Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Unscripted Small Business Podcast. I'm here with Sarah Ney of Duct Tape Marketing.
You give yourself an introduction focusing on your recent experience and how it's built trust for people in the small business community.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on, Jeremy. I appreciate it. So I've been in Duct tape marketing for 15 years. I won't go into all that. I started as an intern, most recently moved into the CEO seat. But what's really helping us build trust, we are in the marketing agency space. And so when we work with clients, we come in and we act as a fractional cmo, we create a marketing strategy and then we transition into a long term partnership. A lot of people that I interact with in the small business space have had challenges when it comes to working with other marketing solutions, whether it be agencies or contractors. And so there's a lot of issues that we talk about that are in the agency space. And so we do things differently. We lead with strategy, we educate our clients along the way, we're transparent in our reporting, and we think of them as true partnerships and not outsourced solutions. And so that builds up a lot of trust with the clients that we serve because they feel empowered to make better decisions in the future. And that's ultimately my goal when it.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Comes to reporting and understanding those metrics. What are some of the conversations you have with the business owner to select out those KPIs to cut through a lot of the industry jargon or the, the non useful things? Because if you are just looking at huge keyword research lists, it can be very easy as an SEO to overwhelm somebody with all of the data, but you're not actually looking at anything truly worthwhile. How do you align expectations in that conversation?
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Yeah, reporting is one of the most complicated areas of small business marketing, I would argue, because there's people that over report, there's people that underreport, there's people that have no idea what to track or why. And so it's just this, it's, it's a complicated space. But you know, I think, I think where people struggle the most is they are doing a lot in terms of marketing. So maybe they're doing paid ads and they're focusing on SEO and they're doing some email marketing and maybe they're even doing direct mail if they're a local service business. But they don't really have proper tracking in place or goals with each of those initiatives. So they just keep doing those things because they've been told that they should or because their competitors are doing those things. And so when we come in and work with a business, we say, okay, what should be your priorities in the first place from a marketing perspective? What should be the areas you're focusing on in the channels and then what's the definition of success on those channels? And so if we're going to run paid ads, for example, what's an ROI that we're looking for in the short term and long term, how are we going to work towards that and how are we going to report that and discuss that on a regular basis? And so having a clear plan in place as to what are we going to do and how are we going to determine if it's successful or not is a starting point. But in an ongoing basis, it's reporting on not just vanity metrics. And so people want to understand that they have people coming to their website. Yes, that's important, agree. But they also care about, are those people doing anything, are they staying on the website, are they filling out a form, are they converting, are they booking a call, is that call turning into revenue? Like, you need to have the full story?
And so that's another area where a lot of small businesses struggle is if they're maybe working with an agency and the agency is saying, look at all this traffic we're getting you. But then you dive deeper and the traffic isn't actually relevant and the traffic isn't actually their ideal clients because they're not taking action. And so you really need the full story from our version of the customer journey. How can people get to know, like trust, try, buy, repeat, refer. You need the full story of how are people getting to know you like you, trust you, how are they trying your services, how are they buying? And then are they continuing to buy and then are they referring? And you need to have metrics in each of those stages to determine if people are going through your customer journey successfully or not.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: I love that view. I literally just consulted on a new project from a very large brand, a national, very large national company. And you know, they had already stood up a site by the time that it came on the project. And like, okay, who, who do you expect to fill out these forms to get in contact with you? I said, we don't know who the client thinks is going to be filling out these forms. Well, then we have a problem. Like if you have already set up your site and it has a quote unquote form, but you don't know whether, is that for a journalist to find out more information about it is it targeted to a specific person that you're targeting that has a type of job that might be interested in getting more information to kick that off? Is it like just the complete lack of connection between the outcome of it versus hey, we built a website for them.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And unfortunately it's such a common story. People will invest thousands of dollars on a website build. They'll have an agency or company come in, they build something beautiful, but they don't build something that actually speaks to an ideal target market with a specific message that identifies. They understand their pain points and what they're hoping to do from a transformation standpoint, but also guides that customer journey effectively. Because going back to the customer journey, a should help people get to know like trust and even be able to try your services and buy your services depending on what you're offering. So a website, yes, should look nice. Like that is important. You should have a nice looking brand so people trust you because that builds trust. But like that is one piece of the puzzle. The content and the journey that you're guiding people on is what I would argue the most important piece of the.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Puzzle given the diffusion of intent. You know, as people use, you know, LLM based tool.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: What.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: How does keyword research evolve, you know, as small businesses try to use the data that's available through tools like Ahrefs or Semrush without getting stuck into this game of just being narrowly tailored to an individual keyword or tool or two.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the way I see SEO shifting right now, and a lot of people are talking about this like it's not dead, it's not going, it's not going away, but it's evolving and it's changing. And so before LLMs really became, became a big thing, it was very focused on specific keywords. Like that's what people were trying to rank on in Google. But now even with Google search, you'll see the AI search at the top, which are sending previews. So people aren't even making it down to the rankings below. And so the priority moving forward is yes, I'm not saying keywords you shouldn't focus on, but you need to be focusing on content as well that will help you show up in AI platforms as well. And so there's a tool that my team really likes. I haven't used it a ton, but my team has called Ask the Public.
