John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today, just me, solo show. Those of you out in TV land, see I’ve got my DTM hat wearing just for this solo show. So what are we gonna talk about today? Remember when I was a little kid, I went to the circus, probably many of you did as well. I think they still have it around. Anyway.

They had the elephants and the trapeze and all that stuff, right? But my favorite, always remember was like this guy that would have like seven or eight plates and you’d have them spinning on these long big sticks. You’ve probably seen somebody do that before as well. And you know, it’s just as one would start to drop, he’d get over there and get that one going again. And then he’d find another one that was getting ready to drop and he’d do that one again. you know, years later, I find that and maybe some of you can relate running a business is a lot like that, isn’t it?

feel like we’re constantly spinning plates. And there’s a reason for that. Unless you have 50 or 100 people working for you, you’ve probably got multiple roles. In fact, the typical small agency owner, marketing consultant, that’s who we work with. That’s who I want to talk with, talk about today. I would say that we’ve all got like seven roles that we have to do every single day, maybe or maybe a lot of them we’re not doing, but they still follow us, right? And so

I want to talk today about what those roles are, but then I want to spend some time focused on how we actually free ourselves from the chaos of that, of the, many of those roles. mean, there’s so many amazing tools today that we have available to us. mean, AI being one of them, of course, but a lot of automation tools that really can make life a lot easier.

There’s a couple other things, certainly delegation to VAs and things. So I’m going to cover all of those today. So let’s go with the seven roles, what they are first off. The first one is CEO. mean, whatever you call yourself, somebody’s got to have, somebody’s the leader, that’s probably you, has to have a vision for the business. so, and that’s a role that I see that doesn’t get played very often. But if we’re not looking up and occasionally saying what needs to happen or where do I want to be this time next year?

John Jantsch (02:12.75)

be really, really simple. I mean, you don’t obviously have the same needs as a large organization for a CEO, but somebody who’s at least somebody that being you, who’s at least thinking about like, where am I trying to take this thing? What’s the big picture? All right. Number two, salesperson. Nobody’s going to make it rain, but you, right? I mean, you’re out there generating leads. You’re out there having those meetings. You’re out there closing those deals. That’s a, that’s obviously a very important role that you have to play typically.

Strategist, if you are a marketing consulting firm, if you’re an agency, you need to develop strategy for your clients. That’s really what’s going to differentiate you from everybody else who’s making those marketing plans, who’s helping that client decide where they’re trying to go. Project manager, right? Once you get the client, you do the strategy, you turn into a project manager, managing maybe its vendors or managing projects, campaigns, whatever the work calls for, there is essentially a project manager.

role in it. Then client manager, we have to do the reporting, we have to actually if we’re gonna, if we’re gonna have long term retainer clients, which are my favorites, we’re gonna have to actually maintain that relationship, we’re gonna have to be showing value, week in, week out, month in, month out. And that’s a role. That’s a that’s a function inside of business. And then finally, do we call it accountant? I don’t know. It’s a finance role. Somebody has to collect the money, somebody has to send out the invoices, somebody has to balance the

The checkbook, somebody has to make sure that bills are being paid on time, right? So there is that bookkeeping function. most people that I work with, agency owners, didn’t go into business because they love doing that work, but it’s an essential role. So of these roles, I think the key is to decide.

which ones are the most important? You know, you can make a case for all of them, right? But there’s no question that selling work, doing strategy, maintaining clients, maybe marketing your own business. I mean, these are roles that really have to be done on a consistent basis if you’re going to grow the business until you start getting help, until you can start getting into the role where maybe you are doing one or two of these and you have people doing some of the other roles.

John Jantsch (04:31.576)

So how do you balance that idea that some roles are more important than others, but you can’t just simply neglect or abdicate any of roles. So let’s go through those and talk about maybe how you not escape the role, but escape the chaos of either doing the role poorly or not at all. All right, so the first one, CEO. This is something that in a small business, I mean,

Time blocking is is the probably the only way you’re going to get to this right? If you just put it down as a task, think big about my business and then that like everything else on your checklist has to be addressed first. You’ve got to give yourself. I don’t care what it is, but let’s just pretend it is. Monday afternoon, block off two hours and use that two hours to think about the future of your business. The vision of business where you’re trying to go.

who you need to be doing that with, what you need to be doing without kind of feeling like, in between that, I’m gonna return email and I’m gonna do this project proposal for a prospect. No, that time is your big thinking time. If you don’t do it, if you don’t take that time to analyze where you are, where you’re going, where you wanna be, where the opportunities are, it never gets done. And then you just get really trapped in, gosh, wonder what I did today. Don’t know, I sure was busy, right?

