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A New Generation of AI: ChatGPT

A New Generation of AI: ChatGPT written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

John Jantsch, host of the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show, and I’m gonna talk about a trend that has gotten so high in the past few months, ChatGPT.

Key Takeaway:

Nowadays, we look for tools that let us be more productive and help us save an immense amount of time. AI is a really hot trend now and accessible to make some of our tasks easier. The newest trend in AI is ChatGPT, a tool that will change how we work and become smarter in how we collect useful information and data for our businesses in order to create smarter strategies. In this episode, I teach you how ChatGPT will be shaking up the way we do things and gain knowledge.

Topics I Cover:

  • [01:51] What is ChatGPT?
  • [03:38] Why use this tool?
  • [04:32] The process of using AI
  • [06:49] How to use AI to create Hubpages for your business
  • [08:43] Discover what your ideal customer needs or wants
  • [11:51] How to use ChatGPT to create online content

Resources I mention:

  • Send John an email

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

  • Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

  • Marketingassessment.co

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



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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m gonna do another solo show. If you listen to my last show, I started off by saying I wanna talk about a trend. I guess today I’m gonna talk about a really hot trend . It’s one that you’re hearing a ton about and so much so that I’ve been talking about it for a couple years, but the hype level on this trend has gotten so high that I wanna come in and do what hopefully you appreciate from me. Dear listener, , I wanna calm down some of the hype and talk about the real ways in which you can use this. You’ve probably guessed by now I’m talking about ai, artificial intelligence, this new set of tools, it’s been around for quite a while. In fact, I would suggest that whether you know it or not, you’re using AI every day.

(01:34): If you ever use Google Maps and it gets you to around traffic jams and gets you to where you’re going at the fastest route possible at that given time, that is a pretty common use of AI in our everyday life. Frankly, you know, the series and those kind of tools that are that, that have been around on iPhones are using ai, but a new generation of AI has jumped to the forefront. Something called GPT, which was essentially just a way to programmatically, systematically teach some AI tools, everything , all the content that’s out there, consuming it on certain topics, you know, up to a certain date. That’s the easy, simple way, probably to, and so what has happened is these tools have gotten smarter because they have, they’re basically just processing lots of language, lots of data. They can take that now and say, oh, okay, here’s how to write something based on that.

(02:27): Data tools have gotten better. Let’s face it. There’s no question. I think that while there are some tools like Jasper and Write, Sonic Market Muse that have been around for a while, I think the real game changer came when OpenAI ChatGPT, I’m sure you’ve, if you’re not using it, I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about it because it has really opened up the white hot topic of ai and it’s, you know, when that type of thing happens, you get so much chatter out there that it’s really hard to kind of cut through. I remember, this is going way back, so hang on cuz I’m gonna do a grandpa thing, almost internet grandpa. Anyway, you know when Twitter came around finally, I don’t know what year it was, 2008, 2009, it is. It’s like, if you’re not on Twitter, you know, you’re just like not cool.

(03:19): And I think that’s kind of where we are with AI to some degree, but let me just tell you, it is an amazing tool, not because it, well, if you’re a student out there, maybe it’s writing your essays, but as marketers, you’re not u going to use this tool today to create all of your content. You’re gonna use this today as a tool to get smarter about your customers, to get smarter about the industry, to get smarter about your competition, to create plans, content, no question. And to do a lot of mundane tasks, to get ideas, to get research. So that’s the way that, that, I’m not saying that we won’t get there one day where you just push a button and it’s writing, you know, your webpages for you. But what it’s doing right now, think of it right now as a a, a time saving efficiency tool that’s gonna save you some brain cells , quite frankly, because there are things that maybe if you sat around for a while, you’d brainstorm and you’d come up with a list of, you know, FAQs or something in your industry, but this is just gonna give you 20 of ’em.

(04:20): You’re gonna go, oh yeah, five of those are good. I didn’t have to use any brain power to get to those. So that’s how I tell people to really start thinking about it. Now, I wanna spend a little time talking about the process of using ai. So if you use a tool, the, you know, the, probably the reason ChatGPT has become so popular is because the interface is so easy to understand. If you use a tool, you know, essentially what you’re doing is you’re putting in what’s called a prompt. You’re telling it to create something based on something that you give it. Now you can give it a simple keyword phrase and it won’t really know what to do with that, but it’ll probably still spit something out. Or you can give, you can go as detail and deep as you want to tell exactly the tone that you want to write it in.

(05:07): First person to use statistics. I mean, those are all basically part of your prompts. So like many things, garbage in, garbage out. So if you put in a great prompt, if you keep refining your prompt to get to what you want, you’re probably going to get a lot better output. I’m gonna talk before we’re done today about what I would say is the top 10 ways you ought to be using these tools pretty much every single days, just from a use standpoint. Again, a lot of times I will start with kind of global ideas. You know, I wanna, I wanna start brainstorming a big idea. I’ll let it drill down to subcategories. You know, when I’m working with a client for, to create ideas, we definitely wanna plug in what are their strengths. You know, for example, I work with remodeling contractors. Well, you know, one, a very big remodeling contractor we work with is specializes in design build or design remodeler, because they have the designers and architect on staff.

