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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Alan Dibb. He is a rebellious marketing rebellious Ozzy marketer, serial entrepreneur, and number one bestselling author of the One Page Marketing Plan and a new book we’re going to talk about today. Lean Marketing, more Leads, more Profit, less Marketing. So Alan, welcome to the show.

Alan (01:30): Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having

John (01:31): Me. I think you or your publisher got a typo in there because shouldn’t that say more marketing? We’re marketing guys. We want more marketing.

Alan (01:39): Yeah, that’s the challenge I’m trying to address because almost every podcast you listen to, every book you read, all of those sorts of things, it just adds stuff to your, to-do list. And I think that’s a big challenge for a lot of small business owners. It’s just that to-Do List is never ending. So really with this book, what I wanted to do is take some of the principles of the Lean movement, which has been very prevalent and very successful in industries like manufacturing and services and things like that and apply it to marketing. And the whole point of the lean movement is how do we get bigger results, more efficiency, less waste by doing less stuff. And so that’s some of the things that I’m trying to apply to the world of marketing. And when I looked at the best, most sophisticated marketers in the world, yourself very much included, their not to-Do list is actually much bigger than their to-do list. Surprisingly. They don’t do a lot of stuff. They do a few things, but very well.

John (02:36): Are there some, I don’t know, things that we’ve just accepted traditionally, marketing techniques that we’ve accepted that really have become a lot less effective and that you think that Lean Marketing addresses?

Alan (02:48): Yeah, I think one of the chapters I’ve got, I talk about content marketing and we used to think about organic and paid content as two completely separate things, but turns out that the paid media and paid content that works best is the stuff that people actually want to watch. So there’s been almost like a merge of paid and organic content. So I’ve created a chapter that covers both paid and organic content really as one thing. Even though there are different platforms and there are different ways of doing things, but really I think search is going to be something that’s going to be a big challenge for a lot of people. I’m sure you’ve been messing around with a lot of the AI tools and things like that, and if my behavior is any indication, my first go-to now for knowledge is not Google anymore. It’s something like either Chat, GPT or Claude, or more recently I’ve been messing around with perplexity. I think perplexity looks like what the future of search is. It’s where it’s generative. There aren’t all of these spammy links that people have obviously bought backlinks and things like that. A lot of AdSense and a lot of spam. So now I find myself going to Google only when I need a phone number or I’m trying to buy something or whatever. When I’m seeking knowledge and information and things like that, I very rarely go there now.

John (04:08): So there’s no question that’s going to be presented a challenge for a lot of marketers, error marketers out there, 70% of the traffic to their website comes from organic search because hey, they’ve just done a good job at it or they’ve paid somebody to do a really good job. So if that theoretically goes away or significantly declines, what takes its place for marketers?

Alan (04:28): I think the thing that’s taking place, and I see this in the behavior, a lot of younger people as well, they’re searching on platforms like TikTok on Instagram, on the things that are coming up on the For You page. It’s the algorithms of all of these platforms like Instagram, like TikTok are getting so much better at knowing what you want without you telling previously things like keywords, hashtags, back links. They were the important factors that really indicated, Hey, this is important. This is content that people want. But those are all very easy to manipulate. And as marketers, we have been manipulating those over the years, and so the platforms have gotten much better at weeding those things out and knowing, hey, this is something that you actually want. And sometimes you don’t even know what you want, but the platform figures it out because it can tell from your watch time, from your scroll behavior, from all of those sort of factors.

(05:24): So what it comes down to is the technical trickery that we’ve all been used to doing, the backlinks, the keywords, the hashtags, all of those sorts of things. They’re massively declining, ine effectiveness and the intrinsic value of the things that you do. So you want to create things that are valuable, that are entertaining, that are inspirational, that are educational. Those things are now moving up and up. So whether it’s on a for you page, whether it’s going to come up on search or anything else, the valuable content, the things that actually help people is actually the things that are rising to the top.

