Duct Tape Marketing
- What is Duct Tape Marketing: It is a small business marketing system that uses a step-by step road map to create a powerful marketing plan that brings outstanding results.
- Unique benefits of Duct Tape Marketing: Gets prospects to systematically call you, makes your staff more effective and permits you to charge a premium for your services.
- The Duct Tape Marketing Story: The story of how John Jantsch combined his experience in marketing and as an entrepreneur with Michael Gerber’s E-Myth to form a brilliant small business marketing strategy and marketing system for small business owners.
What is Duct Tape Marketing?
Duct Tape Marketing® is the first small business marketing program that treats marketing as an integrated system. It is a step-by-step road map that any business, regardless of size, can use to create powerful small business marketing plans that brings outstanding results.
The Duct Tape Marketing System® is designed to show you how to differentiate your business so that you can dominate your market, create magnificent marketing materials, build a lead generation machine, and a web marketing strategy to harness the internet.
Duct Tape Marketing® enables a small business to build a set of simple, effective and affordable marketing tools to carry out its marketing plan. These tools consist of the following:
- Identification of Your Ideal Target Client
- Development of a Unique Core Message
- Creation of a Consistent Image
- Development of a Marketing Kit
- Your Marketing Story
- Case Studies and Testimonials
- Two-Step Direct Response Advertising Plan
- Referral Marketing Process
- Public Relations Strategy
- Content-Based Web Presence (that enables you to capture prospect information), web marketing strategy
- Local business marketing using Search Engine Optimization
- Blogging Strategy
- Social Media Strategy and Implementation
At the core of the Duct Tape Marketing system is a series of twelve steps which can easily be developed and implemented with the help of a marketing consultant like Shawn Russell at Business Diagnostics.
#1 Discovering your ideal target market
Finding and focusing on a market that values what you have to offer is the essential first marketing step. Defining the ideal client and finding more just like them is the purpose of this step.
#2 Creating an unique core message
Most prospects view one business just like another – they think that all accounting firms do the same thing, all electricians do the same thing etc. etc. When this perception exists you are left to compete on price. One of the most important marketing strategies the small business must master is the art of differentiation. Finding an important point of difference, one that matters to your ideal clients, is the primary focus of this step.
#3 Giving them an image – It’s all About the Package
One of the elements that contribute greatly to the success of your firm is the experience that your clients and prospects have with your firm. A great deal of this experience can be found in the image that your firm projects in its marketing. This image and how you present your products and services can be the key to delivering your core unique difference and making your firm the obvious choice in your industry.
#4 Creating a marketing kit that speaks to each prospect
Forget the tri-fold brochure and step up to a marketing tool that will educate your clients and really show them how you have what they need. This inexpensive and flexible marketing kit allows you to personalize your communications and speak to each prospect individually.
#5 Tell them a story and win them forever
Stories help you sell your products and services more effectively by helping you connect with your clients and prospects on a much greater emotional level. Today’s prospect is looking to do business with firms that they can connect with. This step teaches you how to use this powerful marketing tool and extends the value of your marketing kit.
#6 Case studies and testimonials
Demonstrating the results your work has obtained for actual clients is a great way to prove that you and your products and services can, in fact, perform. In this step we will show you ways to consistently obtain the information you need to create compelling case studies and client testimonials.
#7 Two step advertising – Creating a plan for guaranteed results
Most small business waste what little money they put into advertising. It’s not that advertising doesn’t work; it’s that they don’t understand the right way to put it to work. In this step you will discover ways to get your advertising to produce stunning amounts of high quality, qualified leads.
#8 Referral marketing – Generating a flood of new business without spending a dime
For some industries, referrals are the only way to gain access to your ideal target market. Not many people go to the phone book to find a doctor, lawyer or accountant! Learn how to generate referrals in a systematic way and discover some great promotions used by real-world referral generating small businesses.
#9 Public relations – The most believable form of marketing that exists
Some of your most effective sales will be facilitated by a publication that has good things to say about you or your products. There is something very powerful about a third-party endorsement from a magazine or newspaper. In this step you will learn how to tap into this little understood lead generation strategy.
#10 Creating a content based web presence – Content, concept and offline integration
A web site and should be so much more than a static brochure. This step will help you understand how to create content that educates and helps you stand out. Extend your web site to become a tool to generate leads and serve your customers.