(06:02): So we wanna play to their strengths. So that’s gonna, we’re gonna definitely use that as a way to create a differentiator inside of tools like ChatGPT. All right, let me just spend the rest of our time together today giving you a list. I said 10, I’m, I’ll probably go more than that. I’m just going to throw out a list of the types of output that you should be getting out of ChatGPT or whatever tool you use. Again, shout out to Jasper is another great tool. Shout out to write Sonic, like the word write Sonic is a great tool, but you know, whatever tool you use, these are the types of things that, that you can do. It’s not just writing content. For example, something that we have specialized in the last decade or so is, you know, with our clients, we create something that are called HubPages.

(06:51): Blogs are totally out. Stop calling it a blog, stop putting blog in your, in your, uh, main navigation. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to read a blog. We want got good content, but we want it structured in a way we could find it. And frankly, the way most people see blogs is it’s kind of chronological content. You, you put in a blog post to today and you put in another one tomorrow and when you wrote yesterday is gone. And so what we do is we take all that great content and we structure it around the outline of a big hub topic. So again, for example, I use the remodeling contractor. If they remodel construction or uh, kitchens, you know, we might create the ultimate guide to remodeling your kitchen in whatever city that you’re in. That would be the starting point. And then we would actually use, you could use a tool.

(07:37): In fact, you could type that exact prompt in to ChatGPT and it will give you a outline. Here are all the major chunks. It’s, you know, planning, it’s budgeting, it’s design, it’s construction, it’s, you know, it’s choosing appliances. I mean, basically all the kind of subcategories that go into a kitchen, major kitchen remodel, and it creates the outline for you. It even suggests steps all the way down to, yeah, that would actually be a good blog post. Why remodel Your kitchen probably would come up in that outline. , you know, the benefits of it would probably come up in that outline and, and that would make a great blog topic. So what it does is it kind of gives you like, hey, here’s, you know, in instead of just like, what should we write on Monday? It gives you kind of the whole outline for like, Hey, we ought to be doing something in each of these categories for the next six months and we’ll create this page that, that will really be a great resource.

(08:30): Instead of just telling somebody, go read our blog and maybe you’ll find something I can, I, in fact, I’ve probably done shows on that topic. But if not just Google HubPages Duct Tape Marketing, you’ll get a very thorough description of what I’m talking about there. Another kind of fun use for this tool is wouldn’t it be great to know what your ideal customer lays awake in bed at night worrying about when it comes to making a purchase of whatever it is you sell ? Well, you can actually tell these tools something along the lines of, you know, create a list of the top 20 concerns that a homeowner might have when it comes to remodeling their kitchen. Use first person and be very dramatic in your answers. Oh, and as a bonus, go ahead and write the responses that a marketing company for this remodeling contractor might write.

(09:24): So that sounds like a lot that can all go in one prompt. And then you are going to get a, a list of course of not just concerns, but actually sad in the way that a homeowner might say, you know, to deal with noise and budget and on time and you know all the things that you should be then addressing in your marketing. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel?

(10:23): Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So you can use these tools not just to produce content, but to actually produce strategy. In fact, another strategic use. Take all of your Google reviews, you can just copy ’em, paste them in there, and tell the tool to actually go through the above reviews that you just pasted in and create a sentiment analysis, which is just another way of saying what are some of the key themes, , that keep coming up positive and negative? We can take core messages right out of those themes now. All right, let’s go to another step. Once it gives you that output and says, here are the three themes that keep coming up the most, here are the three problems people keep mentioning the most.

(11:20): You could take those in a continuation, put those in and say, okay, create a core marketing message addressing these themes that keep coming up. And so all of a sudden now it’s gonna get creative with you. So think in terms of research for strategy to do things much, much faster. Maybe to give some insights that you don’t have today. You could take three of your competitors and put them in there. And the same thing. What are people say about them that’s positive? What did they say about them that’s negative? You can create how-to, cause it certainly shines at that. Tell it to write a 1000 word article describing the five benefits of doing X, Y, and Z, and it will produce something that’s not bad. I, in fact, I kind of use the sole, the formula of, you know, 20 60, 20, like you give it 20% of the great ideas, let it spit out 60% of the content, and then you actually polish it the final 20%.

(12:18): And you might actually get some decent content written that way. You can take that content that it writes and say, okay, now give me a two minute YouTube video script based on this content. Franka. You can do that with actually any content you’ve written. Let’s see, you have some amazing content on your website already that was professionally handwritten, bespoke, just for you. You could take it to these tools and say, give me 25 uh, tweets based on this content. Give me a two minute video script based on this content. Repurpose this content for a LinkedIn article. And you are gonna get all those things that you could probably create all on your own. In fact, you could do a great job creating those on your own, but you’ve now saved yourself, I don’t know, five hours maybe to actually have it. And there are things that, that, that don’t require brain power.

(13:10): In fact, they just require somebody who understands how to do it. And these tools understand how I how to do it. Great example of that, writing metadata. So, you know, the titles and descriptions, you’ve probably heard every SEO person in the world talk about how important that is as an on page ranking factor. But it’s also, if you’ve got 10 blog posts, it’s also a bit mind numbing to create these tools. Not only create it, they create it in the way that Google wants to see it. They create it certainly SEO optimized. So even if you know how to do that, if you don’t really know how to do that, this is a great aid. But even if you know how to create something like that, this is a tool that will just save you an immense amount of time. I, I can tell you that, you know, companies that produce articles today, and this won’t be 100%, but a lot of companies that produce articles today, a lot of companies that do SEO work, a lot of people that do podcast transcripts, I mean those are all going to be produced by AI if they’re not mostly being produced by AI today.

