Duct Tape Marketing – A must read for all small business owners

As the title of this post says, I would reccomend that every small business owner read this book.  Not only does it clearly outline the process for making the business successful, but it is full of TONS of practical ideas that any small business can implement immediately!
Duct Tape Marketing
John Jantsch shows you how to lay the foundation for your marketing platform by identifying who your target market is so that you don’t waste any time or money chasing bad relationships!  Next, he helps you through the process of boiling your core message down to a single sentence (“Talking Logo”) that will ensure that potential clients, vendors and partners know exactly what benefits you will provide them right off the bat.  Next, we’re off to logo and branding land where we apply all of those initial foundational elements to now create imagery.

I have seen many companies setup that skip completely past these first steps.  Most of them jump straight to selecting a name and creating a logo before laying this crucial groundwork.  Personally, I think it’s probably the hardest part about starting a company and a process that most people don’t feel is practical.  Obviously, once you know it’s there you realize that it’s absolutely necessary.

After John has walked you through the foundational elements of marketing he takes you through the process of developing products for every stage of your customer lifecycle.  This is a very key piece of The Duct Tape Marketing system and another piece that most small businesses overlook.  Typically they have 1 or 2 packages that are fee based and don’t think about giving something away for free to help pull customers into their marketing funnel early on.  This is something that larger companies tend to do, but most small businesses go straight at the hard sell.

The rest of the book really focuses on applying multiple other channels to your marketing system to round the entire thing out.  Rather than going into details or specifics about these I would like to reccomend again that you pick up the book.  It’s worth millions to you if you follow it step by step.  It should be required reading for anyone that doesn’t want to work for someone else their entire life.

How have you used this system for your business?

  • good information for marketing professionals and for all small business owners. thanks for sharing