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John Jantsch (00:01.891)

So, what happens to a business when the entry-level work that trained your people gets absorbed by AI? Today’s guest has been thinking about that maybe harder and longer than most. And his answer is possibly uncomfortable. The traditional path from junior to senior breaks, and most organizations have no plan for what replaces it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Paul Roetzer. He is a former, or I’m sorry, he’s the founder, not former, and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence. He launched the Marketing AI conference, MACON, co-hosts the Artificial Intelligence Show, and has delivered more than 200 keynotes for AI for organizations including Google, LinkedIn, and the US government. I think after Chat GPT launched,

Even though Paul was on that the trail, that certainly opened up many, many doors for him. So Paul, welcome back to the show.

Paul Roetzer (01:03.192)

China, it’s always good to be with you and to catch up. It’s it doesn’t happen often enough.

John Jantsch (01:05.783)

Yeah. You you I think your first appearance was when PR twenty twenty, maybe bookwise was that was the name of the book, right?

Paul Roetzer (01:16.492)

the kind of the agency was PR twenty twenty. That was the agency I sold back in two thousand twenty one. And then we had, I don’t know, the a marketing agency blueprint and the marketing performance blueprint. It could have been one of those that we were on for.

John Jantsch (01:27.171)

Awesome. All right. Well, let’s dive into the AI Institute. you built it really to help marketers understand AI. and then it just kind of blew up, right? I mean, it was an idea that then, you know. So so what it made clear that you needed to build that, which at the time was kind of outside of the marketing realm.

Paul Roetzer (01:38.018)

Yeah. Seven and a half years later.

Paul Roetzer (01:52.406)

Yeah. So the I I I’ll give the quick origin story. So actually it goes back to the PR twenty twenty days. In two thousand and eleven, I wrote the marketing agency blueprints. That was my first book. And at the time we were a few years into being HubSpot’s first partner and kind of at the forefront of marketing technology and social media and inbound marketing and content marketing and all of those things. and that was the year IBM Watson won on Jeopardy. And I became obsessed with understanding how that technology worked. And then

John Jantsch (02:16.226)

Mm.

Paul Roetzer (02:21.997)

Could it actually be applied? That same idea of it was basically a prediction engine. Take data in, you understand the language behind it, and then you make predictions about what comes next. And so I started working on this concept of what I was calling a marketing intelligence engine. And this is back in 2012 and 13. And the premise was: if we could use Watson-like technology to predict what to do next, what net next best action, next strategy, how to spend our marketing dollars, then we could build.

An entirely new way of doing marketing. And so that was the original hypothesis. And I shared that idea in my 2014 book. And then that was like out of the 50,000 word manuscript, it was like a thousand words. And the book was not about AI otherwise. And that was all anybody wanted me to talk about. And so fast forward to 2016, and we were like, Well, what do we do with this? Like I’m really intrigued by it. I’m convinced it’s gonna change marketing and business in the world, but like I don’t really know what’s possible.

So we created the Marketing Institute to research it ourselves and then tell the story of AI, like what was real, what was happening. And so yeah, we created the Marketing Institute in 2016. And and then, like I always half joke, like we survived long enough financially for ChatGPT to show up. I sold my agency in 2021, focused exclusively then on AI and the institute and eventually SmarterX. raised a seed round of funding that kind of got me through the the really lean years and

Chat GPT came and all of a sudden the interest in AI exploded.

John Jantsch (03:53.699)

So I’ve been through I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been through several of these game changing technologies that came along. And there seems to be this curve. You know, there’s the early adopters, of course, and you know, and then there’s the overhypers, you know, and then there’s the like, my god, I guess it’s not going away. We better figure it out. And and then there’s just kind of like, now it’s plumbing. we don’t even call it anything anymore.

Do you see AI having a similar path even if it’s f faster and and more disruptive?

Paul Roetzer (04:27.637)

I did. so my belief was actually by 2020 we wouldn’t have to call it AI anymore. I just thought it was gonna be like marketing and software and stuff. So I what I’ve always said was I overestimated how quickly everyone else was gonna figure this out and the impact it would have, like in the near term, but then I underestimated the long-term, like true transformation it was gonna cause to the economy and businesses and things like that.

John Jantsch (04:32.842)

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:44.236)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (04:53.047)

So I have always sort of had this feeling that, like, well, maybe we shouldn’t even call it an AI institute or AI technology or whatever. We shouldn’t differentiate in that way. But I’ve now become convinced that we have a we have a very extended runway ahead of us where being AI matters, like being AI forward matters. Like it’s a differentiator within organizations to say that you’re AI forward, that you understand the technology, you use the technology.

John Jantsch (04:59.517)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:12.406)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (05:18.319)

and then as a business, I think it’s becoming fundamental for leaders of businesses to be able to think of themselves as an AI forward organization that they’re looking at ways to infuse it into people, processes, technology. And so I don’t know, it’s like I I thought we would be past it by now. And I I honestly I feel like we’re just in the first innings still.

John Jantsch (05:37.154)

Yeah. Yeah. Think about how many defunct social media marketing agencies, you know, are out there, for example, right? and and I think your your idea that, we don’t wanna it’s great that that’s the thing now, but we don’t want to go down that to where it just becomes, you know, business consulting or something. But you know, I think one of the major differences is AI’s impacting

Paul Roetzer (05:44.449)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:02.301)

every area of a business. I mean, you know, the finance people are using it, the operations people are using it. I mean, obviously the marketing people are using it. And think that’s probably a significant I mean, there are many others, but but would you say that that’s maybe in some ways why it’s you’ve got this long runway is because, you know, it’s basically gonna impact everything.

Paul Roetzer (06:23.499)

Yeah, I I’ve I said years ago that I believed that AI was going to become the underlying operating system to businesses and society, that it was it was literally going to be woven into every aspect of what organizations do, their people, their processes, their their technology. And then within society, it was gonna become the epicenter of the economy. It was gonna basically be the driver of growth. And that’s all starting to happen. And so I do think that.

John Jantsch (06:31.543)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:46.871)

I was gonna say they’re definitely there are definitely people suggesting that that’s where we are, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (06:52.041)

Yes, it’s like you the like if if we stopped building data centers right now and if the five technology companies that are spending north of eighty to a hundred billion a year on AI infrastructure stopped doing it, the economy would crumble. Like if we whether people realize it or not, we have become an AI driven economy for better or for worse. And so I yeah, I think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s a general purpose technology. Social media is a tool. Like

John Jantsch (07:07.576)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (07:19.297)

This is this is on on par with like the invention of computers and electricity and like it it yeah, so that’s what that’s what’s different.

John Jantsch (07:19.649)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:24.611)

Cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a little bit of a rising bubble of people that are anti AI. you know, you you see the marketing positioning of, you know, no AI was used in the creation of this. Do you think that is simply a trend or do you think that that will

Paul Roetzer (07:46.51)

I think it’s going to grow significantly. I think it’s gonna be stoked by interest groups that want it to grow. And then I think it’ll naturally grow because people’s lives and communities are gonna be impacted in negative ways. So I always like the the closest thing I can equate to to try and make it tangible for people is, you know, if we go back to 1994, 1995, the internet’s like becoming a a real thing in society. And at that moment, we said, you know what?

There’s gonna be this thing called the dark web, where these like horrible people do horrible things and it’s gonna cause like online bullying and like you’re gonna have all these downstream super negative things that happen. But we go back and say, but would we still build the internet? Yeah, like a hundred times out of a hundred, you would probably still build the internet because it has changed society in a bunch of profoundly like positive ways. And I think AI is gonna be the exact same thing. There’s going to be absolutely

Negative things that happen as a result of it, whether it’s building of data centers in communities that don’t want them, job loss and displacement, whatever. Like those things are gonna happen. They’re a byproduct of it. But if all goes well, it’s also gonna transform health and create growth engines and opportunities we’ve never had before and solve mysteries in the universe. Like it’s gonna do all these things too. So it’s totally natural that there’s just there’s pushback because it’s starting to affect people’s lives. And we

you know, wherever your role in this is, you have to be empathetic to that. Like it’s and that’s my problem with a lot of like the Silicon Valley mentality is accelerate at all costs and like forget if if there’s risks and fears, like throw those aside. I’m not in that boat. I feel like we have to embrace the fact that not everyone loves this and it isn’t all just abundance and amazing things. There’s actually a bunch of things we have to deal with as a society as a result of this.

John Jantsch (09:32.652)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:43.391)

And you know, another issue that I think is I mean, I think there were some unforeseen things that came out of other technologies. But I it feels like even if you ask the smartest people in the world who are making this stuff, they don’t really know where it’s gonna go. And I think that there’s there’s an element of that that I think people some regulation needs to be in order to like not get too far out in front of something they can’t stop.

Paul Roetzer (10:09.227)

Yeah, there’s growing like so recently Demis Asabas posted online about the need for regulation and experts ending a framework. He’s the the co-founder CEO of Google DeepMind. Anthropic has made proposals around regulation frameworks. Sam Altman has called for regulation on Capitol Hill. Like they all claim to want it in different forms, but the regulation can be done where it actually has the negative effect on society. So there’s this like.

Very fine line that I am not the expert in by any means about how to do regulation well. there are very few people that are building the technology who who don’t think that there needs to be some protections and guardrails in place, that we don’t have to stop and say this is gonna have a serious impact. We should be thinking more deeply about it. The challenge has been the leaders of these labs, they’re so focused on just building the technology and competing with each other and competing with China and other countries. They’re

John Jantsch (11:04.524)

Trying to make money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (11:05.525)

Yeah, they don’t sit around and think about the writers who are going to lose their jobs. Like it’s just not and they live in a bubble where it’s like they’re all just technologists and engineers and like they’re all going to have jobs for the foreseeable future because they’re all growing and hiring more of those people, but they don’t think about the average knowledge worker and the impact it’s going to have. So they’re hiring economists and philosophers and like they’re trying to now consider it, but for a long time, they were just heads down, accelerated at all costs.

John Jantsch (11:33.706)

Yeah. Well and I and I think unfortunately when it comes to regulation, you know, you think about the government bodies that are going to decide they need to regulate this. I mean, they can’t even line a swimming pool. You know, so the idea that sorry, that was a cheap one, but the but the idea that they’re gonna actually you know, regulate an industry like this, you know, is pr probably kind of frightening.

Paul Roetzer (11:55.586)

Well, yeah, and they don’t understand the technology and where it’s going. Like the idea originally a couple of years ago is to limit it based on how much compute was needed to train a model. Well, that’s laughable amounts of compute these days. Like and then they just find ways around it. So every time they try and find a way to regulate it, it generally is a a very narrow minded way of thinking about it that would eventually be obsolete within like a year or two.

John Jantsch (12:19.158)

So let’s talk about eight pillars of business AI transformation. That’s something that you have written about. hopefully you remember writing about that. I’ll I’ll I’ll name them for you vision, strategy, data, technology, governance, literacy, people, and performance. the key thing, whether you want to check any of those boxes, is you said no companies ever passed this test yet. where do companies break down in terms of any of those elements when it comes to transformation at an organization?

Paul Roetzer (12:49.419)

Yeah, so this a relatively new concept that I shared. It’s part of a larger transformation system that I’m developing. And it’s like the first piece to it because we talk to a lot of companies of all sizes, small, mid-sized businesses, large enterprises. And everybody’s trying to figure out like what does it actually look like? We throw out this term transformation, but like no one really has quantified how do we actually do that. And what we’ve seen time and time again is, especially in larger enterprises, but it happens in small businesses too.

Just treat it as this technology problem. Like, we just gotta go get some Chad GPT licenses and give them to people. And like then we’re gonna get all these amazing benefits of AI. What app, yeah, and they throw it into the technology pool to do. What needs to happen, and the fundamental flaw that we see is a lack of situational awareness and vision from leadership. And so, my like, if I boil this down to one simple thing, the CEO has to drive the transformation. Like

John Jantsch (13:21.226)

Yeah. And the CTO’s in charge of it. Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (13:43.316)

It has to be so important to the organization that the CEO has embedded him or herself in the deep understanding of the moment, of what the technology is capable of, of the impact it’s going to have on their organizational structure, their people, their products, their markets. And if the C-suite doesn’t have that, then you are not going to see a complete transformation within an organization. So vision and strategy from the leadership on down.

Is what’s fundamental. What’s driving most of the innovation and transformation in companies so far is actually bottom up, where people are just like bringing their own devices to work or getting their own personal accounts and just like doing their own thing. And then sometimes that turns into a collective of people doing their own thing. And then maybe a department’s like, let’s form around this and let’s get a marketing AI council or something. But what often lacks is that top leadership that truly understands this needs to be one of like

John Jantsch (14:19.222)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (14:41.089)

The three biggest priorities we are working on as an organization.

John Jantsch (14:44.428)

Well, and I think you hit on a really thing the thing I see all the time is that they’re treating it like tools, like, here’s a new laptop. you know, as opposed to the fact that this is probably you probably need to rethink your entire organization. You probably need to think what it is, rethink it what it is you actually do. and that might be a little bigger question, you know, about do you even have the right people? you know, do you have, you know, is the structure make any sense anymore? I mean, there’s just

You know, a lot of people like you and I sit around and talk about this stuff, and I think a lot of fifteen person business businesses are saying, Yeah, okay, tell us. I mean, it’s one thing to say you need to rethink your organization. Okay, but like what’s the roadmap for that? I mean, how does somebody, you know, w when you talk about those pillars, are there two or three that they ought to be addressing before they ever like sign up for a subscription? Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (15:34.87)

Yeah, so I mean, literacy is the fundamental thing. So it it’s number six on my list, but it does it’s actually probably number one overall because the even the C suite needs AI literacy. They need the knowledge and the understanding and the belief system around AI and its impact before they can prioritize it strategically within a business. So developing understanding of AI capabilities, the comp comprehension of like what it is and what it’s capable of, and then the competency to use the tools in an intelligent way.

