentioned UX, I mentioned brand, but topical linking is huge. So think about it from a user’s perspective.

Somebody goes to Google, they search how to tie a tie. That user might be interested in more content around fashion, around maintenance or how to use your clothing correctly, how to match outfits, whatever it is. So on your blog post pages you need to be linking to your categories of content as well as related pieces of content to help pull that user through the funnel, through the journey of what they’re actually trying to do. Somebody is searching how to tie a tie, think about what situation they might be in. Are they going to a wedding, are they going to a prom? Think about what are they doing and think about how you can link to your other resources one click away from that article on your site to help guide them through that process.

And then the last thing I’ll mention here John is storytelling. I was working with a client. Huge client, I can’t mention them, but very very well known client. They wanted to publish content for knowledge workers. Yet when I reviewed Google for the content that was ranking very well for knowledge workers searches, everybody was doing a great job telling stories. The content ranking was by actual human beings, like authors that people could read their content and relate to as a human being. They could read their story and resonate with that. My client wasn’t doing any of that. They weren’t telling a story, they weren’t getting the person personally invested in who this author was writing that content. Knowledge work. That’s a very personal, emotional space. And so actually telling a story to reveal who you are as an author, get that author to stick on your content because they want to learn more and find out more about you as a person, is a huge ranking factor, and I say that in air quotes even though you can’t see me. And that’s huge. So I want to encourage all the listeners out there, great UX, brand, search volume, topical linking, storytelling. Huge ranking factors that really aren’t talked about a lot but are super important.

John Jantsch: hey, I wanted to remind you this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is sponsored by Ahrefs and I’m giving away a full year subscription to this awesome tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your niche. I use this tool every single day. One of my favorite ways to use it is to learn why competitors are ranking so high and what I need to do to outrank them. There’s so many great back link tools, search tools, keyword research tools, rank tracking, all built into this tool. And that’s why I love it so much. If you want to enter to win a full year of this tool, that’s like $2,000 value, go to Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and find this episode. If you’re listening to this, if you’re on the page, the links are down below, but you’re gonna subscribe to the podcast. You are going to maybe do a little tweak to get som extra bonus entries. And in a couple weeks we will pick a winner and we’ll let you know if you won a full year. So go check it out.

One of the things we end up working with, there’s a lot of folks they just really haven’t had any content. They’re waking up to it and realizing they need to, but it’s kind of they’re almost starting from zero. And there’s a lot of SEO branded content out there that is really trying to teach people how to write that one big unicorn post that’s gonna get them thousands of visits over so many days or so many months. How do you kind of reconcile that with the fact that a lot of businesses, most small businesses anyway, need to kind of view traffic as an asset rather than a couple home runs? That’s something that they build kind of over time. And again, maybe you disagree with that idea.

Dan Shure:  Yeah, no, I don’t disagree at all. I am well aware of the realities of the sometimes minimal resources that small, medium businesses have. So sure, if you have the resources or if you’re just sitting around because you have tons of extra time, you’re not married, you don’t have kids, you want to create some massive guide or piece of content, great. But most people don’t have that. So there’s still ways to find topics, create content, and drive good amounts of traffic with posts that are not these 5,000 word mammoth guides pieces of content.

One example I’ll give you is I had a client, very similar situation, small website, low domain authority. I did some keyword research for them and I’ll be happy to talk through what that process is, but I gave them a topic. I gave them 10 topics actually. They wrote about all 10, but one of those in particular did so well that after six months they had 35,000 visits from Google. And the first 90 days they had like 2,000, but Google takes some time to kind of ramp up in terms of your rankings. Now this piece of content was not some earth shattering 10,000 e-Book or guide, it was maybe a thousand word blog post that I’m guessing probably took their writer maybe five or six hours to do. But it was all about pointing in the right direction, it was all about aiming. And that’s what a lot of people are not doing and taking advantage of when it comes to content marketing and SEO. They’re just throwing out blog posts. There’s no strategy behind it and there’s no aiming at the topic that has opportunity.

