John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Whitney Johnson. She’s the CEO of the tech enabled talent development company, disruption advisors, one of the top 10 business thinkers in the world as named by thinkers 50. She’s an expert at smart growth leadership. She co-founded the disruptive innovation fund with Harvard business. School’s late Clayton Christensen and she’s the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today. Smart growth, how to grow your people to grow your company. So Whitney, welcome to the show,

Whitney Johnson (01:22): John, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:24): So Clayton Christensen is probably the person that, you know, people that have been doing this, as long as me hold up there is like, that’s the first person that like said stuff that made sense to me. so, so let’s start with the S-curve then, and just kind of, I’m sure a lot of people have been exposed to it in various statistics classes or something along those lines, but let’s talk about how you’re applying it to, to growth into leadership.

Whitney Johnson (01:46): Yeah, so I was exposed to it in investing with Clayton. So we all have our, our place that we learned about it and it’s been around for a hundred years and we used it to help us figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopt and trying to make investment, buy, and sell decisions. And as we were applying it for investing, I had this insight that we could use the S curve, not only to think about how groups change over time, but how individuals change over time. Yeah. And every time you start something new, you start a new project, start a new job. You are at the base of that S and growth is happening, but it’s gonna feel slow until you reach a tipping point or the knee of the curve. And you move into the sweet spot that steep, sleek back of the curve, right? And then you reach this place called mastery where growth starts to taper off. And my aha was is that we could use it to understand the emotional arc of growth. And when we take on something new, it allows us to say, okay, if I know where I am in my growth, I know what’s next. Yeah. So that’s how I’m applying it.

John Jantsch (02:46): So unfortunately, you know, while a lot of people accept this idea of yes, oh, there’s this point where it takes off, you know, there’s a lot of times, that’s the point where it actually dives nose dives too, right? Mm-hmm we get through the hard part and now we’ve kind of outgrown our, our abilities. D does that, do you see that happening with personal development in the same way?

Whitney Johnson (03:04): Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that was interesting to me is as you have now, surmised, I’m very steeped in disruptive innovation. And what we saw with disruption is that even if you were going to pursue a disruptive course and your odds of success increased by six times that went from 6% to 36%. So there was still a 64% chance that it wasn’t going to work. And it’s going to be similar. When you decide I’m going to jump to this brand new S curve, I’m going to do something new. There are, there’s a large possibility that you’ll decide this curve isn’t for me, or this is not going to work. And so one of the things that I recommend is at the launch point, you have this Explorer phase of deciding, do I even want to be here? Whether you decided to jump or were pushed, but then you’ve gotta go through this collection phase. Yeah. And that’s that place where you say, I do wanna be here, but can I get the resources that I need from this ecosystem in order to accelerate into the sweet spot?

John Jantsch (04:06): So I’ve own my own business for, um, coming up on 30 years. And one of the things I’ve realized is that I’m constantly in about 47 S-curves at any given time is what it feels like to me. I don’t feel like there’s one S-curve of growth. Yeah. I feel like there’s everywhere. So mm-hmm how do I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s easy for people to sort of oversimplify this idea of oh, here’s where we’re on the curve. Mm-hmm but how do, I mean, what, what’s your view of, I mean, do you feel like that’s a reality or is that just me being psychotic?

Whitney Johnson (04:38): I think that the S-curve is a fractal that you can think of your life as an S-curve. You can think of your career as an S-curve. You can think of a job as an S-curve and then within that job, you’ve got roles and then projects. And so you can continue to drill down. And to your question specifically, once you start to say, okay, well, where am I in my role on the S curve overall, everything that’s required of me, but it very much is a portfolio of curves that you are going to have a number of different curves that you’re on within your work. And if most of them allow for you to be in the sweet spot, then you can say in aggregate, you’re in the sweet spot. And if you think about your life, you’re balancing your portfolio of SSC curves, where you’ve got your career. Maybe it’s a really steep curve. So in your personal life, maybe you don’t want quite a steep of a curve. So you’re putting together that portfolio. I have a background in investing. So I do think in portfolios to answer your question, yes, we’re on multiple curves. You want to balance them. So you’re not, you know, only on the launch point for all of your curves or only in mastery, but to, to create that balance portfolio,

John Jantsch (05:42): I’ve, I’ve actually referred to it as seasons. I feel like, you know, businesses go through seasons. You know, they’re not, they’re not annual linear necessarily, but they’re, I think it’s kind of what you’re describing. Isn’t it? It’s like, okay, now we’re in this gathering, you know? Yeah. You know, because then that’s gonna produce, you know, fruit. I feel like that is something almost tangible.

Whitney Johnson (06:03): Oh, I love that. I love that metaphor. So, and I love talking about growth. And as you can see our, our listeners, can’t see, but I’ve got behind me, botanical prints of strawberries and peaches because we grow raspberries and strawberries, et cetera. But if you, if you wanted to pull that metaphor, you could argue that the launch point that’s the spring and that’s the time where you are planting. And then you’re going to move into the summer, which is a sweet spot where you’ve got that bountiful, you know, everything’s growing. And then you’re gonna start to harvest when you get into mastery. And then when that decision’s made to do something new, you’re gonna go dormant. There’s gonna, there’s this period of latency where you’re quiet and it’s the winter. As you start to think about moving to your new curve.

John Jantsch (06:48): So, so the subtitle book, how to grow your people to grow your company would imply that this is a book about leadership. Mm-hmm I will tell you that as I read it, I was like, no, this is about personal development

Whitney Johnson (06:58):

John Jantsch (06:59): So is

Whitney Johnson (07:00): That so you are very astute it’s both. Yeah. Let me tell you there, there was a study that came out recently from a ego Zender that surveyed a thousand CEOs and the thousand CEOs strongly agreed that to transform the organization, they needed to transform themselves. Sure. 80% strongly agreed. And so my whole premise, my thesis is that if you want to lead an organization and we talk a lot about how to grow your team and grow your organization in the book, but it always starts with you. The fundamental unit of growth is the individual. And so I purposely wrote this book so that if you only care about personal growth, then you just read the narrative and you can get that. But if you do care about growing your team and your organization, then we’ve got these interludes that are very practical, very actionable on how to do that. But yes, you are, right. This starts with you as the individual.

John Jantsch (07:57): Yeah. Cuz really, without a great deal of self-awareness you’re probably not gonna be a great leader. Right?

Whitney Johnson (08:02): no.

John Jantsch (08:03): So are there some, I I’m sure this is like a lot of things, you know, people read this book and they go, we’ve gotta do this. you know, at our company. Right. So are, what are some of the first kind of new habits or questions maybe that, that people need to start asking themselves as you know, instead of just saying, okay, this is the new way.

Whitney Johnson (08:23): Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that question because I believe in setting small, ridiculously small goals, I read atomic habits and you probably did too. Had em on a podcast.

John Jantsch (08:34): One of my questions actually

Whitney Johnson (08:36): Well, there you go. So yeah. So what I recommend you do is if you find yourself thinking, oh, this model makes sense to me. Yeah. And it is purposely simple. It is purposely visual because that makes it useful. What I would say to you is just get out a piece of paper and draw the S and say to yourself, where am I on this? S yeah. And then have a conversation with a person, a colleague, a person on your team and say, where do you think you are on the S now we have an assessment tool that you can use, but you ask me a simple way to start. Yeah. That’s where you’d start is you draw it out, you have a conversation and then you can plot where your team is. But that initial spark of just drawing that curve and talking about where do you think you are, that orients yourself, orients, you orients your team and you can start to have a very robust conversation about growth and the growth upside you see in this role in your organization.

John Jantsch (09:33): So this leads me to my James clear moment as a matter of fact. Yeah. So you just talked about orienting yourself and I, and I suspect that there is a point, I, I think people probably can orient themselves in the sweet spot and they probably can orient themselves into getting started. It’s that messy middle, that sometimes is really long, boring slog mm-hmm . And one of the things that, that James puts in, in atomic habits is that a lot of times people are successful. Not cuz they have better goals, but because they can tolerate boredom because that’s a lot of what it, you know, we get tired of the stuff. We don’t wanna do it anymore, even if it’s working. So, you know, how, what, what advice do first off, I guess I have to ask you if you agree with that assessment, but if you do, you know what, you know, what does allow people to get through that long part where you’re not seeing any advancement necessarily? And so you don’t really know where you are.

Whitney Johnson (10:22): Yeah. It’s a great question. And what I would say is I wouldn’t necessarily call that the messy middle, cuz I think when you’re in this sweet spot, that’s where you’re exhilarated and you’ve got this optimized tension of it’s hard, but not too hard. So you’re feeling this sense of, of competence and autonomy and relatedness. I think what you’re referring to is when you’re at the launch point and you’ve made the decision, Hey, I’m gonna do this and growth is happening, but it’s not yet apparent. It’s like the, the Lily pads in a pond, like there’s one and then there’s two and then there’s four. But ah, there’s not very many pads in the pond. And so what I recommend you do there is number one is know psychologically what’s happening is that you are at the launch point. It is going to feel like a slog.

And that helps you talk yourself through the impatience that you feel. But then to your James clear or James clear moment to make things clear is if you think about what’s happening in your brain, whenever you do something new, you’re running a predictive model. And so with the launch point, you’re running this model and you’re making lots of predictions, most of which are inaccurate. And so your dopamine is dropping a lot and that is not fun. And so what you can do is you can set those small ridiculously small goals. Like for example, I’m learning Korean right now. Am I studying well because I love K dramas, but am I studying 30 minutes a day? No, I have an app. I pull out dual Ando and maybe I do 30 seconds a day. Maybe I do three minutes. Yeah. But I’ve done it for 103 straight days. Right? Yeah. And so what happens is when that goal is really small, you can hit it every day. You can oftentimes beat it. And when you beat goals, guess what happens, dopamine ding. And so it’s that ability to have those small goals, beat those small goals at the launch point that allows you to basically gamify it and move through the slog of that place where growth is not apparent until you hit that sweet spot and things become exhilarating.

John Jantsch (12:24): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need online marketing, no problem. Semrush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com/Now that’s Semrush.com/now.

So you have a lot of you break kind of the stages down into a lot of things that you should be doing or paying attention to. Or I talked about maybe new habits and I’ll just let you, um, kind of talk about how it applies is collect like a child. You know, I’ve always told people, I think curiosity is really, you know, my superpower. I mean, I’d love to see how things start, how they work, why they don’t work, why something is out place. And so that to me, I was like, well, yeah, I just do that instinctively, but talk a little bit about that. How a leader, you know, or somebody trying to develop personally can apply that idea.