John Jantsch (15:44.972)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:02.199)

That like you know when to go in and ask ChatGPT for help and and then you know what good looks like. So AI literacy is actually the foundation of all the other components. And then if you do that in individually and you go through the organization and say, okay, we’re gonna raise the skill level of everyone, the understanding of AI and the ability to work with it, then you can you can move the organization forward more, not only efficiency with higher efficiency and productivity, but drive actual innovation and growth as a result of it. And then as a small business, you can start to think.

Wow, like for 20 people, we could be performing at the level of 50 people. I was actually having this conversation today with our director of operations, who she and I used to work at my agency together. And we were laughing. I said, Could you imagine if we had these tools back when we owned an agency? Like it like 90% of what we did for clients, AI is capable of doing now. And so, like, like the perfect example we gave was we used to like give.

John Jantsch (16:49.301)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:59.443)

Monthly performance reports to clients by the 15th of the following month. So you’d wrap the month up, you’d organize the data, you’d put it into the thing, you’d do the analysis, you would create the PowerPoint, you’d schedule the meeting, and by the middle of the month, you were talking about what happened the previous month. We now at SmarterX, our COO runs those things in real time. So like at any moment, she has it connected to the data.

John Jantsch (17:04.514)

Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (17:27.585)

She can tell the narrative of what is happening across all of our KPIs. And boom, here’s the update in Zoom. Stuff that we used to spend dozens of hours creating on a 15 day lag, we now do in real time. And so when you apply that across entire businesses, all different departments, you start to realize how different we can run companies today.

John Jantsch (17:49.535)

One thing that and and I said it in my beginning kind of question was that also trained a lot of people, right? A lot of the people that did that work learned a lot about marketing by doing that work, and they’re now missing that. how do we fill that gap?

Paul Roetzer (17:57.495)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (18:05.547)

I don’t know. it is the focus of my Make Con 2026 keynote. So the name of the keynote is The Architect, the Orchestrator, and the Apprentice. And my basic hypothesis is that we have to redefine entry-level work because the tactical things that all of us did to become experts, to know what good looks like, to have judgment and taste, and to be able to work with these amazing tools in a responsible way.

We can do it because we did the data-driven repetitive work all those years and learned right from wrong and good from bad and things like that. And then we edited other people’s work. And it’s like if you remove all of that work from the first three to five years of our careers, how do we get to become the experts we all became and have that domain expertise and institutional knowledge? And so I don’t know the answer, but my current theory is that it looks something like an apprenticeship.

That organizations will have an increased revenue per employee number in as a benefit of AI. So you use AI to run a more efficient business, thereby generating more revenue per employee. But rather than putting that straight to the bottom line, you reinvest a portion of that increased revenue and profit back into developing entry-level talent through an apprenticeship program where they don’t have a direct impact on revenue. They’re actually an expense item for the first maybe two to three years of their career. And so

John Jantsch (19:02.304)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (19:31.81)

That’s a theory, but then you actually have to operationalize well, okay, if if that actually is a viable idea, how do we do it? How do we train them? How do we use these tools to advance their learning so they still come out after two or three years with not only the level we had after two or three years, but maybe like 2x that. So we actually accelerate their learning, their taste, their judgment, their capabilities by leveraging AI technology to train them in new ways. And I have yet to meet a single leader.

Of any company of any size that has solved for

John Jantsch (20:05.558)

Yeah, that’s really interesting too, because I mean I I see it every day. It’s like right now some of the entry level people can’t recognize when AI is just hallucinating and saying stupid stuff. and and or just off brand, you know, even. and I think a lot of that comes from, you know, the fact that you can sit around and look at something and and immediately, you know, know the course correct.

but that just comes from experience. And I think I think that’s a really brilliant idea, the idea of of apprentice. but again, you also mentioned expense. and I think that’s what’s gonna make it hard for people. But the you know, companies that invest like that, you know, long term, we’ve seen it time and time again, win. so I think that yeah, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (20:52.833)

Yeah, you have to play the long game for sure. And a lot of companies aren’t gonna have that benefit. Like I’ve always said, if you’re publicly traded, venture capital backed or private equity owned, you’re f you’re fighting an uphill battle to follow that kind of model, to play the long game and not just take the near term benefits of cost reduction.

John Jantsch (21:10.134)

Are are we past the period when, you know, there was a lot of noise about like I’m I’ve gonna be able to reduce my staff to, you know, a third of what I have. Are we past people realizing that because they’re actually working harder now than they ever were?

Paul Roetzer (21:24.853)

No, I I don’t think we’re any I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface of people realizing that they can reduce their staff. Like, so my my basic premise here is I I do think that AI is gonna drive a lot of innovation, a lot of new businesses, a lot of growth and jobs through entrepreneurship and and creation. But when I talk with leaders at enterprises who are under these very near-term

financial requirements to run the company where you have to either be growing or if you’re not growing fast enough, you have to be cutting expenses to still maintain the profit margins that are required. In those businesses, it’s really hard to sit there and say if you’ve had 15 marketers for the last 10 years, that you still need 15 marketers. Because we if if you train someone properly, like a a manager director level can do a lot of the entry-level work and where you maybe just don’t.

need that entry level higher you were gonna make this year. And so in companies that aren’t growing, I think it’s very hard to make an argument that they will maintain or increase their staffing levels. I I think companies that are growing less than 10% will be under tremendous pressure in the very near future. Once their CEOs realize what’s possible, I think they’re gonna be a lot enough pressure to reduce their staff.

John Jantsch (22:41.131)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (22:44.748)

Talk to me a little bit about MACON. I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, but once you spend our last minute or so together talking about Makeon and inviting people I think you said you even had a special discount code for me.

Paul Roetzer (22:57.187)

yeah. So Mekon, this is our seventh year. It’s hard to believe. I I was I posted something recently about how crazy it actually seems in retrospect. We started this conference in 2019, three years before ChatGPT. We were running an AI conference for marketers. sometimes I struggle to think like, what were we teaching at that point? But it was a lot of like, here’s what it could become, here’s how to find use cases, here’s companies that are building, you know, like.

John Jantsch (23:06.946)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (23:22.729)

Email subject line writing tools and predictive modeling for ad spend and things like that’s what we were focused on back in those days. So it’s become something much larger. That first year we had 300 attendees from 12 countries. This year will be well over 2,000. I know I think we had 19 countries already represented last time I saw it. and we we basically break it into applied AI and strategic AI. So now there’s like two fundamental tracks: track for leaders that are thinking more big picture about the impact on the organization.

John Jantsch (23:24.929)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (23:51.618)

And applied AI is all about use cases, technologies, things like that, where you go in and then we have build sessions and workshops. So it’s an incredibly immersive environment. It’s a great community of other AI forward marketers and business leaders. So if you’re trying to find your people, try and find that community of other people who are thinking and trying to work toward like a human centered approach to this, that’s what Make On is all about. So yeah, you can go to makeon.ai, it’s A I C O N.ai, it’s in Cleveland.

October thirteenth to the fifteenth, and then duct tape one fifty is the promo code for saving a hundred and fifty bucks.

John Jantsch (24:24.492)

So two T’s in there, so D U D U C T T A P E. Yes, okay. Awesome. Duct tape one fifty gets you hundred and fifty dollars off, I’m guessing.

Paul Roetzer (24:28.481)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (24:34.209)

That’s I’m guessing too. Looks like looks like that that would be what the one fifty would be in my mind. So if not, we’re gonna make it so.

John Jantsch (24:40.546)

Awesome. What yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, you know, that idea of literacy, you know, if you’re if you’re finding yourself behind, what a great place to pick up that component and and actually do some hands-on work as well. Well, Paul, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully it won’t be that long. we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Paul Roetzer (25:04.205)

All right, John, it’s great to see you.

John Jantsch (25:05.907)

Dude.

John Jantsch (00:01.891)

So, what happens to a business when the entry-level work that trained your people gets absorbed by AI? Today’s guest has been thinking about that maybe harder and longer than most. And his answer is possibly uncomfortable. The traditional path from junior to senior breaks, and most organizations have no plan for what replaces it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Paul Roetzer. He is a former, or I’m sorry, he’s the founder, not former, and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence. He launched the Marketing AI conference, MACON, co-hosts the Artificial Intelligence Show, and has delivered more than 200 keynotes for AI for organizations including Google, LinkedIn, and the US government. I think after Chat GPT launched,

Even though Paul was on that the trail, that certainly opened up many, many doors for him. So Paul, welcome back to the show.

Paul Roetzer (01:03.192)

China, it’s always good to be with you and to catch up. It’s it doesn’t happen often enough.

John Jantsch (01:05.783)

Yeah. You you I think your first appearance was when PR twenty twenty, maybe bookwise was that was the name of the book, right?

Paul Roetzer (01:16.492)

the kind of the agency was PR twenty twenty. That was the agency I sold back in two thousand twenty one. And then we had, I don’t know, the a marketing agency blueprint and the marketing performance blueprint. It could have been one of those that we were on for.

John Jantsch (01:27.171)

Awesome. All right. Well, let’s dive into the AI Institute. you built it really to help marketers understand AI. and then it just kind of blew up, right? I mean, it was an idea that then, you know. So so what it made clear that you needed to build that, which at the time was kind of outside of the marketing realm.

Paul Roetzer (01:38.018)

Yeah. Seven and a half years later.

Paul Roetzer (01:52.406)

Yeah. So the I I I’ll give the quick origin story. So actually it goes back to the PR twenty twenty days. In two thousand and eleven, I wrote the marketing agency blueprints. That was my first book. And at the time we were a few years into being HubSpot’s first partner and kind of at the forefront of marketing technology and social media and inbound marketing and content marketing and all of those things. and that was the year IBM Watson won on Jeopardy. And I became obsessed with understanding how that technology worked. And then

John Jantsch (02:16.226)

Mm.

Paul Roetzer (02:21.997)

Could it actually be applied? That same idea of it was basically a prediction engine. Take data in, you understand the language behind it, and then you make predictions about what comes next. And so I started working on this concept of what I was calling a marketing intelligence engine. And this is back in 2012 and 13. And the premise was: if we could use Watson-like technology to predict what to do next, what net next best action, next strategy, how to spend our marketing dollars, then we could build.

An entirely new way of doing marketing. And so that was the original hypothesis. And I shared that idea in my 2014 book. And then that was like out of the 50,000 word manuscript, it was like a thousand words. And the book was not about AI otherwise. And that was all anybody wanted me to talk about. And so fast forward to 2016, and we were like, Well, what do we do with this? Like I’m really intrigued by it. I’m convinced it’s gonna change marketing and business in the world, but like I don’t really know what’s possible.

So we created the Marketing Institute to research it ourselves and then tell the story of AI, like what was real, what was happening. And so yeah, we created the Marketing Institute in 2016. And and then, like I always half joke, like we survived long enough financially for ChatGPT to show up. I sold my agency in 2021, focused exclusively then on AI and the institute and eventually SmarterX. raised a seed round of funding that kind of got me through the the really lean years and

Chat GPT came and all of a sudden the interest in AI exploded.

John Jantsch (03:53.699)

So I’ve been through I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been through several of these game changing technologies that came along. And there seems to be this curve. You know, there’s the early adopters, of course, and you know, and then there’s the overhypers, you know, and then there’s the like, my god, I guess it’s not going away. We better figure it out. And and then there’s just kind of like, now it’s plumbing. we don’t even call it anything anymore.

Do you see AI having a similar path even if it’s f faster and and more disruptive?

Paul Roetzer (04:27.637)

I did. so my belief was actually by 2020 we wouldn’t have to call it AI anymore. I just thought it was gonna be like marketing and software and stuff. So I what I’ve always said was I overestimated how quickly everyone else was gonna figure this out and the impact it would have, like in the near term, but then I underestimated the long-term, like true transformation it was gonna cause to the economy and businesses and things like that.

John Jantsch (04:32.842)

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:44.236)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (04:53.047)

So I have always sort of had this feeling that, like, well, maybe we shouldn’t even call it an AI institute or AI technology or whatever. We shouldn’t differentiate in that way. But I’ve now become convinced that we have a we have a very extended runway ahead of us where being AI matters, like being AI forward matters. Like it’s a differentiator within organizations to say that you’re AI forward, that you understand the technology, you use the technology.

John Jantsch (04:59.517)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:12.406)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (05:18.319)

and then as a business, I think it’s becoming fundamental for leaders of businesses to be able to think of themselves as an AI forward organization that they’re looking at ways to infuse it into people, processes, technology. And so I don’t know, it’s like I I thought we would be past it by now. And I I honestly I feel like we’re just in the first innings still.

John Jantsch (05:37.154)

Yeah. Yeah. Think about how many defunct social media marketing agencies, you know, are out there, for example, right? and and I think your your idea that, we don’t wanna it’s great that that’s the thing now, but we don’t want to go down that to where it just becomes, you know, business consulting or something. But you know, I think one of the major differences is AI’s impacting

Paul Roetzer (05:44.449)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:02.301)

every area of a business. I mean, you know, the finance people are using it, the operations people are using it. I mean, obviously the marketing people are using it. And think that’s probably a significant I mean, there are many others, but but would you say that that’s maybe in some ways why it’s you’ve got this long runway is because, you know, it’s basically gonna impact everything.

Paul Roetzer (06:23.499)

Yeah, I I’ve I said years ago that I believed that AI was going to become the underlying operating system to businesses and society, that it was it was literally going to be woven into every aspect of what organizations do, their people, their processes, their their technology. And then within society, it was gonna become the epicenter of the economy. It was gonna basically be the driver of growth. And that’s all starting to happen. And so I do think that.