John Jantsch: Yeah, no question. So let’s say you get one of those. Like I have a couple funny ones that I don’t necessarily make any money off of but they are definitely top of the funnel lead capture opportunities for me. So let’s say you get one of those. Like I write a post years ago on replacement tools for the Google Keyword Planner, and that’s like number three in Google. I get about a thousand visits every day for that, have for years. Wrote another one about Facebook, same deal. So if somebody does kind of catch lightning in a jar for one of those kinds of things, how do they take advantage of that? Because a whole bunch of people just visiting their website obviously it not gonna make them any money.

Dan Shure: Yeah, I think the first thing to do is make sure you’re measuring everything correctly. So for anybody out there that has something like that make sure to go to your assisted conversions in Google Analytics. Well first of all make sure you have some kind of goal tracking set up to even measure this. But then once you do go to assisted conversions and go to it by landing pages. And look to see if that content is actually driven first click or assisted conversions, because that’s where I’ve talked to so many marketing managers, content managers, and they say, “Well our content doesn’t convert.” But then I go into their assisted conversions and I’m like, “Nope, it actually does if you look at first click,” because often times it’s the first discovery channel. So make sure they’re doing that.

Number two, make sure that for all the listeners out there that you have a secondary or other conversions, light touch point conversions that people can be doing. Is it signing up for an email list, is it just simply maybe following on social media. Make sure that you’re measuring that because not every visit of course is going to be a customer right away on the first visit. So there’s other secondary conversions.

But now to your specific question, what I would say is you can leverage that. That content’s going to provide value in other ways. Number one, I’ve seen that if you drive traffic from a piece of content like that around a topic. So an example is I had a client in the industrial safety space. We created him a piece of content about industrial safety. It drove tons of traffic. It was their most trafficked piece of content ever. Did it convert? No, it was nowhere near conversions or anything like that. But we saw their rankings for their industrial safety products improve after we published that piece of content because Google saw, “Okay, this company is relevant around this topic of industrial safety.” And so that’s a huge value point. And I know people want to measure things and they don’t like those [inaudible 00:22:10] abstract measurements, but it’s there and it happens.

And the last thing I’ll just mention too is that once you start ranking and driving traffic for content people are visiting your website, now you’re going to rank higher in their personalized search, meaning that if somebody finds your content, they traffic that, we they visit your website, they’re searching Google for a product or service that you have, you’re actually going to rank higher because now you’re personalized and you’re in their search history. So there’s a lot of extra value. I think people should be thinking about leveraging that piece of content, cross linking to things that do convert, leveraging that content maybe more for PR, link building. But yeah, to your point, not every piece of content’s going to be a conversion machine. But traffic’s traffic, and free traffic from Google, there’s definitely value to that.

John Jantsch: Well and we’ve seen pages like that if we will link internally to other pages it will actually help prop them up.

Dan Shure: Yes.

John Jantsch: And we definitely try to put some sort of content upgrade on those pages so we’re capturing email addresses and so you can then have that sort of random visitor that came by looking for something specific all of a sudden you can build a relationship with.

Dan Shure: Absolutely.

John Jantsch: So Dan tell people where they can find out more about you and we’ll even link to your audit process if you would like us to.

Dan Shure: Sure. My sort of home base online is Twitter. D_Shure, S-H-U-R-E. I’ve got an SEO podcast called Experts On The Wire. I’ve interviewed Rand Fishkin and Annie Cushing and John Mueller from Google and a whole ton of people. So we go very in depth technically sometimes and talk about growth stories, et cetera. Then just my website, EvolvingSEO.com. Or Google Dan Shure. I kind of take over the first page there. So anywhere in those places you can find me [inaudible 00:24:07].

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well Dan thanks for joining us and I think you’re in the Boston area, right? Is that right?

Dan Shure: I am. I’m in Wooster, Massachusetts. 45 minutes from Boston.

John Jantsch: Well next time in that part of the woods maybe we’ll bump into each other.

Dan Shure: I’d love it.

