28: John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

Amy:      00:01     Hi guys, Amy here. If you've listened to the show before,   that this is where we talk about starting and growing a life story business. Clients come to us because they have a desire to record their life story, their memories and reflections and family history, and they want to record this so they can pass it down to their kids and grandkids and future generations. And they need our help to write that life story book or create that life story video or audio, but how do they find us? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today with our guest, John Jantsch. John is a marketing consultant, a speaker, and a bestselling author. He's been called the world's most practical small business expert, and that's because he's full of ideas and practical advice on creating a marketing strategy that can help us grow our business, and especially our local business.

Amy:      00:46     You might recognize his name because he's the author of several books including Duct Tape Marketing, which is also the name of the marketing strategy that he and his consultants teach around the world. He also has a podcast where he shares a wealth of great information. I'll put the links to all of this stuff on the show notes because you really want to check out his podcast and his website. He's got free webinars that delve into a lot of marketing stuff. This last thing doesn't have anything to do with marketing, but I really wanted to point you guys in the direction of his TedX talk. I highly recommend that you watch it. It's about entrepreneurs helping people achieve their dreams and I think that's what we do. We get into this business because we want to help our clients create a life story project and that's something that a lot of them have dreamed about for a long time. But they can't do it on their own. So his TedX talk is really super powerful and I feel very lucky that we have him here today. John, welcome to the Life Story Coach podcast.

John:     01:44     Thanks for having me, Amy, and one thing you left out there is that we're recording this show about five blocks away from each other.

Amy:      01:52     That's right. Yeah.

John:      01:53     Well, I really enjoy doing, not that this is a local podcast, but I really enjoy doing anything locally in the community because for so many years I've been building a global brand, so I'm doing that all over the world, all over the country. So it's really fun to do things that are little more locally focused.

Amy:      02:12     And you certainly have built a global brand. I mean, you're off doing talks and presentations all over the world. So guys, we're very lucky to have him here to talk to us and share how we can build a marketing system that works for us because, John, the clients that we serve are mostly older people. Some of them will be online, some of them will not. And even for the people who are Internet savvy, we have to build such a close personal relationship even before we start doing a life story project because honestly, we're going and meeting these people and they're telling us all about their life. I would imagine that the marketing is probably a little bit different than, say, if you're going out there selling HVAC systems or pretty much anything else.

John:     03:10     It's not as different as you'd think, actually. Obviously the end product and how you get to the end product are different, but somebody finding you, knowing what you do, thinking that that's going to solve a problem that they have, I think that's the challenge for every business. I think about the information we tell financial planners and attorneys and I mean it's not that different quite frankly in some cases. So the principles really apply, it almost doesn't matter what your business is.

Amy:      03:40     That does make sense, right? You have kind of a different approach to marketing than other marketing books that I've read. You have this duct tape metaphor and it represents your approach to marketing. So can you talk a little bit about that?

John:      03:57     I'll tell you how I came up with that name because it has actually served me quite well, but it certainly does kind of raise some eyebrows every now and then. I have my office in Kansas City on the ground floor, almost a retail-looking space and everyday I get to watch people walk by and look at my sign and go, What is that business in there? Which can be a good thing to cause some intrigue. But I really came up with the name Duct Tape Marketing because I had worked with small business owners for a number of years and found it rather challenging. They had the same needs and challenges as much larger organizations, but certainly not the same budgets or even attention spans. I wanted to come up with almost a way to productize or systemize marketing where I could walk in and say, here's what I'm going to do, here's what you're going to do, here are the results that we hope to get and here's what it costs.

John:     04:50     Kind of a revolutionary approach at the time. And what I found was it was actually in trying to solve my greatest frustration and it actually was addressing the greatest frustration of a lot of small business owners. It's hard to buy marketing in a comprehensive, integrated, systematic fashion. Everybody's selling this tactic and that tactic. And so when I came up and realized how much that idea of marketing as a system resonated with small business owners, I kind of figured out if I was going to productize marketing, I had to give it a clever sort of brand name. And that's when I started applying the term Duct Tape Marketing to what I was doing. It just felt like the perfect metaphor for what many people experience in business, that a lot of the marketing stuff is in some ways almost secondary to what your business does.

