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The 4 Marketing Channels You Actually Control | 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success – Episode 5
Catch the Full Episode: Overview If your biggest marketing channel disappeared tomorrow, how long before your pipeline dried up? For most small business owners John talks to, the honest answer is 30 days or less. That fragility is the hidden cost of renting your pipeline instead of owning it, and it’s the focus of Step 5 in the Seven Steps ...
Your Marketing Probably Has All the Pieces. Here’s Why That’s Not Enough
Most founders who’ve been at this for a few years have pieces. Some strategic clarity. A decent presence. Content running, mostly. Owned channels being built. Customer work happening somewhere. The pieces are disconnected. Nobody owns the full picture. Different parts run on different rhythms. Reporting covers what each piece did in isolation, not whether the whole thing is moving. That’s ...
7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success – Episode 4
Catch the Full EpisodeOverview Every founder I talk to is excited about AI content tools. Most of them should be a little nervous. The market is being flooded with content that reads fine and means nothing, and when you add to that pile, you do not rise above it. You disappear into it. In this solo episode of the Duct ...
7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success – Episode 3
Catch the Full Episode Overview For 20 years, small business marketing came down to one question: can Google find you? That still matters. It is no longer the whole answer. Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude very specific questions, get a short list of names back, and trust what they read. If your business is not on that list, ...
The Back Half of the Hourglass Is Where Your Best Growth Lives
The Marketing Hourglass has 7 stages: Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer. Most small businesses have systems for the first five. They know how to get found, how to build some trust, how to close. Then the marketing ends. Repeat and Refer, the back half, get left to chance. Good work, happy customers, and hope. That’s expensive. And it ...
You’re Renting Your Lead Flow. Here’s What That’s Actually Costing You.
If your largest paid channel disappeared tomorrow, platform shuts down, algorithm changes, cost doubles, your pipeline is gone inside 30 days. If that’s true, you don’t have a Growth Engine. You have a rented pipeline. This is the situation most founders are in. Paid ads on two or three platforms. Paid social. Maybe a paid directory. When the credit card ...
Why Producing More Content Is Making Some Businesses Invisible
An accounting firm at about $2.5 million in revenue came to me after publishing a monthly blog post for 3 years. Mostly tax updates and compliance news. Traffic was flat. Inbound inquiries were rare. They were thinking about hiring an agency to triple their output. The right move was the opposite: publish less, go deeper, commit to 3 content pillars.I ...
7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success – Episode 2
Catch the Full EpisodeOverview Most small business owners are not failing at marketing because they lack effort. They are failing because they lack a foundation. In this solo episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch breaks down the second step in his seven-part framework for small business marketing success: diagnosing and solving the “random acts of marketing” problem ...
Why Clarity Comes Before Strategy
Catch the Full Episode Overview Most small business owners blame their marketing when growth stalls. They hire a new agency, rebuild the website, launch another campaign — and six months later, nothing has changed. In this solo episode, John Jantsch makes the case that the real problem lives upstream of tactics: it lives with the founder. This is Step 1 ...