John Jantsch:     Hey thanks for listening to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. I wonder if you could do me a favor. Could you leave an honest review on iTunes? Your ratings and your reviews really help and I promise I read each and every one. Thanks.

Transcript of Be a Better Marketer by Finding Out What People Actually Want written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: You wanted to know how to be a better marketer? Just ask. Ask who? Ask your customers. Ask the market. Find out what people actually want. Find out what their challenges are. Find out what their problems are. In this episode of the Duct Marketing Podcast I visit with Ryan Levesque, he is the CEO of the ASK METHOD Company. And, he wrote a great book called Ask and we break down the simple three step process to get in the right market, to make the right play, to understand exactly how to message your marketing. Check it out.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is sponsored by Ahrefs, the SEO tool set that I use every single day. And, listen in to this episode because I’m going to tell you how you can win a full year subscription. Over $2000 value on this amazing tool. Check it out.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Ryan Levesque. He is the CEO of the ASK METHOD Company and author of the number one best selling book, Ask. So, Ryan, thanks for joining us.

Ryan Levesque: John, it is a pleasure to be here. I’m really excited.

John Jantsch: Well, so let’s just start with breaking down the ASK METHOD. You’ve certainly made a lot of ripples online. There’s lots of information about this online. It’s obviously thoroughly outlined in the book, but, let’s give it the kind of the baseline, so we can then break down each part and then how to apply it.

Ryan Levesque: Awesome. So, the ASK METHOD in a nutshell. It’s a marketing methodology to better understand your audience. To better understand your customers. To better understand the market that you serve. And, then specifically uncover the different buckets that exist in that market, or, sub segments. And, really there are three phases to the process at the highest level. And, the phases are Discover. Which is where you learn about your audience. Segment, which is where you put your audience into different buckets. And, Launch, which is where you launch your [funnel 00:02:12], or, your product, or the business that’s going to serve those different groups of people.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think this is … Maybe you would agree with this because you created this process. But, this has become even more important, don’t you think, in today’s kind of mass blasting?

Ryan Levesque: Oh, absolutely John. You know it’s a classic example if you … It’s not an example that I’ll be the first to point out. But, we live in a world today, you know, that’s very different than it was even just a few dozen years ago. For example, you go the grocery store and there was a time not too long ago that most of us remember growing up as kids where there was two kinds of spaghetti sauce. There was Prego and Ragu. Now, if your wife sends you to the grocery store to get spaghetti sauce … I don’t know if your life is anything like mine, but, there is so much opportunity to make that decision incorrectly. There are literally a thousand kinds of spaghetti sauce at the grocery store today. And, it just underscores this very specific example that we live in a world where people are used to getting exactly what it is that they want. Not some generic solution, but, the thing that serves their exact needs in their exact situation.

John Jantsch: You’ve just derailed the entire show, because now I have to get up on my soap box about yogurt.

Ryan Levesque: Oh gosh. That’s even worse.

John Jantsch: I know exactly the kind and the flavor and the brand I’m looking for and it still takes me 10 minutes to find it.

Ryan Levesque: So true.

John Jantsch: It’s so bad. All right, so does this … Well before I ask you this question, let’s break this down a little bit then.

Ryan Levesque: Sure. Sure.

John Jantsch: So what does Discovery look like? What does Segment look like? What does Launch look like then?

Ryan Levesque: Totally. So, Discovery. The cornerstone of the Discovery process is doing something that we call in my world a deep dive survey. This is a survey where you are asking a very specific set of questions with open ended questions. And, the reason for this is you want your audience to pour their heart out to you. In their own language. what it is that they’re struggling with. Their pain points. What it is that they want in the market that you’re looking to serve. And, then with that information what you do is you identify what we call hyper responsives. So, in every market we talk about yogurt. We talk about spaghetti sauce. There are going to be people who are disproportionally more passionate about that product, service, or subject than everyone else.