John Jantsch (06:31.543)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:46.871)

I was gonna say they’re definitely there are definitely people suggesting that that’s where we are, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (06:52.041)

Yes, it’s like you the like if if we stopped building data centers right now and if the five technology companies that are spending north of eighty to a hundred billion a year on AI infrastructure stopped doing it, the economy would crumble. Like if we whether people realize it or not, we have become an AI driven economy for better or for worse. And so I yeah, I think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s a general purpose technology. Social media is a tool. Like

John Jantsch (07:07.576)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (07:19.297)

This is this is on on par with like the invention of computers and electricity and like it it yeah, so that’s what that’s what’s different.

John Jantsch (07:19.649)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:24.611)

Cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a little bit of a rising bubble of people that are anti AI. you know, you you see the marketing positioning of, you know, no AI was used in the creation of this. Do you think that is simply a trend or do you think that that will

Paul Roetzer (07:46.51)

I think it’s going to grow significantly. I think it’s gonna be stoked by interest groups that want it to grow. And then I think it’ll naturally grow because people’s lives and communities are gonna be impacted in negative ways. So I always like the the closest thing I can equate to to try and make it tangible for people is, you know, if we go back to 1994, 1995, the internet’s like becoming a a real thing in society. And at that moment, we said, you know what?

There’s gonna be this thing called the dark web, where these like horrible people do horrible things and it’s gonna cause like online bullying and like you’re gonna have all these downstream super negative things that happen. But we go back and say, but would we still build the internet? Yeah, like a hundred times out of a hundred, you would probably still build the internet because it has changed society in a bunch of profoundly like positive ways. And I think AI is gonna be the exact same thing. There’s going to be absolutely

Negative things that happen as a result of it, whether it’s building of data centers in communities that don’t want them, job loss and displacement, whatever. Like those things are gonna happen. They’re a byproduct of it. But if all goes well, it’s also gonna transform health and create growth engines and opportunities we’ve never had before and solve mysteries in the universe. Like it’s gonna do all these things too. So it’s totally natural that there’s just there’s pushback because it’s starting to affect people’s lives. And we

you know, wherever your role in this is, you have to be empathetic to that. Like it’s and that’s my problem with a lot of like the Silicon Valley mentality is accelerate at all costs and like forget if if there’s risks and fears, like throw those aside. I’m not in that boat. I feel like we have to embrace the fact that not everyone loves this and it isn’t all just abundance and amazing things. There’s actually a bunch of things we have to deal with as a society as a result of this.

John Jantsch (09:32.652)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:43.391)

And you know, another issue that I think is I mean, I think there were some unforeseen things that came out of other technologies. But I it feels like even if you ask the smartest people in the world who are making this stuff, they don’t really know where it’s gonna go. And I think that there’s there’s an element of that that I think people some regulation needs to be in order to like not get too far out in front of something they can’t stop.

Paul Roetzer (10:09.227)

Yeah, there’s growing like so recently Demis Asabas posted online about the need for regulation and experts ending a framework. He’s the the co-founder CEO of Google DeepMind. Anthropic has made proposals around regulation frameworks. Sam Altman has called for regulation on Capitol Hill. Like they all claim to want it in different forms, but the regulation can be done where it actually has the negative effect on society. So there’s this like.

Very fine line that I am not the expert in by any means about how to do regulation well. there are very few people that are building the technology who who don’t think that there needs to be some protections and guardrails in place, that we don’t have to stop and say this is gonna have a serious impact. We should be thinking more deeply about it. The challenge has been the leaders of these labs, they’re so focused on just building the technology and competing with each other and competing with China and other countries. They’re

John Jantsch (11:04.524)

Trying to make money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (11:05.525)

Yeah, they don’t sit around and think about the writers who are going to lose their jobs. Like it’s just not and they live in a bubble where it’s like they’re all just technologists and engineers and like they’re all going to have jobs for the foreseeable future because they’re all growing and hiring more of those people, but they don’t think about the average knowledge worker and the impact it’s going to have. So they’re hiring economists and philosophers and like they’re trying to now consider it, but for a long time, they were just heads down, accelerated at all costs.

John Jantsch (11:33.706)

Yeah. Well and I and I think unfortunately when it comes to regulation, you know, you think about the government bodies that are going to decide they need to regulate this. I mean, they can’t even line a swimming pool. You know, so the idea that sorry, that was a cheap one, but the but the idea that they’re gonna actually you know, regulate an industry like this, you know, is pr probably kind of frightening.

Paul Roetzer (11:55.586)

Well, yeah, and they don’t understand the technology and where it’s going. Like the idea originally a couple of years ago is to limit it based on how much compute was needed to train a model. Well, that’s laughable amounts of compute these days. Like and then they just find ways around it. So every time they try and find a way to regulate it, it generally is a a very narrow minded way of thinking about it that would eventually be obsolete within like a year or two.

John Jantsch (12:19.158)

So let’s talk about eight pillars of business AI transformation. That’s something that you have written about. hopefully you remember writing about that. I’ll I’ll I’ll name them for you vision, strategy, data, technology, governance, literacy, people, and performance. the key thing, whether you want to check any of those boxes, is you said no companies ever passed this test yet. where do companies break down in terms of any of those elements when it comes to transformation at an organization?

Paul Roetzer (12:49.419)

Yeah, so this a relatively new concept that I shared. It’s part of a larger transformation system that I’m developing. And it’s like the first piece to it because we talk to a lot of companies of all sizes, small, mid-sized businesses, large enterprises. And everybody’s trying to figure out like what does it actually look like? We throw out this term transformation, but like no one really has quantified how do we actually do that. And what we’ve seen time and time again is, especially in larger enterprises, but it happens in small businesses too.

Just treat it as this technology problem. Like, we just gotta go get some Chad GPT licenses and give them to people. And like then we’re gonna get all these amazing benefits of AI. What app, yeah, and they throw it into the technology pool to do. What needs to happen, and the fundamental flaw that we see is a lack of situational awareness and vision from leadership. And so, my like, if I boil this down to one simple thing, the CEO has to drive the transformation. Like

John Jantsch (13:21.226)

Yeah. And the CTO’s in charge of it. Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (13:43.316)

It has to be so important to the organization that the CEO has embedded him or herself in the deep understanding of the moment, of what the technology is capable of, of the impact it’s going to have on their organizational structure, their people, their products, their markets. And if the C-suite doesn’t have that, then you are not going to see a complete transformation within an organization. So vision and strategy from the leadership on down.

Is what’s fundamental. What’s driving most of the innovation and transformation in companies so far is actually bottom up, where people are just like bringing their own devices to work or getting their own personal accounts and just like doing their own thing. And then sometimes that turns into a collective of people doing their own thing. And then maybe a department’s like, let’s form around this and let’s get a marketing AI council or something. But what often lacks is that top leadership that truly understands this needs to be one of like

John Jantsch (14:19.222)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (14:41.089)

The three biggest priorities we are working on as an organization.

John Jantsch (14:44.428)

Well, and I think you hit on a really thing the thing I see all the time is that they’re treating it like tools, like, here’s a new laptop. you know, as opposed to the fact that this is probably you probably need to rethink your entire organization. You probably need to think what it is, rethink it what it is you actually do. and that might be a little bigger question, you know, about do you even have the right people? you know, do you have, you know, is the structure make any sense anymore? I mean, there’s just

You know, a lot of people like you and I sit around and talk about this stuff, and I think a lot of fifteen person business businesses are saying, Yeah, okay, tell us. I mean, it’s one thing to say you need to rethink your organization. Okay, but like what’s the roadmap for that? I mean, how does somebody, you know, w when you talk about those pillars, are there two or three that they ought to be addressing before they ever like sign up for a subscription? Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (15:34.87)

Yeah, so I mean, literacy is the fundamental thing. So it it’s number six on my list, but it does it’s actually probably number one overall because the even the C suite needs AI literacy. They need the knowledge and the understanding and the belief system around AI and its impact before they can prioritize it strategically within a business. So developing understanding of AI capabilities, the comp comprehension of like what it is and what it’s capable of, and then the competency to use the tools in an intelligent way.

John Jantsch (15:44.972)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:02.199)

That like you know when to go in and ask ChatGPT for help and and then you know what good looks like. So AI literacy is actually the foundation of all the other components. And then if you do that in individually and you go through the organization and say, okay, we’re gonna raise the skill level of everyone, the understanding of AI and the ability to work with it, then you can you can move the organization forward more, not only efficiency with higher efficiency and productivity, but drive actual innovation and growth as a result of it. And then as a small business, you can start to think.

Wow, like for 20 people, we could be performing at the level of 50 people. I was actually having this conversation today with our director of operations, who she and I used to work at my agency together. And we were laughing. I said, Could you imagine if we had these tools back when we owned an agency? Like it like 90% of what we did for clients, AI is capable of doing now. And so, like, like the perfect example we gave was we used to like give.

John Jantsch (16:49.301)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:59.443)

Monthly performance reports to clients by the 15th of the following month. So you’d wrap the month up, you’d organize the data, you’d put it into the thing, you’d do the analysis, you would create the PowerPoint, you’d schedule the meeting, and by the middle of the month, you were talking about what happened the previous month. We now at SmarterX, our COO runs those things in real time. So like at any moment, she has it connected to the data.

John Jantsch (17:04.514)

Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (17:27.585)

She can tell the narrative of what is happening across all of our KPIs. And boom, here’s the update in Zoom. Stuff that we used to spend dozens of hours creating on a 15 day lag, we now do in real time. And so when you apply that across entire businesses, all different departments, you start to realize how different we can run companies today.

John Jantsch (17:49.535)

One thing that and and I said it in my beginning kind of question was that also trained a lot of people, right? A lot of the people that did that work learned a lot about marketing by doing that work, and they’re now missing that. how do we fill that gap?

Paul Roetzer (17:57.495)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (18:05.547)

I don’t know. it is the focus of my Make Con 2026 keynote. So the name of the keynote is The Architect, the Orchestrator, and the Apprentice. And my basic hypothesis is that we have to redefine entry-level work because the tactical things that all of us did to become experts, to know what good looks like, to have judgment and taste, and to be able to work with these amazing tools in a responsible way.

We can do it because we did the data-driven repetitive work all those years and learned right from wrong and good from bad and things like that. And then we edited other people’s work. And it’s like if you remove all of that work from the first three to five years of our careers, how do we get to become the experts we all became and have that domain expertise and institutional knowledge? And so I don’t know the answer, but my current theory is that it looks something like an apprenticeship.

That organizations will have an increased revenue per employee number in as a benefit of AI. So you use AI to run a more efficient business, thereby generating more revenue per employee. But rather than putting that straight to the bottom line, you reinvest a portion of that increased revenue and profit back into developing entry-level talent through an apprenticeship program where they don’t have a direct impact on revenue. They’re actually an expense item for the first maybe two to three years of their career. And so

John Jantsch (19:02.304)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (19:31.81)

That’s a theory, but then you actually have to operationalize well, okay, if if that actually is a viable idea, how do we do it? How do we train them? How do we use these tools to advance their learning so they still come out after two or three years with not only the level we had after two or three years, but maybe like 2x that. So we actually accelerate their learning, their taste, their judgment, their capabilities by leveraging AI technology to train them in new ways. And I have yet to meet a single leader.

Of any company of any size that has solved for

John Jantsch (20:05.558)

Yeah, that’s really interesting too, because I mean I I see it every day. It’s like right now some of the entry level people can’t recognize when AI is just hallucinating and saying stupid stuff. and and or just off brand, you know, even. and I think a lot of that comes from, you know, the fact that you can sit around and look at something and and immediately, you know, know the course correct.

but that just comes from experience. And I think I think that’s a really brilliant idea, the idea of of apprentice. but again, you also mentioned expense. and I think that’s what’s gonna make it hard for people. But the you know, companies that invest like that, you know, long term, we’ve seen it time and time again, win. so I think that yeah, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (20:52.833)

Yeah, you have to play the long game for sure. And a lot of companies aren’t gonna have that benefit. Like I’ve always said, if you’re publicly traded, venture capital backed or private equity owned, you’re f you’re fighting an uphill battle to follow that kind of model, to play the long game and not just take the near term benefits of cost reduction.

John Jantsch (21:10.134)

Are are we past the period when, you know, there was a lot of noise about like I’m I’ve gonna be able to reduce my staff to, you know, a third of what I have. Are we past people realizing that because they’re actually working harder now than they ever were?

Paul Roetzer (21:24.853)

No, I I don’t think we’re any I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface of people realizing that they can reduce their staff. Like, so my my basic premise here is I I do think that AI is gonna drive a lot of innovation, a lot of new businesses, a lot of growth and jobs through entrepreneurship and and creation. But when I talk with leaders at enterprises who are under these very near-term

financial requirements to run the company where you have to either be growing or if you’re not growing fast enough, you have to be cutting expenses to still maintain the profit margins that are required. In those businesses, it’s really hard to sit there and say if you’ve had 15 marketers for the last 10 years, that you still need 15 marketers. Because we if if you train someone properly, like a a manager director level can do a lot of the entry-level work and where you maybe just don’t.

need that entry level higher you were gonna make this year. And so in companies that aren’t growing, I think it’s very hard to make an argument that they will maintain or increase their staffing levels. I I think companies that are growing less than 10% will be under tremendous pressure in the very near future. Once their CEOs realize what’s possible, I think they’re gonna be a lot enough pressure to reduce their staff.

John Jantsch (22:41.131)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (22:44.748)

Talk to me a little bit about MACON. I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, but once you spend our last minute or so together talking about Makeon and inviting people I think you said you even had a special discount code for me.