So having that time is how you play the CEO role. Now the salesperson role, you’ve got to really get good at automating a lot of your follow-up. mean, if you are putting, if you’re generating leads by inviting them to webinars or you’re writing, having eBooks or things that they can download, checklists that they can download, you want to make, you know, the active campaigns of the world, the HubSpots of the world will allow you to create a 15 series email follow-up series

that just heaps value after value after value conversation and does it really automatically. I mean, that one’s kind of a no brainer because you really want to be taking a look, know, sale, active campaign, HubSpot, both also have pipeline. So you want to be taking a look at, are people I’ve talked to, here are people I want to talk to, here are people that have expressed interest but not move forward. You want to be having that kind of conversation where you can use those tools to automate

John Jantsch (06:54.862)

You know, if you move somebody from, we had this conversation or we had this meeting, now I’m going to move them to another stage in the pipeline. And that’ll automatically continue to nurture them with a different series of emails because they’ve moved to a different spot in the journey. So it takes time to set some of those things up, but really from a salesperson standpoint, you have to do it. Sales and marketing are something that you have to do every single day. And if you don’t set those things up,

you’ll not only be dropping opportunities, but you’ll be very inconsistent in terms of pipeline. And I think that’s one of the real killers with a smaller business because you get busy and then you look up one day and go, we haven’t been doing any marketing. Now the strategist role, mean, here’s the pitch from duct tape marketing. If you’re an agency or to this role, developing marketing strategy, developing the master plan for a client.

is something that you need to have a repeatable proven system for. If you are constantly making it up with every new client, reacting to what they say they want, here’s a hint. They don’t know what they want. Well, they know what they want. They don’t know what they need. They come to you with a list of tactics. We need you to do our social media and run that campaigns and produce content. What they need is a marketing plan, a marketing strategy that really differentiates them.

And that’s something that we license to agencies, fractional CMOs, consultants as the strategy first leadership system. They need leadership and they need scope. They need you to tell them what to do. They need you to lead them. So having a proven system to do that, quite frankly, is absolutely how you escape really that role from drowning you. Cause that’s, you know, I’ve talked to many, many business owners, many, many agency owners, and that’s the role that

consumes in some cases the greatest amount of time because it’s custom work every single time you do it. So what I imagine if you actually had a client come to you and say, hey, we need a website. You say, yes, you do. But first you need strategy first. And here’s how. And then you literally went down the process step by step. Here’s the process. You taught others in your organization to run many aspects of the process. You don’t have to think about what are we going to do? We’re going to do strategy first.

John Jantsch (09:16.588)

I mean, it’s a game changer. All right, let’s keep moving. Project manager. So you got to work, you develop strategy. They say, the strategy’s brilliant. Who’s gonna do this? And you say, well, I guess we are. And so there, again, using tools like, and we happen to use Monday, project management tools that allow you to not only show your client everything’s on track, give them unified communication.

give them access to all the reports, setting up a project management process that uses a technology like Monday or ClickUp or Asana. mean, there are a dozen, they probably all work about the same way. It’s essential, I think, if you are going to make this work. And a great deal of the things I’ve talked about, AI can play a real role in helping you. It can help you create, it can help you analyze your sales calls, past sales calls. It could help you create that email nurture

Setup that I talked about it could actually help you Set up repetitive tasks in some of the the you know, most of these tools today are building AI into it You can set up repetitive tasks in those All right marketing Your own agency. This is probably the one that gets most people I mean We were a lot of successful agencies in there and I can’t tell how many times they’ve said so they’re coming to us, you know analyzing our program and saying

and don’t look at my website because it’s a work in progress or it needs to be updated or I don’t know what it is. Maybe some of you have experienced that, right? We all do. It’s so hard to work on our own stuff because we’re working on our clients’ stuff. We’ve successfully done where we’ve actually, we have project managers in our business and we actually assign a project manager to our business as a client.

And I suggest that that’s how you have to look at it is you are one of your clients, you’ve got to get that work done. And that’s where really, you know, delegation, having somebody on board to do it. Consistently producing content, reproducing content, a lot of the AI tools, I never advise anybody to go to chat GPT, and say, give me a blog post on x words, but it does a great job of outlining

John Jantsch (11:34.466)

hub pages or outlines for bigger topics or giving you ideas. Then you write the content in your point of view, your voice. And then it does a really good job at repurposing that content into video scripts, into webinars, into LinkedIn posts. And then of course, you know, all of the social networks now tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Zapier, Zapier, depending upon how you say it.

Lately, all of these tools really allow you to take a long piece of content, turn it into a hundred social posts, schedule those social posts out. The tools now will analyze. Lately is a great tool. It’ll actually analyze your content for what will get the most engagement. So there are many things that you can do and it’s not just a matter of spraying stuff around, but today, our clients, our prospects are actually

participating in a lot of networks. They’re getting their information a lot of different places. And so to some degree, we have to have that content in the format that they want it. Video, audio, text, short form, long form, both in video, long form, short form. So I mean, it’s overwhelming job to do that. And so using some of these assistants to really help you can be key. And before I go any farther, let’s use that word assistant again.

There are so many great ways for you to get virtual assistance. And it may not be, you’re gonna go out and find the marketer of the century and you’re going to delegate all your marketing to them. But maybe your first step is to actually say, look, of these seven roles that John’s talking about, which ones, what are those that I can’t do, I don’t like to do, maybe aren’t as essential for my business?

You know, finance is essential, but it’s not essential that you do it. That’s one that there are a ton of people out there that just basic bookkeeping can be purchased very inexpensively and it’ll get done right. It’ll get done on time. You will have your invoices going out. So, you know, there are places where, you know, investing in your business to get to free up not just time, not just tasks, but maybe even headspace. You know, some of these roles you don’t get to because you just don’t have the headspace.

