Category Archives: Strategy

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Focus on Your Customer to Grow Your Business

Focus on Your Customer to Grow Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Simon Severino

strategy In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Simon Severino, CEO of Strategy Sprints GmbH, where their goal is to coach CEOs and their teams to ensure higher NPS (Net Promoter Score), higher sales conversion and faster execution.

Simon also teaches Growth, Strategy, and Innovation at select MBA courses across Europe. Simon is the host of a podcast The Strategy Show, a show from CEOs for CEOs, in every episode he promises you will find a new masterclass on how to grow and scale your business.

Questions I ask Simon Severino:

  • In your experience what are some of the biggest mistakes that you’ve come across that companies commonly make, especially in the strategy area?
  • Can you think of a business that you have been able to convince to simplify and that’s where growth came from rather than piling more on to get growth?
  • Would you say there is a type of business this approach works best with?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • What are Strategy Sprints and how they work
  • How to find the #1 bottleneck in companies
  • How to focus on customer growth

More about Simon Severino:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Zephyr logo

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr.

Zephyr is a modern, cloud-based CMS that’s licensed only to agencies. The system is lightweight, easy to use, and incredibly fast. And with an array of beautiful themes to choose from, you can get your clients’ websites up-and-running quickly and with less effort. Or, if you’d rather build a custom site, Zephyr includes agency services to be your plug-and-play dev shop.

Zephyr is passionate about helping agencies create great websites for their clients. To learn more, go to Zephyrcms.com.

Creating a customer success journey

Creating a customer success journey written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back in the 80s, there was a brand that became a cultural hit called Members Only. Yes, I had a Members Only jacket, there, I admit it. The tagline for the companies’ line of apparel was, “When you put it on, something happens.” (First off, if you’re too young to remember this fad, you can do a search and still find fan sites, and, if like me you had one, please reply to this email, and we can be team members.)

Here’s my point today – what if you could come to think about your customer or clients or patients or whatever you call them – as members.

Now, I’m not merely suggesting you create a membership aspect to your business. However, that might be a great model for you; I’m suggesting that you think this way about them.

If you did, it might change how you innovate, iterate, and support every aspect of your business.

In a stable membership relationship, your goal is to help every member get the transformation they are seeking. So, naturally, you would care more about them getting a result than you getting a transaction.

If that were so, you would have to ask yourself much harder (or at least different) questions.

Then you might start analyzing your customer journey more like a customer success journey.

So, here are a few things to ponder.

1) Where are our customers now in terms of the results they want?

Think stages – we use three stages to talk about our small business customers and their marketing – Build, Grow, and Ignite.

2) What are the characteristics of customers in each of these stages?

For us, we might analyze their online presence, marketing message, and lead generation activity to characterize what they are thinking, feeling, and doing during each stage.

3) What milestones must they achieve to move to the next stage?

Again, for us, it might be a website that generates email sign-ups or phone calls, all the way through creating a robust referral generation system.

Milestones are a pretty great way to think about activity because you can create a yes or no question – do they have this – yes/no are the only answers.

4) What activities or action steps must they take to achieve each milestone?

This becomes the project plan to move through the stages or take the success journey you map out for them.

And, this is a biggie, this becomes the roadmap for every system you need to create in your business, so you provide an incredible journey for every single customer no matter the stage of their journey.

5) What systems must we create to ensure passage through the stages of the success journey?

The beauty of this approach is that it keeps both you and your customers on the same path – a path this is based on transformation, a path that can be accurately measured, a path that is all about results.

Becoming Your Best Virtual You

Becoming Your Best Virtual You written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on Becoming Your Best Virtual You

Virtual and work from home is getting a lot of hype right now, for obvious reasons. I’ve been a big fan of virtual work for many years, and there are some tools I’ve come to love and rely on over the years. I’m going to talk about some of those tools that I think a lot of people have either underutilized or are coming to a new appreciation for right now.

Some of these tools you might begin to use out of necessity right now, but as you get to know them, you might discover that you enjoy them so much you’ll continue to rely on them once we’ve returned to business as usual.

I’m going to run down my list of go-to tools, give you some case studies, and share how I personally use those tools in my daily life as an entrepreneur.

1. One-to-One Video

A lot of people are relying on one-to-one video at present because we can’t meet in person, but one-to-one video is a great communication tool even when we do have flexibility with how we meet up and converse with others.

By one-to-one video, I mean a video that you record specifically for one individual. The greeting and message is personalized just for them. And I’ve found over the years that this technology has many applications, from sending internal messages to remote folks on my team to interacting with clients and prospects.

The first way I use one-to-one video is to provide clarification when I’m sending a message. Say I’m forwarding on a long document with lots of detailed information. I might send along a one-to-one video highlighting the most salient parts of the document to help direct the reader.

I also find it’s a helpful tool when you’re working with a distributed team. For example, I work with a lot of web designers, and it’s quick and easy to record a video that shows minor edits that I’d like to see on a webpage they’ve already mocked up.

It’s also great for documenting processes. Using the screen capture tool allows you to walk someone through a process, if you’d like to give them a guided step-by-step walkthrough of what needs to be done in a given program.

It’s also a creative way to interact with clients or prospects. Instead of just sending a standard introductory email, which doesn’t stand out well or capture attention, use a personalized video to catch someone’s eye in an otherwise crowded inbox. It’s also a great way to send a thank you or to ask for a review from a happy customer.

The Tool: Loom

My go-to for one-to-one video is Loom. Even the free version of the platform has tons of functionality. You can film yourself, do a screen capture video, or create a video that shares your screen and shows you down in the corner.

Loom also makes the sharing process seamless. As soon as you’re done recording your message, you hit stop, it produces a link, and you drop that URL into an email. If you’ve integrated Loom with Gmail, it will embed the video directly into your email.

When someone gets the email, Gmail users don’t even need to leave their inbox; the video plays right within their inbox.

2. Video Meeting & Webinar Platform

When you’re working with a distributed team, it helps to have a way for you all to come together face-to-face. That’s where video meeting platforms come in. We use them for internal meetings, to talk with clients (to present ideas, brainstorm, or offer updates); we even use it for one-to-one sales calls.

Video is also a great tool for creating educational content and webinars. And some podcasters have started using video in their recording process. While they’ll only use the audio stream to produce the podcast, it’s helpful for them to be able to see their guest on the screen and makes the interview more natural and seamless.

The Tool: Zoom

The video meeting and webinar platform I’ve come to rely on is Zoom. What I love about Zoom is that there’s no software involved. No one needs to download anything to access the meeting; you simply forward a link and anyone can join from any device.

Zoom can be used for both webinars and meetings. The tool allows you to do a presentation (like a webinar) where everyone is an attendee and is muted. There’s a screen-sharing functionality, and you can incorporate features like chat, Q&A, and polls into your presentation.

Alternatively, you can use Zoom for meetings. Here, your team hops on the video and you can sit around and talk in much the same way you would if you were all around a conference table.

Of course, the one thing everyone must have to participate in a Zoom meeting is a way to connect. But it’s possible to do so via computer or phone. There’s an app for mobile devices, and people can even call in through a dial-in number, if that’s easier.

3. Live Streaming

Live streaming is becoming increasingly popular. And particularly during the current moment, where we’re not able to meet up in person, we’re seeing more personalities hopping onto Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn to connect with their audience.