Paul Roetzer (22:57.187)

yeah. So Mekon, this is our seventh year. It’s hard to believe. I I was I posted something recently about how crazy it actually seems in retrospect. We started this conference in 2019, three years before ChatGPT. We were running an AI conference for marketers. sometimes I struggle to think like, what were we teaching at that point? But it was a lot of like, here’s what it could become, here’s how to find use cases, here’s companies that are building, you know, like.

John Jantsch (23:06.946)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (23:22.729)

Email subject line writing tools and predictive modeling for ad spend and things like that’s what we were focused on back in those days. So it’s become something much larger. That first year we had 300 attendees from 12 countries. This year will be well over 2,000. I know I think we had 19 countries already represented last time I saw it. and we we basically break it into applied AI and strategic AI. So now there’s like two fundamental tracks: track for leaders that are thinking more big picture about the impact on the organization.

John Jantsch (23:24.929)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (23:51.618)

And applied AI is all about use cases, technologies, things like that, where you go in and then we have build sessions and workshops. So it’s an incredibly immersive environment. It’s a great community of other AI forward marketers and business leaders. So if you’re trying to find your people, try and find that community of other people who are thinking and trying to work toward like a human centered approach to this, that’s what Make On is all about. So yeah, you can go to makeon.ai, it’s A I C O N.ai, it’s in Cleveland.

October thirteenth to the fifteenth, and then duct tape one fifty is the promo code for saving a hundred and fifty bucks.

John Jantsch (24:24.492)

So two T’s in there, so D U D U C T T A P E. Yes, okay. Awesome. Duct tape one fifty gets you hundred and fifty dollars off, I’m guessing.

Paul Roetzer (24:28.481)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (24:34.209)

That’s I’m guessing too. Looks like looks like that that would be what the one fifty would be in my mind. So if not, we’re gonna make it so.

John Jantsch (24:40.546)

Awesome. What yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, you know, that idea of literacy, you know, if you’re if you’re finding yourself behind, what a great place to pick up that component and and actually do some hands-on work as well. Well, Paul, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully it won’t be that long. we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Paul Roetzer (25:04.205)

All right, John, it’s great to see you.

John Jantsch (25:05.907)

Dude.

John Jantsch (00:01.55)

So what if the real risk for small business owners right now is hiding behind professional polish as a brand, while AI research decides which firms it trusts enough to recommend. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Megan Hargroder. She is the founder and CEO of Legends Legal Marketing, an agency that works exclusively with solo and small law firms.

She started in 2011 in a New Orleans studio apartment with four clients paying $500 a month and niched your way all the way down to lawyers and never looked back again. We’re going to talk about her new book, Trust Is The Strategy. So, Megan, welcome to the show. So let’s start with niching. Well, maybe we need to start with how you say it. Because you hear all kinds. Exactly.

Megan (00:45.785)

Thank you, John.

Megan (00:53.987)

That’s Prince on the Rack.

John Jantsch (00:59.438)

You know, there’s a lot of pundits out there certainly saying you’ve got to do it. And then there’s others and I have a view probably slightly towards the other because I’ve seen a lot of people say, I think law firms would be awesome. I’m going to like go to that vertical. And then they work with two law firms and they realize maybe that’s not who they want to work with. Just this example, obviously that doesn’t apply to you, but then they have to start over again. So I’m curious.

Talk a little bit about the math of niching in your case and like what made you go that route, but then also what changed in your agency.

Megan (01:37.621)

It truly just really deep diving into the 80-20 rule and looking at my clients and seeing like, where was my least effort for my biggest profit? And then I layered on top of that, where am I feeling the most successful? And for me, that’s where my feeling I can be the most successful for my clients. And when I started, no one was doing a good job at law firm marketing. Fine Law was the only company on the market. And so

John Jantsch (01:42.862)

Right.

John Jantsch (02:02.988)

Yeah.

Megan (02:07.169)

just doing an okay job meant that you were already ahead of the game. So I liked the idea of being able to definitively guarantee success, whereas other types of, I think people think it’s more fun to work with like a boutique or a restaurant, you know, or I had a national candy brand at one point.

John Jantsch (02:10.478)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Megan (02:29.965)

I guess it’s how you define fun. For me, fun is that I’m not working on the weekends or on the evenings and that I’m not doing an endless display of branding that someone’s just unhappy with no matter what, right? Lawyers are not that picky. They care about one thing and one thing only, our client’s calling me. And so once I felt like I cracked the code on that, I just went all in with lawyers and never looked back.

John Jantsch (02:35.074)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:42.754)

All right.

John Jantsch (02:57.454)

See, and that’s the approach I tell people too. In a lot of ways, you didn’t just go pick a niche, the niche found you, right? Because you had been working in it, you decided, hey, I can get a lot of results for I can provide a lot of value. It’s another way of saying that for these folks and I enjoy doing it. So that to me is the proper way to do it. I just, I see a lot of people really just kind of go, where’s the opportunity as opposed to what you experienced. So.

Megan (03:23.151)

Yeah, and I see my clients do that too with when they’re choosing their niche for law, they’ll be like, where’s the, think this is the best opportunity. Then they’ll go all in and they’ll be like, I actually really hate doing criminal defense or I really hate, you know, expungements or whatever the thing is. So I do agree with you. It’s better to start general and try a whole bunch of things and then just pick your path going from there.

John Jantsch (03:34.83)

Right? Right?

John Jantsch (03:46.382)

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I started in, the, uh, kind the initial question to open the show, talking about this idea of, you know, polish, you know, being, um, you know, something. And in fact, you, you actually tell lawyers the riskiest thing they can do right now is to keep playing it safe. Um, and I completely agree with you, you know, the human element is, is more important than ever. Um, however, I’ve also worked with a lot of attorneys over the year and

polish is like a big part of their mask. So how do you kind of balance that?

Megan (04:20.364)

Well, you use the right word. Polish is part of the mask that they wear, right? And it’s not just for clients, it’s for their peers. Lawyers are very concerned what their peers think of them. And so what you end up getting is polished and professional, which I’m going to use quotation marks around, because all that that actually translates to is generic content, generic messaging. So.

John Jantsch (04:24.715)

Yeah

Megan (04:44.3)

So it’s not resonating with anyone, right? Maybe it’s not turning anyone off or offending anyone, but it’s also not making anyone love you. And that happens a lot on your website homepage, but like the big spot that I see it be really problematic for lawyers is their biographies. And so they’ll have this really safe, I call it a professional obituary that lists their accomplishments, where they went to law school, all the things that people don’t actually care about.

John Jantsch (05:01.614)

You

John Jantsch (05:07.278)

You

Yeah, yeah.

Megan (05:13.538)

when they hire lawyers.

John Jantsch (05:15.95)

Yeah, the, um, I, something I used to do when I first got started at trying to make this point, uh, regardless of the type of business. So let’s say it was a remodeling contractor. I would just go find 10 remodeling contractor websites, copy the first thing that I saw on their website. And then I’d show it to the client and say, first off, do you know who any of these people are? And by the way, you’re on here too. Do know who you are? And it was so easy for them to go, Oh crap, we’re all saying the same thing, which is sort of nothing.

Megan (05:45.103)

And that’s the whole thing. If you’re not saying anything. And so a lot of like what I try to push my clients to do is, well, first of all, you want to build authority. They love that. Everyone’s on board with building authority. We’ve got our awards. We’ve got our badges. We’ve got our testimonials. Great. We’re on board with that. But the next part is that you have to build a component of empathy with.

John Jantsch (05:46.69)

Yeah.

Megan (06:09.484)

these people who don’t know you, right? If you’re hiring a lawyer, you have a problem that you need a professional to solve for you. You don’t know this person, you don’t trust, people don’t trust lawyers. Building trust online is like the hardest thing you can do. So you have to give people something. You have to let them know you understand their problem. And you also have to share something about yourself so that they feel like, this is a human, again, that I can connect with.

John Jantsch (06:20.739)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:37.09)

So trust is in actually in the title of the book. Do you, I don’t think anybody would argue that that’s an important ingredient. The harder part is defined like how do you build that? You know, you can’t just write, trust me, you know, on your website, right? So how do you get people to start saying, these are the things that build trust.

Megan (06:58.626)

think telling a story first and foremost. So using your website to tell someone a story and your homepage should actually not be your story. It should be their story. Right? So if I’m facing chapter seven bankruptcy, what am I going through right now? That’s the story that the homepage should say and I should be able to see myself in there if I’m a client. And then the biography telling the story of the actual attorney. Why are you doing this? You know, aside from money? What made you pick

John Jantsch (07:11.178)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Megan (07:28.206)

Chapter seven bankruptcy as your niche that you want to help people through. How can I trust you to do this? And so there’s elements within the story where you want to show examples of how you’ve solved the problem before outlining people you’ve helped outlining, you know, using a story within story component and then maybe even your own story. So like we have criminal defense lawyers who at one point in their lives had found themselves on the wrong side of the law, right? And

It’s really hard to get people to open up about that when they’re trying to look super polished and professional. But guess what? Those are the stories that get them clients. And once they actually take the leap of like putting that vulnerability out there, people call and they say, I’m hiring you because you, don’t feel like you’re going to judge me because you were in my shoes once before.

John Jantsch (07:57.56)

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (08:08.301)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:17.612)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would guess that in some cases you can have quick wins, but you know, the trust game is also a long-term game. So how do you get people on board with that who are saying, hey, Megan, make the phone.

Megan (08:34.616)

Well, the phone will ring through other methods as well. You’ve got your search strategy, your paid search strategy, you’ve got your LLM strategy, and then you can do organic and paid search work. So that’s the component. But the foundation has to be there. The website itself has to build trust, or you’re paying for traffic to go there, and it’s not doing anything. And really, the big hurdle for newer

John Jantsch (08:35.704)

BLEH

Gosh.

John Jantsch (08:48.216)

Yeah.

Megan (09:01.858)

businesses is building up those reviews because nothing builds trust like reviews and not just any review, not just a five star review, not just highly recommend did a great job because LLMs are reading reviews, but they’re reading them. They’re not just quantifying the five stars. They’re reading them and they’re seeing the keywords used within that. And they’re seeing, this is a detailed.

John Jantsch (09:05.016)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:17.954)

Yeah.

Megan (09:28.974)

example of a problem that was solved by this person and that’s the same problem this person is talking to me about so I’m gonna match them with that so the actual skipping ahead the actual like quality of the Google reviews is the biggest thing that we work with our clients to build up and it’s not easy right especially in in cases with like criminal defense where clients don’t want to leave a review about

John Jantsch (09:45.56)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:51.522)

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Megan (09:57.219)

how you helped them get out of their DUI. So that’s, to me, the hardest part is building substantial reviews. It’s doable, but it’s difficult. The organic SEO is a waiting game and the paid search is a fast game.

John Jantsch (10:13.51)

yeah, you know, probably the first hurdle you’re experiencing is a lot of lawyers don’t want to ask for reviews, right? I mean, it’s like, no, we did what they pay this for. You know, that should be enough. Right. I mean, so, so that’s probably the first hurdle. you know, it’s interesting. You mentioned that about Google reviews. We have been doing it for years, but AI let’s face it has made it easier, you know, to take seven, 800 reviews, dump them into a tool to analyze them. And all of a sudden, you know, the, the, the, law, the lawyer is saying, you know, we have.

X amount of credentials or whatever they say. And the reviews repeatedly say, know what? They call us back immediately. Right. And that’s like the message. And it is amazing that when, as a marketer, when I can show a client that says, this is not me making this up. You know, this is your actual customers talking. You know, it’s a much easier sell.

Megan (11:05.07)

And the LLMs are making that faster, right? So people aren’t having to go through all of those reviews. And some people will still go to the Google reviews and go through all of them themselves. But that really is one of the biggest definers of trust for any local business really is gonna see that as their biggest definition of trust is going to be their actual online reviews. And Google reviews are the most important. I know people…

John Jantsch (11:13.408)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:20.718)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah it is.

John Jantsch (11:32.782)

Three.

Megan (11:33.431)

is on Facebook, people still use Yelp. So those things are still factors and get pulled in. know the Amazon Alexa, for example, is connecting Yelp. yes. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, so so those are still really important too. And I feel like Yelp gets overlooked a lot because Google is still going to be your most valuable. So if you could only get one review, you get it on Google.

John Jantsch (11:43.262)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, and Microsoft uses BitFerBing. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:54.722)

Yeah, yeah.

Megan (12:00.291)

but then if you can layer in that second tier where you ask someone, hey, can you please also just copy paste this on the Yelp page? Here’s the link and make it really, really easy for them to duplicate that in another spot, then you’re really winning.

John Jantsch (12:00.643)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:15.35)

So where we stand today, this will change certainly, but people still have a very, or I think have a higher level trust, whether they should or not, of those three AI recommendations than they do or did of all the ads and everything else that showed up on the homepage. So what are you doing or how are you helping your law firms get recommended directly in that space that is right now, at least, very highly trusted?

Megan (12:44.271)

Okay, well, the biggest way that we’re doing it is a secret, but I’ll tell you some other ways that are not secrets. Because everyone’s trying to crack this code right now, right? And there’s not definitive things. Eventually there will be a little bit more information, like when Google does its algorithm changes and we can do all this, but there’s not that transparency yet with LLM. So we’re kind of all trying little things to see what works. But.

John Jantsch (12:51.288)

Okay.

Sure. Right, right.

Megan (13:13.045)

I would say for law firms specifically, the more niche your website and your content, the better because people are asking specifically, people are not just saying, I need a lawyer, right? They’re saying, I need a lawyer who does this, right? And we’re not seeing the same success with, for example, the high volume, like personal injury lawyers, right?

John Jantsch (13:26.67)

They’re explaining their entire situation, right? Yeah. Right, right.