John:     05:44     It's obviously crucial, but it's not what your business does. I mean, you didn't start to write and record people's life histories because you were so great at marketing. But you also quickly come to realize that there is no business without some form of marketing. And so this idea of simple, effective, affordable marketing captured what it's like for a lot of small business owners. I think I also benefit to some extent from this kind of strange passion that people do seem to have for all things duct tape. So many people can relate to having fixed something in an emergency with duct tape and maybe it's still fixed today.

Amy:       06:36     The kind of the method that you teach promises to be simple, effective and affordable. And I think where a lot of people, well I might be speaking more about myself here, but also other people that I've spoken to that have reached out to me because of the podcast—marketing is always at the top of our mind and it's usually one of the the things that people are afraid of the most because there are so many different ways to go with it. You talk in your books and on your podcast about online marketing and offline marketing. So online, meaning on the computer, and then in the real world. And there are so many directions that we can go.

Amy:      07:20     But most personal historians or life story professionals are on their own, a one-person shop. They're doing all of the things for the business and all of the business things. So they're doing all the writing, the producing and they're doing the marketing and everything else. We only have a certain amount of time, but everybody has lots of good ideas on how they can go out and market. But I think the different message that you're sending is, you're talking about a strategy before tactics and having a solid foundation. So can you talk a little bit about that and why that's so important, especially for a small local business?

John:     08:02     Well, you've mentioned so many of the reasons, but what happens is so many people go out and do it kind of backwards. They go, oh, let's be on Facebook and let's have a website and let's do this and let's participate in this group. And then they start saying, okay, why would we do that? What would we get from being there? Who would we meet if we went there? But they're down the track of just doing all this activity. What we try to get people to do is, particularly small businesses who have limited resources....I mean, yeah, there may be 18 social networks that you could participate in, but if you only have limited time and budget and energy, maybe you ought to prioritize some of that. And so what a marketing strategy allows you to do is to say, okay, who are we really after?

John:     08:56     Who is our ideal client? Who, narrowly, makes an ideal client rather than just saying, I do X, Y, and Z, come and get it. Because a lot of times what happens is we start chasing people that aren't good clients, we're not going to like working with them. And when you're in a very small business, again, some of the folks that you work with probably have a capacity that they can only do so many projects at a time. If that's the case, then I think we need to get much more selective about who we will and will not work with, and that really comes down to kind of having that real narrow focus on who makes an ideal client.

John:     09:35     But the second part of that is to get your message down where you're attracting people who have a problem that they're trying to solve, and connecting what you do that solves that problem. A lot of them think that they are selling a completed personal history. And while that's the end product they want, I want to suggest is that they connect to the problem that's solved instead. So gosh, it's been 25 years ago. My mother was a tremendous cook. Really loved to bake and all kinds of holiday traditions that she centered around the cooking and the baking that she did and she, her health was not great.

John:     10:40     And we all realized that she probably had just so much time left on this planet and so we actually got her to record all of her recipes and all of our traditions and we turned that into a family cookbook. And it is an absolute treasure for something that we would have lost. And now I'm giving it, I gave it to my kids, they're going to give it to their kids. And so we solved what we saw as a central problem, which was a loss of this kind of matriarch for our family. Everybody loves their mom, I hope, but she did some things that were going to be lost forever. I mean, these traditions were going to be lost forever. And in fact, this was back before we had a lot of this technology.

John:     11:26     And so I literally recorded these on cassette tapes, took them to a transcription service, and the woman was literally in tears when she gave it back to me because she just said, you have no idea what a treasure this is. So to me, obviously we wanted a cookbook, I guess, but what we really wanted was to solve the problem that this essential part of our family was going to be lost forever. And that's what I think is something we have to tap into. I've contended that the companies or the people who can explain the problem the best are the ones that we're probably going to connect with and want to do business with.