And so that allows you to do some searches and it shows you exactly. Like if you're, let's say, because we write a lot on marketing strategy, that's one of our core offerings. So I could go in there and say just marketing strategy essentially. And it will give me different types of content to show up, to put on social media, to show up in LLMs, to show up in Google search as well. And so, you know, the, one of the things that it's really focusing on is answering questions that people are out there searching for because that's how search is really starting to evolve. Evolve is before, you know, if you're going to a Google search, a lot of times you're, you're, you know, typing in some keywords or very to the point search queries. That's just what humans were doing within Google. Now within ll, you're going there and you're asking questions. And so you need to start forming your content around what are the questions that people are actually asking and not just what are the keywords that they're using. And so it's evolving quickly, it's changing and has been over the last couple of years. But there are great tools out there like ask the Public that is really easy to use, really easy to understand that you could then use in combination with like a SEMrush and even then a ChatGPT or the platform of your choice to be able to craft content based on what people are actually out there searching for and where you want to show up online.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Absolutely. I did an interview with Mark Williams Cook who created also asked.com, which is a similar platform which reverse engineers what is showing up in those people also ask entries that show up, not just the featured snippets, although featured snippets are directly tied to those people ask it's expandable boxes and then, but even those featured snippets are Now, I think 50% or so or 60% getting replaced by LLMs, but are AI overviews. So you'll see people also asked and then either traditional featured snippet queries or LLM outputs. But I've had particular success. You know, I did a campaign with a precast concrete wall company where we kind of did some analysis and asked, you know, kind of dug in what are, you know, some of the common questions that people have about, you know, firewalls for data centers and things like that and came up with a list of questions that they weren't reflected anywhere on the site. But adding that into those product pages, those specific design pages for that nich ended up boosting, you know, the number of queries that those individual pages showed up for an organic search. But also, you know, we cross referenced and pulled up in perplexity and asked those questions and we started to get cited because we had quotes from the founder. You know, we did an interview to pull some subject matter expertise into the page. What's been your experience so far with the integration of using more distribution channels to show up in LLM tools versus just relying on your own site to be cited in these tools?
[00:09:49] Speaker B: I think you need to be thinking about a combination of both, to be honest. I think if you've been producing content on your own site in a very helpful, authoritative way over time, then you're set up for more success right off the bat with LLMs. But LLMs are pulling from websites, but they're pulling from Reddit and they're pulling from all different sources. And so just really considering what sources are being pulled in from an LLM standpoint and then making it a priority to show up on as many as it makes sense for you. I mean, if we're talking about a true small business with a very limited team, you have to prioritize where you can be. And so I do think that sometimes where people struggle in the small business space is they feel like they have to be on every platform and it's really hard to do with the small team successfully. So then they end up being like on every platform kind of versus doing it well. And so I think understanding what LLMs are pulling in, but depending on your capacity, team size, prioritizing where you think you can actually do things well and make most of the impact would be my advice there.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: That makes sense.
What's your guidance for a local service business? You know, like a regional law office, they're in a specific locality. How does the game change when you add location into the mix?
