Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

First off, I just really, you know, I want to thank the creative live people. I mean, what an incredible opportunity this is, you know, to share this kind of information I have been wearing chuck taylors, really? If we get a camera on those, uh um, since really, in my entire business career and I went up about a new pair just for this, I was so psyched do it. We have seven businesses represented here in this audience. I want to thank you guys. I you know, abstentia ble, you're going to get some value for being here, but but the commitment to leave your businesses for three days, I mean, I sometimes freak out if I don't check email for three hours, you know? So I congratulate you guys really for being here and you guys out there for investing in yourself, a cz well, for tuning in, hopefully you've got some time that you can spend with us today, you know, good morning for some of you. Ah, my australian friends don't go to bed yet. Uh uh, I see you're tuning in as well, you know, certainl...

y participate in the chat. We'd love to hear you and ask your questions, I'm we're going to have the audience in here answering a lot of questions we're going to be grilling them on aspects of their business and helping them get over some of their feeders and challenges, but we hope to hear from you as wealth, so I want to give you a little bit of back story on me because some of you may be familiar duck tape, marketing and my work some of you may not I actually started my own marketing firm about twenty five years ago. Um, it was it's it's funny because I remember my friends at the time. I mean, you know, now it's really cool right to start your own business. Everybody wants to do that. I remember my friends at the time were, you know, so I was going to start my own business here. Well, maybe something will come around. You know, you were able to get a job because you know that twenty five years ago that was code for I couldn't find a job. Now everybody's doing it, which is so awesome, but I quickly found I started is kind of a traditional marketing agency, and I quickly found quite frank klay that I enjoyed working with small business owners, but there was sort of a frustrating lot because in the way in which I had been trained to do marketing, consulting it was very difficult to do that small business they had the same challenges and needs as really larger businesses but not necessarily same budget, same time attentions fans you have same resource is right. So about twelve years ago now I decided what I needed and as it turns out what the world needed was a very systematic approach to installing marketing in a small business to sort of get rid of all of the myths about, you know, it being so hard to do and actually really simplifying the act of marketing a small business on dh that was really the genesis of duct tape marketing I needed to create I wanted almost turn marketing this sort of strange service into a product where I could walk into a small business and say, here's, what I'm going to do here's, what you're going to do here is the results we can expect him, by the way, here's, what it's going to cost and as it turns out, that was music to their ears and so it's solved. Really? What was my greatest frustration? It allowed me to work very profitably with small businesses, but here's where the magic happened, it actually solved their greatest frustration as well I don't know how many of you have tried to buy marketing services tio, have somebody work with you in your marketing business or marketing your business it's a little challenging right? You're working with the person at the print shop you know who's who's designing a new logo you're working with a graphic designer a pr person but nobody that's really got this whole systematic approach and so the duct tape marketing system and that idea really took off and, you know, later came a book to really kind of chronicle that system thank you so many of you that have purchased that book and then an entire network of independent marketing consultants who also had that same frustration and learned that they could actually take this and replicate the yes and so that's what we're really going to share today is this entire duct tape marketing system and you're going to learn a lot about I think you know what drives me and my passion and purpose and working in this in this business my guess is there will be hugging that goes on I'm sorry, I'm just warning right now my guess is they'll be dancing that goes on a little more on that later, but those of you out in the in the studio ants, we want you to be as close as possible and come in here and join everything we're going to do I'm going to give you a couple slides this first section I'm going to really give you the global view of everything we're going to do so day one we're going to talk about what I call the growth foundation this is the strategy stuff, this is the part that unfortunately a lot of people in a skip, too, because they want to get to the you know, how do I do facebook part, but frankly, none of that stuff no, that tactical stuff is really going to matter if we don't nail the foundation if we don't nail the strategy, if we don't really nailed the business model in a way for how you're gonna market your business now day two, we are going to cover all the online stuff I think we have six hours together. I told you guys it's about nine hours worth of content, so get those pens ready. Those of you out there because we're going to fly through through day two now on day three, we are going to cover lead generation, we're going to hear the phone ring, we're going to get people to your site, we're going to really cover the things that since we've built that great foundation are going to pay off in terms of people wanting to be your customers, and we're also going to spend really the second half of day three kind of wrapping all this together, right? Because in a lot of ways, I'm going to make your head hurt. For a couple days and now I want to try to give you some relief like, how do I get it it's done, you know, how do I plan? You know what? How do I prioritize? And so we're going to work on some exercises on that I had the pleasure on maybe some of you have seen it of and really honor, I should say of doing a ted talk ted, ted x casey about a year ago really