I think live streaming is an incredible tool for building community and speaking to your fans, but I find it’s often over-utilized. I think the key to creating great live streaming content is to start by asking yourself “What is useful for my community, prospects, or clients at this time?” That’s the question that should be driving you as you devise your live programming.

All of the major social platforms allow you to go live from within their individual apps, but I prefer to use an external tool.

The Tool: StreamYard

My go-to for live streaming online has become StreamYard. I find the tool helpful for a number of reasons. First, it allows you to broadcast to multiple platforms simultaneously. Rather than having to decide between addressing your fans on Facebook or LinkedIn, with StreamYard, you can do both at the same time.

It also allows you to add branding onto your video. You can put your logo or any relevant promotional information in the bottom third of your video screen. You can also easily incorporate Q&A and chat into your video, making it easy to engage your audience while you’re live.

It’s also really easy to record and hang onto your sessions. While it’s possible to download things that go live on other social media platforms, they don’t make it simple for you to capture that content. StreamYard makes it seamless, and then you have access to the content for future use, should you decide you’d like to reuse it.

Finally, StreamYard allows you to schedule out the time when you’ll go live and includes a notification on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, or your streaming platform of choice. By notifying your audience of when you’re going live in advance, you create a built-in audience for your content and ensure that you’ll have people there to engage with—it helps you to create more of a live webinar experience.

4. Collaboration Software

For many folks who are used to sharing office space with their colleagues, the biggest hurdle to remote work is keeping everyone on the same page when it comes to advancing your projects and agendas. You need a unified communication tool and work space so that you can bring together all the emails, files, revisions, and to-do lists in one place. That way, everyone is always on the same page, and you always know right where to go to look for information.

There are tons of great collaboration suites out there, from Basecamp to Asana to Microsoft Teams.

The Tool: Slack

Our team loves Slack for collaboration and communication. When you’re used to working in an office, you can just pop down the hallway to ask your colleague a quick question. When you’re working from home, Slack is the next best thing.

It not only allows you to keep up a friendly and more relaxed chat environment, it also helps you to keep communications unified and to make sure all relevant parties hear announcements and are kept up-to-date on the latest company news. Rather than having to call around to each person individually, you can notify the appropriate Slack channel, and everyone who needs to receive your message gets it right away.

Is Virtual Me Here to Stay?

A lot of these tools have become necessities right now because of the coronavirus pandemic. People are using the tools in new ways. Some are conducting networking groups online rather than in person. Others have even set up co-working video sessions, where folks log on, go on mute, work individually, and occasionally come up for air to say a few casual words to each other.

We’re even seeing families adopt the technology for fun ways to stay connected virtually. I’ve seen scavenger hunts, science experiments, play dates, book clubs, and dance parties all occur on the web in these last few weeks of social distancing.

While some of these virtual ways of being will likely go away when life returns to normal (a virtual family game night will never replace the in-person hugs and warmth you’ll feel), I suspect some of these new ways of working will stick around.

For example, I host a number of weekend bootcamps throughout the year with our Consultant Network, and we’re planning to move them to virtual events. While there are some things you may lose in a virtual setting (the spontaneous conversation over lunch, say), in terms of cost and ability to include more people, virtual has got in-person beat every time.

Tips for a Better Experience

When it comes to connecting virtually, there are a few steps we can all take to make it a better experience for ourselves, our clients, our families, and anyone else we may be conversing with online.

First, audio is a big deal. There’s nothing more frustrating than listening to fuzzy audio that keeps going in and out. Particularly if you’re presenting to a group, it pays to invest in a nicer, USB condenser mic (like the Blue Yeti). These microphones pick up more depth and character in your voice, and they make you sound a lot more professional than the mic on your iPhone headphones.

Video matters, too. Rather than relying on the built-in camera that comes on your laptop, spend a little bit more on something like the Logitech C922 Pro. A nicer camera will give you higher video quality, with better light and clearer visuals.

Speaking of light, make sure that you have natural light on your face, if you can. Don’t have the light streaming in behind you, though, or you become a silhouette. If you don’t have natural light wherever you’re recording from, investing in a ring light can help your video look less dark and grainy.

Finally, do what you can to eliminate distractions. I know it can be difficult when you’re working from home and might have kids or pets running around in the background, but anything you can do to make your background as clean and seamless as possible is a major bonus for video calls and presentations.

I love the company Anyvoo; they create easily portable backdrops for video calls. You can get whatever you’d like printed on the canvas—your logo, a peaceful mountain scene—and you simply set the background up behind you whenever you have to take a video call. It’s on a stand, so it can be assembled anywhere and is taken down just as easily.

Many of us are adjusting to a new way of working that became a reality very suddenly over the past few weeks. I hope these tools make the transition a little easier for you, and that some of them become favorites that will continue to help you grow your business even after we return to normal life.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Klaviyo logo

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you’re looking to grow your business there is only one way: by building real, quality customer relationships. That’s where Klaviyo comes in.

Klaviyo helps you build meaningful relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers, allowing you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages.

What’s their secret? Tune into Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday docu-series to find out and unlock marketing strategies you can use to keep momentum going year-round. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondbf.

Building a Marketing System in 7 Steps

Building a Marketing System in 7 Steps written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing philosophy is that marketing is a system. It’s not a series of tactics you approach willy-nilly. It’s not a blog post here, a podcast episode there, a social media ad once in a while. The kind of marketing that gets real results is driven by strategy and is constantly refined.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the seven steps any business must take to build a robust marketing system. Going through these steps now and revisiting them annually is the key to ensuring your business’s long-term success.

1. It Starts with Strategy

When you think marketing, your mind might leap to tactical elements: setting up a social media profile, creating share-worthy how-to videos on your YouTube channel, soliciting positive reviews on Yelp. Those are all well and good, and they are certainly elements you’ll want to tackle eventually. But first, you’ve got to start with strategy, and strategy starts with knowing your ideal customer.

If you don’t understand who your ideal customer is—their core problems and the value you bring to every engagement—how can you possibly find a message that resonates and identify the tactics that will work?

The short answer is that you can’t. Every great marketing strategy is rooted in pinpointing your ideal customer and honing in on the ways they want to interact with a business. Only once you’ve established your ideal client can you begin to connect what you offer with how you solve your customer’s problems.

2. Take Control of the Customer Journey

Today’s customer journey is driven by the customers themselves. People can go online to read your website, snoop on your social profiles, and get the inside scoop from existing customers’ reviews. If you let it, the buying journey can happen with hardly any input from you.

But smart businesses don’t sit back and let the customer do what they want; they take the reins on the customer journey. We like to frame the customer journey as one that flows through a marketing hourglass. The journey has seven steps: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.

We call it the marketing hourglass because your marketing tactics need to be involved at every step along the way. It’s not enough for you to leap in just before the sale. You must use tactics early on to help ideal prospects discover your brand. Your content should help convince them that you’re likable and trustworthy.

And your marketing efforts must continue long after that first sale is done. You’ll continue to be involved in the process of encouraging repeat business and a steady stream of positive reviews and referrals. As marketers, it’s our job to help customers take each step along the journey logically.