And, the big mistake that people make when they’re doing surveys in their marketing is they focus on FAQs. The most frequently asked questions. And, there’s something that I teach called the Myth of the FAQ and it goes like this. Depth of response is actually more important than frequency of response. So what that means is you want to pay attention to the minority of people. In Pareto’s principle, the top 20% who give the longest, most detailed, most passionate answers and all of your marketing. The products that you create, should all be designed to serve that group of people and ignore everybody else. So, in a nutshell that’s what Discover is all about. It’s going through that process to understand the language and who your hyper responsives are in the market that you’re looking to serve.

John Jantsch: All right. So, let me drill a little deeper there. If I … Okay. I get that and I’ve … You know, maybe I can write my deep dive survey in a way to get some of these answers. If I don’t have a lot of customers yet today, I mean, who am I surveying?

Ryan Levesque: It’s a great question. So, there’s two processes that … Two, two … There’s a fork in the road when you’re in the Discover [zone 00:05:40]. And, the fork in the road is whether or not you have an existing audience that you already serve, or, you’re looking to get into a new market that maybe you don’t have a business in and you want to maybe test out and see if something that’s worth pursuing. So, if you already have a market and an audience in that market, you’re going to pursue what we call the Classic Deep Dive Survey. Which most typically is reaching out to your existing audience of people and running a survey to them. Analyzing the results and then moving on to the next step, Segment.

If you don’t have an existing audience, you’re going to do what we call the Lean Deep Dive Survey approach. Now, the Lean Deep Dive Survey approach is instead of trying to get hundreds of survey responses from your existing audience. You’re going to be focusing on having about a dozen or so one on one interactions with people in the market you’re looking to serve. And, the way you find these people is by identifying different group, communities, forums that exist online that represent the target market that you’re looking to go after.

So, for example if you’re looking to help moms lose weight after they recently had a baby, then you’d be looking for mom groups online. Right? Forums, Facebook groups, online communities where you can reach out and have conversations online with your target market.

John Jantsch: So, would you … Is this process something that you would say, “Gosh. Every business [new 00:07:00], been in business, doesn’t matter what industry should do?”

Ryan Levesque: I would not only agree with that, I would also say that I’ve … As someone whose used this process, I’ve gone into 23 different markets successfully using this process. And, the only time I have failed in business has been when I thought I was smarter than the process. Like, I thought, “Oh, you know what? I’ve had all this success under my belt. I don’t need to do this. I’ve got good intuition. I’ve got a good gut feel. I’m going to skip this part of the process and dive right in.” Every time that I’ve done that, I’ve failed. Every time that I follow this process, it’s help … I’ve succeeded.

And, the reason for it, John is because you’re using this process as a litmus test of whether or not you should pursue a project. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you had two ideas that you’re thinking about. All right, maybe one is helping moms lose weight after the birth of their child and another one is helping, gosh … Completely different markets … You know, creating a better iPhone case to withstands … You know, I’ve got young kids. Kids who throw the phone on the ground. Withstand that damage. Okay. You’ve got two radically different ideas and you want to see, which one is worth pursuing.

Well, say you go through this process. You start getting feedback from the marketplace. And, in one market, it’s called the iPhone market. It’s like trying to get blood out of a stone to get someone to respond to you. Like, no one is answering your survey. No one gives a crap about what you’re doing. You can’t get anybody to reply. But, then in the mom group, let’s imagine it’s the complete opposite. You have an outpouring of emotion. Moms reaching out to you saying, “Oh my goodness, I’ve been waiting for someone to help me with this exact problem. Where have you been? Of course, I’ll get on the phone with you. Of course, I’ll answer your survey. Tell me what can I do to help?”

It give you a sense for which project is most likely to succeed. Which is the under served market? The one that’s hungry. That there’s an unmet need. And, so you can use this process to kill the iPhone project and pursue the helping moms lose weight project with confidence knowing that there’s unmet need and demand in that market.

John Jantsch: I’ve written a lot of surveys myself over the years and it’s not easy. It’s sort of an art form to write a good survey. And, that’s just half the battle. Analysis of the response is another art form. How do you suggest that somebody who maybe hasn’t done much of this, but, now wants to pursue this kind of overcome that hurdle?