John Jantsch (13:39.584)

Mm-hmm.

Megan (13:40.815)

because most solo and small firms have been priced out of that bracket already. And so the authority has been built up. I think we’ll start to see a little bit of a shift there away from the larger firms as far as recommendations. But things like divorce, child custody, bankruptcy, expungements, DUIs, those types of things.

John Jantsch (13:46.414)

Yeah. Yeah.

Megan (14:09.684)

If you go in really, really specific and you’re hyper-targeting and those are the articles you’re publishing, and then you’re also posting the social media content, it’s looking at LinkedIn, it’s looking at… One tip I would say too is using videos on LinkedIn. Videos on LinkedIn is playing really nicely into LLM recommendations is one thing that we’ve noticed. So I would say building as a business, building your authority.

John Jantsch (14:34.702)

Hmm.

Megan (14:39.394)

through LinkedIn is really good. Most people overlook that as a marketing tool because they think of it more like a B2B kind of thing. And a lot of lawyers are targeting people, but the LLMs are paying attention to what you post on LinkedIn.

John Jantsch (14:55.426)

So you’ve worked with a lot of firms over 15 years. Some have been very successful. I’m sure some have not seen the light and grown the way they’d like to. What would you say, what are some of the core differences of those firms that make steady progress versus ones that just kind of either plateau or burn out?

Megan (15:14.434)

The ones that are the most successful are the ones that stay the course with starting niche and then building. The places we’ve seen problems happen and where we’ve seen things tank out is when someone starts in one place and they wanna make a strong pivot. So we built up a really successful traffic ticket lawyer, for example. And then he decided, let’s add on criminal defense. Okay, that’s relevant, we can add that on.

John Jantsch (15:20.312)

Yes.

Megan (15:43.012)

And then he decided, let’s change the whole website and turn it into personal injury and let’s remove all of these practice areas. And I was like, your search will tank, right? You are the go-to guy for these things already. You can’t play this PI ball game that everyone has already invested so much in right now without paid search, just organically. And he’s like, I don’t care. Like make the switch. It’s going to work out.

John Jantsch (15:48.29)

No.

Yeah, yeah.

Megan (16:13.229)

And then three months later, he’s like, why are my numbers down? And I’m like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me right now? This is not gonna work out between us. I think we need to break up. So that’s kind of the example of just like, I always tell people if you’re gonna hire marketers, make sure you hire marketers you trust and then trust them, right? Because at the end of the day, like my job is to make your goals a reality and to hit your bottom.

John Jantsch (16:31.714)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Megan (16:40.783)

So I’m not steering you in a direction away from making money. That’s not beneficial towards me. So when you get to a place where you’re not trusting your marketing team and you’re fighting against them, that’s a sign that things are gonna probably break down pretty soon.

John Jantsch (16:55.47)

Yeah. You know, I can’t tell you how many business owners that I’ve worked with over the years that I’ve had to tell them, you know, the problem’s not your marketing issue. And believe it or not, some of them know it and some of them actually appreciate that message. And so they’re like, what do do about that? it’s, yeah, exactly. So if.

Megan (17:03.919)

Mm-hmm.

Megan (17:14.113)

Yeah, it takes a third party often to hop in there and be like, bro, listen.

John Jantsch (17:24.064)

If somebody’s listening right now, small firm runs a small business. Maybe they’re not going to write a book this year, but what’s a couple of things that they could do that you think they could see kind of immediate process progress if they did it once a week, know, twice a week, whatever. What are some activities you’ve seen that have really compounded?

Megan (17:47.248)

I would say once a week, go online and claim a profile on some kind of directory. Hit the big ones first, get AVO, get your super lawyers, all those kinds of things, Better Business Bureau, anywhere online that lists professionals, make sure you have a profile and fill it out completely. And if you do that once a week, you will see impact from it. That would be my top.

John Jantsch (17:51.182)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:13.938)

I’ll give you my top one that I tell a lot of business owners is go out and get on other people’s podcasts. Quite frankly, because, you know, talk about trust signals and great links and great SEO and great content that you can share and cut up and do things with. I think it’s, to me, it’s the perfect, it’s really the perfect sort of marketing tactic that a lot of people can do pretty easily in a lot of cases.

Megan (18:36.035)

And it takes pushing though. Like I’m doing this right now because my PR person, Paige has set me up on all of these podcasts. Cause she’s like, you have to do it. Like even as a marketer, I’m like, I don’t do I, do I really? But again, now, now I’m flooding the internet when you Google my name, there’s all of this content now. So she was right. So I think that’s a really good tip too.

John Jantsch (18:38.412)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:45.976)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:49.94)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:55.67)

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, you know, the, thing that I tell people all the time is it’s an amazing backlink. mean, I, you know, I have a very high authority backlink that you’re going to get, but also I’m very incentivized to promote this show. and so that’s the other thing, you know, a lot of guest posts and things, they just get buried in things, but you most podcasts hosts are promoting their shows. So, I tell people all the time, just go out and do it. There’s so many ways that you can reuse that content too.

Megan (19:24.131)

Yep.

John Jantsch (19:25.262)

All right. So Megan, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Can you give me your best news anchor voice?

Megan (19:37.827)

to close it out.

John Jantsch (19:37.934)

to close this out and to tell people where they can find out more about your work and maybe pick up your book.

Megan (19:47.085)

Okay, well, reporting live from Duct Tape Podcast, this is Megan Hargirter with Legends Legal Marketing. You can find me at legendslegalmarketing.com. You can also shoot me an email at meganatlegendslegalmarketing.com. If you wanna chat or if you wanna copy of my book, I’ll just mail you one. Send me an email.

John Jantsch (20:06.72)

Awesome. I didn’t tell you guys, the, as a past career for Megan that I read in her bio. So I had to set her up there again. I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Megan (20:14.767)

you

Megan (20:20.942)

Absolutely. Thank you, John.

John Jantsch (00:02.118)

So, what if every AI tool your business just adopted is quietly making customers trust you less? Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance, and my guest today is Doug Dibert Jr. He’s the founder and CEO of Magnif Mag. I I bet you a lot of people struggle with that. Magnify. Well, he’ll he’ll straighten me out.

A white label video platform that helps marketing agencies and businesses add video to AI chat, email automation, and reputation marketing systems. So Doug, welcome to the show.

Doug (00:36.632)

Thanks so much. Yeah. No, no. It’s we’re we’re we’re we’re we’re marketers and salespeople. We’re not, you know, English majors, right? So

John Jantsch (00:43.91)

All right. So so tell everybody everybody listening how to actually pronounce it.

Doug (00:51.148)

Magnify, yep, yep, you got it. Yep, magnify, M-A-G-N-F-I, yeah. Well, it w I I I originally started it. I was gonna buy M-A-G-N-I-F-I, but somebody else owned it and they wanted five grand for the letter I. And when you’re a startup, right, I mean every dollar counts. So I was like, well, just take off the I, no big deal.

John Jantsch (00:53.484)

it says magnify, okay. Okay, all right. I was

John Jantsch (01:02.95)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I tell you the other issue I ran into. I I so wanted to pronounce your name like the cartoon. I was trying to put an L L in there, you know. I I so wanted to do that as Dilbert, but that’s okay, gosh. I should I should we start my intro over again? I just butchered everything. All right, so yeah, there you go. All right, well now.

Doug (01:17.704)

Yeah, I get that too.

Doug (01:22.882)

Yeah, yeah, I I get that too. It’s it’s actually diapers, but long eye.

It’s it’s perfect and it’s imperfection. There we go.

John Jantsch (01:39.364)

Now we have a reason to talk about it. So that’s a you know, that’s a marketing win. so you started as a video production company agency, and my guess is that most of your clients saw what you were doing or you sold what you were doing as content production. I I think that’s probably a true statement, right? how does Magnify actually look at video content differently?

Doug (01:40.97)

Yeah, there you go.

Doug (01:47.575)

I did, yeah.

Doug (01:56.63)

You got it. Yeah.

Right true.

Doug (02:06.734)

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So how we look at content differently, I mean, this is it’s a little bit of a metamorphosis, right? And a a lot of the metamorphosis for us really has been driven by the advancement of AI in a lot of communication. So video for a long time has been seen as just content. You know, social media, you gotta make video content, you gotta make those expert tip videos, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, which is all true.

John Jantsch (02:13.317)

Right.

John Jantsch (02:23.226)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (02:34.306)

But now it’s it’s even more important because it’s a part of humanizing business communication and AI driven communication now. That’s it’s it’s like the pivot has just happened not even that long ago. It’s it’s it’s definitely very interesting pivot, even for us.

John Jantsch (02:52.634)

Yeah. Well well, and I think the biggest change is what you’re suggesting, and certainly what I’ve seen, is that there’s a lot of places, there’s a lot of gaps in where people are using it, video. Certainly, I mean, I I guess we could start with talking about, you know, how video differs from from word, written word content and maybe go there, you know, like why is video so powerful as a medium period?

Doug (03:11.405)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (03:18.008)

You got it. Well, it’s it’s it’s definitely more powerful than just text on a screen because you see let’s like right right now, we’re doing a video podcast, right? You’re hearing my voice, you’re hear you’re hearing my tonality, you’re you’re seeing my hands move. I’m a big hand talker. So you’re seeing my eyes get big with excitement, right? And then obviously you’re laughing. So just it we read so much nonverbal communication than we do.

John Jantsch (03:38.565)

Yeah.

Doug (03:46.242)

Verbal and we actually in science shows we learn more. So the businesses that are are adding video now to a simple email communication are are standing out in a huge way and closing deals faster. We worked with some sales teams that were super reluctant, like, I don’t want to take the time to record a video. I’m busy. I just want to fire off a quick, you know, email and then send it off. You know, keep the that sales prospecting thing going. But the businesses that actually levered it early on.

John Jantsch (03:47.205)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:08.677)

Yeah.

Doug (04:16.574)

actually close the deals faster because video is a fantastic conduit for no like and trust in a in a digital first world.

John Jantsch (04:23.898)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think I think all communication is a form of persuasion. you know, we’re trying to persuade somebody to do something, you know, even if it’s just right back to me. and so I I think video scores very high on trust, and trust is certainly one of the biggest elements of persuasion, as you as you just mentioned. W I I read in the beginning of this some stats that that actually I think you you have shared. Seventy nine percent of Americans prefer human

Doug (04:30.754)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (04:45.75)

You got it.

John Jantsch (04:53.868)

Over AI agent and customer service, 86 say human interaction still matters to brain experience. I’m wondering if those numbers are skewed because so many people are doing it poorly. you know, so some of the automation, the really particularly the early automation was was more frustrating than helpful in a lot of cases. And they just found themselves like human, human, human, you know, pushing whatever button to get to that. And and do you think that that some of those numbers are there because

Doug (05:03.672)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (05:11.061)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (05:15.98)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:21.594)

People are doing it poorly. I know that I’ve had good experiences with AI chat and I I’m like, Great, that was the way I wanted to go because it I got the result. That’s really all we’re after, right? Yeah.

Doug (05:32.322)

Yeah, you got it. Yep, right to the end result. Yep.

John Jantsch (05:36.048)

So so how does I guess the second part of that, an actual question, you know, how you know, how is somebody using video in all these like customer experience and onboarding and you know, all the things that they think about that they don’t think about in a lot of cases after the sale?

Doug (05:54.03)

Correct. Yeah. Well, so after the sale, super important. So especially after the sale, letting them know that a real human being is actually behind the business is vitally important. So when they get that first welcome email, adding a simple video to it, even if this is generic, even in the chat bot, right? We’re seeing a a nice uptick in people adding video replies just to a chat bot. Because even after the sale, even for Magnify, when somebody comes in and white labels a platform,

John Jantsch (06:06.01)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (06:20.602)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (06:23.0)

They’ll come and they’ll still hit our chat bot up and just ask questions. So we just we deliver video answers to that. So adding video to that. So and then even social media. People businesses don’t think after somebody is sold, like their social media is just for attracting customers. Your social media is also for continuing to sell to your current customers, because if they bought from you, they’re probably liking your social media.

John Jantsch (06:26.693)

Yeah.

Doug (06:48.278)

So continuing to educate and nurture and onboard that customer into how to maximize out your product or your service that you have.

John Jantsch (06:57.914)

So so so give me a little give me a little bit on the technical details. When you say video in your chat replies, that’s really a a a bot that is replying in video form. I mean that’s not actually pre-recorded videos. A lot of people used to do that. but but you’re actually saying no, it’s gonna respond to the exact question it was asked based on a knowledge base.

Doug (06:58.186)

Even after the sale.

Doug (07:09.73)

You got it.

Doug (07:19.138)

Yeah, based on the knowledge base and delivering of a pre-recorded video. You got it. So that way I’ve seen the the bots out there that have like the automated like AI avatar and it looks really weird like the headljerk and then I’ll give you that text response answer. But these are pre-recorded video responses that are delivered by the AI at the right place at the right time.

John Jantsch (07:33.422)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:40.643)

Okay.

Doug (07:44.46)

So business can still we tell me this all the time, automate as much as you can, but when it’s appropriate, add in that video that that human layered response versus just a a talking bot. So what the bot is figuring out where the appropriate response is to add that video video reply.

John Jantsch (08:04.57)

So one of the things I think we talked about was at reputation management. you know, there are a lot of industries that have been on the, you know, getting reviews game for many, many years, home service industries, restaurants, spas, you know, that kind of thing. But it’s I think almost every business has now realized how important it is. how can you use kind of one what I call one-to-one video in referral generation, or not necessary referral, reviews like a Google review.