John (05:58): So to me, it seems like there are two paths here. I think that some of the players that control some of that activity, there’s no question Google controls a lot of what knowledge we get. Ultimately open AI and tools like Claude will somewhat control. At what point do those tools start making money off of that control and basically everything becomes pay to play.

Alan (06:25): Yeah, I think probably the logical step for a lot of those tools will be to do some sort of pay per click or some sort of advertising. And no doubt, Google’s probably not going to just let them eat their lunch overnight, so Google will create results. Look, it’s very early days to see how this is going to play out, but it’s very clear to me that the current model is unsustainable. Google searches now are just a cesspool of just spam and crappy links and things that have been bought. And if you do a Google search for a product, you say this product versus that product, you get all of these crappy affiliate links and it’s all just spam and junk. So where do we go? If I think about my buying behavior, I’ll go to things like Amazon reviews, I’ll go to Reddit posts. So they’re places where I know I’m getting, probably may not be a hundred percent fully organic, but I’m going to find things that are closer to the truth than these fake review sites and these affiliate links and all of these sorts of things.

(07:24): YouTube is another place. Obviously you go to experience the product before you buy, watch an unboxing video, it comes with that length of cable or does it work this way? Does it work that way? So a lot of these experiential ways, so people are looking for ways, how can I experience the product or the effects of the product without having bought it. And so a lot of what we want to do as marketers is facilitate that. So if we can be part of that conversation where we’re in the YouTube video, where we’re presenting or we’re a thought leader in that space, or we’re showing people how it’s done, that’s a much more powerful place to be.

John (07:59): In a lot of ways people are talking about, oh, AI is the end of marketers, but in a lot of ways what it just means is you’ve got to be much more strategic, much smarter in how you do things. In a lot of ways, really good marketers like yourself are actually going to be more necessary, I think in a lot of ways. I

Alan (08:15): Totally agree.

John (08:17): I was just going to say, I know you write a lot about, you’ve mentioned product market fit, really understanding the voice of the customer, really understanding the problem you solve, really understanding the experience they want to have. That depth is really what it’s going to take to show up in places like Reddit. Is that mean? Yeah,

Alan (08:35): Totally. And I alluded to in the beginning as a market previously to show up on search engines, to show up on all of these places, technical trickery was probably your main tool, and we found that a lot of people from IT industry from PaperClick really entered the agency space because they were good at that. They were good at solving technical tricks. How do we get backlinks? How do we stuff the keywords? How do we do all of that stuff? And like I said, that’s declined in effectiveness. And now more and more it’s about the intrinsic thing that you do, the valuable content. Even prior to generative ai, we had content farms where people would just generate crappy low quality content. And I Yeah,

John (09:14): They’re just human AI bots.

Alan (09:16): Exactly. That’s exactly right. And so yes, AI makes that much easier, but I think more and more the people with a valuable voice, with something valuable to say are going to stand out more and more. So I think for people like us, for people like our clients, I think it’s going to be a lot easier and not harder.

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(10:52): One of the first things I outsourced when I started my business, payroll and hr. Well, Gustos payroll and HR services can make it even easier. Gusto was designed for you, the small business owner, they take the pain out of running a business automatically calculating paychecks, filling payroll taxes, getting set up for open enrollment. Gusto does it all, and you want more time tracking health insurance, 401k, onboarding, commuter benefits, offer letters, access to HR experts. You get the idea with Gusto, you can focus on the joy of running your business. It’s super easy to set up and get started, and if you’re moving from another provider, Gusto can transfer all your data for you. It’s no surprise that 94% of customers are likely to recommend Gusto 94. But here’s the best part, because you’re a listener, you get three months totally free. All you have to do is go to gusto.com/duct tape. Again, that’s gusto.com/duct tape. I’m telling you, you’re going to love Gusto get started today. So in some ways, you and I have been doing this for a long time, and in some ways I feel like part of what you’re saying too is a return to what brand marketing used to mean is probably where we’re headed with lean marketing. Is that, would you say that’s accurate?