Whitney Johnson (13:32): Well, first of all, I want to flag for you. That is a superpower. Whenever someone says, Hey, I just do this instinctively that is telling me, oh yeah, that’s a strength. Not everybody. Does that just a reminder. Yes. Yes. So just wanna wanna say that one of the things that, that a child does that around the curiosity is first of all, they, and we would go into something and say, I just want to understand what this is. I just want to figure this out. And at that point there’s very little ego and your identity is not on the line. And so for example, I can remember when I was three or four years old, our family had gone to see the sound of music and I came home and we had an upright piano and I started to figure out how do I play? DOE re me on the piano.

There was no question in my mind of like, will I not be able to do it? Will I look dumb if I can’t figure it out? None of that identity ego was part of the equation. And so collecting like a child is to be at the launch point and say, I like this curve. I, I want to be here. I now have to get the data that would tell me, can I get the resources that I need? And, and I’m gonna be able to gain momentum here and just to collect that data and not have it be a referendum on your identity. It’s just data. Can I get the resources? Do I enjoy this? If the answer is yes, then I keep going. If the answer is no, then I stop. It’s not about my ego. It’s just about iterating and learning and growing and developing. And so that’s the collecting like a child where the ego is out of the equation.

John Jantsch (15:10): So it may actually be a superpower. My parents didn’t always think it was

Whitney Johnson (15:14): Then it definitely is

John Jantsch (15:15): so you, you know, the personal development part, I think, you know, people are gonna grow by reading this book. The leadership part in some ways is, might be harder to install in an organization because there’s so many, there’s so many culture aspects that I’m, that keep coming up for me as, you know, just that collect like a child, giving people permission to do that. Doesn’t always happen at organizations. Does it?

Whitney Johnson (15:39): Yeah, no it doesn’t. And I think that one of the things that is increasingly apparent to me, the more experienced I get in life is that so often will say, well, I think this using this as a tool to think about growth is a great idea, but can you persuade my manager? Right? And the answer is, no, I can’t persuade your manager. Um, but you can. And the way that you can is if you will start with you and if you will start to implement this idea with the people on your team. Yeah. And to collect those data points, because when you are persuading someone to do something new, you are effectively asking them to jump to a new S-curve, which is scary. They don’t want to do it. And so what you’re doing is you’re packing a parachute for them to make it safe for them to do that new thing. Yeah. And you make it safe by you being a Proofpoint by being the people on your team, being a Proofpoint and something as simple as drawing an S and having a conversation. That’s not very scary. Yeah. That’s pretty easy to do. And so you have more control than you think you do, and start with something so simple. So ridiculously small, it’s pretty tough to say, well, I don’t wanna listen. No, it’s something simple. You can start there.

John Jantsch (16:53): So you filled this book with a lot of interviews of people that you had talked to that, you know, kind of are, are doing some of this. This is probably a difficult question. So I’ll let you break it up. If you want, you know, is there a story in the book or is there a person that you’ve talked to since, you know, reading the book, even that you feel like has really kind of nailed this approach, brought this approach to their organization and it’s made a difference.

Whitney Johnson (17:15): Yeah, I do actually. So, and they’re not in the book. So it’s a company called Chatbooks. They’re in Provo, Utah, and they turn Instagram photos into, or actually Lehigh, Utah. They turn Instagram photos into books and they have been around for about seven years. It’s a great culture. People like to work there. And because people like to work there, they had a lot of people who were getting to the top of the S-curve. They were reaching mastery. And so we administered our S-curve tool. And our CEO said, Whitney, this is really helpful because it’s giving us a language to talk about our, our experience. Three examples specifically, what happened? One person, the chief marking officer said, now I understand the experience I’m having. It’s not that I don’t like working here. It’s not that I don’t like you as a boss. It’s just that I’m at the top of my curve.

I’m not growing anymore. I need to do something new. And so it de personalized her jumping to a new curve at a different company. In another instance, you had the president who was presumably on a new curve, but he was bumping up against the scope of the CEO that allowed them to have a conversation said, Hey, CEO, go jump to your curve. So that I’ve got headroom on my curve. Again, allowed them to have a conversation. And then the third thing that happened was the CTO who had been there for several years, was taking on some new responsibilities that were putting him at the launch point. And he was kind of uncomfortable, cuz he’s supposed to be the expert. Yeah. It gave him a way to say, Hey, everybody doing something new I’m at the launch point, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable and awkward and gangly. And it gave him permission. And then also could talk his team through that. And so very simple language to talk about the experience that people were having.

John Jantsch (18:58): Well, that’s a, that’s such a great example too, because very different outcomes for all of them. Yes. But all of them, even if they were painful because they caused change all of them very positive.

Whitney Johnson (19:08): Right?

John Jantsch (19:09): Yeah. That’s awesome. So, so when you tell people where they can find out, I know the book’s available anywhere, but where they can find out more about your work as well.

Whitney Johnson (19:16): Yeah. Thank you for asking. So one easy place is to go to Whitney johnson.com and or to our podcast disrupt yourself. But Whitney johnson.com is the easiest place to start.

John Jantsch (19:28): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you in person one of these days out there on the road.

Whitney Johnson (19:36): Oh thank you, John, for having me.

John Jantsch (19:38): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dale Bertran. He has been an SEO specialist to fortune 500 companies and venture back startups around the world for two decades. He speaks in industry conferences, leads, corporate training events, and serves as entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard alumni entrepreneurs organization. So Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale Bertrand (01:15): Well, John, welcome to, well, thank you for having me. I must welcome you to your own show.

John Jantsch (01:21): well, I appreciate that. I don’t think anybody’s ever done that, so that that’s awesome. so, you know, we’re gonna talk about SEO. Uh, we’re gonna specifically talk about maybe a brand or an evolution of SEO, but it’s funny before we get into it, you know, a lot of people, you know, I bet you get this question a lot, you know, what are the big changes recently that, you know, in SEO and, you know, I think SEO’s like a lot of things, it just kind of evolves, you know, like some of the big, like the, probably the biggest change, if there was one is, you know, rank brain, which really changed how SEO people need to think about SEO, but that’s coming up on seven years ago. So I think a lot of, a lot of people wanna see like sudden change, but I think there’s this evolution, but I’m gonna ask you anyway, what are some of the biggest changes in SEO that, that you are following?

Dale Bertrand (02:09): Well, thinking of it as an evolution is definitely the right way to think about it. When I started with SEO, believe it or not was in 1999 long time ago. And, um, even back then we knew where the puck was going. So to speak, like, you know, the metaphor like skate to where the puck is going. So we’ve known for a very long time that what Google’s trying to do is help people find the right information, the answer to their question. So Google’s just getting a lot better at it with, um, AI and, and all of the different algorithms that, that fall under the AI umbrella. So we, we call Google an AI based search engine now. And yeah, AI based search engines are just a lot better at choosing the right content for the query, giving you the right answer at scale than the rules based search engine, where, where Google started out

John Jantsch (02:58): Well. And I think, think you can test this for yourself. I mean, you start doing a search anymore and on nine times outta 10, they know what you’re searching for before you finish. right. Yeah.

Dale Bertrand (03:08): Yeah. They’ve got the data. I mean, they process billions of searches a day and every time you interact with Google, every time you enter something into it or click on a result, it’s watching you and Google’s using that to, to basically serve up better rankings.

John Jantsch (03:22): Yeah. And it really, you know, a lot of times people look at SEO as a way to trick Google, I guess. I mean, and that’s kind of how we used to look at it right. In some ways. And really the thing people forget is Google doesn’t care about us or our SEO or our websites. I mean, they’re trying to serve their customer, right?

Dale Bertrand (03:45): Yeah. That’s really important. And I think how you frame SEO and how you think about it matters a lot. So if you understand that you are trying to help Google serve its audience, it’s searchers, right. Help by giving Google the content that it needs. If you’re writing, let’s say you’re writing a recipe for a Manhattan or any other bourbon drink, right? Like Google has already has access to thousands and thousands of recipes for Manhattans. So like you’re just not giving it something useful. So that’s one way to think about it. And then the other part of it

John Jantsch (04:16): Is, you know, it’s only two, o’clock where I am Dale, but Manhattan sounds really good. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Dale Bertrand (04:21): I should a drink cocktail mixed box before this. So we could really have some fun and record it at the same time. So the other way people think about SEO is whether it’s like a technical discipline. Like people think of, well, I’m optimizing my website, so I’m moving the HTML tags around or moving the elements around or, um, adding words like adding my keywords and, and that’s, what’s gonna make all the difference. And that’s really the biggest change that we see with the evolution that Google’s undergone as they switch to AI algorithms.

John Jantsch (04:54): So, so I taking this directly from something you’ve written the end of, uh, technical SEO. This doesn’t mean SEO’s dead. It means that your SEO resources are better spent optimizing for your customers, not Google’s algorithm.

Dale Bertrand (05:08): Absolutely. So Google’s algorithm is trained to find the right content to find the content that your customers are looking for when they’re making a buying decision. So the better, you know, your customers, uh, the information they need, the questions they’re asking and then how to answer those questions and give them the information they need to facilitate the purchase. Well, hopefully they buy from you , but the better you understand your customers and better, you’ll be able to create content that Google serves because Google’s doing like a damn good job of figuring it out nowadays

John Jantsch (05:41): Does do things like keywords in your titles and metadata and your URL to have a keyword. I mean, does that stuff not matter anymore because they it’s know what it says.

Dale Bertrand (05:51): It’s not that it doesn’t matter. Like it it’s just that it, it makes it harder and easier at the same time. Like it’s simple, but it’s hard to do like, you know, just creating the right content, creating the content that your, um, customers are looking for, but you can really boil it down to a three step process. Like the first one is building your platform. So making sure that there isn’t anything very broken about your website that would prevent Google from calling your indexing, your content. So that doesn’t mean you’re optimizing for, to get the last millisecond of page feed on your site, but you’re fixing big issues that would prevent Google from seeing your content. And then the second step would be keyword, visibility. What are the right keywords? Make sure they’re in the right places. That’s different from keyword stuffing or right.

You’re even making sure that, you know, you, you have, you have misspellings or synonym and all of that. Like it, it’s really more about the intent behind the keywords. You want people, you want purchased intent keywords. So yeah, whatever you sell, you wanna make sure these are keywords that people are typing in. When they’re trying to decide, you know, what they’re gonna buy in that category. And, and then the third step is really building targeted content and what I call multifactor authority. So the targeted content is the right type of content around the intent behind those keywords that you identified in the first step. And that could take a number of different forms, but it really depends on what you’re selling and what your customers are looking for. So remember you need to know your customers. And then the other part, multifactor authority is proving to Google that you have the answer.