(14:09): Google loves question and answers. FAQs have always been great content. There are certain types of people that they just want to go and find the one question they have and get it answered. So every single one of your service pages, if you offer different services or you offer different products or solutions, should, should have a list of FAQs, not just for the company in general. Yeah, maybe you have one of those that talks about how you work or about your process. But every one of your products and services should have cues. But you know, they take time, like everything they take brain power to, to produce. You can use these tools to get a head start on an, on what questions people are asking and the answers that obviously you’re gonna want to sprinkle your own magic on those, those answers, but it just allows you to do things much more efficiently. Do things that you’re probably not getting to today either because of cost or because of just time and you actually get it done quickly and rolled out. In fact, you know, just the very start of of keyword research, you know, just putting in a couple terms and letting a tool, an AI tool give you, I mean there are tools out there that do this, but the AI tool, since you’re using it can give you a list of, you know, the keyword word phrases that people are searching for companies or businesses like yours.

(15:25): You can tell the, you know, I already mentioned the idea of social posts. It’s great at writing four specific Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I mean, one of the things that’s sort of banding about social media is has a way to differentiate themselves. Each platform now has their own way they wanna see content and what kind of content and what style of content works and what shape the images are. And so using a tool like this to actually write for specific platforms, just take some of the work out of that. You can actually, let’s say you, you wanna make sure that you’ve got a marketing assistant that’s writing content for email newsletter every month for social posts, every month for blog posts every month. You can tell these tools, you can give it the key themes and say create a monthly editorial calendar. If you’re an agency, you can certainly do that for a client and it, and you may not execute on the thing for 12 months.

(16:16): But if you’re an agency or a coach or a consultant and you’re able to show in a proposal to a client, here’s what 12 months would look like, a typical sort of proposed 12 months editorial would look like. It’s a great sales tool. You know, again, like do you execute on every single thing that’s on there, you know, nine months from now, maybe not, but it actually is a great differentiator and is very efficient to produce. Speaking of efficiency, one of the things I’ve learned about advertising or ads, digital ads is you can sit around in a room and guess all you want and some people are probably better at it than others. Which ad, which headline, which picture, which uh, description, which call to action is actually going to be the best. But experience tells me that the only real data that you can rely on is data that you test.

(17:06): So testing your headlines, testing hundreds of variations for ads is how you really get to the winners. Obviously you’ve gotta track and you’ve gotta analyze and you’ve gotta have, you know, your audience variables, right? I mean, there’s lots of variables, but I do know that when it comes to creating lots of variations that you can test, these tools are super fast at doing that. And sometimes you just have to have a lot of volume in order to start testing. So let me ask you this. If you’ve listened to this far, ping me, just send me a note, john@ducttapemarketing.com. Say, I would love it if you would actually demo kind of a working session on, you know, a ChatGPT type of tool. Be happy to do that. So just write that, send me a note, leave me a review. We always love those.

(17:53): Tell other people to subscribe. , what else can I ask you to do? All right, lots to learn. Lots more to come on this. This is actually going to evolve immensely. There will be so many ways that people find to use these tools, but there are very many practical ways that you should be using them today and hopefully this helped sort some of those out for you. All right, take care and hopefully we’ll run into you listener one of these days out there on the road.

(18:21): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.


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Scaling Your Agency Without Adding Overhead

Scaling Your Agency Without Adding Overhead written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

John Jantsch, host of the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show. Today, we have the ability now to start businesses without really adding much overhead. You don’t need an office – all you really need is a computer. But in order to scale, there are a few things you have to get right, and we’ve created a system to do just that.

Topics I cover:

  • [1:42] Why it’s actually pretty easy to scale without adding a whole bunch of overhead
  • [4:06] Why undercharging is attracting the wrong clientele
  • [4:48] Why you need to stop selling the marketing tactic
  • [5:53] Custom projects and making up every engagement as you go isn’t the right move
  • [7:28] The first step to scaling without adding overhead is understanding the problem that you’re trying to solve and promising to solve it
  • [8:31] It’s time to start charging a premium
  • [11:19] Developing a partner team so that you can delegate effectively
  • [12:58] What a strategy first program is and why it’s necessary
  • [14:37] The proven, repeatable process and model that we’ve created that your agency can license
  • [15:09] The next Certification Intensive Training that is happening in February

Resources I mention:

  • Send John an email

More About Certification Intensive Training:

  • Learn more about the training

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



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John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, formerly Blissful Prospecting, hosted by Jason Bay. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Jason Bay is a leading sales expert and he talks with other leading sales experts to get you the information you need. I’ve recent episode, he talked about how much time you need to spend prospecting. Really, really eye-opening. Check it out. Uh, listen to the outbound squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:42): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and today I’m doing a solo show. It’s been a while, so hopefully you, uh, can endure 20 or so minutes of me chatting at you. I wanna talk about, I don’t know if there’s a trend now, it’s not really a trend, some of it’s going on for a long time, but you know, we have the ability now to open and start businesses, coaching, consulting agencies, all manner of businesses these days without really adding much overhead. I mean, you can start pretty easily these days. No office, just need a website. Set a few things up. What happens in a lot of cases is if that entity, that business is successful in any manner, you may, you start to eventually think about scaling, growing it, and that’s when it starts. You start having the, like, I need people, I guess, to do that, or maybe I need offices to do that, or, you know, maybe I need to bring in certain expertise because my clients need it.