Doug (08:14.626)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Doug (08:31.586)

Yeah, review capture. Yeah. So a lot of softwares out there I know for reputation management. After somebody leaves a four or a five star or an NPS score leaves like a nine or a ten, now you could with with our platform, that’s how we work beautifully with those platforms. Is that if they do click those, you can automate either a gay, you know, click here and tell us your story, record a quick video testimonial about your experience. And hey, as a thank you for your time, you know, for for telling us your story, we’ll

Well send you 10% off the next visit, right? So that’s a perfect opportunity to create micro influencers out of those people who are leaving those those five stars or four stars and those nine and tens on the on an MPS score. So then it becomes a content generation engine.

John Jantsch (09:17.348)

Yeah. So so so again, just to clarify that, you’re not necessarily saying use it you know, a lot of people do things where they did a service and they want to send a video out to the person saying, Hey, review us. But you’re actually you’re actually advocating more for once somebody does review you to actually then ha use it as an engagement tool.

Doug (09:36.738)

Yeah, it’s actually both. Yeah, yeah. So it yep, you you could utilize it both ways. Like we we have users on our platform that’ll use our video email tool. So it’ll actually route them to a video message of the owner saying, Hey, like I’m Bob the from from Bob’s Burgers, right? Hey, I’m so glad you had a great time at at our place. If you feel so inclined and you want to tell us your story about how much you loved your burger, what was your favorite burger? Just click the link below and record your story for us. And next time you come in, you know, burgers on me, just for taking the time.

John Jantsch (09:38.479)

Yeah, okay.

John Jantsch (10:06.566)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (10:06.732)

So we’ve seen it both ways. You got it.

John Jantsch (10:10.244)

many years I have actually advocated small business owners, you know how you you fill out a form, whether it’s request a quote or just contact us or whatever the form is, and and it always drove me crazy. You’d press that button, send, and you weren’t even I mean there was no confirmation, there was nothing. You’re like, I don’t know, did they get it? You know, or not, right? And I’d always was big on getting business owners to record a video, send them to a page that basically says, Hey, we got it, you know

Doug (10:11.51)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, small.

Doug (10:16.814)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (10:27.554)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (10:36.674)

Our best agent is on it, they’re gonna get back to you. Me and and the people that did that, it was funny how often we’d get comments because it it was it’s it’s now pretty regular, but it was unique almost so that you know, people would comment on something so goofy and so simple.

Doug (10:39.436)

Yeah.

Doug (10:51.406)

Well what’s what’s what’s funny is you were ahead of the game, John. And because what you were what what you were doing is you were humanizing the experience. Instead of shooting a simple e or even a even an email, just like you said, sometimes you get nothing back, but usually you get that automated little text like, We’ve got your thing, let’s let me be in touch with you, blah, blah, blah. But now, looks like you said, recording, I mean, taking three minutes or less to record a video, throw that in your auto response, and then

John Jantsch (10:56.921)

Yes.

John Jantsch (11:07.045)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (11:20.162)

Having that video pop up? You were ahead of the game, man.

John Jantsch (11:23.79)

Yeah, well and and the fact that everybody the pandemic actually sped this up because everybody that everybody had to go out and get a camera and everybody got on video and everybody was used to now they had all these tools to actually do that recorded before. I mean when I started doing it, we had to bring a crew into the office. It was much harder. So

Doug (11:27.566)

yeah. Yeah. Video.

Doug (11:38.83)

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I remember even even before the like just trying to get something out of Zoom call before all that was was super hard to do. Now it’s like we gotta walk across the street. well to Zoom.

John Jantsch (11:47.47)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So I think I read somewhere you do something called Thank You Thursday. you pick a random client e each week and send a personal video email. it’s so funny. Again, going back to old practices because I’ve been doing this a long time. I had a habit of of every Friday I would call three or four clients, literally with like, hey, I was just let’s see how you doing. And I can’t tell you how often somebody said, you know, I was just about

Doug (12:00.706)

Yeah.

Doug (12:14.926)

There you go.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:21.414)

call you, we need to do XYZ. I mean, it was unbelievable. So I made it a habit. So tell me about your thank you Thursday.

Doug (12:22.19)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, thank you Thursday came well from you know from video email, right? ‘Cause like we talk about you should use video email, should do that. It’s kinda like practicing what you preach. So every Thursday, well, ’cause it rhymes, it kinda helps you remember it. yeah, thank you Thursday. You just pick a random customer and record a video and just say, Hey, how’s the su how it’s going on? Hope you’re doing fantastic and hope you’re enjoying the platform. You know, hope the family’s doing good. Just want to record a video to say, Hey, thank you. I appreciate you because I would not be here if you if we if we weren’t working together. So I just want to say thank you.

John Jantsch (12:38.469)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (12:56.474)

And less than twenty-four hours, if not maybe five to ten minutes later, you would get a response back saying, That was really cool. Thank you so much. And and a little what you just said, John, will happen. They’ll be yeah, well I thinking about adding X this Y XYZ thing on it. I’m glad you reached out. Let’s get this thing going. So it’s I mean, your your your current customer base is is the best base to re to sell additional products and services to because they already know, like, and trust you.

John Jantsch (13:21.412)

Yeah. Have you have you have you quantified or or or gotten even any kind of feedback from clients who’ve maybe adopted that practice to say this is what this has meant over the last six months?

Doug (13:34.466)

Yeah, mean l l literally what I just still what when I kind of explained that concept to our to our agencies and stuff like that that white label us even businesses, literally the same response is like, my gosh, this is so easy, so simple, especially from C suite people, like messaging out their their team members. Hey, I want to record your quick video or record a quick video and just say, Hey, you know, hey, you know, Bill. Just want to record your quick video, just let you know I think you’re doing a fantastic job. Thank you so much for working here.

John Jantsch (13:38.766)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:48.601)

Yeah.

Doug (14:01.56)

Especially if they’re talent they want to keep. People just wanna feel appreciated. So that C suite executive that was using our platform did that. He’s like, my gosh, like this is I’m gonna do this all the time now. Just record video, just say thank you to my team members who are doing a fantastic job.

John Jantsch (14:04.976)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:16.928)

th a lot of people have been, and any number of people have been using tools like Loom to do kind of similar one to one video and you know, you you just click a button and record. I I I know, you know, we initially our initial use case for using Loom was when we were trying to explain, say to a web designer, like, fix this thing right here, you know, and it was just a lot easier, right, to communicate that. How does your platform differ from a you know, a tool like that which can be free?

Doug (14:23.256)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Doug (14:35.372)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (14:45.58)

Yeah, yeah, no, Loom’s a fantastic platform. Yeah. So we we have the we just like you said, we have the we have the same kind of capabilities inside of Magnify, right? But the cool part about what what Magnify is is we’ve built in not just a a screen recording tool, but we have the ability to capture video testimonials, produce simple branded video clips, make little story videos which takes three video clips and produces them into one video, and then literally add video to any marketing communication that you have, whether you have an AI chat bot.

John Jantsch (14:51.718)

Ha ha ha.

Doug (15:14.942)

you have SMS marketing, add videos to that. So we’re kind like the the all-encompassing video powerhouse. And that stemmed when I was running my video marketing agency. It stemmed from what other digital marketers and what businesses were actually asking for on a consistent basis. So when you’re running a video production company, you’d get those nice big client contracts, right? Where you’re making 10,000-ish dollars a video. But

Magnify was birthed out of, well crap. Like I gotta make more I gotta I gotta figure out a recurring revenue model instead of always always hunting and killing that next thing. So that’s where it was kind of birthed from was the the tools, the five tools we have were birthed from what businesses use or and should be using on a regular basis. And then what makes us unique with the video communication tools is the video content creation tools. We produce it for you. So there’s no video editing needed.

John Jantsch (15:49.966)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:01.456)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:09.658)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (16:09.74)

So art it adds your your logo and music and captions and call to action all by itself.

John Jantsch (16:15.856)

Well in and that ten thousand dollar video, you know, AI is cutting into that budget pretty pretty significantly too, I think.

Doug (16:22.582)

yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that. Well, it’s ’cause we we actually just through probably about a good year and a half, like obviously we’re we’re on we’d like to think we’re on the cutting edge of of video. And AI video being one of those. We we’ve seen it go from like the really terrible to where it’s at now and we’ve we have studied it and just started offering like cinematic style AI videos where it looks

Where it could replace a five million dollar budget video. We just did one for a multi location automotive repair shop. And they wanted like, they came to us, they wanted like a Mad Max style thing video built around a air freshener. Their big thing was like this cool air freshener that you that you hang on their their their the the mirror gives them 15% fifteen dollars off their next oil change.

John Jantsch (16:51.534)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm.

John Jantsch (17:10.67)

Mm.

Doug (17:19.81)

Gets it back of the door. they wanted a story built all around that. So we went, we we were like, okay, yeah, we’ll give you like a one that’s like around a minute and a half. But like once we got into it, we’re like, we made us like a two minute 30 30 second, like full movie trailer. I mean, complete with scenes. I mean, if you were to pay a crew your minimal five million dollars, and it turned out amazing, they dropped it on their social media.

And within two weeks got over seven thousand plays. And immediately we’re like, we want to do more. So we’re actually doing one that’s a a gone in sixty seconds theme mixed with back to the future. So that’s sort of getting ready to drop here pro pretty quick.

John Jantsch (17:50.256)

Yes.

John Jantsch (17:56.088)

yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I mean you imagine you imagine like, you know, two actual live trucks or something driving down the road, you know, in a Mad Max style. I mean, I would take f twenty people back in the day, right? All the people holding boom mics and and the three, four different videos on, you know, on trucks. I mean, crazy. So,

Doug (18:02.102)

It’s awesome.

Doug (18:12.366)

Yeah. It’s like my God.

Doug (18:21.85)

somebody who studied filmmaking in college, if I had this at my fingertips back in the day, like I mean, literally, like your the your imagination is only the limit. It’s so it’s crazy.

John Jantsch (18:24.411)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:32.696)

Yeah, yeah. All right, so I’m a two person shop and I don’t have time for video. What’s the least amount I could get away with?

Doug (18:42.712)

The least am I gonna get away with, right? That well, that’s what the Magnify platform was built for, number one. But number, but number two, bust out that phone in your pocket and just record some content for the love. Because I I always love when people you’re on screen, it’s been this is a great analogy I tell all people who are considering it. You ever been scrolling on social media and you stop and you see some guy’s video, you’re like, that guy’s an idiot. Like, I know more than that person.

John Jantsch (18:43.78)

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (19:08.602)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (19:10.968)

Well, that person took the time to record a video. Well, you have no excuse. Start recording that content. Put it on social media, especially if you’re on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is so hot right now for video content. If they if you’re a LinkedIn person and you’re watching this, make video content on LinkedIn to position yourself as a thought leader as an expert. There’s never been a better time to do it on LinkedIn, for sure. Hands down.

John Jantsch (19:14.277)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:21.296)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:34.596)

Although my soap speech, stop recording the videos in your car with you driving. I hate those, okay?

Doug (19:40.544)

Yeah. Listen, I’ve been guilty of those. ‘Cause like sometimes you’ll get that thought that pops in your head and like I wanna get it out before I forget. But I hear you. I hear you.

John Jantsch (19:52.778)

So so so so you’re positioning your program though or your platform as white label for agencies. so tell me a little bit about I don’t know the first ninety days of implementation for an agency, what’s that look like?

Doug (20:01.954)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (20:08.3)

Yeah, so first that’s the most important, right? The first ninety days. So the first ninety days when agency signs up, they they typically have a customer that they’re already like have asked for either video testimonials or they want to add video to an email marketing plan. And so that’s when they typically will find us, right? So but we tell agents all the time, yes, it’s exciting that you have a customer, right? And how our platform works is they pay that the the flat rate and then they get thirty they get thirty seats, thirty seats to give out to as many customers as you got it.

John Jantsch (20:23.675)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:33.284)

Hm. Wow. so those could each be a client could have a seat. I’ll get you, okay.

Doug (20:38.38)

Yeah, so you can give video testimonial capture, video email, branded video clips for your customer and add a layered in video service that works with your existing stack, your reputation marketing, your social media plan, your website design. But we tell them first 90 days, if you make sure you get yourself an optimized YouTube channel for your own agency. And because you agencies

John Jantsch (20:50.638)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (20:59.61)

Yeah.

Doug (21:04.477)

love the idea of having an optimized YouTube channel for their business because one, it helps out tremendously with SEO, right? I mean, and John, you’d be surprised how many agencies don’t know that YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. And when we tell them that they’re like, what? Really? Yes, it is. So yeah, it’s a great way to sell your client into creating content. So the first thing is getting them to create content. Get a video testimonial from one of their happy customers.

John Jantsch (21:10.99)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (21:16.902)

Sure. Yeah. Has been for a long time. Yeah.

Doug (21:32.472)

But it’s implementing it in with their own tech stack, right? So when they approach a business and they go, Hey, check out what we’re doing here. This will work better. This will make work amazing for your business. The business goes, Well, heck yeah, that’s awesome. I want that too. And it’s an easy add on. And most agencies are charging between two hundred and fifty bucks to seven hundred fifty seven hundred and fifty dollars a month in recurring revenue. Right out the gate. Yeah. Yep. You got it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:53.772)

Right. Per se per seat. Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you stopping by, taking a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some where you’d invite people to learn more about w how they can try out Magnify?

Doug (22:11.02)

Yeah, we well obviously you can just go to magnify dot com, A G N F I dot com. And then always hit me and hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m super active on LinkedIn. Just for just search Doug Doug Dybert J R on LinkedIn. I’m on there pretty much probably way too often, but you could f we could find me on there too. So

John Jantsch (22:29.318)

Well I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Doug.

Doug (22:34.072)

Perfect, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:02.118)

So, what if every AI tool your business just adopted is quietly making customers trust you less? Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance, and my guest today is Doug Dibert Jr. He’s the founder and CEO of Magnif Mag. I I bet you a lot of people struggle with that. Magnify. Well, he’ll he’ll straighten me out.