John Jantsch (14:00.814)

I think we covered, no, I’m down to client manager, keeping clients happy. Boy, I tell you, this is one where we have heavily used AI. And the reason is because a lot of the reports that we get, you use tools like SEMrush and you use Google Analytics and you get these reports, you get a lot of data, but making sense out of the data, extracting anything that demonstrate to a client, here’s the value of what we’re doing.

AI is tremendous at actually analyzing those results. you know, using tools for that. In terms of accounting, again, I’m sure I don’t think there’s an AI tool out there that’ll send invoices. The day’s coming. We will have that. But in terms of the accounting role, I would definitely say that’s one that find somebody to do that. If you’re doing that yourself, it’s not getting done well. It’s not getting done on time. And that’s going to seriously hurt your business.

Here’s kind of the four prong approach, if you will.

John Jantsch (15:08.216)

Figure out what’s important, figure out what you like to do and what you’re good at doing. What’s the most valuable to your business and focus on creating systems and processes around those things that free up some of your time. Think about what you could delegate. And again, the list for that is what do I hate doing? What am I not good at doing? What maybe doesn’t move the needle?

if I’m doing it. And those are the first things that you should delegate and outsource so that you’re not doing them. The trouble with a lot of agencies is that, even solopreneurs, maybe you have three or four clients. And so, hey, I can do all this work. But then you look up one day and you can’t. You’re designing the websites, you’re writing all the copy, you’re doing all the things, and all of a sudden, you’ve got as much as you’ve

got on your plate, can no longer look for clients. You can no longer do really great work. You’re getting burned out. So, you know, delegating and outsourcing as soon as possible is a real key here. So the seven roles that I defined are important. They’re the plates that you have to keep spinning. But guess what? You can build foundations under those plates. They don’t have to be a little skinny stick anymore. So

That’s my two cents. If you’d like to know more about the duct tape marketing strategy first leadership system that we licensed to agencies and consultancies, check out duct tape marketing.com. We’d love to visit with you about how we might be able to bring our proven systems processes, almost business in a box. These seven roles are all covered in our training. So we can bring you that proven system so that you

can actually start getting out there and doing your best work, having a life, scaling a business that serves that life. All right, thanks for tuning in. Love to hear your feedback on today’s show and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:00.686)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch and I think I’m kind of the guest today because my host today is Sarah Ney, CEO of Duct Tape Marketing and she’s gonna, we’re just gonna have a conversation about some of the things going on in the world of marketing. I’ve said before, I think 2025 is going to be a year to remember in terms of change. I’ll say that next year too, I bet.

But I think the pace of change that I think we’re seeing right now, just in the first couple of weeks of January, it’s kind of flooring me. And I think it’s going to be tough to keep up. So strap in, hang on, and here we go, sir.

Sara Nay (00:40.285)

And we were just having a discussion with some of our team about how we’re always, you know, looked at it, staying in top of marketing trends. And that’s been the position of duct tape marketing for a while. And right now we feel like we’re sprinting more than we have before with all the advancements. And that’s a lot of what we’re going to talk about today. So thanks for letting me steal the host seat. I want to start with a question. Sure.

John Jantsch (00:46.574)

You

John Jantsch (00:58.368)

Yeah. Well, I can, throw in a joke, a lame joke. So R and D now stands for run and dash.

Sara Nay (01:03.805)

I it. Well, I’m going to start with a question. You’ve been in the game, the marketing game for quite some time now. So you were involved when websites, everyone started building websites and getting online. And also when social media became a thing and everyone was talking about how that’s going to change the whole entire industry. And so right now, obviously we’re going through a lot of conversation and discussion and excitement around AI and everything that’s evolving there. So I’m curious, how does right now feel the same?

than some of those different excitement phases that have happened or developments that have happened over the years. And also on the other end, how does it feel a bit different this time or does it feel different?

John Jantsch (01:41.964)

Yeah. So, I mean, in some ways it feels if there’s a same, it’s fundamentally what we’re here to do as marketers. I don’t think it’ll ever change. And so a lot of the changes that came along were like, wait, we have a new way to interact with customers. We have a new platform to be found. Customers, you know, have a different way to buy from us. So those were, those were kind of in a lot of ways, incremental changes, significant ones for a lot of folks.

In terms of the change with what AI is bringing, I think it’s much more foundational. It certainly feels very different. And I think partly because it impacts so many areas of a business. A lot of the website was kind of a marketing thing, whereas AI is impacting finance, it’s impacting customer service, it’s impacting certainly all the marketing functions. And ultimately it’s impacting consumers and what they’re able to do greatly.

I just feel like this is a, you know, I’ve heard some people say this, it might be kind of cliche, but you know, this is almost like, this is almost like, you know, the industrial revolution, like all these machines, you know, came along that automated, you know, manual labor that, you know, that, that really displaced a lot of jobs and started creating the, you know, the knowledge economy. And I think this is a bit more like that. This is going to fundamentally shift how we work.

Sara Nay (03:04.059)

Yeah, absolutely. And the school system, a lot of it was built from that era as well. And so I’ve heard a lot of conversation about, you know, potentially AI adjusting how we actually teach our children in school as well. Who needs it? It’s done for you. A lot of what you’ve spoken about over the years is strategy before tactics. And now a lot of people are talking about strategy before technology. And so I’m just curious your take on there’s, there’s a lot of shiny objects in AI.