(01:44): But I think it’s really, today, if you focus on a few things, it’s actually pretty easy to scale without adding a whole bunch of overhead. There’s so much that you can do as sort of the orchestrator of things, using third parties, using outsourced folks. You just have to figure out how to bake it into what it is that you’re doing. We work with a lot of marketing agencies, a lot of coaches, a lot of consultants, and the lines have kind of blurred as to what any of those things are. But frankly, I think we all go, most people actually go into business for the same three reasons that they want to generate income. They want to generate some sort of independence, like starting a business as a way to actually make more money potentially than a job. It certainly gives you at least the initial feeling, , that you are going to be free and independent and they’re gonna be able to call your own shots.

(02:41): Sometimes if you’re not, especially if you’re not making enough income, the independence goes away because now you’re working to find work and to find stuff to keep things going. And ultimately I think people get into business because I also wanna create some sort of impact. I don’t know if that’s the initial thought, but I know, frankly speaking for myself, the longer I’ve stayed in business, the more impact is actually meant to me as an end of doing all of this. But I, I do think that it’s a bit of a hierarchy. I mean, again, if you’re not making income, you’re not thinking about independence, you’re thinking about how do I work harder, , how do I work longer, potentially? And if you have that independence that’s robbed from you, you are working too hard or harder than you’d like to and don’t feel like you’re making, you know, reaching your goals, you’re certainly not thinking about independence.

(03:27): But once those things actually happen, if you start to, to realize, hey, I’m, you know, I’m making the money I’m trying to make and it is allowing me to start doing things and building systems and processes, you know, you start to actually think about that. So, you know, I think the key here is if you’re not experiencing those three things at the level you’d like to, I think one of the keys is what are some of the things that are robbing us from those? And again, as I said, I work with a lot of agencies, consultants, coaches, and a couple things I’ve certainly seen is working with low-cost price shoppers. Uh, a lot of times when we’re just trying to go out there and get business, we’re willing to take anybody. We’re actually not willing to say no. And so what we start doing is we start lowering our price, we start attracting, you know, the wrong buyers.

(04:17): And it is, I know this is really an oversimplification, but you’ve really gotta resist the urge. I think what happens when we offer, when we’re selling our services for too low, yes, you might be able to get a buyer here or buyer there, but you’re not gonna attract the right buyer. You’re not gonna attract premium buyers who frankly expect to pay to pay premium or at least expect to understand what something’s worth. So we’ve gotta stop working with those folks. And obviously, you know, I’m gonna talk a little bit about what I’ve seen as a way to do that. We’ve gotta stop selling the tactic in the marketing world. At least people come to us still today. Now a lot of people, fortunately read a lot of stuff, I write about it. And so there is some expectation that we’re gonna talk about strategy, but a lot of marketers are just selling.

(05:05): You know, a client comes to ’em or a prospect comes to him and says, I need a website, or I need this, or I need that. And it’s like, okay, we’ll get you that problem with selling tactics. And I don’t care what industry you’re in. The problem with selling purely selling tactics and not being a strategic advisor is there is going to be there is because of the global economy that we live in, somebody will be willing to sell whatever tactic it is that you’re offering for a fraction of what you are A selling it for today, and B, what you could ever sell it for. And so if people are coming to us expecting to buy a thing, it’s like buying a product. They’re gonna go and say, okay, who else sells that product? And they’re gonna price shop. And so you know that that’s really, you know, that’s actually those two go together , that’s gonna keep you working with those low cost price shoppers.

(05:52): And then the third piece is making it up with every new project. So many consultants, marketers, coaches that I work with pretty much look at every new engagement as a custom or my favorite word, bespoke engagement. And while there can be some appeal and maybe even some logic to why you would want to offer that kind of creativity, 80% of the folks that you might work with need 80% of the same thing, whatever industry you are in. Certainly true in marketing. Everybody that we see has issues with their website, with content, with seo, with email, with soc, social media, with paid ads, with reputation, with tracking what works and doesn’t work. And so we are able to create a repeatable system and I think that that’s one of the real keys to whatever service you provide. Think in terms of turning it into a product.

(06:50): Yes, marketing is a system. And so you sell a system, you install a system, that’s what you do. What happens is you are gonna be able to pro produce far greater results for a client. You’re gonna be able to charge far more because of those results and you’re going to get so much better at doing it in such a way that you can now start to off-board and delegate a great bit of that work. So here’s my kind of four step process for building an agency, building a business without adding overhead. The first one is you’ve gotta understand the problem that you solve and you’ve gotta promise to solve it. Stop telling people what you do and start talking about the problem that you solve.

(07:41): Business owners need strategy. They don’t come to me for strategy, they come to me because they can’t differentiate their business. They come to me because they feel like a commodity and can’t charge the what they want. They come to me because they’re working far too hard in making less. Now those are strategy problems, , but the promise, the problem that we promise to solve are all the things that they’re feeling intensely. We’ve built a repeatable process. And so you have to do that as well so that when somebody comes to you and says, oh, I need this. You say, yes, you do, but here’s our process to get you that result, to solve that problem that you’re talking about. And it goes like this and we’re able to repeat it, we’re able to delegate it, we’re able to train people on it. We are able to get so much better at delivering awesome results because of it.