Amy:       12:07     Well, I'm just amazed because you are a personal historian, you've done a personal history project yourself because that's exactly the kind of projects that people like I do. It can be a long-form narrative where they're talking about their memories, but actually the cookbook thing is a little niche within the life story business. So kudos to you for actually doing that. I had mentioned earlier that sometimes it's the adult children that hire us to do a project and when that's the case it's usually because —you stated it so beautifully—the problem is the impending loss of a loved one, the traditions and the memories and the recipes that that loved one has. And so you don't want to lose all of that. So you do something like a cookbook. Well, most who do reach out to somebody to help them with that do it because they don't have the time or the knowhow to do it themselves. So you guys, you and your family did that. That's wonderful. I love hearing that. When people take it upon themselves and they actually do it to completion, sometimes people start and then it never gets completed. So you get what the problem is.

John:     13:29     One of the really fun parts of this was I have seven brothers and two sisters. My mom's recipes were for six dozen cookies at a time and so anybody who uses this cookbook has to be good at math because she kept her recipe portions in there. My wife started using it, and she was like, "Six cups of flour?"

Amy:      13:55     Oh, that's funny. I like that. Well, it's something else that you talk about is, and I think we're touching on this right now, we say that we are there to solve a problem. And so going back to their adult children coming to us life story professionals, their problem is not just that they're going to lose at some point. We never know when it's going to happen, but at some point they're going to lose the stories of their family, not just their mom or their dad, but also all of their mom or dad's memories of the people that came before. So their mom and dad's memories of their own grandparents. But an additional problem is then that they maybe don't have the time to do this themselves and sometimes it's out of guilt because they know that this is a worthwhile project and they're feeling guilty because maybe they bought a little book to fill out and they never did or maybe they bought it for their parents and their parents never did it. But something I think that you talk about and is really interesting is somebody can need something but they have to want it in order for it to be a viable product or service for us to sell.

John:     15:07     Well, that's right. If all we do is sell a completed book, we're going to sell that to people who have already realized that's what they want. And so they're coming to look for that to get done because they don't have time. And I think what great marketers understand is that a lot of times we have to help people understand why they would even want this. My father recently passed. And one of the things that was really interesting is that generation didn't always talk about the good things or the bad things that happened in their lives. Late in his life, I learned about his parents' divorce. I mean, I knew about it of course, but he'd never talked about it.

John:     15:50     He spent time in Korea. He never talked about that. And he started talking about that. It just made you realize there's all this stuff here that not only are we going to lose, but in some cases maybe nobody's asked him to share some of this information and there's stuff that I don't even know as his grown child about his childhood. I think that's that's an example of a way that we could actually explain a problem, that a life history could actually bring to life and solve that we may not have even thought was a problem, if that makes sense.

Amy:       16:31     Exactly. It absolutely makes sense. The World War Two generation and going on, Korean War generation, it changes a little bit with the baby boomers. They're a little bit more receptive to the idea that passing down their story has worth. But the earlier generations are, they're notorious for being very silent about things like their war experiences. And also it almost can feel like a self-indulgent project to say, Hey, I want to write a book about my growing up years, my young adult years. I want to write a book that is focused on me. So in some respects it makes it a little bit harder. It can make it a little bit harder to convince somebody that they should go ahead with this project. Sometimes there can be some resistance because they feel like, well, who am I to have a book written about myself? How would you approach something like that?

John:     17:37     Well, it's like everything. When somebody asks, who am I to do that?, I always turn it around and say, who are you not to? Because,it's not just about you. It's about what you're able to pass down and share and the wisdom that people will want long after you're gone. And I think that it turns it instead of a selfish act into a selfless act. And I think that's certainly a way to address it. I will also say that in my experience we started actively having these conversations with my father and I could tell he was so thrilled that we asked. I think there probably are a lot of grown children of these aging parents that could actually use this process as a way to to deepen their relationship with the parent that's probably not going to be around for awhile.

Amy:      18:33     I agree with you. Yeah. I've had it happen several times where I've been told that the parents did not talk at all about their younger years or maybe war experiences until a grandchild had to go and interview them for a school assignment and then it's almost like the floodgates open. And then everybody is recognizing the value of this, it piques everybody's curiosity and it also gives permission to that older generation to say, yeah, what we value, what you have to share with us.

John:     19:07     There are a lot of older adults out there that are saying, I would really like to write my memoir thing, but it's almost in some ways ridiculed. Like, yeah, another author, great, just waht the world needs. Part of it is kind of positioning it as a family project. That there's something in it actually for everyone.