3. Content Has Risen to the Strategic Level

Don’t conflate the word “content” with “blog post.” Content is way bigger than that.

Content allows us to take the promise that we made to solve a problem and expand that so we can dominate search, social media, and all other places online where prospects are looking for answers about our brand.

We like to use content hubs to create one-stop-shops for the kind of informative, meaningful content that addresses a customers’ needs anywhere along the journey. Hub pages are designed to bring together all relevant information on a certain topic on one page. Think of them as the table of contents for a great online book in your area of expertise.

Whether someone’s just discovering your business, are coming back for one last look before they make a first purchase, or are sharing information about you with a friend looking for a referral, content hubs have something for everyone.

Content hubs are not only great resources on your website, they help improve your ranking in SEO and ensure that it’s easier for new audiences to discover your business.

4. Be Everywhere Online

People today live their lives online. The average internet user is online for six and a half hours each day! So that’s where every business needs to be, too.

Creating a total online presence allows you to greet people no matter where they are on the internet. Did someone drive by your brick-and-mortar store and look you up on Facebook? You should have a complete profile, with photos, reviews, and contact information, to greet them!

Did one of your happy customers refer you to their friend? Make sure your website is optimized for search, so that you will appear in queries even if that friend forgot to write your business name down and instead searches for a term associated with what you do.

The final piece of having a total online presence is ensuring that all of the pieces are integrated to work as a whole. Make sure that you use consistent branding across all of your profiles so people easily recognize you as the same business. Have your social handles on your website, so people can click from your homepage to your Instagram or Facebook profile. And vice versa! Use social media organic posts and advertising to drive traffic back to your website.

5. Keep the Leads Coming

A steady flow of leads is what will keep you in business for years to come. Not every lead will become a customer, but if you constantly have new opportunities coming your way, you’ll be able to continue to grow your business.

There is no one way to generate leads. In fact, it’s best to spread the wealth so that you’re there in the channels where your ideal customers live. That being said, it also pays not to stretch yourself too thin. You don’t have to be on every social media channel, guest blogging for every industry publication, appearing on every podcast, and showing up in every search related to your industry.

Instead, focus your efforts on the channels that are most likely to generate results. If your ideal clients are Baby Boomers, there’s no need to spend time marketing on a Gen Z-dominated social media site like Snapchat. It’s best to focus on building up those channels that are most likely to consistently generate leads.

6. Focus on Converting Those Leads

Are you doing what it takes to convert each and every lead? What about a plan to reactive old and lost clients? You can dramatically impact a business by setting up better experiences along the customer journey.

This starts with customer journey mapping. Mapping allows you to understand exactly what’s happening at each stage of the journey. If there are elements that are contributing to a less-than-stellar experience, you have the power to change those and make them better. Once you know you’ve built a great experience all the way through, you’ll have a better shot at winning back those clients you lost and capturing new ones, too.

Customer journey mapping also helps you consider all conversion behavior. It’s not just the sale that matters, it’s every conversion step leading up to that. Are people signing up for your newsletter? Are they downloading your free ebook? Are they booking an online appointment to video chat with your sales reps?

By tracking and measuring each conversion behavior, you can begin to identify those weak spots. If you can boost conversion at each weak spot by one or two percent, it adds up to a huge bump cumulatively over the journey.

7. Make a Plan

You don’t need to be like those giant corporations that have five- and ten-year strategic plans. But you do need a plan that says—for this year, quarter-by-quarter—these are our biggest priorities.

Most businesses try to bite off more priorities than they can chew. Limit it to three or four priorities each quarter. From there, you can break these big-picture goals into actionable steps.

Marketing isn’t something you can set-and-forget. It needs to happen daily, so you should schedule it in to ensure it becomes a habit. If you have a team, stay on top of them to ensure that your priorities are moving along and you’re hitting each of those actionable steps on time.

Once you’ve discovered the tactics and strategies that work for you, write them down. By documenting your processes, it’s easy to pass those tasks off to staff members or outside marketing support. That frees you up to focus on the next big strategy to grow your business.

Great marketing is a cyclical thing; it never truly ends. Once you’ve gone through these seven steps, go right back to the beginning and refine your approach. Do you need to revisit the profile of your ideal customer? Is there a new online channel you should be considering in your marketing efforts? Have your mapping exercises highlighted a new opportunity to boost conversions at a given stage in the journey?

By revisiting each of the seven steps of your marketing strategy each quarter, it keeps your approach fresh and helps you identify new ways to reach customers.

How Mobile Has Impacted the Customer Journey

How Mobile Has Impacted the Customer Journey written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The customer journey is influenced by many outside factors. As the use of mobile devices has taken off over the past decade, it’s changed the way that businesses market themselves and how customers interact with businesses.

In order to better understand the impact mobile has had on the customer journey, it’s helpful to go through and assess the effect at each stage of the marketing hourglass. By better understanding how mobile changes customers’ behaviors, you can begin to adapt your marketing strategy to meet their evolving needs.

Mobile in the First Stage: Know

How do people discover a new business? Before the days of computers, it was all print and television ads, word of mouth, or simply driving by your storefront. Now, there are dozens of channels for people to encounter your brand. And mobile only further diversifies the field.

In some ways, mobile has shortened the customer journey. Mobile searches with the phrase “near me” and “can I buy” or “to buy” increased by 500 percent between 2015 and 2017. That boost means people are turning to mobile to discover immediate solutions to their problems. By entering this search term, they’re able to quickly check out your website, read reviews, and even find your hours and location on a map. What would have taken more in-depth research in the past is now condensed into a few minutes and a handful of clicks on a mobile device.

It’s also important to remember that not everyone finds you via an internet browser search. With the advent and rise of mobile apps, some people are discovering businesses through a specific app. For example, those who search for local businesses on the Yelp app are only being presented with businesses who have a presence on Yelp. If you haven’t claimed your profile there, you’re not going to be discovered at all. So making sure your business’s profile is claimed on the major local listings sites, like Yelp and Google My Business, is critical to winning at mobile.

For that same reason, you need to have a presence on social media. Some people turn to Facebook or Instagram for advice on which local businesses to patronize. Again, you’re not even going to be in the running if you don’t have a profile on those sites!

How Mobile Influences the Like and Trust Phases

Once someone’s discovered you online, they want to get to know you better. And to do that, they need to be able to learn more about you. Just like you wouldn’t get married after the first date, prospects want to make sure you’re the right fit before they dive in.

You want your content to build that familiarity and trust, while being easy to consume on a mobile device. That starts with creating content that can be enjoyed on the go. Podcasts are an easy listen for folks who are on their commute, and video is often a bite-sized way to share meaningful information that builds trust and authority.

Social media is also critical in this stage. Posting regularly on social media means that those who discover you on mobile can do a quick inventory of who you are and what you do by scanning backwards through your recent content.

For those who aren’t looking to make an immediate purchase, social media remains a great way to stay top-of-mind on mobile devices. People often check their social media accounts multiple times a day, and so if you’re appearing at the top of their newsfeeds each time they log in, you build that familiarity quickly.

Advertising can also help you stay top of mind. Social ads are a way to remain omnipresent on prospects’ feeds. And display ads allow you to keep you name on people’s minds even when they visit other websites from their phone’s browser.