(08:27): So we’ve gotta take that repeatable process mentality. You have to charge a premium today. Go out and double your prices. How’s that? How’s that for listening? Did you get your money’s worth if you go out and double your prizes? Here’s what I, here’s what I will tell you will happen. Some people will object, even some of your current clients will leave, but will all of them will half of them even? Heck no, . And what’ll happen is the next project that you engage, the next client that you engage, that doubled price is going to be straight to the bottom line. It’s gonna be all profit. If you wanna increase your profits , just raise your prices. You don’t have to double them, but I can just about guarantee that 70%, 75% of you listening today are not charging what you should be charging. Here’s the problem. If you don’t charge a premium, you are automatically turning away your best buyers.

(09:24): You are automatically attracting those low cost tire kickers shoppers and you’re not going to have the space or the profit or the revenue to delegate that work to third parties, to freelancers. Again, you don’t have to have employees. That’s why this is such a beautiful message about no overhead. But if you don’t have the revenue to begin with, if you’re not charging enough for the services you’re providing, you’re never going to feel like I can pay somebody else to do that work. In a perfect world, this orchestrated business, you’re the strategist, you’re the relationship builder, you’re maybe the chief salesperson, but you’re delegating. You’ve got enough cap in what you’re charging to delegate and go by, get other people to do it. That is absolutely the only way to scale. If you simply fill up your workload and then go hire somebody else and bring into your business and fill up their workload as well, you’re just gonna be on the treadmill for life and you’re probably gonna end up making less money because you’re gonna be paying all those people to do the work if you’re charging a premium.

(10:27): That’s why having repeatable process works. That’s why promising to solve a problem that’s going to attract people that you can charge a premium. And then the last one I’ve, fourth element I’ve alluded to already is if you’re going to want to build this business that can scale without adding overhead, you are going to need to be thinking about always thinking about your partner team. Because frankly, no matter if you’re outsourcing to freelancers, you need three awesome freelancers for every service or tactic that you need somebody to work on, like paid ads or content or web design or whatever it is in your particular industry, because you’ll lose those people. You’ll rotate through some. Some will be a great fit for that really big complex client. Some be a great fit for that kind of turnkey cookie cutter client. So you’re always working on developing a partner team, but you’ve gotta have that repeatable process in place so you can delegate effectively. You can teach people to do what it is that you do, and you’ve gotta be charging enough so that you’ve got the cap space to do that.

(11:36): Look, marketing’s a system. That’s the, that’s what I’ve, that’s been my life’s work. is teaching people that idea and for the agencies that we work with, we teach kind of this fractional CMO plus implementation team path. So we all, all attract clients the same way. Free content these days or some portion in fashion of networking or a funnel or referrals. A lot of people in the traditional sense, they have a meeting. It’s really a sales meeting to discover what the issues are to then write a proposal to wait around and see if maybe the proposal comes through to do the work and then to start it all over again. . But our repeatable system looks like this. You put out free content or however you attract leads, you actually conduct a strategy session. So instead of a sales call, you’re not there to find out what they need.

(12:28): Well, you are there to find out what they need, but you’re there to actually present information in a way that, that, that demonstrates such value that they’re like, nobody’s ever presented way to me. You know, a lot of times we show up and we ask questions and we get over objections and we close or we trial close. Well, what I’ve found is if you just demonstrate to somebody a process of your part of your repeatable system that has tremendous value, they’re gonna come to the end of that and saying, how can I get this? And you’re like, oh, I didn’t even think to sell you anything . So a strategy session in that fashion, then actually have the answer for us. It’s a six, what we call strategy first. So nobody passes go without going through our strategy first program. What that allows us to do is a number of things.

(13:18): First, it allows us to develop the strategy, but it also allows us to develop a relationship as a trusted advisor. It allows us to teach a client or a, or yes, in this case a client or a client’s team, what marketing really is. And then, and only then do we turn to a long-term retainer. One of the mistakes I see a lot of folks make that are in this consulting agency world is they want, they have a long-term retainer approach and they wanna sell that long-term retainer. But if you take this piece on the front end and create this value through strategy, first off it’s work that needs to be done. In fact, I would contend that a lot of agencies, while they don’t have a process for it, they kind of have to do a little bit of strategy work. They just don’t get paid for it.

(14:01): But there’s a lot of things you can’t really propose without doing a strategy. The other thing it really teaches for us, you know, a lot of times when people propose long-term retainers, it’s just a guess. You know, when we go into a long-term retainer after doing strategy, we know 100% what is going, what is going to be needed because we’ve spent enough time with the client to, to figure it out and to find out this approach is something that we license to agencies. It is something that we teach. We have a network of folks that then collaborate and band together. We’ve got the strategy sessions, we’ve got the entire repeatable process. We’ve got the model for pricing and building your agency without adding overhead. I’d love to teach it to you, or I’d love for you to at least check out and see that if it’s something that kind of meets your world, um, and what you’ve been looking for, I can tell you all about, you know, all the perks and benefits and the exact process that we go through to licenses.

(15:04): There is a page, I’ll leave this in the show notes, but I’ll also leave it here that you can check out. It’s just dtm, like for Duct Tape Marketing, right? dtm.world/workshop. Uh, depend upon when you’re listening to this, we hold the certification intensives for licensing about every 60 days. So we’ve got a couple coming up in early in 2023, but also check out that page cuz uh, that’s where we will always have the most up to date upcoming dates for our certification intensives. All right, Erwin, take care. And again, I’m recording this towards the end of 2022, so I’m gonna wish those of you that listen to it right away, a rocking 2023. All right, take care. Love to hear from you. Send those cards, letters, messages. It’s just john@ducttapemarketing.com. If you ever wanna chat with me, I return all the emails from sane sounding people.