[00:11:04] Speaker B: Well, I mean, versus a national business is what you're asking me. From an SEO standpoint specifically or cause, I mean everyone needs a marketing strategy. Like that's, that's what we do specifically for the businesses that we work with. But what we're recommending for a local service based business is very different than what we would recommend for like a thought leader or author that's national and targeted B2B businesses. And so it's just your industry dictates what matters and what doesn't matter. And so for our local service based businesses, like we go all in on, you know, local keywords and things like building out their Google business profile and optimizing that and like consistently posting and getting as many reviews as we can because all of that stuff is really, really important for a local business versus a national B2B brand. You know, we're doing more like webinars and podcast interviews and backlinks back to their website. And so it just really depends on what the business is. I mean, their location, but also what are they trying to accomplish as well. So everyone needs a marketing strategy. What you recommend after that is customized based on a number of factors. Location being one.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: When it comes to building bottom of funnel content for local service providers, what's your advice and guidance to.
To draw out the value that needs to be at that bottom of the funnel. Now that comparative information, how do you go about getting that out of your conversations with your clients?
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Yeah, so maybe giving you a little more context of what we do would help. Because when we ever. Yeah, so when we come in and work with clients, we always start with an initial engagement, 30 to 45 days, where we're creating an overall marketing strategy. So we're doing things like online presence review, competitive review, research. We're interviewing some of their best clients, we're interviewing their leadership team, we're developing ideal client profiles and messaging for them.
After that, after we know who we're targeting with what message, because that's what a lot of people skip over too fast. We then map out the customer journey, we map out content strategy, we identify what are their four to six biggest growth priorities over the next quarter. And we put that all into an execution calendar. So when we're going through all of that process, we're developing a comprehensive plan for all of their content strategy moving forward. But we're always going back to our view of the customer journey. So we're saying top of funnel. That to us is no, like trust. Middle of the funnel is try and buy, bottom of the funnel is repeat and refer. And so when we're working with them, we're mapping out what do they have already from a content perspective, where are their gaps and where do we need to build it out further? And so it really is specific to the business and their specific needs, and then we go into execution mode from there. Does that help give you a little bit more context on how we approach something like that?
[00:13:47] Speaker A: No, that's what I was hoping to hear. A little bit more of the process and kind of pulling that out a little bit. Some of those pieces that you spoke about very quickly, I think deserve a lot more analysis, because I think that in an age where you can plunk in a question to an LLM and get output whether it's hallucinated or not or very good or Deep. You're going to get a very different insight from an actual record interview conversation with the leadership and get very different insights from having conversations with their clients. What's been your experience? What can you share about either of those two processes? I think actually taking the time to find a previous client to interview is extremely valuable. If you can do it and get somebody on the line and record it, I think there's a lot of value there. What would you recommend that a small business owner try to capture in that conversation that's going to be useful for their marketing?
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So we've been mapping out marketing strategy for about 30 years.
Recently. Before AI was a thing, I always talked about how we were creating a marketing strategy for people. Now we're creating marketing strategy for people and AI. And so it's shifted what we do a bit because we're thinking about how can we train AI platforms moving forward to then be more effective with our execution. And so to your point, that's where a lot of people miss with trying to create content on something like a chatgpt is they go to it and they start start producing generic stuff because they haven't taken the time to train it properly. And so when I talked about going through our whole strategy first process, we're gathering information, we're gathering documents to then train AI to then say, okay, now that you know everything you want to know about this business, for the most part now we can start thinking about how we're going to use this platform to execute for us. So I think it's a really important piece. Why we get leadership interviews, for example, is because we're trying to get their story and how do they talk about things and how they approach the industry and how they think they're different and why they're in the business and what they want to do moving forward, what's important to them, you need to know all of that stuff. So then you can use something like a ChatGPT to be able to effectively create content in their tone of voice with their passion and their stories mixed in. Because if you skip that step, you're creating content that anyone else could be creating. And that's what people are getting tired of already. And so that's, that's why we do the leadership stories. But then the ideal client interviews is really important as well. The reason why we've been doing those for years and years is because you're trying to get get Persona information, ideal client information, and you're trying to get messaging information from those interviews. And so you're trying to learn about them as humans. What were they struggling with before they signed up for your services?