So if I’m writing about I’m making something up here, non-alcoholic drink recipes or something like that because I sell non-alcoholic, um, spirit. Then Google needs to believe that we are the brand. We’re the website that that information should be coming from. And so that’s back links, that’s engagement with the site, reducing your bounce rate, making sure that when people come to your site, they stay, cuz Google will notice if they just bounce directly back to Google’s, uh, search page and then the company you keep matters. So like if you were selling non-alcoholic drinks, you could imagine that there are a number of medical organizations or mothers against drunk driving that would care about the mission behind your product. And you wanna make sure that Google can see that you’ve got endorsements of all types. You could imagine from authoritative folks in your space.

John Jantsch (08:10): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need it online marketing, no problem. Semrush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free@somerush.com slash. Now that’s S E M rush.com/now.

And I know the answer to this, but you know, I’m just gonna tee it up for you. Okay. So some might interpret what you just said is getting back links, but you’re talking about something much deeper, aren’t you?

Dale Bertrand (08:56): Yeah. So back links are still important and you know, we work to get white hat, you know, to sorry. We work to earn back links, um, on our projects. So that could be PR, but a lot of it is just making sure that you’re running a good business. So you’ve got customers that are raving about you. You’ve got products worth writing about, and your business is making an impact with your customers or a community or something, uh, where Google can see that you’re gaining traction. So, so that’s why it goes beyond back links. Because if you think about it back links are really a proxy for something. There are proxy for endorsements in your space, in your market. The, if you’re, maybe you’re in the medical space and you’ve got the Mayo clinic, you know, writing about you, you might have a partnership with them. And an artifact of that is the fact that they’re linking to you.

John Jantsch (09:42): Yeah.

Dale Bertrand (09:43): Yeah. So, so we wanna start on, we wanna start with the run, a good business, make good friends, you know, make you earn those endorsements. And then once, once we have that, then we’re looking at ways to translate those into technical artifacts on the web that Google can see.

John Jantsch (09:58): And, and certainly one of the things that they can see better than ever is that they’re the right links, right? There’s they’re links back links. That make sense. That would be logical, that would actually contribute to the conversation. , you know, as opposed to the, you know, round Robin directories that, you know, nobody ever actually sees and they have no authority at all. I mean, that, I think has been something that’s been with us maybe at least five or six years, hasn’t it?

Dale Bertrand (10:21): Oh, longer than that. So I, I should know because we, I mean, I was doing, I’ve been doing SEO for a very long time. So there used to be black hat techniques that worked and, and we did it because it worked nowadays. It just, they have to be natural links. Like you really do need to be building a community around your brand and, and content. A lot of it depends on whether you’re B2C or B2B. If you’re B2C, you wanna build a community, um, around your brand, get traction and make sure Google can see it. And then if your B2B, then the number of searches is gonna be lower is just gonna be lower volume, but still they’re gonna be valuable. Organic traffic is valuable. But in that case, it’s more that you want to make sure that Google can see the company you keep so that you’re, you’ve got relationships with the industry, trade organizations and conferences. And if you’re in the medical space, it’s PhD, sorry, MDs or MD PhDs, which is even better and what, whatever works in your industry.

John Jantsch (11:15): So there’s really a lot of elements here. I mean, there is the technical aspects of content of website that, that lead to SEO. There’s the, the actual good deep content itself. But then in a way it’s actually promotion of that content , you know, to the right audiences that, that then drives, you know, the right links or drives the right mentions or right. Traffic. So, I mean, do you see it that way as almost like three disciplines?

Dale Bertrand (11:44): I, I try. So, yes, but I try not to. So when it comes to like a, a successful SEO campaign, there’s gonna be a lot of elements. Like you said, the technical platform, keyword research, the customer research, the content, and then the authority building. And then there’s, you know, there’s PR within that, there’s a lot of dis disciplines within that, but it’s really hard, especially for small business owners to think about, um, to, to even, you know, have the courage to do SEO when it requires so much. So instead. And, and I, I think I’ve learned about this, John sitting next to you at a dinner a long time ago, where you, you kind of helped me simplify some of my ideas, the way that I like to think about it. We, you have a purpose behind your SEO. And, uh, what I mean, when I say you have a purpose behind your SEO is that you’ve got a purpose behind your brand, a purpose behind your business. Yeah. And, and a quick example I’ll give you is that we worked with a company that was a manufacturing company and what they manufactured was Velcro straps. It’s, it’s pretty darn boring. And I hope they’re not listening to this cause they get excited about manufacturing. It’s run by two engineers. And these Velcro straps are used by electricians. If you’re installing bundles of wires into a big building, you need a lot of these Velcro straps to make sure that it’s not spaghetti of wires everywhere.

John Jantsch (12:56): I got a few of ’em here with all my technology that hook up here.

Dale Bertrand (13:00): Perfect, perfect. And for them, we, they wanted to do SEO. They wanted to build content, but what were they gonna do? They gonna write 50 articles about Velcro. Like, Hey, Velcro’s awesome. For all these reasons, we’ll write one article about each reason. So you could do that, but it’s not gonna help you build a community, build authority and have Google see that you’re gaining traction. So what, what we realized when we were talking to them is one of the founders of this company was he was volunteering weekends at a technical high school near, near where, um, they’re located. And so what we did was we put together a campaign. We called it the campaign to recruit the next generation of electricians. And basically it was, you know, they were going to identify, it was young people, help them pay for some exams, some licensure and, and also help them put a little bit of money towards their schooling.

And what we did was we promoted that campaign. We said, Hey, if you care, and we reached out to like-minded organizations like organizations that care about providing, you know, job opportunities for young people. And there was one that was about finding job opportunities for recently incarcerated people. And we told them like, we’re looking for kids to help. Could you help promote this campaign? And basically when we look at it that way, and the reason why I call it purpose driven SEO, is because we wanna find something behind our brand that we can promote and build a campaign around. And then we get all of those other artifacts of SEO, the, the content, the technical platform, the traction, the links, the authority building the, the endorsements of like relationships with other organizations that are helping us promote our campaign. We get all of that by just focusing on this one purpose. So that, that’s why I like to think of, uh, SEO campaigns as like purpose driven SEO campaigns. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:44): And, and I love that. And before people think, oh, I have to learn this new, you know, tactic or this new technique. What you just described is what people like me were doing in the eighties. Right? Yeah. It was just PR and community building, but we pitched a newspaper, you know, or we went out to a nonprofit agency and got them, you know, to partner. What? So, so the more things changed, the more they say the same, I mean,

Dale Bertrand (15:09): Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:10): Human influence hasn’t really changed or what people’s desires are or what lights them up. Hasn’t changed. We just have to figure out now they’re on different journeys. They’re, they’re in different platforms, they’re in different places. They get their information differently. And we just have to, we have to just remember those principles. Yeah. And then apply it to the technology. Don’t we,

Dale Bertrand (15:30): And then also realized that there was a hiccup in the fabric of time in the marketing space. Yeah. Where all of a sudden these technical people, I have a technical background. I was a programmer before I started doing SEO, but technical people for all of a sudden had all this value because the web came along. Right. And if you could optimize a website just right, or get your programmer to do it, you would get tra traffic from Google. Yeah. And, and those days are, are really behind us. Yeah. Where like Google’s AI has gotten to the point where it understands when a brand is building traction or, or if you like sell a B2B service or something like that. When you have endorsements in relationships with folks in your space that makes you worthy of organic traffic and rankings. Yeah. So now Google’s getting like, just getting so good at what they do that we’re reverting back to actually generating the, the right content that your customers are looking for and proving to Google that you’re authoritative in your space.

John Jantsch (16:26): So that example that you gave you, you give that a name or at least a point of view, which I think people I’d love for you to kind of riff on this a little bit, because I think people need to acknowledge this and, and think about this more and you call it promoting the story, you know, not promoting your content or not promoting your products or your, you know, webpages or whatever, but promoting kind of the whole story, which to me was that was the technical, you know, school, you know, story that, that people got interested in and the byproduct was you got links and you got traffic and you got eyeballs.

Dale Bertrand (17:03): Yeah, exactly. That’s what Google is, is looking for. So just think of it as like brands that are building traction or building like an audience. Yeah. And if you can show that initial uptick, then Google will give you the rest of the traffic and kind of have to help you go along that trajectory help you grow along that trajectory.

John Jantsch (17:21): So one of the elements of this kind of authority ideas is actually finding and activating influencers. I mean, people that you, you know, we all think about the, oh, you know, the top 10 names, every single person can name. Sure. We want them to talk about us and our stories and, uh, content. But you know, for that you’re Velcro person, Gary V talking about, them’s probably not gonna really do ’em much good. You know, how, how does the Velcro, you know, manufacturer go out there and find the right influencers to, to talk about their story.

Dale Bertrand (17:51): So what you would love is if it was your customers and it depends a lot of it depends on what you sell. So you could be in a consumer space where you’re basically, um, you’re basically incentivizing your customers to, to be brand evangelists and talk about the products, review the products, whatever you can do to get them to do that would work. It could be an ambassador program. And then in the B2B space, it, it might not be your customers. A another example I’ll give is we work with a 3d printing company that sold, you know, multimillion dollar high-end 3d printers, but there’s just not enough customers to really, you know, turn that into links and, and relationships that Google would see. So we focused on 3d printing hobbyists in order to generate content and build a community around the brand, even though what we were selling and making our money off was high end 3d printing machines that, that they could never afford. But we were able to build a community around the brand that Google saw and, and generated rankings and traffic.

John Jantsch (18:49): So I, I have kind of one final question that, and I’m just curious your opinion on this, cuz there’s a lot of various opinions, you know, on, on SEO related sites, how valuable are signals in social media. So people linking from Twitter, people talking about your brand from a pure SEO standpoint, how valuable are those?

Dale Bertrand (19:11): So there’s two answers, both are correct, which is the direct value of the links in the mention is not valuable. Yeah. But we still use social media as a tool for PR, which helps us build relationships, get back links on, on websites that Google can see stuff like that. And we know that it’s not valuable cuz short version of the story, Bing had tried to use social media instead of back links because Google started out, you know, really focused on back links to determine authority in the best websites. And when Microsoft started its search engine, they said, ah, we’re gonna do it better. We’re gonna rely on social media and it just didn’t work. Yeah. So they abandoned it. They went to links just like Google and now Google and, and Microsoft are both trying to figure out how to incorporate social signals. But uh, apparently what we see in the research is that it it’s just not, it’s just not good. Like it doesn’t help them identify the best content, the same way back links, engagement, and these other artifacts of real world relationships do.