(16:00): How’s that? All right, take care. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.


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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

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10 Essential Website Elements Every Homepage Needs To Have

10 Essential Website Elements Every Homepage Needs To Have written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

john-jantschIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show on the 10 essential website elements every homepage needs to have.

Key Takeaway:

What’s the purpose of a website today? Your website has many jobs to do—and that’s part of what makes it so challenging to figure out what elements you should or shouldn’t include on your homepage. Ask yourself: Does your website build trust? Do you articulate what you do and who you serve? Are there clear calls to action? The list of questions goes on. I believe there are 10 critical elements every small business must include on its website, and in this solo episode, I’m breaking them down one by one.

Topics I Cover:

  • [5:04] Number 1 – Make a promise to solve your ideal customer’s greatest problem
  • [7:02] Number 2 – Include clear calls to action
  • [8:30] Number 3 – State clearly who your business gets results for
  • [10:02] Number 4 – Outline your core offerings
  • [10:54] Number 5 – Articulate your process and what customers can expect
  • [11:35] Number 6 – Feature your team
  • [12:31] Number 7 – Build credibility and trust
  • [13:29] Number 8 – Include a video on your homepage
  • [14:51] Number 9 – Use segmentation to personalize content offerings
  • [16:33] Number 10 – Offer various ways to get in contact with you – including SMS or text messaging
  • [17:37] Number 11 – Ensure your site is mobile optimized

Resources I Mention:

  • Website Essentials Workbook

Take The Marketing Assessment:

  • Marketingassessment.co

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



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John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Janssen today. I’m doing a solo show, just me, nobody in the other screen. All right. I wanna talk about websites, but more importantly, I wanna talk about what I think are the 10 essential elements that every small business website, particularly the homepage needs to have today. And here’s the reason, the question that causes the reason for so many elements being necessary. The question is what’s the purpose of a website today? I know many people would say it’s to get customers or it’s to track leads, but I’m gonna suggest that your website has many jobs to do. And that’s part of the challenge, I think, with trying to figure out what goes on there. What doesn’t go on there. What do people need to see if you think about your website being the hub, maybe, or at least the starting point for a lot of your customers, for a lot of the decisions that are made about doing business for you.

John Jantsch (01:45): It’s part of the journey. We wanna find people that we can know and like, and trust as I’ve talked about for years. And I think that the website does a lot of that filtering both attracting and repelling. I suppose, those who come to your website. So it’s not simply just, I gotta have a website so that people can find me and buy from me. I mean, 87% of potential customers won’t consider a business with low ratings. So it’s not just that your site has to be there and be findable. People have to get there and they have to build some trust. You have to prove there has to be social proof. There has to be reviews. There have to be things that can make people say, yeah, okay. I checked that box. 64% of consumers say watching a video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision.

John Jantsch (02:32): So part of the journey is that may be where they come to find out about you. But now they’re looking for more of that same type of content on your website. 86% of buyers will pay more for a better experience. I know I have I mean, 86% is most of us. So a lot of times our analysis is, does the site load quickly do the forms fill out? Does it look intuitive? Does it look like what I think it should look like for this industry? I mean, we all have gone to that website that looked like it was built 20 years ago and we’re out of there. And I think that’s a big part of a job that our website’s going to do. It’s going to start the experience of what it’s gonna be like to work with you. And then finally, and I think this one points to the need for all of these elements that I’m gonna talk about today, probably more than anything, 92% of consumers will visit a Bo a brand’s website for reasons other than making a purchase.

John Jantsch (03:31): So what are those other 92%? And by the way, that’s not just prospects and buyers. That’s also potential employees because really when we talk about all these changes in marketing, the thing that’s changed the most, I think is really how people choose, get to choose, to become customers and employees and the kind of straight line suggestion of the funnel approach to marketing of get some people to know you push a few small few through that to small end of the funnel. I mean, that journey, that linear journey is really doesn’t exist today. And that, that many of the ways in which people decide about a company that they’re gonna do business with might be considered out of our hands out of our control in some ways. And our job really then is to guide people along this journey. But let me give you one last biggie for why your website needs to look a certain way, act a certain way, provide a certain journey for people, your website.

John Jantsch (04:28): I believe because it is such an important part of the journey gives you the greatest ability to increase something that I came across it in Harvard business review talking about enterprise companies, but something called WTP, which is willingness to pay. And I think that in the sea of options that people have out there, if you can increase your worthiness, if you can increase the experience from your website, you’re going to increase, somebody’s willingness to pay. All right? So let’s get in quickly to the 10 things. So the first thing your website needs to do is make a promise to solve your ideal. Customer’s greatest problem. So many websites today that I go to you go there. First thing you see above the fold is we are this business or we’re this kind of business, or we’ve been in this business for X amount of years.

John Jantsch (05:22): Typically the person that’s visiting the site knows what business you’re in, because that’s why they found you. That’s what they’re looking for. But what they wanna see is do you get me? Do you understand? I mean, is there something that you’re doing that’s different? In fact, if you can communicate the problem, a lot of times people don’t really even know the problem they’re trying to solve necessarily. They know, for example, I’m a marketing firm. They know, for example, somebody’s a remodeling contractor. And so they go to a remodeling contractor, but what problem now? I mean, people don’t wanna buy marketing services. They don’t really even wanna buy remodeling services. They want an incredible kitchen with an incredible experience. They want quick wins, long term growth, hassles. They want great communication. I mean, those are the problems that people are trying to solve quite frankly, through looking at our businesses as a way to do that.