wonderful experience and those of you that know the ted mantra it's ideas worth sharing in eighteen minutes or less that's really the format, right? So this is gonna be a lot like a ted talk, so this is going to be one big idea we're sharing in eighteen hours or more, okay, so so, you know, a lot of similarities in that, so really hang on, this is going to be an awesome ride, so I'm going to start today with what I call the seven steps to small business marking the seven steps to marketing whatever you really want to call it. This is the framework. This is my point of view, this is the system in a nutshell, and really in the next segment today we'll drill down deeper into that and deeper into that so you, in some ways you're going to hear today some repetition even or what feels like repetition but we're going to do it's you know, the old analogy of peeling the onion you know we're going to kind of peel back the layer in the layer on and really get into the how to but first I think you need to understand the whole sort of path on where we're going so I want to start with because we're going to talk about marketing right for a long time here so I want to start with my definition market because experience tells me if I were if you guys were out there, if you pose the question to the audience, you know, what's your definition of marketing and if I would oppose it here to this group what we find is a whole lot of definitions, a whole lot of miss definitions or a whole lot of pieces maybe of definitions on dh so I want to kind of get us on a baseline you could go back to believe in whatever you want to believe after you leave here, but this is my definition of marketing and I've actually been using it now for about ten years and frankly I think it's become more more relevant with each passing year so my definition markings, getting someone who is in need to know like and trust you now that's really a the game that I think we're all involved in now how many of you have I didn't get to ask you this before? How many of you and you out there and the internet have a million dollar ad budgets that you can throw towards market right? I've never yet had anybody right his hand I must be talking to her all right? And I don't know but see, the point is if you have a million dollars said to throw at building some know like and trust you, khun may be succeeding that but since most of the audience is I talked to most of you out there on the internet, probably very few of you raised your hand as well you have to take a very systematic approach to building your market, so when I said my definition of market he's getting someone has a need to know like and trust you, one of the things I want to start off with today is that I don't need you to trust me right now, you know, just because I'm up here and, you know, somebody said I was the expert and that was the person that you should learn from, you know, some of you may be already do because you've experienced my body of work, you've read my books, the very first thing though if we're going to make any progress over the next three days is I need you to trust yourselves because a lot of the challenges come with our beliefs, our beliefs about what marketing is our beliefs about the fact that we're no good at it, that we don't understand it on one of the things that I ultimately want to do is change your behavior, right? And I can't change your behavior until I change your beliefs, and so it starts with that idea of trusting yourself, you know, then you can trust me, but I'm gonna push you in many ways as possible, sometimes some ways that are uncomfortable to to change your thoughts and your approach to marketing completely. And that starts with the very first belief is that marketing is a system. It's not this complicated, you know, crazy thing that yesterday was wearing a black turtleneck just for effect that you have to actually go out and hire somebody who wears a black turtleneck tio actually bring into your business because it's, the strange thing, it actually is not only system, I mean, many of you think in terms of ryan, I know you you probably put together those wallets and there's a very systematic way in which you cut that out and so that and have that, you know, designed, I'm I'm guessing, right, um, and a lot of us are very familiar with this idea of systems for making it, fixing it, shipping it, doing all this stuff, you know, hiring people, firing people, paying the bills, all those kinds of things, but then marketing somehow falls outside of that. And so what I'm going to suggest is there actually is a very simple, systematic approach to marketing as well, and it is not only a system it's, probably the most important system in your business, how many of you started your business? Because you wanted to do a craft, you wanted to practice your art, you wanted to do this thing that you knew how to do, and then you pretty quickly ran square in the face that you're in a marketing business, right? Anybody have that realization? Yeah, absolutely, every single business, every single day, absolutely. And so we're going to try to make that part of it an essential part of your business because, you know, what's funny is that if I were then to go around and ask you how much time you spend as the head of marketing in your organization, right, my guess is tuesday, I'm sorry. Friday at two o'clock, you started thinking I should do some that marketing right? And we just all admitted were in the marketing business, the most important system in our business, right? And yet we don't treat it as such, so let's make it something you can enjoy let's make it something that simple let's make it something that you don't I think is something you don't know how to do or that you're afraid to do and let's go get it. So here the seven steps I'm going to go into each one so you don't have to juggle these down out there in internet land I'm gonna cover each one of them a little more slowly but I always like to give people the whole picture too. So there's there's a system in seven steps right now I can't emphasize. In fact, if somebody out there you know you guys want to do it or somebody out there in internet land wants to start making a mark every time I say the word system, you know, be really fun to see how many we get, teo at the end of three days because I guarantee it's going to be pages full