How to Try on Mobile

When we get to the try phase of the customer journey, mobile has an important role in ensuring that customers don’t slip away at this critical stage.

Mobile tactics can help to facilitate the try process by making it easy to prospects to sign up for a demo or appointment. A smart use of chat or SMS marketing techniques can make it easy for you to automate the sign-up process, while providing prospects with a more personalized encounter with your business.

Newer technologies like augmented reality (AR) are changing the way people try on their phones. Take furniture store IKEA as an example. They built an app that allows prospects to try out a piece of furniture in their home through the power of AR. Prospects can point their phone at an empty corner of their room, select the sofa, chair, or lamp that they’re considering, and see on their screen what the item would look like in their home.

While AR technology might not be readily accessible to all small businesses yet, it’s definitely a trend to watch, as more and more retailers incorporate it into their marketing strategy.

Mobile Makes it Easy to Buy

A recent survey found that 79 percent of smartphone users had made a purchase on their phone within the past six months. So not only are folks using their mobile devices for research, they’re actually doing transactions on their phones.

For any small business with an e-commerce component, it’s critical that you make it easy for people to purchase via mobile. This is all about creating a customer experience with the least amount of friction in the buying process. Make it easy for people to navigate to their cart. Don’t ask for lots of additional information in the checkout process–only collect information necessary to process the transaction.

After the initial purchase has been made, great mobile UX can also help facilitate the onboarding process. If you’re an e-commerce brand, provide updates on shipping status, and make sure that customers can easily track their packages.

No matter what kind of business you’re in, there is content that you can create in a mobile-friendly format to make it easier for new customers to get the most out of their new purchases. Put together an email series with responsive design (so it looks great on any screen, big or small!) that outlines special tips and tricks for using the new product or service.

Use Mobile to Inspire Repeat Purchases

Once you’ve gotten a prospect to convert to customer, there’s still work to do! And pushing existing customers towards a repeat purchase can be achieved with some mobile-friendly tactics.

Retargeting is a great way to bring existing customers back into the fold. You can advertise on social media or via display ads, and direct certain content towards those who have already bought from you. If someone recently made a purchase, you can target them with advertising for a related product or service in order to encourage an upsell. If a customer has drifted away over the past few months, you can show them ads welcoming them back with a special offer for return customers.

Building out a rewards program is another way to engender loyalty amongst existing customers. This can be done either through your website (which should be mobile-friendly!) or with an app specifically for your business. The additional benefit of creating an app is that you eliminate the competition. Your existing customers come directly to you via the app to make a purchase, rather than going onto the web to search for your solutions and run the risk of getting drawn in by one of your competitors with a smart SEO or paid search strategy.

Mobile and Referrals

The final stage of the customer journey is getting your customers to refer others. As I mentioned in the earlier phases, reviews are a key part of the referral process, and that’s particularly true on mobile. People who are searching for solutions on the go will turn to reviews in lieu of asking friends or family for recommendations. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re doing the work to solicit reviews from your customers.

You can also consider creating a referral program. If you have a mobile app for your business, creating a program directly through the app is a great, easy way to help your mobile-minded customers refer their friends.

Finally, social media can help you generate referrals. Share user-generated content that sings your brands praises. Create contests and opportunities for your existing fans on social to give your brand a shout-out to their friends. Get influencers to try your product and vouch for you to their followers. A referral from a real friend or trusted influencer on social can go a long way in winning over new customers.

Mobile marketing has changed the way consumers buy, and so businesses have had to adjust their marketing accordingly. By considering how to get the most out of mobile at each stage of the customer journey, you can position yourself to reach the majority of consumers, who have become more and more focused on mobile over the years.

Small Business Marketing Insights for 2020

Small Business Marketing Insights for 2020 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on 2020 Small Business Marketing Insights

I wanted to close out the year with a solo show looking ahead to the next one; let’s talk small business marketing insights for 2020.

While there have been some big trends in the world of marketing—things like AI—getting a lot of buzz, I’m not here to talk about those. Trends like that are often not relevant to small business owners. Instead, I want to cover what I think are the insights for 2020 to give you some things to think about, that can actually add to what may be your long list of planning elements.

Insight 1: Audio Content Will Prevail

I think audio content is going to be something that people need to really embrace for 2020. If you’re not podcasting already, now is the time to start. It’s a great way to produce content. It’s also a great way to open up lines of communication with people you want to speak with, whether those are authors and influencers or folks in your target market or even your very own customers.

So podcasting is a great way to build relationships. But beyond that, the format appeals to the needs and sensibilities of a modern audience. People have less time and attention to sit in front of a monitor and read content. I certainly know I’m that way! Same with video. I have a lot of trouble sitting in front of a monitor and devoting time to a video when I could be doing other things.

Audio content, on the other hand, is totally portable. I can download a podcast, stick my phone in my pocket and go for a walk. I can turn it on in the car and listen during my commute. I can walk the dog, I can go for a run. The portability of the format makes it incredibly easy for even the busiest of people to consume the content at some point during their day.

So, if you are not producing audio content, I’m going to encourage you to do so. And there are a number of ways to get started. If you have videos you’ve already produced, you can strip out the audio from those videos and run it in another format. You can use audio to talk about your business, then get the audio transcribed and use that on webpages as written content.

And you can create a non-traditional podcast. It doesn’t have to be all guest interviews. You can occasionally do a rant (like this one I’ve done on marketing insights!) to get results.

Getting started with audio now isn’t just about getting immediate results—it’s also about the long game. I see smart speakers eventually playing a bigger role in the way people consume more of their daily content. So “Alexa: play my flash briefing,” might deliver a daily recap of audio content. While I think this is a ways off, it’s never to early to get prepared for a shift like that!

Insight 2: Take Your Marketing In House

As a marketing consultant and person who trains marketing consultants, I think more small businesses should bring things in house. And there’s two areas in particular that should be outsourced less: marketing tactics and technology.

In the case of both of those areas of focus, it’s not an either-or proposition. You hire a marketing person to handle routine things that include both sides of that coin, from writing content to doing social posts to getting reviews to making Instagram posts. Those are all things that I think you should have an internal resource to do, but the secret ingredient is to marry that with a strategic marketing partner.

A lot of times, small businesses will hire a marketing person who knows how to manage social media, but isn’t given any broader direction when it comes to marketing strategy. (And that’s because there often isn’t a bigger strategy.)

That’s where a marketing consultant or advisor comes in. They can help you with the strategic component, the plan, the operations of the plan, the analysis of results, and make sure that you remain on track in working towards your big goals. Meanwhile, the internal person who knows the intricacies of the business can be directed to execute on this plan and craft messages that align with your strategy. That way, you get the best of both worlds.

In fact, I think this is going to be so critical in 2020 that we’re creating a certified marketing manager program, where we’ll train small business marketing staff on how to hire internal people and have that person directed by an outside resource, like a Duct Tape Marketing Consultant.

Insight 3: Humanize and Automate

Remember how back in the day, every deal was done with a handshake with a trusted partner you could look in the eye? Then technology came along, and suddenly you could do business without ever actually speaking with another human being. Now, it seems the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way, and we’re finding a happy medium.

