John Jantsch (00:00.91)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I am going to do a solo show. Might be one of my last solo shows of 2025, depending upon when you’re listening to this. I’m going to call this, Why Your Business Needs a Marketing Operating System. So if you’ve been listening for any amount of time at all, you’ve certainly heard me say marketing is a system. It starts with strategy before tactics. I’ve been saying that for 30 years.

And in some ways, we have brought a systematic approach to marketing. Have we brought a system? Probably not always. It’s probably been more of a concept because we just really haven’t had the tools necessary to do it. But I believe we are approaching that point where we do have the actual tools to create a tangible, installable

marketing operating system in a business. I’m very excited about that. That’s really going to be the next chapter of duct tape marketing. If you will, we are going to go very heavily into that. What I think is a needed innovation in the market. I will still say that we encounter every single day businesses that feel chaotic, disconnected, even if they look outwardly like, yeah, they’re succeeding. They’re growing.

Internally, when you get in there, there’s a lot of things going on that nobody’s really sure of. There’s not a lot of planning. There’s certainly tactic of the week still going on. And every now and then you get lucky and some of that stuff works, but it certainly makes it difficult to scale a business in that way. And that’s really what I want to tackle today. Kind of the common pain points that we encounter. Random tactics, too many tools, inconsistent results, no clear message or direction. Boy, that one’s a killer.

A lot of businesses, when I talk about marketing as a system, maybe they have financial systems, they have hiring systems, have systems, whatever it is they make out the door. But then when it comes to marketing, it just feels like such a foreign concept. And I think it’s just a normal concept we’ve been taught to really think differently about. So before I get into the stages of the system, what the system might look like in your world or in any business’s world.

John Jantsch (02:19.95)

It has to be built on something that is strategic. And so we’ve been using for the last couple of years something I call the marketing pyramid. And it’s a framework to really, it’s really in a lot of ways the spine of the system. That it’s the structure that really informs kind of how we build it. And a lot of times when people talk about strategy, certainly when they talk about marketing strategy,

It’s like they do it in a vacuum. I mean, a lot of times when they’re talking about a marketing strategy, they’re really just talking about how are going to get business? And that’s a gross strategy, maybe, but that’s all. Here’s the idea behind the pyramid is that you need to build from the bottom up. And that first rung of the strategy pyramid begins with business strategy. I what is the vision, values, goals? What’s even the business model? mean, if you’re talking about, we need to grow 20 percent. Well, why? How?

Is that going to happen and so? That without a conversation about that or at least some analysis of that It’s very difficult for you to think in terms of like here’s gonna be our marketing strategy because your marketing strategy is supposed to Solve for the all of that right it’s like if these are our objectives of this is where we’re trying to go the marketing strategy is gonna just support that it’s not going to just be this thing that we operate and hope we get to where we’re going and inside of

the marketing strategy, there are really three layers. It’s not just about getting the phone to ring. It’s not just about getting leads. The first layer, well, the three layers are brand strategy, growth strategy, which I mentioned, and customer experience strategy. Those are all a combined whole really that go into a marketing strategy. And so many people leave out the first one and the third one. So that brand strategy is, you know, what’s your message? What’s your identity? What’s your positioning? What’s your proof?

You know, what do you want the market to be thinking about you out there? And do you have a defensible competitive difference that you can really go out there and understand who your ICP is, your ideal client profile, and understand who you’re competing with for that ideal client profile so that you can send the right message and really have a strong brand strategy. Now, after that, this is the part most people understand.

John Jantsch (04:40.654)

is the growth strategy and that’s really the offers, the channels of how you’re going to generate leads. Ultimately, how you’re going to convert leads as well. And then the third part that I see people quite often missing and not thinking about is the customer experience strategy. How are we going to retain customers? How are we going to generate referrals? How are we going to wow our customers?

so that they are out there actually talking about us and advocating for doing work with us. Those all need to just be planned things. So we need to build now, start building objectives around what we want to accomplish in each of those strategies. Now, if we’re going to build a true marketing operating system, one of the core pieces that this is going to be built on is a system strategy. So what’s our tool stack?

What are the processes? How do we create automation? Increasingly, what role is AI going to play in our creating systems? Because this is really how you get this repeatable system in place is by actually having a plan, having that business and marketing strategy that is then going to be executed by who’s doing things. And then of course, that’s the final tip of the pyramid, and that’s the team strategy. What are the roles? What’s the rhythm?

How is AI going to be integrated into your team? So that’s the spine. That’s ultimately what we want to have a plan for. And then we build the marketing operating system in stages to actually execute on that. There isn’t any way for me to put a pyramid down in structure in front of you and say, here, fill out all of this and we’ll have this. That’s the ultimate goal to actually have this completed marketing pyramid that’s going to be our guide.

but we’re going to build it in, and we’re going to build each of those pieces in stages. So, what are the seven stages? I like seven as a number. Seems like I’ve used a lot in the things that we’ve created. So, the first one is the strategy first core. This is something we’ve been doing for 25 years, and it’s still a crucial element. I don’t care what we’re developing, it’s a crucial element, always will be.