Ryan Levesque: I’ll help you … I’ll answer that question by helping people overcome a few common mistakes. So, the biggest mistake that I see people make and one of the biggest objections to this entire process is, but wait a second. Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses.”

John Jantsch: Right.

Ryan Levesque: And they say, “Well Steve Jobs is famous for saying people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” So, to help come up with your questions, this is the rule of thumb. The thing that you want to remember. There’s only two types of information that people can give you an accurate answer to in the form of a survey, or, really in any form of an interview. And, the first one is this. People don’t know what they want, but, they know what they don’t want.

John Jantsch: Yes.

Ryan Levesque: And, you think about it in your life. Right? If you’re a business owner and you’re listening to this right now, oftentimes when we hire someone on our team, it’s difficult to know exactly what it is we’re looking for. Right? But, if you can think back in your career, John. If you’ve every had to fire anybody, whether it’s been an employee, a contractor, anybody that you worked with over the years. When you hired that person’s replacement, what went through your head? “I don’t want her to be like this. I don’t want him to be like that. Definitely can’t be like this.” It becomes really easy. Right?

John Jantsch: Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: So, the questions that you want to ask are around things like, when you’ve used other solutions in the past, what’s been most challenging? When it comes to achieving this objective that you have, what’s your biggest struggle or frustration right now? Things like that. The second type of information that people are really good at answering is past behavior. People don’t know what they want for dinner tomorrow. And, if you ask your wife, or a friend, “Hey. Where should we go for dinner?” It’s that. “I don’t know. What do you feel like?”

But if I said, “Hey, John. What did you have for lunch today?” We’re really good at being able to answer what we’ve done in the past. Past behavior. So, as you’re thinking about questions that you want to ask your audience, that’s going to give you accurate information. Past behavior, so what products have you used that you’ve tried and haven’t liked? Right? How much money did you spend in the last 30 days on XYZ solution? Things like that. Or, what you don’t want. Frustration. Struggle. Challenge.

John Jantsch: Okay. So, let’s jump to the second half of that. It makes total sense. So, I get all these answers, is there … Do you have sort of the same rule of thumb for how I would analyze these answers? I mean, I’m envisioning answers all over the board. Maybe themes that keep reoccurring. How do you kind of put that into usefulness?

Ryan Levesque: Exactly. So, imagine … Let’s fast forward for a moment and whether you do a dozen or so one on one interactions, or, you get a few hundred survey responses, what you now want to do is start looking at the open ended answers. And, you actually want to start analyzing them for themes. Now, whenever I introduce this step of the process, inevitably there’s an objection. People say, “Can I just outsource this? Or, is there some sort of like AI technology that I can just have do this for me and spit out the themes are?” And, the answer is of course you can outsource it. And, there may be an AI technology, but, I’ll say this, “Even as a CEO of a multimillion dollar company, this is some of the most high value work that you can do.”

John Jantsch: Yep.

Ryan Levesque: Because you’re going to see and hear and read in your customer’s own words how they describe their problems.

John Jantsch: Yep.

Ryan Levesque: How they describe their frustrations. How they describe their fears. What’s going on in their life. And, what happens when you start reading these is … I like to get to this point, John, where I say, “You’ve changed as a human being.” Where you walk away having gone through this experience and you say, “I get it now.” Like, I’ve been saying this in my marketing. I’ve been using these words, which came in my head and in the reality my customers, my market, they’re saying this instead.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: So, what you do is you go through the open ended responses at a high level and you start in a spreadsheet or a document, however you like to work. You start documenting the different themes that you see emerge. Oh, this person said this. And, then you start kind of organizing those themes and you want to get to a point … The rule of thumb is you want to identify the top three to five buckets that exist in your markets. So, the themes that you see, the top three to five, which ideally cover 80% of your market. Now, the reason I say 80% and not 100% is whenever you’re do one of these surveys, you’re always going to get some outliers. Right? You’re always going to get people who say, “What’s your favorite kind of spaghetti sauce?” You’re going to get three to five themes and then you’re going to get a few crazy people who say, “I don’t like spaghetti sauce. I like ketchup and Tabasco sauce.” Right?