John Jantsch (06:11): So what problem can you promise to solve that needs to be above the fold? And frankly, I’m starting to actually see websites to Google this sometime problems we solve. And you’re gonna see some websites that are actually dedicating entire pages to a list of problems that they solve. You know, for example, in, in marketing, most of the problems we encounter are actually strategy problems, but nobody goes, I’m gonna go find me to buy some strategy today. but they, that they’ve, they wanna know why they can’t charge a premium for their services or worse, why they’re always having to offer discounts. And so that’s a problem that can be solved with strategy, but we have to identify the problem. The thing that they’re actually experiencing is they can’t charge enough. We’re gonna fix that with strategy, but it won’t. We have to articulate that problem first before they’ll listen to our solution about strategy calls to action.

John Jantsch (07:04): If somebody, you know, how today is so popular, so common to get these long scrolling home pages. Well, if somebody comes to your website and they’re starting to engage and they’re starting to scroll down and say, oh, who do they serve? You know, who are their case studies? They start looking for things. We wanna have the ability for somebody to click, to take an action, to do something that’s CTAs calls to action above the fold, right under your core message. There are people that are, that actually are just looking to contact you. So make it easy for them to do that. But the vast majority of people are looking for a price, quote, an evaluation, a free report. That’s going to tell them how to do X, Y, and Z. Sprinkle those throughout your homepage, sprinkle those throughout your website.

John Jantsch (07:52): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing, build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels, faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush.com that’s S E M rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free, who we get results for.

John Jantsch (08:34): Tell me very specifically who your ideal customer is. Don’t tell me that you serve homeowners. Tell me that you serve homeowners in a very specific area of town with a very specific challenge with a very specific need. I mean, identify as clearly as possible show pictures of, you know, maybe you have three or four segments, but don’t just leave this open to where somebody says, well, I own a home.

John Jantsch (08:58): So I guess I can call them be very specific where somebody says, oh my goodness, you serve me. You’re talking about me. And I’d like to use the word who we get results for rather than who our customers are, who we sell to getting results as what people are after in a lot of ways, that’s a problem, uh, that, that you’re trying to demonstrate that you can solve. And one of the things about that approach to who we get results, it’s sort of implied who we don’t get results for or who we can’t work for. Again, using my business. As an example, if somebody just comes to me and says, I want leads, I on Facebook ads and, you know, go, I mean, we get results for people who actually wanna build a long term strategy that allows them to dominate their market and not just have a quick event that is maybe going to make the phone ring.

John Jantsch (09:45): Maybe not. We talk about strategy incessantly because that’s really, in fact, that’s really the only way to engage my firm. And so we want to chase people away. We don’t want people who are like, oh, I don’t need that strategy stuff. We want them to know that’s not who we’re gonna get a result for number four, our core offerings. So there’s so many businesses that sell, have the ability to sell. I should say 27 things. But when we really dig in, what we find is that there are three things they do that generate 80% of their profits, 80% of their business, really their ideal engagements. And yet they list everything they could do. What I want you to think about doing is saying here’s the three things at the most that we do, and we do them better than anyone. Now, if you get a customer and you, you have a great relationship, you start working with them.

John Jantsch (10:38): It doesn’t mean you can’t sell them the other 27 things. But when it comes to actually getting that ideal customer, you want to, you want that profitable customer. You want them to know that the service that you sell, whatever it is, it, you are better than anyone else at doing it. That you’re the obvious choice for doing that. The fifth thing I wanna hear a little bit about is your process. If you have a process for getting me your result, I mean, it might be the ordering process. It might be your onboarding process. It might be your 37 step process to make sure that the job site is cleaned up after you’re done. Processes are amazing marketing materials because they prove that first off you have a professional approach. You have thought out how to get me a result, put those on, on, you know, tell me what’s going to happen next.

John Jantsch (11:24): I mean, you could even have a process that says, look, if you fill out this form, here’s, what’s going to happen next. You know, if you’re trying to get a quote, tell them the steps in the process, tell them what to expect team, you know, for, I read thousands of Google reviews and I will tell you that for most small businesses, when a customer is happy, they’re happy with the person they worked with. Not necessarily the company, the person they worked with, the technician, the person that delivered the service, you know, to them, that’s the brand. And so let’s feature our team. Let’s show. ’em what our culture is all about. Have videos of all of your staff saying their favorite meal on their birthday or something goofy like that. Just make sure that you’re featuring everybody, that person’s going to be working with the client.

John Jantsch (12:11): That person’s gonna be the person that shows up at the door. Let’s have pictures. Let’s have videos. In fact, what’s great about those is if you have salespeople, if you have technicians, send those out, here’s who here’s, who’s coming to see you. Great way to, you know, to really open the door, to really build trust, to create an experience. I feel like I’ve met that person now, before they show up, trust my customer journey. You’ve heard me talk about it forever. No, like trust, try by repeat and refer. I think trust today, especially when you think about somebody who’s just going out there surfing, or maybe somebody told ’em in a Facebook group, oh, you need to check out this company or this website. They’re making a lot of decisions about whether or not they even wanna pick up the phone or fill out a form or engage you in any way, shape or form based on what they see right away.