ok that's going on in the lounge? Sure. Think a system. Here we go. All right. And so let me give you a little acronym really corny, but I I think it I think it spells this idea of system, you know very well so the system we'll save you save yourself time, energy and money that really is the beauty of this and like I said that's kind of a corner I didn't make that up and I can't really remember where I stole it so hopefully we don't have any copyright issues you know, right off the bat but but I've seen that used by the people and I think it really does define you know the bennett what to leave the core benefit of this idea of thinking about a system systems repeatable systems predictable a system if if operated correctly allows you to build expectation both internally and externally so let's talk about the core components then of this system number one strategy before tactics we're going to spend what's ultimately the entire day if you really get down to it talking about strategy but don't don't worry you know it's not gonna be in a boring way it's not gonna be in that way that you've seen and any of you mba people out there sorry I have to pick on you it's just not going to be that that same approach to strategy is going to something actually very practical that you can use and that you can install in your business core components of really the customer who the customer is this is not rocket science, okay, but but I find that you know, people don't approach it necessarily in the way that I'm going to who your customer is we really can bring value to on dh how you're different from every other business that says they do what you do I mean, you know you're different, right? You understand that, right? But the market doesn't necessarily because we spent so much time showing them how were the same unfortunately so we're gonna work on that greatly number two is a concept I'm it's probably the thing I may be the most proud of in terms of the duct tape marketing system is something that I call the marketing hourglass it borrows some you may get this already it borrows from this age old marketing term the marketing funnel, right? So it kind of borrows from that idea, but it takes it much, much deeper because I think particularly today's age, you know, it used to be we just spend some more money, gets more people the top of that funnel, you know, tournament to clients let's got much harder to do. Some of you have actually expressed a little bit of that being your challenge today, right? So we have to spend as much time on creating an incredible experience creating customers that want to talk about us that want to send us business as we do in trying to go out there and generate more phone calls and more clicks at the top, so the idea behind this hourglass is something that we're going to spend I'm going to talk about it this morning we're going to talk about it in a whole session this afternoon because it's a really great framework um and I've had customers that just get it I can't tell you how many times andi I hope we hear this from from the audience outside of here is well, how many times people have really heard me drill down on this idea of the hourglass and go marketing finally makes sense because it in a way simple five's how you even need to think about what you're doing in marketing your business if you get that part right now we can do it ten ways to sunday but if you get that part right in thinking about your business a lot of marketing is going to get much easier. The third part is we have to publish educational content. I mean, how many of you let me ask you this how many of you have a dvr, right? Uh how many of you listen to satellite radio? Right? Anybody on a do not call list right? Anybody use any spam filtering? Right? It's it's gotten very hard for us to get our messages, you know, inside the heads of the people that we really need to get those messages so let me ask you this how many people have been looking for a solution and did it a search on search engines right one hundred percent we all have done that we all do it without even thinking about it anymore, you know, in fact, it's gotten to the point where you can't even have a good argument the bar anymore, right? You know, because, I mean, you know, how many home runs did mickey mantle hit in nineteen, sixty five, you know, who cares, right? You know, on the discussion, but that's, we've all just grown to do that behavior and so what we're looking for when it when it's not necessarily bar fight of our bar argument now is we're looking for, you know, how to do something, how to fix something, how to get more of something who to hire for something and so increasingly returning to our networks and to search engines to do that, and we're finding businesses. And so that idea of publishing content in order to be found and I don't care what you sell a lot of businesses, people say, well, naturally, john, you're marketing consultant, you're an author, you're you know, sure, you should publish all kinds of information no brainer, right? Okay, but I'm going to I'm going to suggest every single one of you, even if you're selling a twenty nine dollars product will benefit from doing that ah, the web this is the fastest moving part it's right in the center of the system there certainly are tremendous. You know, a lot of times I get talking to groups and every now and then people remind me that people actually do stuff off line too. You know, the people actually meet in person on dh so this is not at the exclusion of that but we have to build a total online presence it's a lot like the duct tape marketing system in a lot of ways where I talk about the need for really integrating these parts well the same is true. Long line I mean, how many of you have had a a solicitation from an ex ceo person or from a social media person or from an email marketing person writer, a web designer and everybody sees that is the solution the one thing they need to do and the real solution and trust me, this is day two the entire day the real solution is understanding that your customers do use all of these tools. How can you build integration of all these things without first driving yourself crazy but second in a way that delivers value to your customers that's how we have to look at everything so lead generation again for a lot of organizations they look at it is, you