So this insight sort of seems counterintuitive, but I’m saying you need to both humanize and automate. It comes down to finding the right balance. Both customers and business owners want things to be convenient and efficient—which is where automation comes in—but they also want that human touch.

There’s a tremendous amount of research being done around what makes someone love a company. And in many cases it’s things like convenience, knowledge, communication, efficiency, friendliness—all human traits. But a lot of the reasons a company is convenient and efficient are now aided by technology.

So I think that we need to get to the point where we are automating everything that can and should be automated and we are humanizing or re-humanizing everything else. My insight for 2020 in terms of a recommendation in this case, is get back on the phone. Let your phone ring, answer your phone, call people, that is one of the easiest ways I think to re-humanize our businesses. I’ve certainly been guilty of the opposite, and I look forward to picking up the phone more this year.

Insight 4: Focus on Customer Experience

Customer experience and retention is the golden opportunity for every single business.

PwC did extensive research into why customers stay loyal. They found that very few reasons had anything to do with the actual product or service. For the most part, it was all about customer experience—things like convenience, knowledgeable communication, efficiency, and a friendly staff.

So, how can we look at this in our marketing? You’ve probably heard me talk about the marketing hourglass, where we get people to know trust, try, and buy. But then we think marketing ends at the repeat and refer stages.

In reality, though, all seven stages must come together under the marketing umbrella. Everything from building knowledgeable, efficient communication to reporting results and providing friendly interactions for customers all go hand-in-hand.

I think we as marketers ought to spend at least half our time on creating a better customer experience and then you can spend the other half on generating more leads and converting more leads.

Insight 5: Paid Search Matters More Than Ever

Paid search—Google ads, Facebook advertising, LinkedIn, all the banner ads—have been around forever. So it’s not their existence that’s a new insight. In fact, certain types of businesses, like e-commerce brands, have used paid search to dramatically grow their businesses. But we’ve now entered and era where the small local business of any stripe must embrace paid search. Increasingly, Google is where people turn to find any and every piece of information about a business. Even if they’re already a customer!

An interesting anecdote for you: I did a search the other day for a plumber in Kansas City. And the first real result, meaning an actual business that wasn’t either an ad or an aggregator like Angie’s List or Home Advisor, showed up on page two. So, pay to play is definitely here. Making paid search a real, significant part of your overall marketing plan is no longer optional.

My first bit of advice on that front is to make sure you’re involved in the paid search process and are doing it in a smart way. Do your research about what paid search actually entails. You don’t have to do it for yourself, but you need a baseline knowledge to know you’re not getting scammed.

I see so many small business owners that work with pay per click firms that basically set up templated campaigns and forget them and don’t communicate and just say, “Oh, you got 27 clicks this week”. Well what does that mean? It means I spent X amount of money, that’s all you can tell me. It’s not about how many clicks you got, it’s about how many customers you won.

My next piece of wisdom is the use paid search to capture people with the highest purchase intent. There’s a lot of categories of business where paid searchers converted two to one over people that just went out and had a long tail search and found your blog post.

I’m not saying abandon everything else. In fact, never abandoned your website, SEO, or content. But you want to supplement it with paid search to get that high intent stuff. Maybe there’s categories where you’re having trouble getting your content to rank. Maybe there are certain really competitive search terms like an emergency service for something that you know if somebody finds your ad they’re going to buy it, because they’re trying to fix something.

I believe that the local service ads are going to only get bigger as a category. Eventually, you’re going to find accountants, lawyers, and more in those service ads because Google is making more money on those ads than anywhere else. And, consequently, the ads are going to take up more real estate on the results pages.

One final note on paid search: if you set your campaigns up correctly and are checking in on reports regularly, you come to understand that you’re not really bidding on keywords. You’re bidding on search terms: what someone puts into a search term to make your name pop up.

Once you begin thinking of things in those terms and use analytics to track your results, then you can build a complete roadmap for your marketing plan. When you understand the tactics that are working, and how people are moving throughout their customer journey from start to finish, then you can tailor your content further to encourage others to take that same path to conversion.

Those are my five insights for 2020. I hope you get out there and make moves to implement some of the tactics around these insights, because I really do believe they can make a huge difference in your marketing.

To help you in your marketing efforts, I wanted to announce that—while I don’t have a release date yet—you should keep your eyes peeled for a significantly revised edition of Duct Tape Marketing, the original book. Also, we’re creating a certified marketing manager program, which should be launching at the end of Q1 2020. The program will allow business owners to provide personal development and training to their team. You’ll have your own private coach or consultant, and they won’t just go through the plan, but will also apply the plan to your business.

So keep an eye out for all that and more in 2020. Take care and have a great rest of your 2019. See you in the New Year!

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush.

SEMrush is our go-to SEO tool for everything from tracking position and ranking to doing audits to getting new ideas for generating organic traffic. They have all the important tools you need for paid traffic, social media, PR, and SEO. Check it out at SEMrush.com/partner/ducttapemarketing.

How Did the Customer Journey Evolve in 2019?

How Did the Customer Journey Evolve in 2019? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The customer journey is at the heart of all marketing efforts. I wrote last week about how the marketing hourglass and the marketing maturity model are the two frameworks to guide you through the creation of your entire marketing system.

While the marketing maturity model helps you to establish and grow your own marketing assets, the marketing hourglass teaches you how to interact with customers throughout their journey with your brand. In today’s digital world, where things change quickly, the customer journey continues to grow and evolve. And it’s critical that you’re aware of these changes so that you can continue to deliver an effective marketing message to customers, even as their journey shifts.

Let’s take a look back at how the customer journey evolved in 2019 and where we might expect it to go in 2020.

The Omnichannel Experience Expands Further

Digital marketing allows you to create multiple touchpoints with your customers. From your website to social media to video platforms to paid advertising, there are dozens of channels for you to explore. And in 2019, you gained even greater options.

Voice search continues to grow. Experts expect that 200 million smart speakers will have been sold by the end of the year. While smart speakers and voice assistants provide another way for you to get discovered by new prospects, you may need to pivot your SEO efforts to get noticed by Alexa and Siri. Things like having a mobile-friendly site that is fast and secure, and making sure you’re listed on relevant local listings sites (think Yelp, Facebook, and Google My Business) can all help you to be the brand that’s suggested by a voice assistant.

Augmented reality (AR), which first gained widespread attention as the tech that powered the popular Pokémon Go app, is now being used by marketers to sell products. We’ve seen retailers in the fashion, beauty, and home furnishing spaces develop apps that allow people to virtually try before they buy.

Visual search is also something to keep on your radar screen. Social platform Pinterest has added visual search to their site, allowing consumers to upload a picture of a product they like and presenting them with suggestions for where they can purchase the item—or something similar—online. For tips on how to make Pinterest work for your business, check out this Duct Tape Marketing podcast episode with Pinterest expert Alisa Meredith.

Data and Automation Are More Important Than Ever

Data and automation are buzzwords we’ve heard tossed around for several years now, but they’ve established themselves as critical elements of business operations and marketing. On the marketing front, they allow you to better understand the unique shifts in your customer’s journey, so that you can modify your approach and direct the right message at the right prospect at the right time.

As the technology becomes more widespread and costs of implementation decrease, small businesses are able to tackle personalization on a level that was previously only possible for giants like Amazon.