John Jantsch (12:59): Kind of first impression. I mean, that’s how we do it today. We won’t move forward. unless we feel like, okay, I like what I’m seeing. There’s proof that they’ve worked with other people, oh, they’ve got these three people as customers. I know who they are. Oh, they’ve their content has shown up in this publication. That must mean something. Oh, they have 108,000 Twitter followers. Again, all the ways in which we show proof that we’re a real business, that other people trust us, that we can get results. I love case studies to show that we’ve gotten results for people. Number eight, generically video video is for a percentage of the market out there is how they want to consume content. I, I mean, I can decide all the statistics about YouTube and frankly, even TikTok. And some of those other places that are very video centric, people love video, but it’s also a great way to build trust.

John Jantsch (13:48): It’s a great way for you to show your customers, your happy customers. There’s, you know, you read that testimonial that says they were great, Betty from Memphis. Well, how about Betty from Memphis? gushing about how great they are. Show us how your product’s made. Show us behind the scenes. Again, I already talked about your technicians, your designers, your sales people ought to have videos. You’re seeing more and more videos. And again, this doesn’t have to be high quality stuff. This can be pick up an iPhone. Let people start talking. I saw a great video the other day about, you know, an actual patient. This was not a like deep medical thing. I think it was a dermatologist or something that was had a patient was actually asking them a few, you know, very frequently asked questions and the doctor was answering those questions as part of the video, there was no, I don’t think HIPAA issues or anything with what was going on there, but I just thought it looked very real.

John Jantsch (14:39): It was in the office. It looked like an actual patient. Maybe it wasn’t , maybe it was, there was the technician. And, but it looked very much like an experience that somebody going to that office would have increasingly segmentation. If you have several types of customers, several types of markets, completely different markets. You know, I always use the real estate agent as an example. They want home buyers and they want home sellers. totally different needs, totally different questions, totally different objectives. So how do you talk to them? Well, today we’ve gotta start using technology. And one of the simplest technologies is to have a path. Are you this? Or are you that go here for the best content for this go here for the best content for this. Maybe you can actually have, you know, you’ve probably gone to a website that has these popups, that, that are actually asking questions.

John Jantsch (15:31): I think we used to think of those popups as being really intrusive. And yeah, sometimes if I’m really trying to find something specific on a website, you feel like they’re intrusive, but if I’m coming to a website for the first time, and I’m trying to understand, like where do I find the answers? I’m very willing to answer a question. If the proposition is tell us, you know, which tell us who you are. tell us what you’re looking for so that we can actually make sure you get the right content. I think we’ll give people that shot. I mean, we actually want that more personalized journey. The technology is there today and you’ve got competitors out there that are completely personalizing for, you know, who people are once they get in their CRM and you come back to my website, you know, I should be able to tell you, heck I should.

John Jantsch (16:19): I should say, I should actually know a lot about you and not bother you with the free report that I know you got the first time you came here. So those are things that people are expecting today because the technology makes it possible. Give me lots of ways to contact you like it or not. Text messaging in a lot of industries is the preferred method. If you’re under 40, there’s a good chance. Or I should say if your customer’s prospects are under 40, there’s a good chance that they are going to in many industries want that type of communication. And I’m not talking about the spammy like bomb people with, oh, we have 10% off today kind of stuff. But for appointment reminders, for review request for things that, that, you know, shipping details. I mean, those are things that people now expect to have the ability to get a text or an email, or, you know, a chat bot.

John Jantsch (17:13): I mean, we’ve just gotta give people, you know, all the ways in which they prefer their preferred methods, like years ago, we used to talk about, do you take checks and credit cards well and cash. Well, now it’s SMS and it’s chat bots and it’s, you know, real time response. I mean, that’s really what people are expecting. I know it’s harder, but I think we’ve gotta give people the options to communicate the way they wanna communicate. And then the last one, this is actually number 11, if you were keeping track kind of a bonus, really, but you know, we’ve been talking about for years, this idea of mobile first, we’ve absolutely got to think in terms of what our website looks like and how it acts and how people can respond using mobile devices because let’s face it. They are. I mean, I, I almost every single one of our clients is well over 50% in terms of traffic to their website coming on a mobile device or a tablet.

John Jantsch (18:09): So most designers, I shouldn’t say most, a lot of designers still, or a lot of these, you know, way webpage builders today. People are designing for that big, giant screen they have in front of them. You’ve got to design for a mobile device and then make it work on a bigger screen. And so if you start thinking about that functionality too, I want click to call because I sure as heck don’t wanna have to like, look at your phone number, go, and now I wanna call you. So I have to go to my phone, the phone app component or text app component. And now I have to put that number in and then I have to come back and forth cuz I can’t remember. So click to call texting, chat on mobile, you know, easy like your hours directions. I mean all the things that people on a mobile device quite often are looking for immediately and expecting in the experience, but certainly make sure that you’re, we’ve all seen them.

John Jantsch (18:59): You know, the sites that, that, you know, the content was designed for a big screen, you put it on that mobile and all of a sudden the responsive element of the website just makes the, a mess out of the content. So that’s it, that’s the 10 things. I hope that you enjoyed those today. If you come to duct tape, marking.com, if you Google website essentials, you know, you’ll find, uh, some of this in a, you know, in a video format, in a text format, we actually even have forms a workbook that you know, for, you know, working on your website. So check out some of the resources at ducttapemarketing.com. All right, that’s it for today. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.


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This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

 

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

 

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit Semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.

 

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