A white label video platform that helps marketing agencies and businesses add video to AI chat, email automation, and reputation marketing systems. So Doug, welcome to the show.

Doug (00:36.632)

Thanks so much. Yeah. No, no. It’s we’re we’re we’re we’re we’re marketers and salespeople. We’re not, you know, English majors, right? So

John Jantsch (00:43.91)

All right. So so tell everybody everybody listening how to actually pronounce it.

Doug (00:51.148)

Magnify, yep, yep, you got it. Yep, magnify, M-A-G-N-F-I, yeah. Well, it w I I I originally started it. I was gonna buy M-A-G-N-I-F-I, but somebody else owned it and they wanted five grand for the letter I. And when you’re a startup, right, I mean every dollar counts. So I was like, well, just take off the I, no big deal.

John Jantsch (00:53.484)

it says magnify, okay. Okay, all right. I was

John Jantsch (01:02.95)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I tell you the other issue I ran into. I I so wanted to pronounce your name like the cartoon. I was trying to put an L L in there, you know. I I so wanted to do that as Dilbert, but that’s okay, gosh. I should I should we start my intro over again? I just butchered everything. All right, so yeah, there you go. All right, well now.

Doug (01:17.704)

Yeah, I get that too.

Doug (01:22.882)

Yeah, yeah, I I get that too. It’s it’s actually diapers, but long eye.

It’s it’s perfect and it’s imperfection. There we go.

John Jantsch (01:39.364)

Now we have a reason to talk about it. So that’s a you know, that’s a marketing win. so you started as a video production company agency, and my guess is that most of your clients saw what you were doing or you sold what you were doing as content production. I I think that’s probably a true statement, right? how does Magnify actually look at video content differently?

Doug (01:40.97)

Yeah, there you go.

Doug (01:47.575)

I did, yeah.

Doug (01:56.63)

You got it. Yeah.

Right true.

Doug (02:06.734)

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So how we look at content differently, I mean, this is it’s a little bit of a metamorphosis, right? And a a lot of the metamorphosis for us really has been driven by the advancement of AI in a lot of communication. So video for a long time has been seen as just content. You know, social media, you gotta make video content, you gotta make those expert tip videos, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, which is all true.

John Jantsch (02:13.317)

Right.

John Jantsch (02:23.226)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (02:34.306)

But now it’s it’s even more important because it’s a part of humanizing business communication and AI driven communication now. That’s it’s it’s like the pivot has just happened not even that long ago. It’s it’s it’s definitely very interesting pivot, even for us.

John Jantsch (02:52.634)

Yeah. Well well, and I think the biggest change is what you’re suggesting, and certainly what I’ve seen, is that there’s a lot of places, there’s a lot of gaps in where people are using it, video. Certainly, I mean, I I guess we could start with talking about, you know, how video differs from from word, written word content and maybe go there, you know, like why is video so powerful as a medium period?

Doug (03:11.405)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (03:18.008)

You got it. Well, it’s it’s it’s definitely more powerful than just text on a screen because you see let’s like right right now, we’re doing a video podcast, right? You’re hearing my voice, you’re hear you’re hearing my tonality, you’re you’re seeing my hands move. I’m a big hand talker. So you’re seeing my eyes get big with excitement, right? And then obviously you’re laughing. So just it we read so much nonverbal communication than we do.

John Jantsch (03:38.565)

Yeah.

Doug (03:46.242)

Verbal and we actually in science shows we learn more. So the businesses that are are adding video now to a simple email communication are are standing out in a huge way and closing deals faster. We worked with some sales teams that were super reluctant, like, I don’t want to take the time to record a video. I’m busy. I just want to fire off a quick, you know, email and then send it off. You know, keep the that sales prospecting thing going. But the businesses that actually levered it early on.

John Jantsch (03:47.205)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:08.677)

Yeah.

Doug (04:16.574)

actually close the deals faster because video is a fantastic conduit for no like and trust in a in a digital first world.

John Jantsch (04:23.898)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think I think all communication is a form of persuasion. you know, we’re trying to persuade somebody to do something, you know, even if it’s just right back to me. and so I I think video scores very high on trust, and trust is certainly one of the biggest elements of persuasion, as you as you just mentioned. W I I read in the beginning of this some stats that that actually I think you you have shared. Seventy nine percent of Americans prefer human

Doug (04:30.754)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (04:45.75)

You got it.

John Jantsch (04:53.868)

Over AI agent and customer service, 86 say human interaction still matters to brain experience. I’m wondering if those numbers are skewed because so many people are doing it poorly. you know, so some of the automation, the really particularly the early automation was was more frustrating than helpful in a lot of cases. And they just found themselves like human, human, human, you know, pushing whatever button to get to that. And and do you think that that some of those numbers are there because

Doug (05:03.672)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (05:11.061)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (05:15.98)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:21.594)

People are doing it poorly. I know that I’ve had good experiences with AI chat and I I’m like, Great, that was the way I wanted to go because it I got the result. That’s really all we’re after, right? Yeah.

Doug (05:32.322)

Yeah, you got it. Yep, right to the end result. Yep.

John Jantsch (05:36.048)

So so how does I guess the second part of that, an actual question, you know, how you know, how is somebody using video in all these like customer experience and onboarding and you know, all the things that they think about that they don’t think about in a lot of cases after the sale?

Doug (05:54.03)

Correct. Yeah. Well, so after the sale, super important. So especially after the sale, letting them know that a real human being is actually behind the business is vitally important. So when they get that first welcome email, adding a simple video to it, even if this is generic, even in the chat bot, right? We’re seeing a a nice uptick in people adding video replies just to a chat bot. Because even after the sale, even for Magnify, when somebody comes in and white labels a platform,

John Jantsch (06:06.01)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (06:20.602)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (06:23.0)

They’ll come and they’ll still hit our chat bot up and just ask questions. So we just we deliver video answers to that. So adding video to that. So and then even social media. People businesses don’t think after somebody is sold, like their social media is just for attracting customers. Your social media is also for continuing to sell to your current customers, because if they bought from you, they’re probably liking your social media.

John Jantsch (06:26.693)

Yeah.

Doug (06:48.278)

So continuing to educate and nurture and onboard that customer into how to maximize out your product or your service that you have.

John Jantsch (06:57.914)

So so so give me a little give me a little bit on the technical details. When you say video in your chat replies, that’s really a a a bot that is replying in video form. I mean that’s not actually pre-recorded videos. A lot of people used to do that. but but you’re actually saying no, it’s gonna respond to the exact question it was asked based on a knowledge base.

Doug (06:58.186)

Even after the sale.

Doug (07:09.73)

You got it.

Doug (07:19.138)

Yeah, based on the knowledge base and delivering of a pre-recorded video. You got it. So that way I’ve seen the the bots out there that have like the automated like AI avatar and it looks really weird like the headljerk and then I’ll give you that text response answer. But these are pre-recorded video responses that are delivered by the AI at the right place at the right time.

John Jantsch (07:33.422)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:40.643)

Okay.

Doug (07:44.46)

So business can still we tell me this all the time, automate as much as you can, but when it’s appropriate, add in that video that that human layered response versus just a a talking bot. So what the bot is figuring out where the appropriate response is to add that video video reply.

John Jantsch (08:04.57)

So one of the things I think we talked about was at reputation management. you know, there are a lot of industries that have been on the, you know, getting reviews game for many, many years, home service industries, restaurants, spas, you know, that kind of thing. But it’s I think almost every business has now realized how important it is. how can you use kind of one what I call one-to-one video in referral generation, or not necessary referral, reviews like a Google review.

Doug (08:14.626)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Doug (08:31.586)

Yeah, review capture. Yeah. So a lot of softwares out there I know for reputation management. After somebody leaves a four or a five star or an NPS score leaves like a nine or a ten, now you could with with our platform, that’s how we work beautifully with those platforms. Is that if they do click those, you can automate either a gay, you know, click here and tell us your story, record a quick video testimonial about your experience. And hey, as a thank you for your time, you know, for for telling us your story, we’ll

Well send you 10% off the next visit, right? So that’s a perfect opportunity to create micro influencers out of those people who are leaving those those five stars or four stars and those nine and tens on the on an MPS score. So then it becomes a content generation engine.

John Jantsch (09:17.348)

Yeah. So so so again, just to clarify that, you’re not necessarily saying use it you know, a lot of people do things where they did a service and they want to send a video out to the person saying, Hey, review us. But you’re actually you’re actually advocating more for once somebody does review you to actually then ha use it as an engagement tool.

Doug (09:36.738)

Yeah, it’s actually both. Yeah, yeah. So it yep, you you could utilize it both ways. Like we we have users on our platform that’ll use our video email tool. So it’ll actually route them to a video message of the owner saying, Hey, like I’m Bob the from from Bob’s Burgers, right? Hey, I’m so glad you had a great time at at our place. If you feel so inclined and you want to tell us your story about how much you loved your burger, what was your favorite burger? Just click the link below and record your story for us. And next time you come in, you know, burgers on me, just for taking the time.

John Jantsch (09:38.479)

Yeah, okay.

John Jantsch (10:06.566)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (10:06.732)

So we’ve seen it both ways. You got it.

John Jantsch (10:10.244)

many years I have actually advocated small business owners, you know how you you fill out a form, whether it’s request a quote or just contact us or whatever the form is, and and it always drove me crazy. You’d press that button, send, and you weren’t even I mean there was no confirmation, there was nothing. You’re like, I don’t know, did they get it? You know, or not, right? And I’d always was big on getting business owners to record a video, send them to a page that basically says, Hey, we got it, you know

Doug (10:11.51)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, small.

Doug (10:16.814)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (10:27.554)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (10:36.674)

Our best agent is on it, they’re gonna get back to you. Me and and the people that did that, it was funny how often we’d get comments because it it was it’s it’s now pretty regular, but it was unique almost so that you know, people would comment on something so goofy and so simple.

Doug (10:39.436)

Yeah.

Doug (10:51.406)

Well what’s what’s what’s funny is you were ahead of the game, John. And because what you were what what you were doing is you were humanizing the experience. Instead of shooting a simple e or even a even an email, just like you said, sometimes you get nothing back, but usually you get that automated little text like, We’ve got your thing, let’s let me be in touch with you, blah, blah, blah. But now, looks like you said, recording, I mean, taking three minutes or less to record a video, throw that in your auto response, and then

John Jantsch (10:56.921)

Yes.

John Jantsch (11:07.045)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (11:20.162)

Having that video pop up? You were ahead of the game, man.

John Jantsch (11:23.79)

Yeah, well and and the fact that everybody the pandemic actually sped this up because everybody that everybody had to go out and get a camera and everybody got on video and everybody was used to now they had all these tools to actually do that recorded before. I mean when I started doing it, we had to bring a crew into the office. It was much harder. So

Doug (11:27.566)

yeah. Yeah. Video.

Doug (11:38.83)

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I remember even even before the like just trying to get something out of Zoom call before all that was was super hard to do. Now it’s like we gotta walk across the street. well to Zoom.

John Jantsch (11:47.47)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So I think I read somewhere you do something called Thank You Thursday. you pick a random client e each week and send a personal video email. it’s so funny. Again, going back to old practices because I’ve been doing this a long time. I had a habit of of every Friday I would call three or four clients, literally with like, hey, I was just let’s see how you doing. And I can’t tell you how often somebody said, you know, I was just about

Doug (12:00.706)

Yeah.

Doug (12:14.926)

There you go.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:21.414)

call you, we need to do XYZ. I mean, it was unbelievable. So I made it a habit. So tell me about your thank you Thursday.

Doug (12:22.19)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, thank you Thursday came well from you know from video email, right? ‘Cause like we talk about you should use video email, should do that. It’s kinda like practicing what you preach. So every Thursday, well, ’cause it rhymes, it kinda helps you remember it. yeah, thank you Thursday. You just pick a random customer and record a video and just say, Hey, how’s the su how it’s going on? Hope you’re doing fantastic and hope you’re enjoying the platform. You know, hope the family’s doing good. Just want to record a video to say, Hey, thank you. I appreciate you because I would not be here if you if we if we weren’t working together. So I just want to say thank you.

John Jantsch (12:38.469)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (12:56.474)

And less than twenty-four hours, if not maybe five to ten minutes later, you would get a response back saying, That was really cool. Thank you so much. And and a little what you just said, John, will happen. They’ll be yeah, well I thinking about adding X this Y XYZ thing on it. I’m glad you reached out. Let’s get this thing going. So it’s I mean, your your your current customer base is is the best base to re to sell additional products and services to because they already know, like, and trust you.

John Jantsch (13:21.412)

Yeah. Have you have you have you quantified or or or gotten even any kind of feedback from clients who’ve maybe adopted that practice to say this is what this has meant over the last six months?

Doug (13:34.466)

Yeah, mean l l literally what I just still what when I kind of explained that concept to our to our agencies and stuff like that that white label us even businesses, literally the same response is like, my gosh, this is so easy, so simple, especially from C suite people, like messaging out their their team members. Hey, I want to record your quick video or record a quick video and just say, Hey, you know, hey, you know, Bill. Just want to record your quick video, just let you know I think you’re doing a fantastic job. Thank you so much for working here.

John Jantsch (13:38.766)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:48.601)

Yeah.

Doug (14:01.56)

Especially if they’re talent they want to keep. People just wanna feel appreciated. So that C suite executive that was using our platform did that. He’s like, my gosh, like this is I’m gonna do this all the time now. Just record video, just say thank you to my team members who are doing a fantastic job.