John Jantsch (20:15): So Dale tell people where they can find out more about fire and spark and uh, the work that you’re uh, doing.

Dale Bertrand (20:21): Yeah. So we’re at fire and spark.com all spelled out and you can email me directly Dale, D a L E fire and spark.com um, all spelled out. And um, always, I love talking about SEO. So if anybody has any SEO questions, I’m, I’m happy to hear it.

John Jantsch (20:37): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road again, maybe in beautiful state of Maine.

Dale Bertrand (20:46): Awesome, John, and thank you for the

John Jantsch (20:48): Opportunity. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason Bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hey, hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I am doing another solo show, just you and me and the radio, as they say, I guess somebody probably said, I’m gonna talk about something that I’ve been talking a lot about lately called the customer success, track little plug for my latest book, the ultimate marketing engine. I talk about it in depth in there, and there’s all kinds of resources. And if you’re listening to this show in August of 2022, you can pick up the Kindle version for 2 99. Okay. There’s a commercial today. But if this topic resonates, go get the book because I go so deep in into it. So here’s the basis premise behind this customer success track. Over the years, I started to recognize, and again, I didn’t wake up on day one and say, this is how the world is over tons and tons of experience, years clients, prospects.

John Jantsch (01:45): I’ve started to realize that there are about five stages of marketing that many businesses go through. And some of them rush through them. Some of ’em hang out in one stage or the another for a long time, but I’ve been able to recognize the characteristics of a business in that stage based a lot on what’s going on in their marketing or what’s going on in, you know, increasingly in their online presence. I know what challenges they’re probably facing at that point because of where they are. But I also know have been able to identify the milestones that we need to move them through and consequently, the tasks associated to each of those milestones. And if we do that, I mean, it’s basically a task list of things that need to be accomplished. If we do that, we can also say, but here’s the promise of moving through that stage.

John Jantsch (02:37): I’m gonna go into some depth from a marketing standpoint. So if you’re a business owner out there thinking, okay, he’s talking about me right now. Maybe it’ll give you some clues to what you need to be looking at in your marketing. If you’re a marketer, if you’re a consultant listening to this and you work with folks on their marketing, this is a great way to start thinking about how you would retain clients for a longer time, because you’ve got a roadmap that you’re working from. And again, as I said, the much, much more depth on this in the ultimate marketing engine and a lot of things that I’ve been writing about, but I thought I would bring it out today because I think what happens is a lot of times people can’t really identify the problem or they think the solution is I just need more leads.

John Jantsch (03:19): Well, what I’m gonna share today is that’s not always the challenge. There is sort of a linear order. to how things need to be done, how things need to be built, how your business will evolve. And I think to some degree you can start recognizing it’s hard if you get stuck because a lot of businesses get to a certain point, frankly, and they’ve grown. They’re doing some things that maybe now they’re juggling a lot of balls dropping a few plates, but outwardly they appear to have succeeded some. And so they, a lot of times dig in and just try to do more where they are and what I wanna suggest through this idea of the customer’s success track and the stages and the customer success track is there’s certain things you as the owner, the founder, the head of marketing, whatever your role is, need to start doing differently at each of these stages.

John Jantsch (04:06): And I think sometimes that’s what trips people up. There are a lot of people that, that they love tinkering. They love DIYing. They love getting in and digging under the hood and figuring things out. Even if it takes ’em all day long to do it. And that has to change. If in fact you wanna move through these stages. So that’s a little bit of what, what I’m gonna talk about today. All right. So let’s talk about the stages. I’ve given them names. There are five of them. I’m gonna go through the characteristics and I’m hopeful that you’ll listen and go, oh, wait a minute. That’s some of what I’m experiencing. So that must be where I am. All right. The stages are foundation level up, organize, stabilize, and scale. Now those are arbitrary names. That’s just a name that we pinned to each of the stages.

John Jantsch (04:53): If you’re thinking about developing something like this for your own practice or for your own offerings that you go out there, obviously five’s even an arbitrary number, but we just found that who we worked with that was a good way to delineate. All right. So what are the characteristics of that foundation business quite often, sometimes, but not always. They’re in a startup mode. They’re very founder driven. All the sales are typically happening from the founder, going out there and knocking on doors. Almost. There’s no website leads coming in. They’ve maybe built a website. It’s kind of a brochure, but no leads coming in. They’re talking about their company. They’re talking about their products in most of their marketing. There’s not a consistent online presence. I mean, we see this all the time. Maybe they’ve got a LinkedIn profile, they’ve got a, a, you know, Google business profile page and there’s off branding off names off what they call it. I mean, there’s just, it’s a lot of inconsistencies. And typically it’s because they’ve not attached any value to participating in social media. They’re not using email in a consistent manner. Even if they’re getting clients, they’re not using email to nurture those leads, to nurture those clients, to actually get repeat business.

John Jantsch (06:05): Part of the reason, some of the challenges of being in this stage, marketing’s changing quickly, or at least it really feels like it. I think it, we run into folks all the time and this part of their, and they just don’t know where to invest. I mean, somebody tells me I need to buy this. Somebody tells me I need to be here. Social media in a lot of cases feels like a way, particularly when you use it the way you see so many people using it, repeat business is not coming your way. And frankly, you’ve got too many tasks.

John Jantsch (06:37): Any of that sound like you , those are the challenges. Now here’s the payoff. If we can fix, if you can fix those challenges, if you can start addressing the fact that you have to look at your website, for example, in a much different way, you have to actually start telling stories. You have to actually start using email. You have to actually start understanding the problem you solve for your customers. Some of the strategic things that go into actually creating a consistent online presence. The promise of that is that you’re now gonna have a website that’s prepared to not only a attract leads, but convert them. You’re gonna get traffic flow from the search engines because you’re creating useful content that people want to find. People wanna read. You’re addressing the problems they’re trying to solve. You can start generating reviews, perhaps automatically using some of the tools that are available today. And you can start thinking about re-engaging past customers. That’s the promise of getting just the foundational stage built.

John Jantsch (07:39): Now, obviously that may not make the phone ring that may not actually take you from a revenue standpoint where you want to go. So what’s the next level of maturity. The next stage, we actually call that one level up. A lot of times people will get that website built that work with a marketer. I mean, they’re starting to produce content that they’re starting to optimize some of their assets out there, but they’re not really converting any of that web traffic. I mean, I guess the first trick is to get some traffic there , but it’s not converting. So, so frankly, if you get things out of order, let’s say at this stage, you wanna start running ads. Well, you’re gonna be wasting a lot of money because until you’re converting traffic that comes to your website, there’s no point sending or, or getting traffic that comes there.

John Jantsch (08:25): You’re not getting into page one. You know, search engine results are on maps in for local businesses there. There’s still okay. You’ve bought into social media, but there’s no engagement, which is really the only thing that matters leads are coming in, but you don’t have any real systematic way to follow up on them. You’re starting to think about online advertising, but not really sure what to do. And then this is what another thing we commonly run into at this stage. There’s no sales process, not one that’s repeatable. Anyway, that just kind of happens as it happens. Now, again, part of the challenges of being in this stage is maybe you’ve got customers, maybe you’re fulfilling orders, but you don’t have enough time to produce content or at least the volume of content that marketers say you need today. You’re not really sure what content to produce online.

John Jantsch (09:16): Advertising seems both complex and expensive. You’re not converting enough leads. You’re starting to have those conversations, but you’re not really converting them into customers. And unfortunately at this stage in many cases, because there aren’t systems built for fulfillment, you’re not retaining those clients. So at this stage, what we’re working on doing now is creating landing pages, creating and narrowing the focus of an ideal customer, creating ways in which we can make content for really, for all stages of the customer journey, creating trust on the website, creating an actual journey with calls to action and maybe some free downloads. So you can start capturing those leads that are, or that traffic that’s coming to your website because they’re interested in something you’re putting out there. So if we can get that now we’ve got the foundation built and now we’re starting to layer on conversion. I mean, we’re starting to layer on, okay, we’ve got people coming now, what’s gonna turn them into customers or what’s gonna at least put them into our pipeline.

John Jantsch (10:19): So the promise there is that, that now first off you’re gonna start attracting higher quality traffic and leads because that’s one of the real challenges in that foundation mode is you might be attracting some leads, but they’re the wrong leads. So you’re gonna get more ideal client interactions at this phase. Search engines and maps are gonna start noticing you, you all, you will create because at this stage, you’re now ready to create some automatic lead capture and follow up. You’re going to create a solid sales process at this stage so that you can start to consistently converting leads that, and in those sales conversations that you’re having,

John Jantsch (10:56): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition.

John Jantsch (11:15): If you need it online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try Semrush free @ Semrush.com/now that’s Semrush.com/now,

John Jantsch (11:31): all right, now we’ve got somebody up and running. So, so you can see we’re kind of building on this. So once we’re up and running, we’re gonna move into organized. Now what’s happening here is okay. Now I’m starting to get leads. I’m starting to have sales conversations, but now I’m kind of a mess. now I’m not tracking client relationships. I’m not really fully tracking my marketing results because I’m running too fast. I’m not upselling. I’m not cross-selling, I’m not taking advantage now of the fact that if I just drove more traffic there, say through advertising, I’m really in a, in many cases, I’m still fighting that competitive dynamic. I’m not seen as a leader necessarily.

John Jantsch (12:11): Now again, the challenges that, that this stage brings quite often is that your lead cycles are really up and down. Sometimes it’s busy. Sometimes it’s slow. sometimes you can keep up. Sometimes you can’t. I mean, marketing return is hard to understand. There’s so many things that go into it. If you’re not really accurately tracking, it’s a challenge. Client acquisition seems really hard or maybe expensive sales processes still at this point are very manual and customer service now has become an issue and is in inconsistent. So what are we gonna go to work on here? This is a place where we certainly are gonna start talking about the need for a CRM. at this stage, you need to be using some of the tools that allow you to automate some of your marketing, to track some of your clients to segment who’s coming to your website.

John Jantsch (13:03): We’re gonna set up a dashboard. You know, at this stage, we want to know what’s working. What’s not working. We’re gonna track calls. We’re gonna track emails. We’re gonna track ad spend. We are going to start thinking about campaigns now to retain customers campaigns, specifically, to sell more to existing customers. We’re probably gonna start talking about referrals here. We are. Certainly at this point can take advantage of some of the online advertising, but we also have to really focus on what happens when somebody becomes a customer. This is the stage where we certainly could go to work earlier on this, but we find that this is where it becomes so crucial that we can make it a priority. And that’s the customer experience, the onboarding, the follow up, the communication, the orientation. I mean, all those as set intentions that we can repeat, you know, time and time again.