This year, 80 percent of regular shoppers indicated that they’ll only do business with brands that serve up personalized experiences. So if you’re still sending the same emails to everyone on your mailing list, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Understanding customer data allows you to segment your customer base into different personas. Very few businesses serve customers that are all exactly alike. For most of us, we mean different things to different people. Let’s say you’re a florist. Some of your clients purchase flowers only for special occasions, like birthdays and anniversaries. Others are event planners who place large orders on behalf of their clients. Others still are individuals with standing orders for arrangements at their home or office.

Each of these customers have very different needs, and so they should be getting very different marketing messages from you. By using the data you already have on your customers to better understand their behaviors and actions, you can craft your marketing messaging to speak directly to each segment of your customer population.

And with marketing automation tools, you can set your system to send certain messages to customers that are triggered by specific behaviors. That means everyone is always getting the marketing message they most need and want, and you’re likely to generate more business.

Online and In-Person Worlds Collide

If you’re a marketer today, there’s so much to think about in the digital world that it’s possible to get carried away and forget that your customers still exist in the real world! That’s why it’s important that, even as you keep an eye on digital trends, you work to bring the digital and real worlds together for your customers.

Eighty-eight percent of consumers who do a local search on their phone end up calling or visiting the business within 24 hours. This means that the online portion of the customer journey is leading directly to in-person sales.

How can you better facilitate the customer journey from online browsing to in-person purchasing? Make sure your business is present on local listings sites like Google My Business so that you can get found in the first place. Have your contact information and hours listed prominently on your site and local listings, so that prospects can actually call and visit.

Webrooming is another digital-to-real-world trend that local businesses need to be aware of. Webrooming is the practice of searching for a product online while you’re physically in the store. I know I’ve done it myself to check out specs and reviews on the top one or two items I’m considering. Reviews and ratings are important to any small business for SEO, but they’re also relevant in the real world as they have the ability to sway a webrooming consumer in real time.

Engagement is Key

As the customer journey has grown more and more complex, engagement has become even more important. When prospects or customers reach out to you via any channel, you must respond quickly and effectively.

Engagement is your opportunity to capture more of your audience’s valuable attention. If someone comments on your social media account, don’t just let it sit there or simply reply with a like. Instead, ask a question or write a response that invites them to engage in conversation. The longer you can keep that volley going, the greater their sense of connection becomes with your brand. If you’re able to make a good impression now, it’s the kind of thing that will make them think about you later when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Building Loyalty is Critical for Long-Term Success

Because the customer journey is no longer a straight light, you need to build loyalty. Otherwise, people will abandon you when a better offer comes along.

Be honest: How many times have you done your product research on one site, settled on your product of choice, and then opened up a Google tab to search for the same product elsewhere, cheaper?

Digital enables people to go through all of the steps of the journey with you, and then at the last minute jump ship to go with a cheaper competitor. The only way to combat this is to offer an incredible customer experience. Your brand has to be about more than your products, or you’ll lose your differentiation (and your customers). And you need to be going above and beyond at every stage of the customer journey, because they can slip away at any point.

The Journey Can’t Just Happen, You Need to Guide It

With so many marketing channels in place, you can’t leave customers’ paths to chance. Instead, you need to take control of your destiny and guide the customer journey.

This starts with mapping to understand your current customers. When you know how your existing ideal clients behaved on their journey, you can work to recreate that experience for others. Not only is it more likely to lead to conversions, it also means you’ll be attracting new customers who fit your ideal profile

When you’re refining your approach, it’s good to use testing. Research your existing customers, posit a theory, test it out, and measure results. A/B testing is a great way to run side-by-side comparisons of different approaches to see which resonates best with your target audience.

The customer journey is constantly evolving, and I’m sure we’ll see even more changes—big and small—in 2020. No matter where the customer journey goes next, if you keep the marketing hourglass and a commitment to serving your customers as your North Star, you’ll be able to weather any ups and downs in the marketing landscape.

The Relationship Between the Marketing Hourglass and Maturity Model

The Relationship Between the Marketing Hourglass and Maturity Model written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape philosophy is that marketing is a system. There are so many moving parts that go into creating a great marketing strategy that, without a guiding framework, it’s easy to get tangled up, twisted around, and lost completely in the weeds.

Over the years, I’ve developed two systems that inform all of the marketing work we do: the marketing hourglass and the marketing maturity model. The marketing hourglass is a way of thinking about the customer journey. These are the steps that a consumer will take in engaging with your brand. It starts with first coming to know you, and goes all the way down to when they’ve become a happy repeat customer, ready to refer friends.

The marketing maturity model is a way for you think about your own marketing activities. What are the assets you need to build, then grow and amplify (or ignite) in order to guide those prospects from the top to the bottom of the marketing hourglass?

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how the two systems are inextricably linked, and how you can align the way you think about the work you do behind the scenes to create your marketing presence with the experience customers are having on the other side.

The Top of the Hourglass and The Grow Phase

The top of the marketing hourglass is when prospects are first coming to know your brand. We call them the know, like, and trust phases. They’re not ready to make a purchase decision yet, but as they move through these three steps, they’re getting closer.

It starts with them first encountering your brand. Maybe they hear your name from a friend, maybe they discover you in a Google search. Whatever the case may be, you need to greet them with a solid marketing base at this stage to get them to go any further.

marketing hourglass

Create a Strong Website and Tackle SEO

Don’t you grow wary when a business operating today doesn’t have a website? What are they trying to hide? Or how far behind the times are they? The first step in the marketing maturity model is building a great website because it is the heart of your online presence. A strong website is more than great design; it’s about incorporating a modern promise that shows you understand your customers’ problems and have the best solution out there to fix it.

Behind every great website is a strong SEO strategy. While SEO is an ongoing process and there are dozens of factors to consider if you’re taking a pro-level approach, even a marketing novice can use some SEO quick fixes, like repairing broken links, checking site speed, and designing a mobile-friendly site, to get your website ranking higher.

Build Trust with Content

Once the prospect has discovered your website, you need to provide them with ways to come to know and trust your brand. That’s where the other elements of the build phase—a strong content program, social media presence, and email marketing campaign—come in.

The content on your website (blog posts, explainer videos, product descriptions, your about us page—if it’s on your website, it’s content!), should help prospects get a greater sense of what you do. Your homepage will draw them in with a promise to solve their problem, your other content needs to prove that you’re as good as you say you are. Informative blog posts, glowing reviews from existing customers, and explainer videos that teach viewers something valuable are all great ways for them to come to know and trust your brand.

Get on Social Media

Social media can help in the like and trust phases, too. Simply having a presence on the major social sites gives your business greater legitimacy. Then, creating a strong social presence, with consistent posts that are relevant and helpful, builds on the trust factor.

And take it beyond simply posting—engaging with your followers on social media means building a personal connection. It allows prospects to get to know the individuals behind the brand, and when they get 1:1 responses to their questions and comments on your page, they develop a deep trust in your business: “If they’re paying this much attention to me before I even become a customer, I’m sure I’ll be in good hands once I make a purchase!”

Stay Top-of-Mind with Email Marketing

Finally, email marketing is a great way to continue to show your expertise and remain in prospects’ fields of vision. While they have to seek out your website content or social media profiles, creating an email newsletter filled with helpful tidbits (and the occasional offer) allows you to come to them with your industry knowledge.