Alan (12:12): I think brand and also really also understanding what brand is to a lot of people. Brand is hey, it’s about the logo course or the colors or whatever. And so the definition of brand is very important. So brand is really the personality of a business. So if I think about you, if I think about myself, if I think about anyone who’s got a strong personal brand, you could take away the logo, you could take away the name of the business, and you’d still recognize who they are. There’s a particular personality. If you read the writing, there’s a particular writing style. Can someone recognize who you are without just your logo, without your name and things like that. So a brand is the personality of the business and more and more personality is going to be integral to doing well in the marketing space. So if you have a look, even some of the biggest brands in the world like Tesla, if you have a look at who’s following Tesla versus who’s following Elon Musk, it’s a huge margin.

(13:11): People follow people, right? Again, similar Richard Branson and Virgin, right? People follow Richard Branson. So people want to follow people. People don’t really want to follow. There are some cases where you want to follow a car brand or a fashion brand or whatever, but mostly people want to see other people, so they want to see other people do interesting stuff. They want to see other people educate. They want to see people do those things. And so the way that you can measure how effective your brand is, what market is sometimes called brand equity, and what brand equity is, what’s the premium that someone will pay over the intrinsic value of what you do over the commodity value. If I’m going to pay more for a Rolls Royce than I am going to pay for a Hyundai Hyundai, even though they’re functionally the same thing, right? I’m going to pay a lot for that brand value. So how much would people pay a premium over and above what you do? And that’s really your brand equity. If people won’t pay a premium for what you do, you really don’t have a brand.

John (14:10): Interestingly enough, AI has actually brought out the scam and hype and high pressure sales. We see it with every new kind of thing, new wave of technology, whatever. You get all the get rich quick people. I’ll just let you put an end to, are those days over? Are we going to see the effectiveness of that kind of marketing go away too?

Alan (14:29): Yeah, look, same as we remember the early days of social media that was going to change everything. And of course, it does make a change, and of course you do have to adapt. If you’re still reliant on print media or newspaper advertising or whatever, then of course you are going to be heavily impacted. But every technological change we’ve had, every change in media has really been about getting us closer and closer to the customer. We used to have so many different intermediaries between us and the customer. Now it’s getting more and more direct, more and more a creation of value. If we have a look at who some of the most influential people are right now, they’re people who have direct contact with their audience. So the question is, are we able to connect directly with our audiences? Are we building that audience? Are we building that email list?

(15:21): Are we building that social media following? Are we building that brand authority? So that’s become so much more important. Used to be able to buy your way onto all the media, and to some extent you can now, but it’s hugely expensive. Very few of us can buy Super Bowl ads and be omnipresent everywhere. Buying your way has become much more expensive because media is so much more fragmented. There used to be maybe few newspapers, a few TV channels, and you could get on all of them pretty easily. Now there’s even just on the internet, right? There’s YouTube, there’s TikTok, there’s Instagram, there’s Facebook, there’s all the different platforms. And so to buy your way now into being omnipresent is so much more difficult.

John (16:04): I know in the book you talk about, and you and I share this approach, certainly a structured approach to marketing. What would that look like in a lean marketing environment?

Alan (16:13): Yeah, so I talk about lean marketing infrastructure with three major. If we want to do more with less, that implies that we need to use leverage. A leverage approach basically just means we need to use some force multipliers. What’s a force multiplier? Force multiplier is something that takes an input and gives you a greater output. And in a lean marketing infrastructure, there’s really three major things that give you that force multiplier. The first is tools, and we’ve just been talking about tools like ai, but there are other tools like your CRM system. So tools really help us with that force multiplier. And sometimes literally, if you want to smash down a brick wall, you could do so with your bare hands, but it’s going to be very difficult, very painful, take a long time. But if we have a sledge hammer or something that will physically multiply our force, we can do that very easily in a few minutes.