know, what's the one thing I need to be doing you know, I can't tell you how many people you know are selling courses on you know get rich on facebook you know get all you know get two billion likes on facebook and that's all you need to do in your business right? Well lead generation is also a very integrated approach and so what we're going to do on day three is really talk about the need for combining advertising and public relations and a systematic approach to referrals and even those businesses obviously a lot of times people say cash advertising cost money right? You know, I'm not sure that that I can you know, you know I'm just starting right I mean there's a lot of you out there you know, trace and you said, you know, I'm really just starting here you know, you may not want to write the three thousand dollars check to be in the you know, bridal magazine although you said you didn't want to do weddings in the baby magazine, right? Um but you know, getting somebody to talk about your business, getting existing customers to talk about your business and combining that with maybe some sort of advertising that you do is actually how you build lee generation mo mentum it's how you actually resell your existing clients as well, so a lot of times people really do think in terms of advertising in some of the things we talk about in lead generation as just a way to get new customers it's actually how you get referrals it's actually also how you get your existing customers to buy more number six in the system is lead conversion. My guess is and this is just experience tells me this is not anything personal, this group here or anybody out there. My experience tells me that if you were to drop me into any business and say, look, things were ok here, but how could we make him better? You've got thirty days, right? If I was given that challenge, lead conversion, or you're selling process or lack thereof is the very first place I would go because most people get pretty good at explaining what their business does and maybe generating some leads and generating referrals. And then there's just really drops off the second somebody says, I want to know mohr or I want to buy and way spend so little time on that aspect on really converting a lead, making sure that the experience is great, making sure that our customers get results and really, if we focused mohr time on those elements and I'm going to go deep into those elements you know you really wouldn't have to generate, you wouldn't have to spend much energy energy generating leads again seven peace is to live by the calendar now the reason I put this last is quite frankly you know, maybe some of you are already starting to get overwhelmed I guarantee you by some point in day to you know you're going to be overwhelmed on day it's just the nature of how much information I can present but it's also just the nature of you know how many things there are to do in your business is right I mean you know, you even I'm sure that you all have days you know where you feel like I've got more to do than I could possibly get done well, you know, you start throwing all of this new marketing stuff on here on dh it's probably only going to get worse and so what I really do try to focus on that is trying to figure out how can we not get overwhelmed right? How many of you plan to be on in business mark in your products and services six months from now kashtan that they all raised their hand okay, so what that means is that we are going to think in terms of how we map that out how do we blueprint that ok, how do we make sure that we're just making progress every single day because we can't get it done gone in three days together we can't get it done in a month the in fact I'll let you off took altogether it never ends right we just make up more stuff that we have to do to go to the next level and to go to the next level. What the first important step is let's build the foundation let's make some progress so that we can make mohr progress. So that's the foundation of the duct tape marketing system and so what we're going to do really, from what we have seventeen more hours left together, you know, you guys have to sleep here, right? He realized ok, the time that we spent together, we're going to work on then on building those components, and we're going to try to personalize that I am going to try to personalize that kelly is going to try to personalize it as much as possible for your businesses, and I hope that we get some personalization from out there and do we call it internet land? We've got to come over the better for everyone works. Yeah, and calm the interwebs thie internet. How about we call him duct tape land doctor? Then you tell us what you want to be called. I think I like that. All right, those of you out of duct tape land uh, let's hear from you so I want to start on I'm going to we're going to go into these subjects, but I want to start first on beliefs I told you we were going to do that. And so one of the bleeding let me just poll how many of you think that you're bad dancers? Some of you think you're so bad you went like this, you're not only bad, you're embarrassed. Ok? Um, I'm a terrible dancer way thing is I need you guys come up here to every single one of you that's, right? You know, here, especially the ones in and raise your hand in front of the right there right there, dr larry, come on, who raise their hands in their bad dancer? I want some of you guys out there doing really important stuff in the audience, so I don't know what you're doing but it's really important. Get up here. Wait, you don't close by your good dancing. I had a great time doing it, and the fact the matter is it doesn't matter if I think I'm a bad dancer because I got you guys write on dh that's really one of the messages they're always sent from that and just a warning and those of you that tune in the entire time with us, um, that moments going to come up every single day at some point and we'll see if anybody makes any improvement and they're dancing and way I I asked for some no wonder I want to start with tom petty. You know, maybe some michael jackson, you know, but way have to stay with the royalty free music, of course, to make sure the musicians get paid for for their work. But I was doing a little running down the dream in my head. So case, you guys weren't just so you know where I was.