John Jantsch (03:08.546)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:14.722)

Yeah, no more math, right? Who needs math? Who needs learned math, right?

John Jantsch (03:24.557)

Yes.

John Jantsch (03:31.278)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (03:31.867)

There’s a lot of, every time I check my email, there’s 10 different tools that are being recommended for me that relate to AI. And so I think a lot of people are getting sucked into just doing things and figuring out how it works, but not necessarily taking a step back and saying, how could this apply to my business? How could I approach this strategically? So what would your advice be there for someone that needs to get out of the shiny object syndrome and focus on the strategy behind it?

John Jantsch (03:54.498)

Well, I think there’s a real danger in not. In fact, think strategy is more important. And here’s why. It’s like taking somebody who used to ride a bike. You know, got a helmet, you’re riding the bike, you’re probably okay if you crash unless you’re like on a mountain or something, right? But now we’re going to put somebody in the seat of a Lamborghini without a seatbelt, without a helmet. We’re going to say, drive really fast. And if they don’t…

If they’re on the right road, if they don’t have the right map, if they don’t have the right skills, you know, they’re just going to, they’re just going to die faster. I know that’s sort of dramatic, but I think that that’s what’s going to happen from a marketing state, from a business. If your strategy is wrong, if your messaging is wrong, if your product market fit is wrong, you’re just going to fail faster now. So you might succeed faster as well.

Sara Nay (04:29.233)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (04:43.648)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:46.606)

But if you don’t have the right strategy in place, it’s going to say, here’s the path we’re going to take. There’s a real danger in just having a whole lot of technology that’s going to get you there faster.

Sara Nay (04:57.649)

Yeah, absolutely. What about the mindset shift too? Cause there definitely are different sides of things. People are like AI is the future, stuff’s changing quickly. This is the best thing ever. But there’s also the other side of things where people are like, I’m terrified as where we’re going, we’re going to lose all these jobs. And so what about adopting the right mindset to be able to advance with these different tools?

John Jantsch (05:04.824)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:10.424)

Sure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:16.13)

Well, I think there’s legitimate fear. There are a lot of jobs that are going to be displaced, a lot of positions, a lot of skills that are not going to be that important. mean, when you think about it, I now have the world’s smartest human beings, the world’s greatest IQ at my disposal. All of sudden being smarter is not going to be an advantage necessarily because we can tap that computing power.

so the mindset shifts, I think, I think it’s a two level, certainly at the leadership level, you have to embrace it. You have to train your folks. You have to get them ready. And I think at the manager, the skilled, you know, person working in an organization, you know, they have to realize that their job is probably not, any more about doing technical things. it is going to be about managing the path that those technical things are being done on. So.

You know, that might not be a fit for everybody who really likes to get in there and crunch the numbers and analyze the data. You know, instead of really looking at like, I need to be really good at reading actuary tables, for example, you actually need to be really good at analyzing this amazing output that you’re going to get from these tools and managing and orchestrating the output that you get and making sense of it and contextualizing it. And that’s probably a different skill set.

You know, before we got on the call, I was, and I give Lisa Adams full credit for this. her up on LinkedIn. If you want to find out some somebody who’s really doing some great things in AI. But she, she said this statement. I think we’ve been saying it for a long time. Strategy is going to be more important. The human element is going to be more important, but she, just nails it with this. As AI democratizes IQ, EQ is going to become more important.

Some people call them soft skills, but emotional quotient. The ability to bring emotion, the ability to bring reality into who you’re trying to market you, to understand your customers, to understand the context in which your customers are trying to solve their problems. Those are things that humans with high EQ are very, very good at.

John Jantsch (07:33.058)

you can take it farther. mean, AI is democratizing reach. So community is going to be more important. Like as we can like spam more people, you know, communicating is going to be more important as AI just makes it so easy for anybody who’s never written two words, or put two sentences together, can now create, you know, theoretically create long form content, you know, having that personal connection with your clients is going to become more important. So those are all things that

If you were going to go read a book or take a course on EQ, those are the kinds of things, listening, empathy are the kinds of things that they would talk about. And I think those are going to be the things that those are going to be the skills that are going to be valued in the job market moving forward.

Sara Nay (08:19.611)

Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ve talked about this a lot, you and I too, it’s right now it’s we’re not thinking about AI is replacing jobs. It’s helping us do different or better or higher level work. And so think that also sums up what you were saying there. We’re not like firing our whole team and letting them go because we’re bringing a bunch of AI. but we are helping them all elevate and us ourselves elevate, you know, to, focus on the strategic thinking and the creativity and the collaboration and the EQ elements that you talked about there as well.