(17:03): So similarly, there are tools that we can use, AI included, CRM systems included that are going to help us multiply the force of our inputs. Then there’s assets. So the reason that you and I are speaking today is because of an asset. I’ve got one of my books. Had I not had the asset in the marketplace, I would be not as well known. I would not be invited to speak on podcasts. I would not have been invited to speak on stages. We get so much lead flow because of an asset that we’ve got out there in the marketplace. So having an asset is equivalent to the financial world. If you own an asset and you can generate dividend income or rental income or whatever, that’s something that can just work for you and compound over time. And then the third piece of a lean marketing infrastructure is processes. So processes are equivalent to compound interest. So the things that we do daily, weekly, monthly, the boring stuff, not necessarily treating marketing like an event, but really treating it like a process. What are the things we’re going to do daily, weekly, monthly? They’re going to give us that return.

John (18:08): So the landscape has never been more saturated. I don’t know, I probably will say that again next year, but it’s really gotten hard. Even if you’re buying your way into things, it’s really gotten hard to cut through because people have a lot of ways people communicate in Reddit because they’re no ads there, or they communicate on Discord because they just want to hear the scoop from somebody without the hype. So how are we going to actually get, if more and more people, generationally particularly, start turning to those kinds of places to get their information, how do we get our message out? How do we cut through the clutter?

Alan (18:42): You’ve got to have a message worth getting out for a start.

John (18:46): There’s that.

Alan (18:48): That’s a great place to start because a lot of messages are just, Hey, we’re awesome by our stuff. And so that’s the message of probably 95% of businesses out there. So you’ve got to have a message that’s actually worth getting out. I used the analogy of a microphone. If you’re a bad singer and I am a bad singer, if I amplify that message, that makes things worse, not better. I’m just now a loud, bad singer. So we need

John (19:14): To have, give us an example, Alan.

Alan (19:16): We really need to have a message that’s actually worth amplified. Because if you think about a lot of what we do as marketers is really amplification. How do we get our message to more people? How do we get more people to notice us? So if our message is not worth noticing, if our message is not worth hearing, then that’s a pretty bad start. So that’s really one of the first places that I will work or my team will work with people on, is really figuring out what’s a message that’s really going to connect with your audience? Then really injecting personality. If we look at all the most successful people online, if we look at really all the most successful people anywhere, we really need to inject entertainment in what we’re doing because people will tolerate almost anything, but they won’t tolerate being bored. Frequently, we’ve heard advice from marketers saying things like, keep your emails short or keep your videos to two or three minutes, because why?

(20:12): Because people have short attention spans. Turns out that’s not true. People will sit through a two or three hour podcast. People will binge watch hours and hours of Netflix. People will read huge books and things like that. What happened to that short attention span? It turns out people don’t have a short attention span. They have a short boredom span. So if you’ve got something interesting, something worth saying, something with personality, then people will pay attention and they’ll pay attention for hours and hours because that’s something that’s capturing their attention. There was a guy who quoted him in the book, I think Howard, I’m getting his name wrong, but he basically said, people don’t read ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes that’s an ad. So really what we’ve got to do is create content. It may have a commercial intent, but it’s content that’s actually worth watching. It’s a message that people want to hear. It’s got personality, it’s got opinion. So that’s really what it’s about. How are you going to connect with your audience in a way that they actually listen to what you’ve got?

John (21:12): Awesome. I want to thank you for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Share a little bit of information about your new book, lean Marketing. You want to invite people where they might connect with you or find out more about your work and get a copy of Lean Marketing.

Alan (21:25): Yeah, so Lean Marketing is the new book. If you’re listening to this before May 8th, you can pre-order it. If it’s after May 8th, go play Everywhere. Books are Sold, and I’m at lean marketing.com. We’d love to connect with everybody.

John (21:39): It was great catching up with you once again, and hopefully we’ll run into you on these days out there on the road.