#11 Building traffic and repeat visitors – Optimization, list building and local search
Web sites have become an essential marketing tool no matter the size or purpose of your business. Local shoppers are using the Internet to find local businesses in every city in America. Overlook this step and you may get left behind.
#12 Extending the conversation – Blogs, podcasts, RSS, Online PR and Social Media
Blogs have moved beyond a trendy new tech topic to a must have small business marketing and communication tool. Blogs help your search engine traffic, help demonstrate your content knowledge and build trust within your market.
Unique benefits of Duct Tape Marketing
Duct Tape Marketing helps you focus on your ideal client
There is always a market out there that is just waiting for someone to service it. Not only are they waiting, they are willing to pay a premium to be serviced by someone who operates just like you. They value what you have to offer, they enjoy your relationship approach to customer service and they readily refer their friends and colleagues as a token of their appreciation. Sound like fairy-tale land? When you intentionally choose a market with a specific need or problem and then show them why you deserve their trust, it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable.
Duct Tape Marketing gets prospects to systematically call you.
By creating advertising and lead-generation promotions that allow the prospect to move gently along the know, like, and trust path at their own pace, Duct Tape marketers entice fully-qualified prospects to contact them.
Duct Tape Marketing has the ease of an orchestrated system.
By working in the confines of a system, creating fixed steps, documenting and duplicating each step, the Duct Tape Marketer is able to quickly build the essential foundational components. The focus then moves to operating and enhancing the system. That’s where the real magic lies.
Duct Tape Marketing makes your staff more effective and efficient.
Your staff will thank you for including them in the marketing process and giving them tools to become immediately successful in their jobs. The payoff in terms of effectiveness and efficiency is sometimes stunning.
Duct Tape Marketing permits you to charge a premium for your products and services.
When you become the obvious choice for a service, product or market, your customers are not only wiling to pay a premium, they expect to do so. In fact, you will be surprised to learn that the greatest challenge can sometimes be charging enough to align with the perceived value!
Duct Tape Marketing allows you to create predictable sales forecasts.
Because of the systematic approach to lead generation and lead conversion at the core of the Duct Tape Marketing system, business owners can create and test successful promotions and expect predictable results when they increase the scale of such promotions.
Duct Tape Marketing makes your business more valuable.
Nothing makes a business more attractive to a potential buyer than documented systems and predictable marketing results. The primary constraint on most small businesses is the “rainmaking” status of the owner. The Duct Tape Marketing system presents a process to transfer that status to others. A potential buyer must feel confident that the business can operate without the current owner before any serious consideration can be given.
The Duct Tape Marketing Story
The Duct Tape Marketing system was born out of John Jantsch’s initial failure to serve the small business clients that were drawn to his agency over ten years ago.
Shortly after departing college he went to work for a large advertising agency. It only took him about five years in this job to realize he had to own his own business.
At first, he went to work serving the marketing project needs of very large corporations but he found that he was always much more interested in working with small business owners.
However, he found it very difficult to help small business owners using the traditional advertising agency model. Small business owners simply couldn’t afford to spend marketing dollars on image advertising, creative briefs and research teams to form their marketing strategies.
He found the missing ingredient to his puzzle in Michael Gerber’s brilliant small business book titled the E-Myth Revisited. Through the E-Myth, Gerber was one of the first to introduce the idea of a replicable small business system.
While John had found that small business owners had little trouble grasping systems for things like accounting and shipping, no one was talking about marketing as a system.
It became painfully clear to him that only way to effectively deliver simple, effective and affordable marketing results for small business owners was through the development and application of proven set of marketing principles and strategies.
This system had to be duplicatable, produce predictable results and come with a fixed, almost product-like, price tag.
The Duct Tape Marketing System is the outcome of over twenty years of work in the real world small business marketing laboratory and John’s continuing passion to help small business owners.
John still loves working with small business owners and he continues to do so everyday. He derives considerable joy knowing that thousands of small business owners have now succeeded growing a business the Duct Tape Marketing way with his help and the help of his Duct Tape Marketing Coaches.
“Shawn has a great energy that he always brings to each meeting,” said Christine. “With respect to marketing knowledge, he is very skilled and creative. He always provided consistent, positive, and well-tailored insight to the project at hand.”
Christine Snyder of Snyder Homes Remodeling
"The 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success" 