Or, “I don’t like spaghetti sauce. I’m allergic to tomatoes.” But, the vast majority are going fall within three to five buckets. That’s where you kind of want to land. And, then that helps you identify the different groups of people that likely have different needs, wants, and desires and who can benefit from different messaging in your marketing. Now, a big mistake that people make here, John, and I’ll wrap on this point, is people say this, and they say, “Three to five buckets, really? My market’s like 17 buckets. Can I do 17?”

And, the challenge with that is when you do that it becomes such a big project that it’s an albatross. In theory, it’s great idea. But, when you get to the actual practical work around it, it’s so much work that you end up sticking with your one size fits all messaging. And, never get it off the ground.

John Jantsch: You know it’s funny I’ve used for a lot of years now that reviews have become so important. That unsolicited review on Google Plus. You find a company that’s got 30 or 40 of those, I guarantee you, you can find themes that are probably the things that their clients appreciate more than the messaging they’re using.

Ryan Levesque: Totally. I’ll tell you, listen, if you are a service professional … So, if you do any sort of service work or you’re a local area business, spend some time on review sites for your competitors. So, if you’re a restaurant go on YELP. Look at your restaurant’s reviews. If you sell a product you do the same thing, but, you do it on Amazon. So, you look at products in your category and you’ll see what customers of the product are saying and you’ll be able to do the same thing that we’re talking about here.

John Jantsch: Yep.

Ryan Levesque: You’ll be able to identify the themes that emerge among those customers.

John Jantsch: And, the things they don’t like.

Ryan Levesque: Exactly. Totally.

John Jantsch: Because, it will tell you those too.

Ryan Levesque: Oh, right. For sure.

John Jantsch: Hey. I want to remind you this episode the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is sponsored by Ahrefs and I’m giving away a full year subscription to this awesome tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your niche. I use this tool every single day. One of my favorite ways to use it is to learn why competitors are ranking so high and what I need to do to outrank them. There’s so many great backlink tools, search tools, key word research tools, rank tracking, all built into this tool and that’s why I love it so much. If you want to enter to win a full year of this tool … that’s like $2000 value. Go to Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and find this episode if you’re listening to this. If you’re on the page, it’s the … The links are down below, but, you’re going to subscribe to the Podcast. You are going to maybe do a little tweak to get some extra bonus entries and in a couple weeks we will pick a winner and we’ll let you know if you won a full year. So, go check it out.

So, has your method evolved based on what you’ve learned?

Ryan Levesque: You know it evolves every single year. So, I’ve been doing this now for a little over a decade. I started int his business in 2007. And, like I said, I’ve gone into 23 different markets myself. This is me personally. And, in that process have evolved every single time. So, the work that I did in the first market I went into is kind of like crayons on the pavement of the driveway. And, I’ve reached the point now where it’ll never be perfect, but, I’ve optimized it to a point where there’s simplicity on the far side of complexity. Right? So, things like the identifying hyper responsives, identifying the top three to five buckets and not 17. Certain metrics that you want to be looking for in terms of length of response in certain markets. To help you identify is this a market that’s passionate enough to pursue.

All of that comes from … Basically this is where I put my 10, 20, 30 thousand hours of my life and now I’ve been fortunate enough to teach this methodology to literally thousands of entrepreneurs around the world and that’s expanded my testing laboratory exponentially. Because you see what works at all these different markets.

John Jantsch: So, we’ve been talking about messaging, but, have you been able to kind of reverse engineer this process to help somebody identify really the characteristics, behaviors, psychographics of what their ideal client should be?

Ryan Levesque: It totally helps you do this. And, I’ll give you a very practical way that you can do this. Number one, if you have customers right now, okay? What you want to do is segment your absolute best customers. The ones that you love working with. Maybe these are the people who have been for years. Maybe they are repeat buyers. Identify that specific group of people. Then identify people who have bought from you once and never bought again. Right? So, they had one transaction with you and for whatever reason after that transaction they’ve never done business with you ever again. And, then identify the people that are in your audience on your email lists, on your … You know, Facebook fans, whatever, who have never bought from you ever. Run the same survey to each of those three different groups of people. You will be astonished by the differences in language that they use to describe you. To describe their problems. To describe their life, their situation. And, basically what you want to do then is use that intelligence to say, “All right. I want more people.”