John Jantsch (06:56.302)

tools come, platforms come and go, AI is here this week, who knows what’s here next week, strategy, the strategy core, and fundamentally what we’re here to do as marketers, I don’t think will ever change. So we have to build that, we have to diagnose the gaps, we have to clarify the message, we have to define the client journey, and we have to tie those back, and really part of the first part before we’d ever get started is we would have an in-depth analysis.

with your help, of course, as the business owner on what the business strategy is. And quite frankly, that may be a discussion that we have to start because you’ve never really looked at a long term approach to your overall business strategy. So we may start there before we actually start or maybe as the discovery phase of the strategy first core. The second component then is what we call the campaign builder system. So I mean, this is where we’re going to plan.

you know what 90 day campaigns would look like. But we’re going to start here with building your brand engine and your growth engine and your customer experience engine because those are going to be the things that we’re going to launch really out there. We have to have those built in order to build campaigns. Stage number three, the third component is what we are calling the work stream engine. So this is where we’re going to assign roles, SOPs, rhythms for execution.

probably build OKRs, which is an objective key result tool that I think Google was, or people at Google were most noted for developing that. It’s great tool for actually breaking things down into small chunks so you can get to it. Then the next stage we’re gonna go to really is the AI powered marketing hub. I believe that, you know, a lot of people are still looking at AI as a tool or they’re looking at it as a

platform or as a way to do automation or as a way to do things faster and more efficiently, I ultimately believe that it’s going to be just baked into how we work as a company. let’s say you have Google Workspace or you have Microsoft Teams. Today, a lot of the communication across organizations, even outward communication, say via Gmail, things of that nature, is all just baked into those kind of

John Jantsch (09:21.304)

tools. mean, they basically are workplace tools that everybody uses in the organization. They all communicate with each other. They all collaborate. Well, AI is going to be baked in. Increasingly, it is being baked into those tools. But what we’re going to build is the AI marketing hub. So you’ll have playbooks now for how’s the newsletter going to be written? What are blog posts going to be? How are we going to do social? What are our ads going to look like? I believe we can use the AI tools to build a framework inside of an organization so that

no matter who’s operating the system inside the organization, they will actually have the playbooks to do it correctly and to use AI in a way that’s branded and in your voice and trained, but can also produce a lot of output that is part of the marketing plan.

Now, the fifth stage is actually, we’re calling it scorecards and signals. So this is gonna be your dashboard. It’s gonna be how you track performance without really getting into the vanity metrics. It’s gonna be, we’re gonna measure what matters, right? Now, this comes in the fifth stage, but frankly, we are using data throughout. I mean, when we are looking at an ICP, we’re looking at data. When we’re looking at core messaging, we’re looking at data. So…

Data becomes this fifth stage where we’re going to build the ultimate output tool, but we’re going to be baking data into the culture and the DNA of the organization. I think that that’s a real gap for lot of organizations. They don’t know what to measure. They aren’t measuring anything, or they’re measuring stuff that’s so complex it doesn’t really give any insight. And so we’re going to bake it into every stage, but then you’re going to have actually the dashboard as part of that.

One of the things that’s really important is this is not no system is set and forget it. We’ve got to tune it. We’ve got to maintain it. We’ve got to give it oil. All the metaphors you want to use there. And so we’re going to actually have what we call the momentum meeting. So it would be a very structured monthly check in that’s going to drive accountability and alignment and reassign ownership, reassign responsibility on what’s going on.

John Jantsch (11:34.688)

assess where you are on meeting your system output. And then the last piece, I think any good system, you’re basically building the thing and hoping you got it right. And so constant optimization is probably, many of you probably experienced that in your own business. mean, we’re every 90 days tweaking something or maybe.

changing direction almost in a large way or to some degree or in a new product offering or something. So there’s this constant feedback and review to refine and improve what’s working that we call the optimization loop.

Once we build that, what happens after that? It’s our belief that clear strategy is something that doesn’t change every month, but your marketing systems run consistently. Campaigns generate results, not noise. the key is inside the organization, think everybody knows what their role is. Everybody knows what their objectives are. Everybody has…

has visibility into what’s working, what’s not working. And I think that confidence across the team should really soar. Even if the team includes outside folks that are third party suppliers, partners, vendors, it really gives them confidence to know that there is a plan that they’re not just doing their one little part out there. So.

John Jantsch (13:13.922)

What’s next?

This is something that we are building now for clients. And it’s something that if it makes sense for you, we would love to show you this system.