What kind of research they did, they do. How do they make their buying decision to move forward? After they joined, what happened? What success have they, like, received in working with you? Why do they stay with you? How do they refer you to others? Like, you're trying to, like, learn about them and the transformation and then the journey they went on. So you can attract more people like them moving forward. But you also need to learn what messaging resonates with them. So when you understand what people's pain points are and what they're struggling with and what keeps them up at night, but you also understand what success would look like and what it would feel like after they achieve that, you can then start crafting content that talks about where they're at and where you can take them and why you're the best solution moving forward. And so those interviews are really important to help you deeply understand the people that you serve and what message resonates. And then you can say, okay, what are we going to do from a marketing perspective? But when people skip over those two components, that's where they waste time, energy, money on marketing in the long run.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Great. I think that's fantastic. How does that research process change? You know, some SMBs that you work with might be local service providers, but some might be providing their goods or services directly through E commerce. In what way does somebody who's, you know, local, you know, they're installing handrails as a service business, but if they're actually just selling those stair handrails via E commerce online, how does that change the game for them? What should be the shift in focus? Or is there a shift in focus? What, what extra steps might be needed to succeed at an E commerce view or type business versus a service business?
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Yeah, so everyone still goes through, I would say, the first half of strategy the same. So everyone needs to do an online audit, competitive research, interviews, ideal client Personas, core messaging, like that all is consistent. Everyone also, we map out the whole customer journey for them as well. But where things start to vary depending on the company and the industry is when we map out the customer journey, like what we would recommend for an E commerce business versus a local service business is going to be different even from the first stage of how can people get to know both of those businesses? And so everyone goes through the customer journey mapping. Because you need to map out your customer journey. But what you're recommending in each of the stages is where things start to get different depending on, well, based on the specific business that you're working on in the industry they're in. And then also content strategy will be different for an E Comm versus a local service based business. And then the growth priorities, those are the four to six biggest things you're going to recommend for the next quarter. Those are also very different. And then the execution calendar puts it all together. So everyone, I believe should go through the same stages for strategy. But when you're actually planning out the, what are you going to do? That's where it varies depending on, on the industry and size and so many different factors.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: When you're, when you're moving from your first year to your second year with your clients, what does that ongoing journey look like? Versus, hey, we've got all of these low hanging fruit to knock out. We've got these urgent things. What does it look like when a CEO campaign or marketing campaign starts to mature?
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Yeah, we have something we call the customer success track.
Our founder John Jantz wrote a book on the topic, the Ultimate Marketing Engine. It includes a lot more than just this, but it's one of the main focuses in the book. And the idea is that maturity evolves with marketing over time. And so you can't just keep doing the same exact things forever. You need to lay the foundation and then you need to help the business stabilize and then scale and work through different levels of maturity. And so how we accomplish that with our clients is we do a full strategy first engagement on the front end, which is 30 to 45 days, but then on a quarter, well, we're looking at the metrics on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. We're reporting the clients on a monthly basis, but on a quarterly basis. We're then doing a deep dive into the metrics. Like what all did we accomplish? What are the results we gotten? Did we hit our goals that we set? Okay, based on all of this information, what are we going to do in the next three months to help marketing continue to grow and evolve? And so then we identify what are the next four to six growth priorities along with all of the reoccurring marketing tasks. And we do that on a quarterly basis. And so I believe you can't really plan for marketing further than three months at this time because it is changing and shifting and evolving so much. And so working in like three month sprints and then paying attention to the data is how you can continue to effectively have marketing evolve and grow.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: That makes sense, particularly with the growth rate and change and Adoption of LLM tools. My friend Michael McDougald says ChatGPT is your least trained but most popular customer support representative, I would imagine. I'm curious what your, your agency's perspective is on what exactly changes or what specific tactics or additions or modifications need to be in mind when thinking about the impact of, you know, bot on bot conversation. You know, and that means like somebody is in Claude, they put in a prompt, a bot goes in and scrapes Google, it might come to your site and then pull back that information that's presented from that back to you, back to them. And you don't have as direct control over what's, how that's synthesized, how that's mashed up with other outputs.
So what is the practical from your side, from an agency perspective, on what needs to be done to keep those tools in mind when you're crafting a campaign pain?