Amy:       19:34     That's what I usually tell people, that it's a gift that they're not giving to themselves, but they're giving it to all of the generations that come after them. So I would like to shift gears a little bit because I know you have so much good stuff to say about how websites should be set up and things like that. When we talk to people, a lot of it has to be in person but they have to be able to find us, and just to make your business legitimate, you have to at least have a website. I think there's an awful lot of us who don't really know very much about the intricacies of making the websites optimized and things like that. But you have some good webinars on your website, and you talk a little bit about—I'm sure I'm going to get this wrong—the Google Small Business Universe, is that right?

John:     20:27     Well, that's just my term for it, but especially locally and online. I mean Google is it, and following what they want to see—their best practices and their tools and their services—is always going to be good advice at least in the near future for small business owners. I mean even if most of, if not all, of your business comes because somebody heard you did great work and they wanted to know how they could get that done. And so a friend told them, today we turn to the web and at least say, okay, how do I contact that person? Let me read a little bit about them; let's see if what other people think about them. I mean, we're still doing that even if the entire transaction and way that we conduct business is across the coffee table.

John:     21:26     We are using the websites and the internet as kind of the hub for information gathering. It can be a starting point. I mean, it can be a transaction point obviously as well today, but at the very least, it needs to give people a sense that this is somebody I can trust, this is somebody who knows what they're doing, this is how I get ahold of this person. This is what other people say about this person. It doesn't have to be an elaborate project. It just needs to be a comfortable place that people can know your story enough to connect with you.

Amy:      22:10     I think that we have an advantage. If you're a life story professional, in most markets you are not going to have much competition, there's just not that many people out there who are doing this. So I think probably as a kind of a minimum, what you want is if somebody googles around, let's say they live in Kansas City and they—I shouldn't use myself as an example because I'm sure mine isn't set up correctly at all! I don't know if they're googling in Kansas City for life story writers, what they're going to come up with. I would hope they would come up with The Story Scribe, which is my company, but I don't even know if that's true. So why don't you give us a few things that we can do to at least give us a shot at showing up in the Google results page.

John:     23:00     So at the very least, you just spend some time in Google and do some searches for what you think people search for when they're looking for you. Ask your existing or past clients how they found you or your service. Because I think one of the challenges, when people say it's great because we don't have a lot of competition that's both good and bad, because it also means there aren't a whole lot of people typing into Google how to get my story written or personal historians. And so, you're not going to necessarily get a flood of business because you've optimized your website. You're going to get that business because you're out there networking, because you are doing things offline that are driving people to your website. Your website in a lot of ways is just a place for you to build trust and for them to experience or sample your work if you will.

John:     24:00     The short answer is, spend some time writing your own content. Spend some time creating things that when that person does reach out initially and maybe calls you and says, my aunt Betty said you did a great work for her, that you're actually really feel proud to send them to your website, to say, "Go get this document. It talks about all the great reasons to do this, how to work with somebody like me, how to get prepared to record this history." So creating those resources and having them on your website actually enables your entire offline marketing and makes the process more convenient. And today especially, you started talking about the baby boomers and of course we're going to have the millennials right after them. I mean convenience is a great part of why we have websites and why we have online resources. Because it makes it easier for these crazy times when everybody's busy. The company or the service that is the easiest to get information from and to do business with is going to win.

Amy:       25:08     That's a really good thought. I have copies that I've made of an information packet that I give to somebody when I'm doing the in-person sales talk and I never thought of putting all those as pages on my website.

John:     25:25     Well, the lovely thing about putting all the pages online is that it turns into content that's actually going to help people find you, because part of the process of writing about how this process works, why you would do it, you're going to naturally work in the types of phrases and content that people are looking for. Maybe they're trying to figure out how to do it themselves. Well, they're going to find you and learn that, well, my goodness, I don't have to do this myself. Use your website to teach and educate and produce useful content around all the topics people might be searching for. Even if you're telling them—and this always frightens people—even if you're telling people how to do it themselves, which is maybe the way they're going to find you in the first place. Many of them will come to realize they can't and don't want to do it themselves. But now they found you and they trust you.

Amy:      26:17     That's a great point. So do you recommend that people have blogs attached to their websites? I mean, is it something that you have to keep continuously updating and having new information or can you have just all static pages and people will still be able to find you?