John Jantsch (08:48.844)

Yeah, and sadly, there will be people that are looking at that way. Look, I can have all these agents and I don’t have to have any people. I saw somebody post on LinkedIn, the $3 billion company with only three employees. you know, those get headlines, those get clicks. But, you know, frankly, it is going to displace the positions or the functions inside of organizations. you know, certainly people with high EQ, I think, will

who can adapt to kind of a new way to work, I think will thrive. And there will be some, you know, just like everything. I mean, when the automobile came along, you know, when the factories came along, mean, different jobs got displaced when the computer came along, you know, different jobs got displaced. And, you know, the, the, it ultimately, you know, new jobs were created, new education was created, new training was created for people to, you know, to change the skills. But that’s

Sara Nay (09:20.669)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:44.482)

You know, it’s never great for somebody that, you know, all their life has done a certain type of job and now they’re being told, you have to, you have to work differently than you have your whole life. But you know, that that’s come really with, with even incremental changes, you know, over time in the workplace.

Sara Nay (09:53.776)

No.

Sara Nay (10:00.197)

Yeah, I think it’s really important. I read something the other day about the mind shift with AI and what you were talking about there is like, you really have to have a growth mindset with this thing. You have to be eager to learn and expand and grow as a human to be able to get the full capabilities of AI. And I think that’s a good, good way to think about it as well.

John Jantsch (10:07.918)

Totally. Totally.

John Jantsch (10:16.504)

Yeah. And I’ll acknowledge it’s exhausting. but you, you know, I think particularly at the speed, you know, that we’re moving right now, but you’re absolutely right. You have to have that gross mindset and, and it’s tough because I mean, it means you have to do things that are not comfortable. Maybe, you know, there, there’s a lot of people that you mentioned this idea that AI seems really frightening and kind of techie. And so there’s just.

Sara Nay (10:18.993)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:43.468)

You know, some folks that that’s, know, that’s not their comfort zone, but it’s a matter of, don’t mean this in a really negative sounding way, but, I don’t think we have much choice.

Sara Nay (10:55.079)

Yeah.

Another area I want to dive into a bit more is you mentioned the human element a little bit more and making personal connections with your clients. And so with the evolution of AI right now, we’re seeing people are producing more content. There’s chat bots online, you’re, you know, you’re getting cold outreach, direct outreach from AI tools. And so there’s a lot of stuff that feels very automated. LinkedIn comments is another example where it just feels very automated. So how can companies stand out from that noise by doing things such as, you know, building trust, building brand actually

John Jantsch (11:07.491)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:25.635)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (11:26.675)

connecting with people. So what are some examples to stand out from the noise?

John Jantsch (11:30.894)

Well, I think for a lot of marketers, particularly, you have to really understand your brand voice. mean, you have to have a brand voice. mean, that’s one of your differentiators. Duct tape marketing is quite often seen by people as very practical, down to earth, plain spoken. And that’s a brand voice that we’ve spent a lot of time developing. And shame on us if we use some of the automation tools to not sound like us.

so, so I think that’s really, you know, I feel like we’re very empathetic. think we’re very caring about what we do, and care about the people that we serve. and that comes out, I think in the content that we produce and, you know, it is really tempting to say, look, I can do a, I can automate somebody having a hundred LinkedIn comments, you know, spread all over the place. Well, first off, it probably is counter.

to what you’re trying to do because you know, you and I have laughed about it. You see these comments on your LinkedIn posts and it’s clearly, you know, that was just AI generated and, and, you know, it really actually kind of makes you want to ban that person, you know? And so it’s certainly not doing any value for them. But I think what it just means is it’ll get easier to spot something that is both AI generated and something that is actually authentically generated.

I think you’ll get, I think the gap between those two is going to get even larger. And so spending the time to say, Hey, here’s who I really am. And this is how I talk. And maybe I don’t use punctuation here, you know, whatever, whatever it is, that is your brand voice. I think just understand it and stay true to it. And I know there are a lot of people talking about, you can train AI to do that. but I can spot it.

Sara Nay (13:18.619)

Yeah. think one of the easiest ways to spot an actual human producing content for me versus AI, one of the best ways I can see is storytelling. If someone’s talking about their actual personal experiences, I think that’s an easy way to spot. do you think there’s going to be an increased importance of storytelling as a brand and also humans representing the brand as well?

John Jantsch (13:27.458)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (13:39.148)

Yeah. Yeah. I think storytelling has actually been, it’s been hot for 10 years. know, I mean that idea in marketing, but I think you’re right. It’s now going to be a key differentiator. mean, AI can’t make up that case story or that example of, know, what happened, you know, on the day at work in your actual office can’t be made up. And so, you know, I think that that’s a lot of ways going to be a huge differentiator.

Sara Nay (14:04.081)

Yeah, absolutely. Do you think there’s a specific area of marketing that’s being shaken up the most right now? So SEO, paid, any channels that are being shaken up the most right now?

John Jantsch (14:12.653)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:16.194)

Well, I think the content one was the first one that of course, you know, when people woke up and went, wait, I hate writing content. You mean I can just put this in this thing and it’ll spit out 700 words? I mean, the real temptation, you know, was first there because it seemed so easy. It seemed, you know, too good to be true, right? And so people certainly jumped in there. So it, now a lot of people are starting to realize the backlash of that and the fallacy of, you know, of that just being able to produce content. So that was the first area though that clearly got disrupted.