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it just comes down to what we talked about previously in this conversation is just crafting your content in a format that LLMs are favoring and showing up consistently and adding value and being your authentic self. So I think that when, I mean, whenever we're crafting any sort of campaign or any sort of content for our clients, we're using different tools that are available for us to understand what keywords we're focusing on. But how are we structuring the content using things like FAQs and the summary on the beginning of it and all of those things to be able to be pulled into LLMs effectively. So I think that, you know, gone are the days where you can just publish content and hope it, hope it shows up. You have to be very focused on what you're putting in the content, but also how you're structuring it. But at this point, I think the best thing you can do is just keep learning and keep reading and keep understanding because you know what's working today. From an SEO standpoint, maybe if we have this interview in three months, we would be saying completely different things. And so just staying up to speed as much as you can, being curious, being a natural learner, and hoping you can continue to evolve is the best thing you can do right now.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Do you think that Google is changing how it works with authority in terms of backlink strategy? Or if we're just going to keep seeing the same reality of, hey, backlinks still work in this particular way because you do have like the combined ecosystem right now of what shows up in Gemini and Google AI overviews, digesting content, and then you have, you know, the, the ecosystem of regular organic results. You have the organic output of maps, images and videos. The concept of authority building really change right now or is it just more of what's always been true?
[00:24:09] Speaker B: I think it's hard to know right now. I think that backlinks are still important. I think authority building is still important.
Like for example, with me being on a podcast as a guest, maybe the link is a little bit less important these days, but I'm still getting expos to other audiences by doing these things. And so I think it's still important to focus on authority building in that way. I do think things are shifting a little bit with backlinks, but time will tell. You know, there's just so much that's shifting and evolving right now that I would say don't stop doing what you're doing, but just pay attention to are you still getting the results you were previously?
[00:24:46] Speaker A: I think that makes sense and it's in line with some of the advice I gave about literally earlier today to, you know, a local custom home builder of you need to look at your marketing and co marketing and interacting with other small businesses that are associated with your niche and industry as much as a business development and a secondary channel. Every, you know, if you're doing interviews, every person that you interact with, you're potentially, you know, know they're putting out something on social media. So you're increasing your marketing budget by their marketing budget.
So don't just think in terms of, you know, I think there, there is an unfortunate side effect from that, you know, 2010 to 2020 mindset of I need backlinks of forgetting about the business aspect of the, the websites that you're interacting with and the huge potential for or accessing somebody else's email list. You know, one of my friends, Greg Danio, he developed a whole service that they just take your email list and reach out to other similar businesses and then the niche and say, hey, would you like to trade? Sends you know, to our email list and there's fantastic results of like, hey, I was sitting on this resource and now I've multiplied it by, you know, a thousand times by contacting 10 similar but different businesses that have similar lists.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great play and we do that a lot with our home service businesses as well. It's okay, so you're modeling contractor. Who else serves your target market? How can you co market together? How can you do email swaps? How can you get listed on each other's website? Because also, you know, everything you listed there. It's. It's a great play to get exposure to an audience. Audience with little effort. Like, it's not like you're having to pay a bunch of campaigns and you know, to get there. It's just developing a relationship with someone and doing a swap. So it's not this huge lift.
But on top of that too, it allows you to provide more value to your audience as well, as long as you're bringing in good solutions. Because if you're bringing in people that you really would refer to and send traffic to, then you'll be able to say, hey, I'm a remodeler. But also we have all these other great connections and so we always have talked about over the years of impacting the entire ecosystem system of the clients you serve. And so it's like you solve your problem, but then you can help them solve other problems through relationships you've built. Able to just provide so much more value to the people you serve. And you become a lot stickier over time as well.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Love that. Give a shout out to where people can find you online if there's any particular resources you've been developing for SMBs or SMB owners that they can find. On Duct Tape marketing, of course.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: So duct tape marketing.com is our website. And then I wrote a book this year called Unchained Breaking Free from Brokers and Marketing Models. And so that website is just unchainedmodel.com.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: Awesome. I'll make sure that gets linked in the show notes. Thanks so much for your insights.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Of course. Thanks for having me on, Jeremy.