John Jantsch (13:56): So we do this in this stage, and now we’re gonna see a consistent lead flow. We’re not gonna be wasting money on advertising because we’re gonna understand what works, what doesn’t, we’re gonna automate some of the lead nurturing, not as a way to shield ourselves from having to talk to customers, but as a way to actually create a frictionless better experience for prospects and customers, we’re gonna be converting the right customers. And we’re gonna have much higher retention and referral. This is the place where a lot of businesses, I mean, getting to this space is really the goal. Many businesses don’t even reach this stage, but also this is a place where now all of a sudden, if we’re gonna go beyond this, we can’t just add more revenue. We just can’t add more sales because we’re not gonna be able to handle it. We have to add team.

John Jantsch (14:44): We have to add delegate delegation. This is the place at which quite frankly, the marketer, the doer, the task doer, who has maybe moved to being task manager. This is the place where we need actually a real CEO. we need the head of the organization to form because this is the, you know, I don’t know where the revenue is, but it’s certainly when we’re gonna go north of a million in revenue, obviously that’s an arbitrary figure because types of businesses are different, but this is the one to 10 to 50 million range where short of a leadership team, short of, uh, you being a CEO and no longer being the marketing manager or the marketing doer has to happen. So what’s happening here. You know, we’re using the characteristics now are actually more positive because you’re using a CRM for sales. You’ve established some marketing KPIs.

John Jantsch (15:40): Maybe now you’re starting to get the room, the breathing room to think, Hey, we can develop new products, new offerings. We’ve got online advertising, working for us well enough. Maybe we’re starting to feel like, Hey, we’re a bigger player. We need to get more involved in the community, more involved in our industry. We need to start developing internal marketing roles. Now the challenge, of course, at this stage, that all those characteristics sound lovely, right? Profitability starts to vary at this stage. We maybe were really pumping in expenses cause we’re buying advertising. We’re adding team. So expenses are increasing rapidly.

John Jantsch (16:19): It’s tough to maintain marketing momentum with the growth that’s coming and even harder to maintain fulfillment. It’s time to actually probably bring on a strategic marketing hire as well. And this is the point where a lot of founders actually have to start analyzing, am I the right person? to be in this seat to be the COO, do I need a COO? Do I need somebody? Who’s actually not only running marketing, but to somebody who’s actually running operations or at least creating the delegation and the systems and the processes for getting all the work done. So in many cases, this is where we’ll definitely go to work on trying to automate things in an elegant way. Again, not to just shield the, the business from ever having to talk to anyone. This is where we’ll make significant talk about making significant investments in both marketing spend.

John Jantsch (17:15): And then I guess a third one operations spend, if in some cases, this is the place, you know, for many of our consultants, for example, this is the place where they need to start adding account managers. They need to AC actually start adding managerial levels in, in, you know, several places because businesses there. But if it’s going out the back door as fast as it’s coming in the front door, you’re not really gonna gain any traction, but the promise here, if we can get this done, if we can build systems for both marketing and for fulfillment here, we can start replicating what we’re doing. We start replicating what you used to be doing maybe as the founder and the startup, and this is gonna actually lead to consistent lead conversion, which certainly is going to lead to consistent growth. This is where word of mouth and referral generation just starts happening.

John Jantsch (18:04): Steadily your business really becomes start starting at this point to become an asset to the owner of the business, because it’s not as dependent on you. And frankly, if you ever wanna talk about exiting your business or selling your business, I mean, that’s certainly one of the criteria. Somebody has to be able to see how this would run without you. You know, there are many businesses that get found by an individual grown by an individual. And really a lot of the relationships are with that individual as opposed to the systems and the framework of the business. All right, the last one as we call scale, and really this one, probably this stage, you know, probably fits somebody that is maybe, maybe thinking in terms of exiting the business or certainly of maybe exiting their role as a, you know, day to day CEO or something, you know, kind of moving to a board type of role.

John Jantsch (18:57): So what’s going on here typically, is that again, more positive characteristics, but still same challenges. So lead flow is pretty consistent and predictable starting to build an internal marketing team. You’re sales management driven, not just a couple sales people out there, right? There’s an entire selling system. You’re starting to become recognized as a leader or in your industry or in your town. There’s a bit of financial mastery. So at this stage, while again, some people who are more financial oriented, you know, maybe start this in the first stage, but this is where profit and your cost of acquisition of new business. This is where you’re starting to have capital needs. I mean, so financial mastery is, has become a much bigger piece of the puzzle for success here. And you’ve really almost built and established, uh, uh, an internal org chart of roles of management roles.

John Jantsch (19:53): Now, the challenges here of course, is anybody who’s grown to this. I mean, we might be talking about 20, 30 people or more here. We might be talking about 10, 20, 30 million or more here. And so all of a sudden culture, the thing that maybe was a great thing, not only for those people that work there, but for your customers, um, rapid growth sometimes really comes with a deterioration of culture. There’s staff turnover. There’s no emphasis on employee branding. There’s a challenge to innovate, to continue to grow that bring new products and service offerings can add a lot of stress at this stage. So in terms of many of the things that that I talked about as characteristics, I mean, now you’re gonna go to work on you. You absolutely are gonna build team. You’re gonna build leadership team here. You’re going to formalize structure around people, operations.

John Jantsch (20:46): You’re going to need to give more and more focus to fulfillment and more and more focus to innovation. In fact, a lot of leaders in this stage of business, actually their primary job is to innovate, becomes the, you know, you’ve got that operations higher in place that is that managing the people that you’ve got. Somebody that’s focused on culture. You’ve got somebody that’s focused on sales. You’ve got the finance piece figured out. So in many cases, the role of the leader at this stage is ideas is innovation is to figure out how you can get more market share. Again, the promise, the value of the business will continue to grow. Cash flow will be consistent if need be. You’re gonna be set up in now to raise significant capital. A lot of folks go out and raise a whole bunch of capital based on money or I’m sorry, based on an idea, but a business that generates consistent cash flow can demonstrate an ability to grow is going to have a really easy, um, access to a lot of cash.

John Jantsch (21:49): Should they need it? And certainly this is that are seen as leaders have a much easier time attracting experienced talent to, to the organization as well. So all of that to say, you know, many companies, many businesses come to us say, I wanna grow, I want more business. I want more leads. And what we’ve discovered is certainly that’s, we’re gonna get there but first we’re gonna develop more clarity. First, we’re gonna develop more confidence in the systems, more control over what works and what doesn’t work. And there is a linear process for this. But for us having this roadmap is such a, you know, becomes the mission, becomes taking folks from where they are to where they want to go. In terms of training, in terms of hiring, in terms of even sales messaging, being able to demonstrate that you have a path to build on for many particularly service businesses is a pretty compelling differentiator and a compelling offer for somebody who is just had so many people selling them the tactic of the week.

John Jantsch (22:52): So while I just went through kind of our customer stages and I could do a whole nother show on every milestone involved in accomplishing moving people through there, but my feeling is that just about any business I’ve done marketing here, right? But just about any business that sells to other businesses, maybe even individuals could develop this idea of stage growth of staged evolution or maturity. So that’s what I wanted to share today. As I said, if you pick up the ultimate marketing engine, you can pick that up. Wherever books are sold, all the electronic book. If you’re listening to this in August of 2022 is on sale now for $2 and 99 cents. So when you get the book, you’ll actually the entire show that I went through has a, has this roadmap in a form. So when you get the book, you’ll actually get all the forms and tools that are shown in the book as well.

John Jantsch (23:43): So that’s it for today. Hopefully we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we create it a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:02): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Brooke Sellas. She’s the CEO and founder of B squared media and award-winning digital marketing agency focusing on social media management, advertising, and social led customer care. She teaches a digital marketing course at the university of California in Irvine, and is also the author of a new book. We’re gonna talk about today, conversations that connect how to connect, converse, and convert through social media, listening and social led customer care. So Brooke, welcome to the show.

Brooke Sellas (01:27): Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to chat with you today.

John Jantsch (01:32): So part of the, part of the subtitle, I guess, is actually there’s two terms in the subtitle I really wanna get into, but the first one is let’s just jump right into, you know, how do you define social listening?

Brooke Sellas (01:44): Oh, that’s a great question. So for me, social listening is using tools which essentially those tools then use artificial intelligence and machine learning to look for keywords, right? It’s really just that simple. You put in keywords about your brand, your industry, your competitors, your products, and the social listening tool goes out there into the worldwide web and on social media channels and listens for those terms that you’ve put in and then brings all of the information back to you on what’s being said about those terms. So it’s, you know, if we were to do it manually without the tools and without the artificial intelligence, it would be like trying to drink through a fire hose.

John Jantsch (02:30): Yeah. So, so the most basic tool, I mean, I’ve had a Google alert set up for my name, I don’t know, 20 years. Right. So what are some of the new what’s the, some of the new tool set you’ve mentioned, you know, machine learning AI. So what are some of the new tools?

Brooke Sellas (02:44): Yeah, so Google’s actually great. And I say that like, look, you could set up a Google alert, you put your, you know, your company name or your name into Google with quotations. It’s going to bring back, you know, instances of when that keyword is found. But we use at B square media, we use sprout social mm-hmm, which is a social media marketing tool. They provide a suite of different types of tools for social media marketing, but there’s a lot of them out there there’s mention.com. Yeah. Right. And mention, allows, I think for one free listener. So if you wanna dig, dip your toe in the water, check out, mention.com. They’ll let you set up one, but there’s other ones too. Talk walkers, another one, sprinkler. There’s a lot of different tools that now offer this service. My advice, if you’re just getting into social listening, know what you want to do first and then ask as you’re demoing these tools to be shown. Right. Show me, don’t just tell me how your tool can help me accomplish this thing that I’m trying to do.

John Jantsch (03:43): Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a hard task. Know what I want to do first? Right? You introduce fairly early in the book, something you call social penetration theory and I’m have to tell you that that sounds painful actually

Brooke Sellas (03:56): Terrible name. I know, obviously not named by marketers

John Jantsch (03:59): so, so at the base, you know, what you’re talking about with this idea is that, you know, you think about, I think you use the analogy of the onion, you know, you get to the core. So I guess I’ll let you explain in your own words, you know, what is it and how do, how should we be thinking to use it?