I would say the next one is clearly going to be coming in the creative space, the design, the video, the editing. mean, those are things that, again, I don’t think there’s too many people out there going to Dali and producing images for everything, but certainly it’s not far away and they’re not only having video and audio editing tools that work quite well, they’re going to have video and audio creation.

tools that are going to work, you know, to the, to the level where you could actually put in a script and it will actually create an entire video for you. So I think there’ll be some disruption there. Again, I think that’s one of those things that now all of a sudden there’s the, know, there’s a lot of things that AI tools can do. And, you know, I think the differentiator is going to be somebody looking at it and saying, you know, with our brand voice in mind, with our brand promise in mind.

what should it do? And so, you know, there are things, you know, I had somebody that wanted to have an AI bot interview me for a podcast, you know, for, for example, I was like, well, first off, I wasn’t interested, but secondly, I was like, why would anybody, you know, think that was a good idea? But, you know, there are a lot of things that people do because they look at it they go, look, if we connect this together and this connect and people get really excited about that.

Sara Nay (16:01.852)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:10.382)

But I think we have to stay real and say, okay, from a practical sense, what would be best experience for our clients?

Sara Nay (16:17.723)

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why we’ve been really focused on recently in our conversations is what’s a good use case. Like, why are we exploring this? How can we actually make a difference with that? And I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind. Another area that I’ve heard you talk about a little bit is hyper personalization in terms of communication. And so it’s not going to be just about mass content to everyone that follows you. Like we have an opportunity to get a lot more focused in what we’re saying to specific people. So I would love to just hear your, your insights and what do you think the opportunity there is for 2025?

John Jantsch (16:47.352)

Well, for a lot of smaller businesses, the opportunity, mean, personalization has been there. Let’s face it, since email service providers came along and you could say, John, inside an email, that’s a level of personalization that’s been there forever. But what AI does is gives us easier access to a lot of data. So for instance, not only do I know your first name,

I know your LinkedIn profile and I know the last five things you’ve posted about. And that can actually be brought into a data set, you know, keeping all privacy, you know, things in mind that can be brought into a data set that would allow me to say, Hey, here are four products we sell. You talked about this. I’m going to send you an email on Tuesday morning at seven o’clock, because that’s when you post all the time. And I know you’re around on your computer. So I’m going to send you that email and I’m going to talk about.

not only a certain product that we have that I think would be a fit for you, but the problem that you uniquely identified that it solves for you. So that’s the promise of it. Now, the challenge of course is, you know, a lot of small businesses don’t have access to that data. A lot of larger organizations certainly are way ahead in that game. but

Segmenting and personalizing is something that, you know, a lot of the tool sets are going to start making easier in the very near future. And I think it’s, you know, a lot of what we have to do as marketers is informed by behavior that other companies are doing, that people get used to. And so when people start expecting that you’re going to understand, you know, what they need, or you’re going to understand it.

They already bought that product. They’re going to be less tolerant about, you know, your kind of one size fits all kind of promotion.

Sara Nay (18:41.275)

Yeah. On the sales side of things, I’m using a tool right now to prepare for sales calls where it basically brings in someone’s disc profile based on their LinkedIn. And it helps me understand how to sell to that unique individual, how to get their attention. Should I stay very high level or should I get down into the weeds? And so that’s just an example of more personalized sales. I know you were talking a lot about marketing, but marketing and sales go together. So

John Jantsch (18:57.485)

Right.

John Jantsch (19:05.582)

Yeah. I, it’s funny that I use that same tool. Of course, I just did a Google meet with somebody and it actually popped up in the Google meet and said, here’s how to talk with that person. So it was pretty, pretty cool. Yeah. I suspect it does in zoom. I didn’t, I’ve never done it, but I, that was the first time I’d seen it.

Sara Nay (19:16.414)

well.

Sara Nay (19:23.724)

Well, we’re at the top of our time about so any final thoughts just on the topic of 2025, what people should be focusing on right now in marketing.

John Jantsch (19:31.436)

Well, you said probably the one that’s the biggest, know, is, is continue to evolve. I mean, this is not going to stop. You’re not going to catch up necessarily. So continue, you know, to grow, continue to commit to growth. And I don’t think you have to, I don’t think you have to throw your hands up and say, I have to learn everything about this. Follow a couple of good people, focus on one new tool or one new use case, you know, a month.

or something so that you’ll start understanding it and start making it a priority for your teams to start, to continue to grow, to continue to learn these things so that you can actually explore them together and really start to get that mindset cemented about how we have to work with this new set of tools and technology that we’re all going to have available, whether we like it or not.

Sara Nay (20:24.893)

And I would add one more to I’ve learned a lot from just connecting and masterminding with other people that are doing really interesting things with AI and so I would also encourage you on top of what John just shared to form a mini mastermind group with some peers and share use cases and how you’re both all exploring the different tools as well because I think you can just learn a lot from others because we’re all just figuring it out right now.

John Jantsch (20:32.622)

100%.

John Jantsch (20:46.668)

We ought to do that. Why don’t we create a membership type of program where you can join and we’ll give you a use case once a month and kind of collaborate as a group in a live training or something. If that sounds interesting to you, send me an email, because that’s something we might actually work on. think that would be a really cool thing. So it’s just John at Duct Tape Marketing if you think that that idea of a collaboration membership.

around AI so you can learn in real time. Like there’s no way to create a course on AI because it’s changing so fast, but kind of having a monthly accountability group where you’re working on a use case might actually be kind of cool. So let’s do that, sir.