The Middle of the Hourglass and the Grow Phase

The middle of the hourglass are the stages we like to call try and buy. By this point, you’ve built a lot of trust around your brand. Your prospects are intrigued and really like what you do. If you can make a compelling offer to get them to give you a try, and the trial goes well, that’s often what seals the deal and helps them convert to full customer.

At this point in the marketing maturity model, you want to continue expanding your essential blocks from the build phase. Your website and content program can grow. Adding things like a regular podcast with a cadre of exciting industry guests is a great way to strengthen your content. Gather all of your relevant content together onto hub pages to give your content program and SEO a boost.

Speaking of expanding SEO efforts, focus on building up backlinks, and get Google Search Console set up so that you can optimize your search ranking for many years to come.

Also, continue to engage and follow up with leads via social media and email marketing. But it doesn’t stop there; now is the time to introduce new tactics to grow your existing relationships and turn prospects into customers.

Undertake Paid Lead Generation

When we say paid lead generation, we’re talking about things like search ads and social media advertising. These can come in many forms. A great place to start is with boosting content on social media, giving posts you’ve shared organically a broader reach for a small fee.

The more advanced tactics take you further into tracking your ads and getting more efficient about driving conversions.

Once you’ve established a series of Google Ads, you can use their offline tracking tool to understand how your ads are impacting business in the real world. By importing your sales information from conversions that happen in your brick-and-mortar store or over the phone, you can better understand the effectiveness of your online ads and refine your approach to win over more prospects.

For all of your ads, you should be creating landing pages that are unique to that particular campaign. In doing that, prospects find the exact deal, offer, or topic that intrigued them in the ad front-and-center on your website, and it makes them all the more likely to convert.

Create a Culture that Integrates Sales and Marketing

Your marketing efforts can take you pretty far, but you need them to be integrated with your sales approach from the start in order to get the greatest result. Make sure that your sales and marketing teams are in communication from day one about prospects.

Set up a clear process for the handoff from the marketing to sales teams, so no one falls through the cracks. And have your marketing team create materials for your sales team, so your brand voice remains consistent in those interactions with prospects as you’re shepherding them from your marketing to sales basket.

Focus on Customer Experience

This is the stage at which your prospects become customers. They’ve liked you enough up to this point to give you a try, so the customer experience must be stellar. That’s the way to take them from one-time customer to repeat buyer.

This starts with a killer onboarding process. No matter what kind of business you’re in, there’s some kind of onboarding for new customers.

If you sell products, your onboarding has to do with getting the product to your customer and ensuring they know how to use it. If you’re shipping your items, make sure that you have a process for your customers to track their packages. Once the item gets to them, include information that will help them get the most out of their new item.

For complicated products, like an electronic device, include clear instructions and maybe even a link to explainer videos to help them get set up. Simpler products, like clothing items, can include care instructions or even just a thoughtful thank you card to show you appreciate your customer’s business.

For services, your onboarding process might be more complex. Establishing a single point of contact within your company for any questions your new client may have, and sending along forms and paperwork that can help you both get on the same page faster, are important elements of your onboarding process.

No matter what kind of business you run, reviews are also very important at the try and buy stage. If you have an unhappy first-time customer, a speedy, sincere response to their complaint can turn things around and save the relationship. Similarly, glowing reviews shouldn’t go ignored. If you take the time to thank new customers for their positive feedback, their happy feelings will only grow!

The Bottom of the Hourglass and the Ignite Phase

By the time you’ve reached the bottom of the marketing hourglass, you’ve already won over that first-time customer. This is your chance to get them to become a life-long customer, and to tell all of their friends and family about your business.

And while it’s statistically easier to hold onto existing customers than to win new ones over, the last thing you want to do is take someone for granted now! You’ve already put in the hard work of converting them; you need to continue to wow them so that they’ll stick around.

Again, you continue to work on the existing tactics you’ve got up and running, from your website through to sales enablement and customer experience. But here, you add three more elements to take your marketing approach to a whole new level and build those lifelong customer bonds.

Invest in a CRM

A customer relationship management tool (or CRM, for short), helps you to better manage all of your customer interactions, both old and new. The tool allows you to track all points of contact with prospects and customers.

This is helpful in better understanding prospects’ path to conversion, and in offering better service to your existing customers.

Let’s say you have an existing customer who’s had an issue with an order. When your team can see that they called last week and emailed a few days later to follow up—and can pull up the transcripts of those communications, plus see notes from the customer service representative who was handling the case—you’re better able to take appropriate action for your customer, without making them explain their problem over and over each time they reach out.

Or maybe you have a customer that’s never had a complaint in their life. The CRM can still help; it can provide information for you to make smarter offers to that customer. If you’re a home improvement store and you notice that a customer recently purchased a dehumidifier, you can target them with ads about replacement filters for their new machine.

Whether you’re troubleshooting, looking for new cross-sell opportunities, or simply trying to better understand your sales pipeline, a CRM is the way to do it.

Use Marketing Automation

Marketing automation and a CRM tool often go hand-in-hand. The CRM gives you all of the customer information you could need or want to enact smart marketing automation techniques.

When you understand your customers’ behaviors, you can segment your buyers into different personas. Each type of customer has their own unique needs that your business meets, and when you understand those needs, you can create marketing materials that most effectively speak to them (and direct that messaging only at the relevant parties).

Take Advantage of AI and Analytics

Also tied in with your customer information is analytics and AI. When you’re gathering information on your customers, you can use analytics to understand what the data all means and, from there, refine your marketing strategy long-term.

Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console for your website are free to use, and can provide you with deep, meaningful information about the behaviors and attributes of your customers and prospects. You can even use more advanced techniques, like call tracking, to understand how your online marketing efforts are affecting customers’ behaviors on the phone.

Armed with this information, you can undertake A/B testing, showing two different marketing messages to two different audiences in order to understand which one works best. This kind of testing allows you to hone in on the best possible messaging for each segment of your audience, helping you to retain existing customers and win new ones who might be referred by your biggest fans.

When it comes to creating an effective marketing strategy, you need to align your marketing tactics with what your prospects and customers want and need. By using the marketing hourglass as a guidepost while you walk through the marketing maturity model, you can build a strong marketing presence that will work for your business from start to finish.

How to Create a YouTube Channel and Rank Your Videos

How to Create a YouTube Channel and Rank Your Videos written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Video is an increasingly important marketing tactic. Consumers today have shorter attention spans and are often consuming content on the go. They don’t always have the time to sit and read through a thousand word blog post; they’d much rather catch a four minute video on the topic while they’re riding the train into work or eating a salad on their lunch break.

It’s a great idea to include video wherever you can: on your website, on your social media, and on the biggest online video platform of them all, YouTube.

If you don’t yet have a YouTube channel for your business, now is the time to make one. Here, I’ll walk you through the steps of creating a YouTube channel and producing videos that consistently rank.

Establishing Your Channel

If you don’t have a YouTube channel yet, the first step is to set one up. To do so, log into YouTube using your Google credentials, and select “Your channel” from the dropdown menu on the upper righthand corner.

You’ll be given the opportunity to create a personal account or create one for your brand.