Brooke Sellas (04:17): Yeah. So if we jump in our hot tub time machine and go back a few years, I was looking to complete an undergraduate thesis and I was really into Facebook at the time. I kind of saw that there was like a business case for Facebook. So what I did was I looked at this social penetration theory, also known as the onion theory, which says as human beings, the way we form relationships is through self disclosure. So if I like you and I meet you, Hey John, how’s it going? You know, that’s cliche, that’s number one. And I say, what do you do for a living? And you say, I’m a marketer. That’s a fact, right? That’s two, but we’re not really building a relationship with cliches and facts, right? It’s very surface level. It’s like the breath it’s going around the outside of the onion. We would appeal that onion back through the layers and get to the core of who someone is. So if we start to share opinions and feelings, those third and fourth level disclosures, that’s where we start to build trust, move the relationship forward, become loyal to someone. And what I looked at in my thesis is does this theory apply to social media? Can brands use this, you know, opinions and feelings type content to better connect, converse and convert their audiences? And what I found was yes, because humans are still humans. ,

John Jantsch (05:49): You know, and so much of what applies in social media where we’re not face to face, I think applies if you’re at a cocktail party, right. I mean, people use that analogy all the time. And I will say that, you know, if I’m at a networking event or something and somebody I’ve not met, uh, walks up to me and says something like, so what’s your favorite food to eat? You know? Or just something that like, sort of random, but too personal, you know, or just like really wants to like dive into, you know, what are you working on? That’s exciting for you today. I mean, you know, people do that kinda stuff. They’re just like, yeah. Ooh, I, I don’t know. We gotta get through like the fact stage or something. Right? Yeah. So how do you balance that idea of sure. Be vulnerable show, you know, show your core. I mean, that’s how people want to, but not do too soon.

Brooke Sellas (06:39): right. That’s a great point that you bring up and nobody’s brought this up yet. So I’m glad that you did. It’s always looking at breadth, you know, around the surface of the onion and depth at all times. Yeah. Because when we think about social media and specifically we’re constantly hopefully building our audience. So we’ve got people who may have been with us all 10 years. We’ve been in business who follow are followers of, of the page and engage with us. But we may have people who been with us a year or we may have people who joined us today. So we constantly have to get that media mix of our content. Right. And I think what’s so amazing is that if for the new people, if you already have that opinions and feelings, content, you’re already having those conversations with those people, who’ve been with you for a long time. It actually takes them less time to get to depth, right. It takes them a little less time to kind of jump in because they already see that you’re warm, you’re welcoming, you’re having these back and forth conversations and it just makes it easier for them to then supply their own opinions of feelings.

John Jantsch (07:42): One of the, this, you might actually say, this is the underlying story or plot for the entire book. Is this, I, this notion of thinking conversations, not campaigns. And particularly in this day and age, when everybody sees social as a channel, a marketing channel, and that they’re building teams that they’re giving tasks to do social media. I mean, how do you get that? I mean, it’s almost culture, right? Yeah. Ingrained as opposed to, you know, people thinking, no, I have a task. I, my task is to meet business objectives by using social media.

Brooke Sellas (08:15): Right. Yeah. And I think the big thing that I try to help marketers understand is if you are having these opinion and feelings, conversation, it’s so much easier for you to bring back home a voice of the customer data, which then helps you that much more easily meet those goals that you have, right? Those business goals that you’re trying to meet, right? Because everything that we do, if we’re gathering these really good opinions and feelings from our customers and would be customers can drive product packaging can drive sales messaging can drive more social content, can drive, you know, our advertising copy. So it really goes well beyond social media, even though we’re using that medium to collect this information.

John Jantsch (09:06): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush.com that’s Semrush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free.

John Jantsch (09:46): in your opinion, or in your research. What percentage of social media posts, content, et cetera, is total unmitigated crap.

Brooke Sellas (09:57): 99.9, 9%. I’m sorry. I really feel badly letting people down, but yeah, I mean truly, and we know this, right. We can go take a look right now and we would find it most content lives in cliches and facts, which is not good.

John Jantsch (10:13): And don’t, let’s not forget the well worn quota host.

Brooke Sellas (10:17): Oh, we,

John Jantsch (10:18): Yes, I don’t. Where does that

Brooke Sellas (10:19): Fit? I cliche. I would, you know, I would probably label that as cliche. You know, it, here’s an interesting little homework assignment for anybody who’s listening and does use social listening start labeling your content. Be honest with yourself, start labeling your outbound, social media content with your social media listening tool as cliche fact opinion and feeling, and then you can start to collect data points for yourself. Oh my God. 99.9, 9% of our content is cliches in facts. We need to try to do more opinion and feeling type content.

John Jantsch (10:52): Is there a place for some of that that we’re kind of laughing about? Like sometimes I will be snarky about people posting quotes and then I’ll get a lot of people that go, no, I love those. You know, so, I mean, is there a place for like some amount of that?

Brooke Sellas (11:05): I think there is, but that’s, I would never be the decision maker on that. I would let the voice of the customer tell me. So if I, if we, you know, try those quote posts and we put those out and we label it as, you know, cliche, but we see that we’re getting the engagement and the conversation, right. Not just engagement. I want to converse mm-hmm because we have to connect. Then we can converse. Then hopefully we can convert, but just the smashing the like button, that’s not gonna do it for me. But if we see that people are commenting on those quotes and they’re like, oh my God, John, you’re amazing. I love when you post these, keep doing it, the customer’s telling you to do it. They’re telling you what you’re want, what they want and you give it to them. And that usually ends up pretty good.

John Jantsch (11:49): So this is not a very useful part of the segment of the show. I’m warning you right now, but let’s just, let’s just get the trolls out of the way right now.

Brooke Sellas (11:57): Ugh. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s just a fact of being in social media, right? It used to be like, oh, well, if you have to deal with the troll, I think it has now shifted to well, when you have to deal with troll, right. And especially when we’re talking about being vulnerable and posting opinions and feelings as a brand, or, you know, trying to align your audience with your own brand values, there will be trolls

John Jantsch (12:25): And well, I guess in some ways you’re expressing opinions by doing that and that’s just gonna attract trolls. Right.

Brooke Sellas (12:30): Exactly right. And that’s okay. They’re dissent is allowed. That is part of the conversation. Dissolution is also allowed. We want to align more with the people who are, you know, like us similar to us and align with our brand values. So if someone doesn’t align and leaves, that’s fine. If someone gives dissent in a conversation, they’re sharing their opinions. That’s fine. Yeah. You have to decide with your troll policy. When does it cross from dissent into, you know, actual trolling and then what are your rules and regulations around dealing with those types of people? Because guess what, as I say in the book, some of those people are, you’re paying customers. So what do you do then? It’s not as easy as like, oh, just ban them, block them, delete what they said. It’s it. Doesn’t, it’s just not that easy. It’s much more nuanced than that.

John Jantsch (13:23): I mean, I think you’re, you would say, would you agree that it goes far as saying if you’re not getting some descent, maybe you’re not pushing it.

Brooke Sellas (13:31): yes. My real from the heart answer is yes. My marketing answer is I know how scary this is. You know, when we’ve, I’ve been talking about the book now for about a month and every person I’ve talked to is like, you’re what you’re telling us to do is so scary. Hmm. So I get how scary it is, but at the same time, it’s beautiful. I mean, think about your own personal relationships. I hope you have lots of different people in your life and they all have different backgrounds and different viewpoints and you learn from those things. And I think it’s no different with, you know, the brand to audience or community or customer relationship. We want to learn from all of those opinions as long as they’re constructive and not hurtful.

John Jantsch (14:20): So, because we’ve been talking a lot about opinions, there are a lot of very strong, personal opinions out there circulating in the world right now.

Brooke Sellas (14:27): Very,

John Jantsch (14:28): Is there a place for that under your brand umbrella? I mean, obviously you can make a case for be true to who you are, but you can also make a case for does anybody who is buying your product really care, what your personal opinion is on X?

Brooke Sellas (14:46): Yeah. I think that’s a great question. And I think, you know, more research is needed around that, right? We need more brands who are willing to take the risk, and then we need to study that because I’ve seen it both ways. I’ve seen brands post about black lives matter or pride, right. And have PE people in their community really latch on and appreciate that. I’ve also seen those same brands push people away because they’ve really stood their ground with a certain opinion. So, you know, I think one of the examples that I give that kind of falls along with this isn’t in the book is Nike. When they started working with Colin Kaepernick mm-hmm and people were out there burning their Nike shoes. That was the marketing story, right. That that’s the story that we all heard. But the true story is that, you know, the campaigns that they did with Kaepernick had millions upon millions of views, millions upon millions of positive comments and over, you know, the next few months after they partnered with Kaepernick, they, their stock prices, rose people bought more. So I think the people who moved away from Nike, and again, I understand this is a huge brand that can take these kinds of risks, but the people who moved away and decided to burn their shoes and never buy again by that’s okay. Because the people who, you know, aligned with that value and aligned with Nike’s opinions and feelings bought more, and we saw that in their stock prices.

John Jantsch (16:16): Yeah. Probably every one of those videos that got posted burning shoes sold about eight pairs. Right. I mean, they were probably like burn baby burn. Right. right.

Brooke Sellas (16:24): And also like, you know, from the other end of that, like, just from the consumerism point of that, Nike’s like, well, yeah, I already gave us your money. So do what you will with the

John Jantsch (16:33): Product. Good point. So I guess the, I guess I’ll ask you the really big, giant question that you probably get asked all the time. And I know there’s an, it depends answer as part of this, but what should I be posting?

Brooke Sellas (16:46): Ah, I, you know, I think more opinions and feelings, content, and it doesn’t have to be risky. It doesn’t have to be black lives matter or pride. It could literally be, you know, if I’m assuming a lot of marketers listen to this podcast, you know, how do you feel about Instagram’s latest update. We already know, right. We’ve seen it. The conversation been happening all around, but that’s a layup. That’s a layup question that allows you to get that voice of the customer data back opinions back. And then you could say, here’s how we feel. You know, you are gonna align with some of those people or, you know, maybe lose the others. And it, they could be little easy layups like that with the book I just published, I was using cover art all throughout publishing. And then as I’m writing, I’m like, oh, you know, I should probably ask my customers what cover they wanna see.

Brooke Sellas (17:39): So I created kind of two throwaway covers because I assumed the cover I was using was going to be the one they chose and they didn’t. So I actually went to print with the cover. Most people chose because that’s what voice of the customer does. It allows us to see what the customer wants, see what they align with. Right. And that was that there was nothing risky in that. I mean, I could have, if I really wanted to gone to print with the cover I wanted, but why would I would be going against my own advice at that point?

John Jantsch (18:09): Yeah. And I will say on that topic, because there is a picture of the post that you did, that you have a lot of great examples and pictures and that I think will, that are helpful to drive home some of your points. So let’s, I, I started the show by talking about the first idea in the subtitle of a, of social media listening. And I want to end really giving you a chance to unpack the second topic in that is, you know, explain what social led customer care is.