It’s a double down strategy. You want to double down on the group of people who are already resonating with you and your business. So, you want you find more people like the guys and girls who are buying ever single thing that you sell. And, this is a way to identify what makes that group of people different from the rest of the world.

John Jantsch: So, we’ve been talking about the steps in the process, do you have maybe a case study or an example you want to kind of draw from that, “Hey. Here’s this company that did XYZ and here’s what the result was.”

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. So, there’s so many. I could take … You know there are literally dozens of case studies. Give me a direction, John that would be probably the most useful case study. B to C, B to B, what [inaudible 00:20:09] most useful?

John Jantsch: Yeah that’s … I’m going to go with B to B professional services. So, somebody who is maybe wants to put themselves out there as kind of an expert thought leader. And, maybe they’re going to track consulting clients, or, coaching clients.

Ryan Levesque: Great. Okay. So, okay. So, the one that comes to mind right now is one that was recently in the news, just to give you a sense. So, this is a tiny little start up company that provided basically assistance to business owners. So, professionals provide assistance to business owners who are looking for access to business funding. Right? So, anyone on this call right now if you’ve ever, you know, had to seek out business funding from your bank, form a third party provider, you needed it grow, to finance equipment, to finance your business. This is a small little company. Start up company that was looking to do this.

Going through this process they identified the different buckets of people and how to serve those people differently. Created different funding products. So, they took this kind of this service to productizing their service. Right? So, creating a package if you will, that specifically served the needs of each of these different groups of people. And, then within a few short years took that start up business to a company that’s now known as Swift Financial. That was just acquired by PayPal for tens of millions of dollars. And this is a company that literally started in a tiny little office, just a few guys trying to figure it out and make ends meet. And, the story has a happy ending with a big, big fat acquisition for tens of millions of dollars.

John Jantsch: That’s a … I think everybody will like that story. So, thank you for [crosstalk 00:21:48]

Ryan Levesque: We all want that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right?

John Jantsch: That’s right. So, Ryan, where can people find out more about the ASK METHOD and again, I’m not sure are you … I know there is a program that you have around the book. But, are you also doing private consulting?

Ryan Levesque: We do. So, the best way to learn more, to go deeper in what we talked about would be to go to ASKMETHOD.com. There you’ll have two options. Number one, you can get a free copy of the physical book that, John mentioned, Ask. It was a number one national best seller. It sold over a hundred thousand copies. It’s published in a dozen different languages. You get a free copy of the book. Just pay a small shipping and handling. Or/and you can also get a free ASK METHOD blueprint. Which talks about the process. If you’re the type of person that likes to see mind maps and flow chart, it’s going to walk through the entire process at a 30 thousand foot level. That’s 100% free and you can download it there. And, then from there, yeah, we have programs. Online training programs. We have coaching and consulting programs. We even have a certification program to certify people in the methodology to do this for other businesses. That’s the best place to start.

John Jantsch: Awesome. And, you and I are going to, of course, October 17 … So, depending on when you are listening to this. We’re going to be out at Ontraport, speaking at the same conference. So, that’ll be fun.

Ryan Levesque: I’m super excited and that’ll be the first time that you and I meet in person. Which I’m equally excited about and looking forward to.

John Jantsch: Me as well and plus, you know, Santa Barbara is and awesome place to hangout.

Ryan Levesque: Totally.

John Jantsch: Well, Ryan, thanks for joining us and again, I will certainly see you out there on the road soon.

Ryan Levesque: Awesome. John, thanks so much for the opportunity. It’s been a pleasure and a lot of fun.

John Jantsch: Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. I wonder if you can do me a favor? Could you leave an honest review on iTunes? Your ratings and reviews really help and I promise I read each and every one. Thanks.