John:     26:35     I'm a big fan of blogging and it's one of the ways that you keep adding new content. Google likes that. But be strategic about it. So you don't have to just go, "What should I write this week? Um, I guess I'll put 500 words up." So if you instead say, "I'm going to write the guide, the ultimate guide (let's give it a good name), the ultimate guide to creating your family history." Essentially, you're going to write 10 blog posts that are, that might be, if you think of the ultimate guide, 10 blog posts are going to be the 10 chapters that would go in that book and they're all going to link together and they're all going live or some portion of them are going live on the ultimate guide page and then link off to the full blog post so you can take 10 weeks, 10 months, whatever to write that. You link it all together and it acts as a magnet for people that are looking for some information. You'll get those pages to rank nationally, not just locally, if you take that kind of strategic approach. So it's not just blogging Amy's personal thoughts for the day. Rather, it's a very strategic approach to create a body of work that will serve as an asset over time.

Amy:      28:09     In a previous podcast episode, I interviewed Derrick Lewis, a business book ghostwriter, and he did something similar. Well, I don't know if it started off as a blog, but he did a book on how to write a business book. So it's geared towards business people who want to set themselves up as the authority in their field. And just like you're saying, very many people then realize, oh boy, this is way harder, this is more than I want to do myself. And you've already shown that you know how to do it because you're teaching them how to do it. And so I guess it creates more confidence in you when they decide that they don't want to do it themselves.

John:     28:53     I say that all the time. People don't want to really know how to do it. They just want to know that you know how to do it. And so if you teach them that, and you kind of stole my thunder there, so you create this whole part on your website that becomes this guide, well now you've got 10,000 words. Well guess what, that turns into a great portable Ebook, or let's take it a step further: Publish it on Amazon, using the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. And now all of a sudden you've got a global audience which you may or may not ever want to work with, but now you have...Well, maybe make a little revenue off of that. So what the heck, sell it for $2.99. But what's going to happen is people are going to find that, they're going to share that, they're going to ask you to come talk to their group about what you do. And the next thing, you've got a brand that is going to make you kind of the preferred choice for somebody who wants to do this.

Amy:       29:49     Yeah, that's all really good advice.

John:     29:52     Assuming that you like to write stuff,

Amy:      29:57     Hopefully if we're life story writers, we better like that.

John:     30:00     That's pretty funny though. I coach a lot of marketing consultants and they're all out there telling their clients they need content and blogs and some of their blogs and websites are woefully in neglect themselves. So I'm sure that that's true of your folks. You're too busy writing to actually write.

Amy:       30:23     I don't blog on The Story Scribe, which is my main business, I mean that's my life story writing business. I do on the Life Story Coach, which is this the podcast and a website that goes with it. I do occasionally write blogs there. And oh my gosh, it's so, it feels so good. I mean, I used to journal a lot. I used to write for the newspapers, so I used to do a lot of my own writing and— this is an aside, it has nothing to do with marketing—but I realized how much when I start writing my own piece, I realize how good it feels. Because I'm in this business where we're channeling other people's words and we're shaping them into a text that they would, write if they were writers. But it's not your own material, it's not even our own words, you're just the craft person to turn that into the kind of book that they want. So it does feel really good to sit down and write my own stuff. So anyway, that's my long-winded way of saying you're really inspiring me to write.

John:     31:27     And we're going to, between us, we're going to produce about 4,500 words today for the transcript. So put that on your website.

Amy:      31:33     Alright. Well, okay. So I know that you don't have very much time. One last thing, just because I had never heard of this until I started reading your stuff. I've been reading your stuff for a long time, but this one for some reason I escaped my attention up until recently. You talk about Google My Business. Is that something where if you're on it then if somebody types in, say, "life story writing Atlanta," that whoever in that market will come up? Is that right?

John:     32:04     Yeah. So that's Google's local search engine, if you will. So they think somebody is looking for a local business. So let's say, I'm in Kansas City, (well, I am in Kansas City!) and I type in tree service and it says, oh, you're in Kansas City and we think you're looking for a tree service. So any kind of search like that, whether I type in the name of the city or not. If they determined that there's local intent, I'm looking for a local business or a local service, then they are going to serve up the normal results that they do, but they're also going to include what are called Google Maps results. It's changed over the years, but currently today it's three listings and it will show, hey, we think these are by you and here's their phone number, here's their website, and if you're on a mobile device, click to call, here's directions, click on the button to get directions.

