Duct Tape Marketing—What Is It, and Why Is It the Foundation of our Coaching Program?
“Just as any handyman will tell you that a roll of duct tape is the single most useful tool in their toolbox—one they would never be without—so I began to understand that small business marketing must be simple, affordable, always-at-the-ready, and effective at solving any of a host of problems.”
As a business owner, you likely hear from hordes of marketing salespeople who are pitching the latest tactics—SEO, social media, advertising, pay per click—and some of them can offer some great advice in these areas, no doubt. But don’t mistake these individual tactics for a marketing solution. First, employing one or two tactics in a piecemeal fashion will not give you a coherent marketing strategy. These folks are not evaluating your company’s needs—they are selling their solutions. Second, this “shotgun” approach is unlikely to be cost-effective; it’s easy to overspend, investing in multiple specialists who aren’t seeing the bigger picture. You may boost your company’s profile and your revenue to some degree, but are the results commensurate with the costs, and are they sustainable? Do you rest easy, feeling that your marketing efforts are well in hand?
Duct Tape Marketing, by contrast, is a system, not unlike your accounting or IT systems. It has a structure, goals, methods, and schedules. It’s a system that we tailor specifically for your company. DTM takes the holistic approach to promoting your business.
When I talk about marketing, I often describe the difference between a strategy and a tactic, and this is an essential distinction. DTM doesn’t treat marketing as a singular event or an arbitrary group of tools. I use DTM’s methodology to help my clients identify a collection of tactics as we build a personalized, turn-key strategy—a system that conveys the right messages to the right people, consistently and repeatably.
Duct Tape Marketing is more than that, though—it’s a collaborative network of over 125 marketing consultants. As members, we consultants benefit from training several times a month to keep our skills current and to stay on top of the latest trends and marketing automation tools. We interact with each other every day in private on-line groups, sharing information, asking and answering questions, and offering advice. Some of the DTM consultants are gurus in a particular marketing technology, and others specialize in a given industry niche. It’s an incredibly rich trove of resources that I can bring to each and every client consultation.
Essentially, Duct Tape Marketing lets me take my consulting to a higher level than I could achieve on my own. My clients don’t need to worry about expending great effort on knowing what works for marketing or what makes one tool better than another. With all the resources of the DTM network behind me, I take the time to filter tactics and tools to take the guesswork out. Together, we build the system that will work the first time and will continue working into the future.
Pick a random assortment of marketing tactics and apply them haphazardly, and you can probably guess the results. (Maybe you’ve experienced the results!) “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time,” said Zig Ziglar, author and motivational speaker. Instead, I encourage you to think of your marketing strategy as your target, your tactics as your arrows. Build a good target, and your mindfully chosen arrows, or tactics, will hit the bulls-eye every time. Duct Tape Marketing’s systematic approach is serving thousands of small businesses well.
So what, exactly, does this Duct Tape Marketing methodology entail, and what can you expect from our coaching program?
· Develop a marketing strategy that guides where you invest.
· Identify and target the most ideal customers, those whom you enjoy working for and are profitable, and watch them flock to your business.
· Create effective marketing messaging that is clear, concise, and consistent.
· Build a marketing system that’s repeatable, month after month.
· Be confident that someone in your company other than you can run the marketing of your business.
As the name implies, Duct Tape Marketing creates marketing that is simple, effective, and affordable—a durable, practical system for your company’s marketing strategy.
Are you curious to learn more? Check out the Duct Tape Marketing blog (which has been highlighted as a “Forbes Favorite” and as a top small business resource by Harvard Business School) or podcast (which Fast Company has called “One of the best podcasts for business-savvy listeners”). You can find John Jantsch’s books on Amazon and elsewhere.