Sara Nay (21:26.609)

Let’s do it. heard it here first. We’ll keep it as practical as possible. So thanks, John.

John Jantsch (21:28.206)

All right. Awesome. Well, thank you all for tuning in to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. And this is where I guess I’m supposed to say, hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

Sara Nay (21:42.109)

Thanks everyone.

John Jantsch (00:00.898)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and guess what? It’s just me, no guests today. I’m doing a solo show. know, 2024 is getting ready to wrap up, depending upon when you’re listening to this. So I thought I would do my predictions for marketing disruption in 2025. And no shock, I’m going to actually give you five of them, but no shock, a lot of them have to do with AI.

That’s just where we are at this point in time. So I’m going to talk a little bit about what I think marketers, marketing consultants, marketing agencies, you as a marketer for your organization need to be aware of. Number one, I’m calling this hyper personalization powered by generative AI. There are a heck of a lot of tools out there now that are helping us get better at segmenting rather than just like market segments, but actually all the way down to

individual segments. you know, AI is going to give us the ability to create one-to-one campaigns really at scale. And I think that it’s going to be a huge differentiator because customers, I think you’re just going to demand, you know, once the market starts doing things and people start experiencing them, we start demanding, hey, I want that experience. And I think generic messaging is really going to make you fall

So you’re going to need to adopt some AI tools that offer or help you offer this idea of hyper personalization. know, frankly, a lot of the CRM tools, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, you know, allow you to personalize email campaigns. And you combine that with a segmenting tool, a customer data platform will really then allow you to go deeper and deeper, do that kind of almost one-on-one personalization.

start small. You don’t have to go crazy. But I think you need to start really businesses at all levels need to start thinking that way. You know, beyond the CRM or the marketing platforms to really getting into start saying, okay, our newsletter, could we, is there, do we have the ability to start sending instead of one newsletter that everybody gets a hundred newsletters that really understand who they’re sending to.

John Jantsch (02:28.104)

and replace content. That’s what we’re going to start seeing. You know, eventually we’ll start seeing websites. You you revisit our website and dependent upon what I know about you or dependent upon, you know, the pages you look at, you might actually start seeing personalized content. That’s the world that I think is coming. It’s actually it’s happening. We just don’t even realize it if people are doing it well. All right. Number two, decentralized communities on places like

Reddit and of course everybody’s talking about Blue Sky right now as a new one. I think that you are going to see consumers moving to some of these platforms that, you know, they’re a little ad-like experiences. I think people are getting really distrust with the traditional social networks that have become politicized and have been just…

cramming ads down our throats and selling data and whatnot. So I think you’re just going to see people, consumers moving to some of these new platforms. So consequently, you’re going to see brands moving to them. And I think this idea of nurturing smaller communities is probably going to be something that, that starts happening again, starting small, set up, you know, at least a presence on, you know, places like Reddit, blue sky. I don’t know if you’ve done a search on Google lately, but

you know, we’re starting to see all kinds of Reddit content come into the search results. so participating in at least understanding what’s going on in those places, I think is going to matter. And I’m not even talking about some of, you know, those are public places, but, you know, some of the private, like if you don’t belong to a Discord community, you know, it’s not being surfaced in search and you wouldn’t know what’s going on there. So I think you’re going to see a lot more of that.

I’m using tools like BuzzSumo and BrandWatch, you know, to really monitor discussions that are happening in some of these places, I think is, know, whether it’s your brand or it’s related to the products and services that you sell. think understanding how and where people are having these conversations and the fact that they are going to be in a lot of places that maybe you’re not today. And I’m not necessarily suggesting this idea that

John Jantsch (04:47.866)

you need to sign up for every new thing that comes along. I think it’s more understanding the trend that consumers are moving to some of those and moving away from really listening to a lot of the traditional platforms. All right, another one with AI directly in the title number three, generative AI led creative production. Everybody talks about content.

And certainly we’re getting there to where content production using these AI tools has become very effective. So the next, I think the next obvious thing is the creative assets. So make them faster, cheaper, more accessible. It really levels the playing field, I think, to be able to have graphics, to be able to create videos. And I think…

I think it’s going to, we are going to continue. could make this on an entire trend when I’m talking about agencies, traditional agencies, people who are doing tactics the same way, I think do risk some obsolescence. Agencies are not going to be replaced, but ones that are using traditional tactics and selling traditional tactics really run that risk. Our job, I think is going to be strategy. It’s going to be orchestrating.

using the rich set of tools that are available to us. So I think that that’s going to happen. You’re going to see more and more of it. Things like Dolly and Pictory that are allowing us to create video and image assets. All of the design folks, the Adobe’s of the world are going to get into this. Canva is actually adding. It’s a great tool to create for creative production.

being able to automate things across some of these platforms. So again, from the tools, start looking at Pictory AI and Dolly and Mid Journey. Adobe’s entry right now is called Firefly. These are some of the things that I think that we really need to understand, but they’re certainly disrupting.

John Jantsch (07:00.078)

you know, the industries as well. I would say, you know, where we are at the close of 2024 going into 2025, these tools are not the they’re not ready for prime time in terms of saying, I’ll just create all my images and all my illustrations, all my video. I’ll just have avatars, you know, creating those. mean, I think we’re a long way from people understanding how the market’s going to respond to those. And certainly you’ve all seen the kind of oddities that can be created, you know, using a dolly.