Brooke Sellas (18:40): Yes. So most people, I know brands won’t wanna hear that but most people don’t follow brands on social because they wanna see those like fun kitty and puppy memes or, you know, facts about the next product release. They actually, over 70% of people use and follow use social media to follow brands, to ask a support question. And customer care is actually a little bit deceiving, even though that’s the technical term for it, because it eludes that we’re just talking to customers. We’re just talking about support and retention. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So somebody’s already purchased and post-purchase, they come to us on social for a question or a complaint that does happen a lot. But I think what a lot of people miss about customer care is acquisition. And so I’ll give you this example too, if you’re using social listening, one of the very first labels or tags, you know, they call it labeling or tagging depending on your tool, I’d set up our acquisition and retention tags.

Brooke Sellas (19:49): And we did this fun little project actually, while I was writing the book, we went to all of our customer care clients. And we said, how much of your social chatter, you know, coming into the brand, do you think is acquisition? And how much do you think is retention? And every single customer said, oh, acquisitions probably like zero to 5%, it’s all retention. So we started tagging all of these conversations as such. And what we found was that every single client had over 20% acquisition tags. And that means customers who aren’t yet customers coming in and

John Jantsch (20:26): Asking like presale questions. Yeah,

Brooke Sellas (20:27): Yeah, yeah. Three purchase questions. In the buying moment, we had one brand who literally has four product lines that month, over month have somewhere between 60 and 80% acquisition, mind blowing mm-hmm . So now we’re working with their sales team to create more, you know, nurture content for the types of questions that we’re getting were actually getting retail values put into the conversation amount. So I’ll give you an example, July, they had 70% acquisition on one of their product lines. We attributed the retail value of the products mentioned in that conversation to about 1.2 million in revenue. Now, imagine, which is, this is the next step we’re going to be doing with them. If they gave us links that were attributed to the social media team, and we were able to capture 20% of that 1.2 million. Now we’re talking about a $240, $240,000 in revenue attributed to organic social. And then what happens when that happens? The C-suite starts to say, oh, wait, social media is valuable. because I still don’t think they quite get that yet. Right. Because customer care again is, has this whole like myth around it that it’s only about the customer and it’s not

John Jantsch (21:47): All right. I’m gonna ask you a, a question that is a fairly specific use case. And it’s it’s because I want to know the answer to this myself. sorry, listeners. Hopefully this applies.

Brooke Sellas (21:58): No shoot. I love this. I love it. It’s exciting. It’s like a game

John Jantsch (22:01): exactly. So imagine I’m a brand who does not sell direct to consumer. So I have a channel of retailers or distributors or something. How could I use this to actually, I don’t know. Sometimes people use the term pull sales or push sales, you know, so push ’em into the dealers, you know, build more brand affinity so that when somebody walks into the dealer or Walmart or wherever they ask for my product,

Brooke Sellas (22:26): I love that question. And that’s a great, that’s a great segue into social listening beyond, you know, customer care because you can use, remember we talked about social listening, being keywords. So like, let’s just use, say you’re working with a company that doesn’t sell direct. It sells through retailers, but it’s printers, right? Let’s just pretend it’s printers Uhhuh. You could put the keyword into social listening best all in one printer. Right. That keyword phrase, as we go on with this example, and then again, the artificial intelligence is gonna bring you back. All the instances of people online, talking about best all in one printers. If you then could go into those conversations and make the recommendation for the dealer or the reseller or the retailer.

John Jantsch (23:16): Yeah.

Brooke Sellas (23:16): You could then still close that business. I mean, it’s the same kind of project. It’s just not warm. Right? It’s not inbound. It’s outbound. So it’s a little bit colder, social selling, but I still bet you would capture some percentage of that conversation towards revenue.

John Jantsch (23:34): All right. One last question. I’m going longer than I usually do sometimes, but I want to give people the chance, get this question all the time. How do I get first off and then use, you know, we used to call it user generated content. Certainly you could talk about it as customer care content and you know, how do we get our customers to produce? So some really authentic social content for us. And I’m not meaning like, how do we get them to just do the job? But it’s like, how do we get them enthusiastically wanting to participate in that way?

Brooke Sellas (24:05): It’s so interesting because I, this is the same answer I give when people talk about community, how do I know if I can build a community or if I have a community. And I always say community happens in the conversation, not in the, not with the content. It happens in the conversation. So does U GC are user generated content. If you’re having those opinion and feelings, content, and John says something spectacular about my product, I then say, and we’re conversing, right? So we’re already having this back and forth. So there’s a little bit of like trust there. Yeah. I could say to John, I cannot, like, I couldn’t have described our product better. Would you be willing to create a post? You know, that says that, or can I snip this conversation and use this in one of our own posts and more than likely, I mean, going off of experience here nine times outta 10. Sure. John says, yes.

John Jantsch (24:54): Yeah. Cuz I’m a fan. Why wouldn’t I? Yeah.

Brooke Sellas (24:56): Right. You know, you already have

John Jantsch (24:57): That. I did it voluntarily. Right. right.

Brooke Sellas (24:59): You already given us the information and we are kind of coming back to you and going, oh my gosh, you’re a rock. This is amazing. Can we use this? And John, because most of us are like, oh, give me the limelight. Yes, please. It’s going to say yes. And then other people might chime in and see that right. Community audience and see our conversation and say, well, I think you’re amazing too. It, we are built as human. Right? It’s all about psychology. We learn by mirroring one another. It’s all about reciprocity. All these same psych psychological concepts happen on social. It’s just a different medium.

John Jantsch (25:38): Well, and it circles very directly back to your social listening too. Right. Because I bet you that we’re missing those like golden moments that our customers are out there actually sharing because we’re not listening.

Brooke Sellas (25:49): Right? Yes. Yes. You’d be surprised, you know, people tag brands or mention brands just fine. But a lot of

John Jantsch (25:56): Times I do it all the time. You’re

Brooke Sellas (25:57): Not being mentioned. Yes.

John Jantsch (25:59): Well I do it and I tag them and I like never hear from ’em too. You know? So you man, in my

Brooke Sellas (26:04): Way, I wanna help those people.

John Jantsch (26:06): exactly. Yeah. Our awesome Brooke. Well, thanks so much for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. Uh, we’ve been talking about conversations that connect you and tell people where they can connect with you or, and certainly find out more about the book.

Brooke Sellas (26:19): Definitely. So if you visit our website, it’s just B squared.media. So it’s our business name B squared media. But with a.media, you can find out all about our services, the book me, or you can just literally Google Brook sells. I think I’m the only one so far and all of our sites will pop up. You can connect with me directly through social. Twitter’s my favorite platform. So if you wanna come talk with me there, happy to have a conversation with you.

John Jantsch (26:48): Awesome. Well, Brooke, again, thanks for taking the time out today. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days, soon out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co, check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Janssen today. I’m doing a solo show, just me, nobody in the other screen. All right. I wanna talk about websites, but more importantly, I wanna talk about what I think are the 10 essential elements that every small business website, particularly the homepage needs to have today. And here’s the reason, the question that causes the reason for so many elements being necessary. The question is what’s the purpose of a website today? I know many people would say it’s to get customers or it’s to track leads, but I’m gonna suggest that your website has many jobs to do. And that’s part of the challenge, I think, with trying to figure out what goes on there. What doesn’t go on there. What do people need to see if you think about your website being the hub, maybe, or at least the starting point for a lot of your customers, for a lot of the decisions that are made about doing business for you.

John Jantsch (01:45): It’s part of the journey. We wanna find people that we can know and like, and trust as I’ve talked about for years. And I think that the website does a lot of that filtering both attracting and repelling. I suppose, those who come to your website. So it’s not simply just, I gotta have a website so that people can find me and buy from me. I mean, 87% of potential customers won’t consider a business with low ratings. So it’s not just that your site has to be there and be findable. People have to get there and they have to build some trust. You have to prove there has to be social proof. There has to be reviews. There have to be things that can make people say, yeah, okay. I checked that box. 64% of consumers say watching a video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision.

John Jantsch (02:32): So part of the journey is that may be where they come to find out about you. But now they’re looking for more of that same type of content on your website. 86% of buyers will pay more for a better experience. I know I have I mean, 86% is most of us. So a lot of times our analysis is, does the site load quickly do the forms fill out? Does it look intuitive? Does it look like what I think it should look like for this industry? I mean, we all have gone to that website that looked like it was built 20 years ago and we’re out of there. And I think that’s a big part of a job that our website’s going to do. It’s going to start the experience of what it’s gonna be like to work with you. And then finally, and I think this one points to the need for all of these elements that I’m gonna talk about today, probably more than anything, 92% of consumers will visit a Bo a brand’s website for reasons other than making a purchase.

John Jantsch (03:31): So what are those other 92%? And by the way, that’s not just prospects and buyers. That’s also potential employees because really when we talk about all these changes in marketing, the thing that’s changed the most, I think is really how people choose, get to choose, to become customers and employees and the kind of straight line suggestion of the funnel approach to marketing of get some people to know you push a few small few through that to small end of the funnel. I mean, that journey, that linear journey is really doesn’t exist today. And that, that many of the ways in which people decide about a company that they’re gonna do business with might be considered out of our hands out of our control in some ways. And our job really then is to guide people along this journey. But let me give you one last biggie for why your website needs to look a certain way, act a certain way, provide a certain journey for people, your website.

John Jantsch (04:28): I believe because it is such an important part of the journey gives you the greatest ability to increase something that I came across it in Harvard business review talking about enterprise companies, but something called WTP, which is willingness to pay. And I think that in the sea of options that people have out there, if you can increase your worthiness, if you can increase the experience from your website, you’re going to increase, somebody’s willingness to pay. All right? So let’s get in quickly to the 10 things. So the first thing your website needs to do is make a promise to solve your ideal. Customer’s greatest problem. So many websites today that I go to you go there. First thing you see above the fold is we are this business or we’re this kind of business, or we’ve been in this business for X amount of years.

John Jantsch (05:22): Typically the person that’s visiting the site knows what business you’re in, because that’s why they found you. That’s what they’re looking for. But what they wanna see is do you get me? Do you understand? I mean, is there something that you’re doing that’s different? In fact, if you can communicate the problem, a lot of times people don’t really even know the problem they’re trying to solve necessarily. They know, for example, I’m a marketing firm. They know, for example, somebody’s a remodeling contractor. And so they go to a remodeling contractor, but what problem now? I mean, people don’t wanna buy marketing services. They don’t really even wanna buy remodeling services. They want an incredible kitchen with an incredible experience. They want quick wins, long term growth, hassles. They want great communication. I mean, those are the problems that people are trying to solve quite frankly, through looking at our businesses as a way to do that.