John:     33:00     So that's kind of the intent of that. And all of those results are pulled from essentially—I won't be technically true if I say all—but 90 percent of those results are pulled from something called Google My Business. Google My Business is a free service. If you type in business.google.com and type in the name of your business in the city, they'll say, well sure we've got you in the directory, do you want to claim that listing? Or maybe you've already claimed it. And it just is there, it's their information layer so that you can provide them...here is my exact name, here's my exact address, here's the category of business I'm in, here's where my business is located, these are the products we offer. Here's some photos, here's a video of me talking about my business. It's just kind of a collection of knowledge and data that they're able to use. Then for anybody who's doing that local search, that's where your Google reviews will show up there and you can respond to those reviews there. So increasingly for local businesses, if you're not showing up, I mean, there's only three listings, so we call it the three pack. If you're not showing up in that three pack for your category of business, then you might not exist.

Amy:       34:19     So it's almost like the yellow pages for Google or what the yellow pages used to be? It's a dirctory, and then they choose the top three from their directory.

John:     34:28     Yeah. And it's not just the top three. Proximity has a ton to do with it. I mean, if I type in hair salon right now, there's a hair salon 67 feet from me and that will come up, number one today, but if I drive two miles away from here it won't. So there are a lot of factors that come into play. Getting reviews, having your business highly talked about and shared, and social signals, all of those things come into play. But proximity is a big factor as well.

Amy:      34:56     Well, and I would guess that if most places don't have too many personal historians or life story professionals, then we should be in those top three. But I thought this was some of that sort of magic stuff that Google did all on its own. But we can be proactive, we can go onto business.google. Is that what you said?

John:     35:20     It was. If you have a business address and phone number and name of your business, pretty good chance you're in there. It's just whether or not you've taken advantage of it and optimized it and made it correct. You can't know what Google's going to do, but you can certainly share better data with them.

Amy:       35:41     Right. Well, okay. Actually that does bring up a question. Most people that I know that do this.... For a while I was in a coworking space, Cowork Waldo, and I now am back in my home office. I don't have clients come here ever. The only time that they need my address is if they're going to mail me a payment. So in general, I don't think I have my address at all on my website. Is that, do you have to have your address for that? I'm trying to think if there's any compelling reason that I would not want to have my address associated with it.

John:     36:17     You might not because somebody will show up at your house someday,

Amy:      36:17     That could be awkward!

John:     36:25     To see you insurance or something. But you have the option, you don't have to show your address. I mean, if you're in a highly competitive business and people are coming to your business, your address must be on there or it's really not going to benefit you to be in there, but in cases of people with home offices don't want to have their listing, there's no reason to have their listing. Like it's a warehouse and we go out to our customers. You don't have to put that in there. We'll sometimes try to say, well, I service people within a 50-miles radius or something like that, so they'll kind of take that as a factor. But one of the things you do have going for you is, as you said, you should be able to get your site to rank for the industry that you're in.

Amy:       37:12     Well, wonderful. John, this was such a good conversation. I appreciate it so much. Can you tell us where people can find your books? I think I mentioned in the intro that you actually, you are a consultant yourself, but you also have a whole team—it sounds like a very, very large team—of consultants all over the place. So if somebody wants some help with getting their business going, getting their marketing plan going, where do they look and where do they find your books and find you?

John:     37:39     Sure. So the easiest place to look is just Duct Tape Marketing and that's ducttapemarketing.com. And my books are on Amazon, Indiebound, and any of the places that sell books, Barnes and noble online, wherever you like to buy books, you can find really all of my books there. As far as my network of consultants, yeah, we have about 150 consultants around the world in 14 countries, all installing the Duct Tape Marketing system. And so if your listeners are in Austin or Boston or Salt Lake City, they can find a local consultant teaching the Duct Tape Marketing methodology.

Amy:      38:20     Great. And if they're in Kansas City, they can go buy your shop, which is right across from the Bier Station.

John:     38:20     And write down from Mclean's Bakery.