So we’re not there yet necessarily, but we’re moving there rapidly and certainly in 2025 it’s only going to continue.

This next trend, number four, I’m calling AI-driven marketing orchestration.

I think AI in a lot of ways is going to become the central hub for certainly for campaign management. I think we can make a case for a lot of things in operations and finance. You know, we’re all really going to be disrupted in terms of how we do things. So you could actually say, you know, I talked about marketing orchestration, but you could really talk a lot about business orchestration as well. But there’s no question that

that a lot of the campaigns, some of the automation, some of the integrations and things that we do today are going to be replaced. So you’re seeing many, many tools, HubSpot, know, go high level. You know, they’re building a lot of AI into, you know, email and, and add workflows. Even, you know, things like Google analytics are, you know, you’re going to start seeing people analyzing for insights. mean, a lot of, a lot of times just reports of like,

John Jantsch (08:41.89)

Here’s the data, make some sense of it. These tools are very, very good at doing that. So think you’re going to see really full scale AI driven automation and really something that’s going to allow us to automate a lot of the touch points seamlessly. So that’s something that I think we, it’s not a overnight buy one tool, get rich, flip the switch. It is just something that piece by piece.

S O P by S O P campaign by campaign, you’re going to start seeing people integrating these more effectively. All right. Now I’m going to come full circle because I think a lot of, you know, people look at these AI tools and they’re, they’re, they really look at them as, this is going to replace humans and this is a girl place our need to do, to do marketing or to have marketers in general. And I think to me, what it’s going to do is it’s going to,

No question it’s going to impact some of the things that were done by hand. Some of the inefficiencies is going to allow people to actually deliver more value, maybe more profitably if you understand how to employ these. And number five to me is actually the piece that brings this together. I think brand marketing, I call it as the new standard. Branding, brand marketing has always been important.

But I think in turn, when it comes to customer growth and to generating leads, a lot of people have gotten away from that idea because heck, if you could figure out SEO, you could get cheap leads. If you could figure out the ad platforms and certainly they would sell you all their data, you could get cheap leads. And I think that’s going away. That’s one of the things that generative AI is making go away. A lot of the easy search, a lot of the ad platforms are going to not being able to sell their third party data. And so this differentiation through brand marketing is,

I mean, it was so important, frankly, before we actually even had a lot of the online and digital channels that exist today. And I think we’re going back there to some degree that I think consumers are really going to be much more effective in aligning their values with the brand’s values. And the fact of the matter is, I say this all the time.

John Jantsch (11:03.778)

No matter how much we talk about all these platforms and tools and technology changing, the thing that continues to change rapidly is how people get to choose to buy. mean, so much of the power, if you will, in the equation has shifted to the buyer because they could find out so much more information. They can actually be well down their journey to making a purchase decision before we even know they’re out there. so brands that really want to differentiate today,

are going to focus on trust or increasing trust, increasing loyalty. you’re going to have continued regulatory scrutiny. I think it’s going to continue to drive some of that. and I think that we have to, as businesses, you know, really focus on aligning campaigns with authentic brand values. and, and really, you know, again, our ideal customer, you know, wants to see, and I think has the ability now to choose.

to work with companies that really do communicate their values. In terms of how do you go there, one of the things you might do is just audit everything you’re doing. mean, are you in alignment with your brand standards and your values? Are you putting out messages out there that don’t make sense necessarily to the market that you’re trying to attract? And frankly,

One of things we have to do is continue to monitor these things because consumers are going to become very wary of AI produced content, AI produced visuals, AI all the way to the level of AI produced video that can replicate somebody so thoroughly that it’s very, very difficult to tell if that’s the real person or if that is an AI video. And I think a lot of consumers are going to want to know.

They’re going to want that transparency in addition to that value alignment. those are things that I think we really are going to have to be very wary of.

John Jantsch (13:09.292)

I think we have the opportunity though to lead. And whether it’s in our business or it’s in, if we are an agency working with clients, I think we do have the ability to teach and the lead. When there are new tools, I’ve talked about AI extensively in this, when there are new tools, new technologies, there’s going to be a lot of misinformation. There’s going to be a lot of hype. There’s going to be a lot of people telling you all you need is AI to get rich. mean, every single day you’re going to be hearing those kinds of messages. And I think that.

It’s really, I think one of the things that we have to do is cut through the clutter. mean, that’s really always been what I’ve tried to do when I see a new technology. The first thing I want to know is can this help me do my job better? Can this actually help me provide more value for my customers? And if the answer is yes, I want to explore it. If the answer is no, it’s just a new thing. It’s everybody’s talking about it, you know, in ways that don’t make sense. I mean, I don’t really care about that.

But I think that’s how you can start breaking these new technologies down in very practical ways. All right, that’s all I have for today. Hopefully you find some interest in this as you charge into 2025 or if you’re listening to this in 2025, certainly some things to consider. Love to hear feedback. Feel free to send me messages. It’s just John at ductapemarketing.com. And of course we love that feedback. Well, we really love five stars actually.

On, on Apple or Spotify or wherever you choose to listen. All right. Take care. Appreciate it. Well, hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.