John Jantsch (06:11): So what problem can you promise to solve that needs to be above the fold? And frankly, I’m starting to actually see websites to Google this sometime problems we solve. And you’re gonna see some websites that are actually dedicating entire pages to a list of problems that they solve. You know, for example, in, in marketing, most of the problems we encounter are actually strategy problems, but nobody goes, I’m gonna go find me to buy some strategy today. but they, that they’ve, they wanna know why they can’t charge a premium for their services or worse, why they’re always having to offer discounts. And so that’s a problem that can be solved with strategy, but we have to identify the problem. The thing that they’re actually experiencing is they can’t charge enough. We’re gonna fix that with strategy, but it won’t. We have to articulate that problem first before they’ll listen to our solution about strategy calls to action.

John Jantsch (07:04): If somebody, you know, how today is so popular, so common to get these long scrolling home pages. Well, if somebody comes to your website and they’re starting to engage and they’re starting to scroll down and say, oh, who do they serve? You know, who are their case studies? They start looking for things. We wanna have the ability for somebody to click, to take an action, to do something that’s CTAs calls to action above the fold, right under your core message. There are people that are, that actually are just looking to contact you. So make it easy for them to do that. But the vast majority of people are looking for a price, quote, an evaluation, a free report. That’s going to tell them how to do X, Y, and Z. Sprinkle those throughout your homepage, sprinkle those throughout your website.

John Jantsch (07:52): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing, build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels, faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush.com that’s S E M rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free, who we get results for.

John Jantsch (08:34): Tell me very specifically who your ideal customer is. Don’t tell me that you serve homeowners. Tell me that you serve homeowners in a very specific area of town with a very specific challenge with a very specific need. I mean, identify as clearly as possible show pictures of, you know, maybe you have three or four segments, but don’t just leave this open to where somebody says, well, I own a home.

John Jantsch (08:58): So I guess I can call them be very specific where somebody says, oh my goodness, you serve me. You’re talking about me. And I’d like to use the word who we get results for rather than who our customers are, who we sell to getting results as what people are after in a lot of ways, that’s a problem, uh, that, that you’re trying to demonstrate that you can solve. And one of the things about that approach to who we get results, it’s sort of implied who we don’t get results for or who we can’t work for. Again, using my business. As an example, if somebody just comes to me and says, I want leads, I on Facebook ads and, you know, go, I mean, we get results for people who actually wanna build a long term strategy that allows them to dominate their market and not just have a quick event that is maybe going to make the phone ring.

John Jantsch (09:45): Maybe not. We talk about strategy incessantly because that’s really, in fact, that’s really the only way to engage my firm. And so we want to chase people away. We don’t want people who are like, oh, I don’t need that strategy stuff. We want them to know that’s not who we’re gonna get a result for number four, our core offerings. So there’s so many businesses that sell, have the ability to sell. I should say 27 things. But when we really dig in, what we find is that there are three things they do that generate 80% of their profits, 80% of their business, really their ideal engagements. And yet they list everything they could do. What I want you to think about doing is saying here’s the three things at the most that we do, and we do them better than anyone. Now, if you get a customer and you, you have a great relationship, you start working with them.

John Jantsch (10:38): It doesn’t mean you can’t sell them the other 27 things. But when it comes to actually getting that ideal customer, you want to, you want that profitable customer. You want them to know that the service that you sell, whatever it is, it, you are better than anyone else at doing it. That you’re the obvious choice for doing that. The fifth thing I wanna hear a little bit about is your process. If you have a process for getting me your result, I mean, it might be the ordering process. It might be your onboarding process. It might be your 37 step process to make sure that the job site is cleaned up after you’re done. Processes are amazing marketing materials because they prove that first off you have a professional approach. You have thought out how to get me a result, put those on, on, you know, tell me what’s going to happen next.

John Jantsch (11:24): I mean, you could even have a process that says, look, if you fill out this form, here’s, what’s going to happen next. You know, if you’re trying to get a quote, tell them the steps in the process, tell them what to expect team, you know, for, I read thousands of Google reviews and I will tell you that for most small businesses, when a customer is happy, they’re happy with the person they worked with. Not necessarily the company, the person they worked with, the technician, the person that delivered the service, you know, to them, that’s the brand. And so let’s feature our team. Let’s show. ’em what our culture is all about. Have videos of all of your staff saying their favorite meal on their birthday or something goofy like that. Just make sure that you’re featuring everybody, that person’s going to be working with the client.

John Jantsch (12:11): That person’s gonna be the person that shows up at the door. Let’s have pictures. Let’s have videos. In fact, what’s great about those is if you have salespeople, if you have technicians, send those out, here’s who here’s, who’s coming to see you. Great way to, you know, to really open the door, to really build trust, to create an experience. I feel like I’ve met that person now, before they show up, trust my customer journey. You’ve heard me talk about it forever. No, like trust, try by repeat and refer. I think trust today, especially when you think about somebody who’s just going out there surfing, or maybe somebody told ’em in a Facebook group, oh, you need to check out this company or this website. They’re making a lot of decisions about whether or not they even wanna pick up the phone or fill out a form or engage you in any way, shape or form based on what they see right away.

John Jantsch (12:59): Kind of first impression. I mean, that’s how we do it today. We won’t move forward. unless we feel like, okay, I like what I’m seeing. There’s proof that they’ve worked with other people, oh, they’ve got these three people as customers. I know who they are. Oh, they’ve their content has shown up in this publication. That must mean something. Oh, they have 108,000 Twitter followers. Again, all the ways in which we show proof that we’re a real business, that other people trust us, that we can get results. I love case studies to show that we’ve gotten results for people. Number eight, generically video video is for a percentage of the market out there is how they want to consume content. I, I mean, I can decide all the statistics about YouTube and frankly, even TikTok. And some of those other places that are very video centric, people love video, but it’s also a great way to build trust.

John Jantsch (13:48): It’s a great way for you to show your customers, your happy customers. There’s, you know, you read that testimonial that says they were great, Betty from Memphis. Well, how about Betty from Memphis? gushing about how great they are. Show us how your product’s made. Show us behind the scenes. Again, I already talked about your technicians, your designers, your sales people ought to have videos. You’re seeing more and more videos. And again, this doesn’t have to be high quality stuff. This can be pick up an iPhone. Let people start talking. I saw a great video the other day about, you know, an actual patient. This was not a like deep medical thing. I think it was a dermatologist or something that was had a patient was actually asking them a few, you know, very frequently asked questions and the doctor was answering those questions as part of the video, there was no, I don’t think HIPAA issues or anything with what was going on there, but I just thought it looked very real.

John Jantsch (14:39): It was in the office. It looked like an actual patient. Maybe it wasn’t , maybe it was, there was the technician. And, but it looked very much like an experience that somebody going to that office would have increasingly segmentation. If you have several types of customers, several types of markets, completely different markets. You know, I always use the real estate agent as an example. They want home buyers and they want home sellers. totally different needs, totally different questions, totally different objectives. So how do you talk to them? Well, today we’ve gotta start using technology. And one of the simplest technologies is to have a path. Are you this? Or are you that go here for the best content for this go here for the best content for this. Maybe you can actually have, you know, you’ve probably gone to a website that has these popups, that, that are actually asking questions.

John Jantsch (15:31): I think we used to think of those popups as being really intrusive. And yeah, sometimes if I’m really trying to find something specific on a website, you feel like they’re intrusive, but if I’m coming to a website for the first time, and I’m trying to understand, like where do I find the answers? I’m very willing to answer a question. If the proposition is tell us, you know, which tell us who you are. tell us what you’re looking for so that we can actually make sure you get the right content. I think we’ll give people that shot. I mean, we actually want that more personalized journey. The technology is there today and you’ve got competitors out there that are completely personalizing for, you know, who people are once they get in their CRM and you come back to my website, you know, I should be able to tell you, heck I should.

John Jantsch (16:19): I should say, I should actually know a lot about you and not bother you with the free report that I know you got the first time you came here. So those are things that people are expecting today because the technology makes it possible. Give me lots of ways to contact you like it or not. Text messaging in a lot of industries is the preferred method. If you’re under 40, there’s a good chance. Or I should say if your customer’s prospects are under 40, there’s a good chance that they are going to in many industries want that type of communication. And I’m not talking about the spammy like bomb people with, oh, we have 10% off today kind of stuff. But for appointment reminders, for review request for things that, that, you know, shipping details. I mean, those are things that people now expect to have the ability to get a text or an email, or, you know, a chat bot.

John Jantsch (17:13): I mean, we’ve just gotta give people, you know, all the ways in which they prefer their preferred methods, like years ago, we used to talk about, do you take checks and credit cards well and cash. Well, now it’s SMS and it’s chat bots and it’s, you know, real time response. I mean, that’s really what people are expecting. I know it’s harder, but I think we’ve gotta give people the options to communicate the way they wanna communicate. And then the last one, this is actually number 11, if you were keeping track kind of a bonus, really, but you know, we’ve been talking about for years, this idea of mobile first, we’ve absolutely got to think in terms of what our website looks like and how it acts and how people can respond using mobile devices because let’s face it. They are. I mean, I, I almost every single one of our clients is well over 50% in terms of traffic to their website coming on a mobile device or a tablet.

John Jantsch (18:09): So most designers, I shouldn’t say most, a lot of designers still, or a lot of these, you know, way webpage builders today. People are designing for that big, giant screen they have in front of them. You’ve got to design for a mobile device and then make it work on a bigger screen. And so if you start thinking about that functionality too, I want click to call because I sure as heck don’t wanna have to like, look at your phone number, go, and now I wanna call you. So I have to go to my phone, the phone app component or text app component. And now I have to put that number in and then I have to come back and forth cuz I can’t remember. So click to call texting, chat on mobile, you know, easy like your hours directions. I mean all the things that people on a mobile device quite often are looking for immediately and expecting in the experience, but certainly make sure that you’re, we’ve all seen them.

John Jantsch (18:59): You know, the sites that, that, you know, the content was designed for a big screen, you put it on that mobile and all of a sudden the responsive element of the website just makes the, a mess out of the content. So that’s it, that’s the 10 things. I hope that you enjoyed those today. If you come to duct tape, marking.com, if you Google website essentials, you know, you’ll find, uh, some of this in a, you know, in a video format, in a text format, we actually even have forms a workbook that you know, for, you know, working on your website. So check out some of the resources at ducttapemarketing.com. All right, that’s it for today. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.