Because you’re creating this for your brand, you’ll want to establish a Brand Account. This also provides you access to other services like Google Photos using your business name rather than a personal account. Plus, Brand Accounts can be managed by multiple people, so additional team members can update and manage your videos.

Once you’ve created your channel, you need to create a description of your business and add images, like your logo and a background photo. Keep your branding consistent with your other online assets, so that it’s easy for people who know you from elsewhere to recognize this as your official YouTube channel.

You can also create a welcome video, which will play when someone visits the home page of your YouTube channel. This is a great way to introduce visitors to what your business does and give them a preview of the type of content they can expect to find on your channel.

How to Find the Right Video Topics

Once you’ve gotten the building blocks of your channel in place, it’s time to start thinking about the content you’re going to create. It’s important to put together an editorial calendar that will keep you on track and help you produce videos that speaks to your audience’s needs and interests.

Deciding on content areas for your videos should start with keyword research. This is the first step to creating content on your website that will generate leads, so the same principles should apply here.

Start by going to YouTube and searching for a term that makes sense for your industry. Let’s say you run a catering business, and you do a lot of weddings. You might go to YouTube and type in “Wedding catering” and see what autocomplete results pop up.

This shows you what real search terms people are entering into YouTube for videos about catering. It looks like cost-effectiveness is on people’s mind, with “wedding catering on a budget” being the most popular result. But people are also looking for ideas, tips, and help with set up on the day of their event.

Once you’ve undertaken that basic keyword research, you can take things a step further and use a tool like vidIQ to get even more detailed information on each video that ranks for your selected search terms.

Understanding how existing videos rank can help you identify popular topics, find gaps in information that you can fill with your own content, and discover topics you might not have thought of on your own, but that would be relevant to your business.

Create an Editorial Calendar

Now that you’ve settled on the right topics for your YouTube videos, you want to create a calendar for creating and releasing these videos. One of the keys to generating subscribers (which not only draws more attention to your brand, but is also a known ranking factor) is releasing new videos on a regular basis.

That’s why it’s so important to put together a content calendar and to stick to it. It’s often easiest to settle on a batch of topics for the coming months and then set aside a few afternoons or one whole day to film the content back-to-back. You can then edit the videos in batches and have the content backlogged so you’re not worried about finding time to film and edit a new video each and every week.

What to Include in Your Video

Two of the biggest ranking factors for videos are retention rate and subscriber rate. If you create videos that hold viewers’ attention for the whole time, and then they click the subscribe button after watching—that’s like the Holy Grail of YouTube videos.

So what are the keys to creating videos that people want to watch, and that inspire people to subscribe to learn more from you in the future? It’s all about creating useful content and cutting right to the chase.

People don’t have all day to sit and listen to a long preamble on your video. Introduce the topic right up front, by including a clear description in the video title and saying right in the first ten seconds what it is you plan to cover in the video. It helps, too, to include a teaser of the big nugget of useful information that you’ll be saving for the end of the video. You know how, on evening newscasts, they always dangle a super interesting story in front of you before the commercial break so you’ll keep watching? You should do the same in your video if you want to entice people to stick around until the end.

After your brief introduction, get right into it! We’ve all watched those videos on YouTube with lots of detours, personal stories, and long sidebars before they actually get to the meat of the content. And we’ve all stopped watching those videos and gone looking for something more succinct. If you want people to like your content enough to keep watching to the end and subscribe to hear more from you in the future, you’ve got to keep it helpful and brief.

Adding Descriptions and Tags

Much like you would on a blog post, you need the supporting materials around the video itself to be engaging and SEO-friendly. Make sure that the title to your video is descriptive and includes relevant keywords. Write a video description that clearly outlines what viewers can expect to learn if they watch, and include an eye-catching thumbnail of the video.

Select the category that makes the most sense for your video, and include even more detailed keywords in your video tags. Use your top keyword in the tags, along with variations on that theme and other related keywords that are relevant for the video content and your business.

Sharing Your Video

Once you’ve created your first video, spread the word! Share the video on other social media channels where you already have a following. Include it in your weekly newsletter or in a blog post. Getting the word out about your videos to your existing audience can help to build up those initial views so that you can start to gain traction in YouTube rankings.

Once you’ve created more than a handful of videos, you can create playlists on your channel. By grouping relevant videos together, you’ll draw even more attention to your content. If you’re a marketing consultant like me, you might create a playlist around SEO, one around paid search, and one around social media marketing.

A viewer sees a particular topic of interest, like SEO, clicks on the playlist, and all of the videos on SEO are automatically queued up, one after the other. This can give you a huge boost in video views, as people are drawn down the content rabbit hole.

Video has become the preferred way for many consumers to interact with content. And YouTube is the biggest video platform in the world, with billions of videos uploaded each and every day. If you want to provide customers and prospects with useful content, you need to meet them where they are. Establishing a YouTube channel and optimizing your content to rank in search results is yet another way to catch the eye of new prospects and stay top-of-mind with existing customers.

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur Reading: September 18

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur Reading: September 18 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur – September 18

It’s time for another episode featuring a reading from my upcoming book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, due out in October 2019. If you’ve been following along, you know that the book is structured as 366 daily meditations for entrepreneurs, with readings from famous Transcendentalist authors and commentary from me on how it all relates to the entrepreneurial journey.

Today’s Reading: Find Your Gifts

But the great Master said, “I see/No best in kind, but in degree;/I gave a various gift to each,/To charm, to strengthen, and to teach.//”These are the three great chords of might,/And he whose ear is tuned aright/Will hear no discord in the three,/But the most perfect harmony.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – “The Singers” The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1854)

Poetry is hard for most so here’s the full context of what goes on in The Singers. There are three musicians and people can’t figure out which one is the best so the great Master assures them they are all great for different reasons and if you listen with that in mind all you can hear is the most perfect harmony.

Okay now go reread the stanza above and it may be much more lyrical.

So, how do you find harmony in a world of difference? How do you find yourself and your place in the band? 

Or to quote Deepak Chopra, “There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.”

Your values, the things that mean the most to you in life right now, are the keys to understanding your gifts. The musicians in the poem above employed their gifts to charm, to strengthen, and to teach.

How about you? Journal, get alone, ask your three closest friends. Don’t sweat it –  as long as you are actively looking – your gifts will find you.

Final Thoughts

I think there’s a lot of pressure today, particularly on entrepreneurs, to prove their success and self-worth. To some degree, that’s why you see so much nonsense on social media.

Deepak Chopra says, “there are no extra pieces in the universe,” and that idea that we’re all unique, connected, and here for a purpose? It’s powerful. I don’t know that I’ll ever find my purpose and my gifts, but I think it’s cool to live with the idea that I can relax because I’m meant to be here. My job is to insist on myself and never copy.

With that in mind, I leave you with today’s challenge question: When was the last time you got lost in the present and time disappeared? What were you doing?

Want to learn more about The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur? Click here.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Intercom. Intercom is the only business messenger that starts with real-time chat, then keeps growing your business with conversational bots and guided product tours.

Intercom’s mission is to help you provide simple, quick, and friendly service for your customers. When you can give your customers the one thing they’re looking for, you’ll generate amazing results for your business.

Want to learn more and take advantage of a 14-day free trial? Just go to intercom.com/podcast.