John Jantsch (14:04.976)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:16.928)

th a lot of people have been, and any number of people have been using tools like Loom to do kind of similar one to one video and you know, you you just click a button and record. I I I know, you know, we initially our initial use case for using Loom was when we were trying to explain, say to a web designer, like, fix this thing right here, you know, and it was just a lot easier, right, to communicate that. How does your platform differ from a you know, a tool like that which can be free?

Doug (14:23.256)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Doug (14:35.372)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (14:45.58)

Yeah, yeah, no, Loom’s a fantastic platform. Yeah. So we we have the we just like you said, we have the we have the same kind of capabilities inside of Magnify, right? But the cool part about what what Magnify is is we’ve built in not just a a screen recording tool, but we have the ability to capture video testimonials, produce simple branded video clips, make little story videos which takes three video clips and produces them into one video, and then literally add video to any marketing communication that you have, whether you have an AI chat bot.

John Jantsch (14:51.718)

Ha ha ha.

Doug (15:14.942)

you have SMS marketing, add videos to that. So we’re kind like the the all-encompassing video powerhouse. And that stemmed when I was running my video marketing agency. It stemmed from what other digital marketers and what businesses were actually asking for on a consistent basis. So when you’re running a video production company, you’d get those nice big client contracts, right? Where you’re making 10,000-ish dollars a video. But

Magnify was birthed out of, well crap. Like I gotta make more I gotta I gotta figure out a recurring revenue model instead of always always hunting and killing that next thing. So that’s where it was kind of birthed from was the the tools, the five tools we have were birthed from what businesses use or and should be using on a regular basis. And then what makes us unique with the video communication tools is the video content creation tools. We produce it for you. So there’s no video editing needed.

John Jantsch (15:49.966)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:01.456)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:09.658)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (16:09.74)

So art it adds your your logo and music and captions and call to action all by itself.

John Jantsch (16:15.856)

Well in and that ten thousand dollar video, you know, AI is cutting into that budget pretty pretty significantly too, I think.

Doug (16:22.582)

yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that. Well, it’s ’cause we we actually just through probably about a good year and a half, like obviously we’re we’re on we’d like to think we’re on the cutting edge of of video. And AI video being one of those. We we’ve seen it go from like the really terrible to where it’s at now and we’ve we have studied it and just started offering like cinematic style AI videos where it looks

Where it could replace a five million dollar budget video. We just did one for a multi location automotive repair shop. And they wanted like, they came to us, they wanted like a Mad Max style thing video built around a air freshener. Their big thing was like this cool air freshener that you that you hang on their their their the the mirror gives them 15% fifteen dollars off their next oil change.

John Jantsch (16:51.534)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm.

John Jantsch (17:10.67)

Mm.

Doug (17:19.81)

Gets it back of the door. they wanted a story built all around that. So we went, we we were like, okay, yeah, we’ll give you like a one that’s like around a minute and a half. But like once we got into it, we’re like, we made us like a two minute 30 30 second, like full movie trailer. I mean, complete with scenes. I mean, if you were to pay a crew your minimal five million dollars, and it turned out amazing, they dropped it on their social media.

And within two weeks got over seven thousand plays. And immediately we’re like, we want to do more. So we’re actually doing one that’s a a gone in sixty seconds theme mixed with back to the future. So that’s sort of getting ready to drop here pro pretty quick.

John Jantsch (17:50.256)

Yes.

John Jantsch (17:56.088)

yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I mean you imagine you imagine like, you know, two actual live trucks or something driving down the road, you know, in a Mad Max style. I mean, I would take f twenty people back in the day, right? All the people holding boom mics and and the three, four different videos on, you know, on trucks. I mean, crazy. So,

Doug (18:02.102)

It’s awesome.

Doug (18:12.366)

Yeah. It’s like my God.

Doug (18:21.85)

somebody who studied filmmaking in college, if I had this at my fingertips back in the day, like I mean, literally, like your the your imagination is only the limit. It’s so it’s crazy.

John Jantsch (18:24.411)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:32.696)

Yeah, yeah. All right, so I’m a two person shop and I don’t have time for video. What’s the least amount I could get away with?

Doug (18:42.712)

The least am I gonna get away with, right? That well, that’s what the Magnify platform was built for, number one. But number, but number two, bust out that phone in your pocket and just record some content for the love. Because I I always love when people you’re on screen, it’s been this is a great analogy I tell all people who are considering it. You ever been scrolling on social media and you stop and you see some guy’s video, you’re like, that guy’s an idiot. Like, I know more than that person.

John Jantsch (18:43.78)

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (19:08.602)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (19:10.968)

Well, that person took the time to record a video. Well, you have no excuse. Start recording that content. Put it on social media, especially if you’re on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is so hot right now for video content. If they if you’re a LinkedIn person and you’re watching this, make video content on LinkedIn to position yourself as a thought leader as an expert. There’s never been a better time to do it on LinkedIn, for sure. Hands down.

John Jantsch (19:14.277)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:21.296)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:34.596)

Although my soap speech, stop recording the videos in your car with you driving. I hate those, okay?

Doug (19:40.544)

Yeah. Listen, I’ve been guilty of those. ‘Cause like sometimes you’ll get that thought that pops in your head and like I wanna get it out before I forget. But I hear you. I hear you.

John Jantsch (19:52.778)

So so so so you’re positioning your program though or your platform as white label for agencies. so tell me a little bit about I don’t know the first ninety days of implementation for an agency, what’s that look like?

Doug (20:01.954)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (20:08.3)

Yeah, so first that’s the most important, right? The first ninety days. So the first ninety days when agency signs up, they they typically have a customer that they’re already like have asked for either video testimonials or they want to add video to an email marketing plan. And so that’s when they typically will find us, right? So but we tell agents all the time, yes, it’s exciting that you have a customer, right? And how our platform works is they pay that the the flat rate and then they get thirty they get thirty seats, thirty seats to give out to as many customers as you got it.

John Jantsch (20:23.675)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:33.284)

Hm. Wow. so those could each be a client could have a seat. I’ll get you, okay.

Doug (20:38.38)

Yeah, so you can give video testimonial capture, video email, branded video clips for your customer and add a layered in video service that works with your existing stack, your reputation marketing, your social media plan, your website design. But we tell them first 90 days, if you make sure you get yourself an optimized YouTube channel for your own agency. And because you agencies

John Jantsch (20:50.638)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (20:59.61)

Yeah.

Doug (21:04.477)

love the idea of having an optimized YouTube channel for their business because one, it helps out tremendously with SEO, right? I mean, and John, you’d be surprised how many agencies don’t know that YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. And when we tell them that they’re like, what? Really? Yes, it is. So yeah, it’s a great way to sell your client into creating content. So the first thing is getting them to create content. Get a video testimonial from one of their happy customers.

John Jantsch (21:10.99)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (21:16.902)

Sure. Yeah. Has been for a long time. Yeah.

Doug (21:32.472)

But it’s implementing it in with their own tech stack, right? So when they approach a business and they go, Hey, check out what we’re doing here. This will work better. This will make work amazing for your business. The business goes, Well, heck yeah, that’s awesome. I want that too. And it’s an easy add on. And most agencies are charging between two hundred and fifty bucks to seven hundred fifty seven hundred and fifty dollars a month in recurring revenue. Right out the gate. Yeah. Yep. You got it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:53.772)

Right. Per se per seat. Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you stopping by, taking a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some where you’d invite people to learn more about w how they can try out Magnify?

Doug (22:11.02)

Yeah, we well obviously you can just go to magnify dot com, A G N F I dot com. And then always hit me and hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m super active on LinkedIn. Just for just search Doug Doug Dybert J R on LinkedIn. I’m on there pretty much probably way too often, but you could f we could find me on there too. So

John Jantsch (22:29.318)

Well I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Doug.

Doug (22:34.072)

Perfect, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:01.708)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and again, no guest. I’m doing this series of seven steps to small business marketing success. This is actually episode number five. So go to the show notes. You can find all the other episodes if you are behind on this. but I’m gonna dive into episode or step number five. and this one really talks about pipelines. Having a great, healthy pipeline is awesome, isn’t it? Unfortunately,

many people don’t own their pipeline. And this is going to be easy to test. I’m gonna really talk that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. But if if let me ask you this. If your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, the platform shuts down, alg algorithms change, cost doubles. how long before your pipeline would dry up? be honest. most of the folks that I encounter 30 days or less. and that’s really risky, and that is the cost of

Renting versus owning your pipeline. And I I want to talk about a little bit about those terms. If you own it, that means you control it. you decide who’s on it, what reaches them. no platform’s really going to change that is going to to to really make that go away. That’s that’s the true idea of owning. So I mean, you own your website, you own your email list, you own your social media.

To some degree, although those are really controlled as well. So I want to get into some of the things that I believe if you want to truly own your pipeline, you have to actually own all the assets that drive your pipeline to the extent that you can. Now, when you hear marketers talk about owned media, earned media, paid media.

When I’m talking about renting, really that’s what paid media is. And to some degree earned media, which is great, the publication writes about you. some

John Jantsch (02:07.638)

search platform sends traffic to you. Yeah the social media platforms, you know, people follow you and you know on YouTube or something and and then click over to your website. Those are all things that you you kind of earn mentions. But again, those are really not under your control. I mean those are things that could theoretically go away tomorrow. YouTube changes their algorithm and you no longer get any traffic from it. so that’s why I want to focus on this idea of own. you know someone else

on in on most pipeline, rented pipeline, somebody else owns it, you pay for access to it, you play basically by their rules. and and the the beauty of that, of course, is that that can happen instantly. If you’re a new business and you go to Google AdWords and you open an account and you start advertising, I mean you can actually generate pipeline, you know, immediately. But as many people have experienced, that pipeline

Can get more and more expensive every single year, less and less profitable every single year. they change the rules, and all of a sudden you can’t talk about your product or service in the way that you want to in your ads. I mean, there are all kinds of things that that are there. and a business and and the challenge is this rental model is very fragile, but it can be invisible too, right? A business can look very healthy.

Be chugging along, but it’s 70% of their pipeline, 70% of their customer growth comes from rented channels. And all of a sudden, you know, they disappear overnight because something changed. So here’s a here’s an audit that I would tell you to do. You can do this live. lift up list every lead source that’s produced revenue for you in the last 12 months. And I know sometimes that’s hard to attribute where the revenue came from, but

Spend some time thinking about where your revenue comes from, what lead source, and start marking: is this owned? Is this rented? or you know, rented is the same as paid. you know, and and really kind of look at what’s the ratio. All right. So I want to talk now. Now that you’ve done that, I’m gonna talk about the the the four owned channels and why you need to really put more emphasis, probably.

John Jantsch (04:30.828)

need to put more emphasis on those and less on the rented ones. So the first one is email. I’ve been around for a very, very long time. We started, we started, I think, heavily using email right at the end of like in the 90s, 97, 98, 99, all of a sudden email became a thing. everybody was, you know, really adopting it. And I swear, you know, once people, once people learned the marketing

value of having an email connection with somebody. Of course they started abusing it. And that’s why a lot of people have then declared almost every year from about 2000 and well, let’s say 2004 or so when social media started cropping up that the email was dead. How many times have you heard that one, right? At least for 15 years. But it still works. It’s still one of the most valuable channels. and I

contend that it probably will remain. Now it it it has gotten harder to make effective. and that’s really more because people have abused it and because people have other options that that they’ve spent on. And you know, there’s so much spam and cold, you know, outreach that comes through those that have have actually made people, you know, not like email, if you will, but but a qualified email list that you have built over five years, direct, reliable,

owned is really one of the most efficient channels that you can have. But again, qualified, nurtured, not abused, members of that list can can be really one of the most valuable marketing assets that that a business has. key word again, qualified. people asked to be on it. It was not scraped, it was not bought, it was not added. this is

This is actually your first layer of content, if you think about it. The principles that make content work apply. Genuine point of view, useful, specific. So when you’re sending email out, that is part of your content plan, right? So genuine point of view, built on one of your core principles, built on one of your hub page, one of your

John Jantsch (06:52.0)

elements that you’re using in all of your marketing, all of your content. Ca email in a lot of ways is a content channel. It’s not necessarily a sales channel. It certainly can be. You can earn the right to sell very directly in email, but it is first and foremost, it is a content channel.

John Jantsch (07:12.278)

And again, you know, a lot of I think a lot of people, partly because of spam and things that have gone on, you know, feel like, you know, email doesn’t feel that exciting anymore, right? And I think that that’s a lot of times the edge. you know, the the the real and and again, I’m not talking about necessarily all the ways that people are using it and abusing it. I’m talking about the ways that you have the ability to have a direct conversation. And that and that’s you know, that’s probably one of

It’s one of things I forget all the time, but it’s probably one of the core principles of email is we feel like, okay, this email is going out to 20,000 people. So we’re writing it like it’s going out to 20,000 people. What if you wrote it like it was going out to one person? That you told a personal story, that you were vulnerable, that you shared a a a point of view that might not be accepted by everyone. That’s how you have to think about all of your writing.

You’re writing it to one person. Whether it’s a YouTube video, an email, a social media post, it’s not, hey guys, hey everyone listening. It’s hey, you one person, I wrote this directly for you, or at least you’re gonna feel like I wrote this directly for you. That’s how you make email, certainly a potent channel. I wrote an entire book about this second channel called the Referral Engine. and I’m

Happy to say that that book has remained evergreen because the referrals are not some hack that come about because of the next platform. They are genuinely earned if you actually focus intention on them. Obviously, you’ve got to do good work to get referrals. But after that, if you are intentional about how they are are created, referrals are they’re probably for most of us, they are the best leads. they already

arrive kind of pre-trusted. they close faster, they’re less price sensitive. They’re more likely to refer other people because that’s how they came to you. most small businesses, I think most small businesses, hopefully you do, receive some referrals, but they happen accidentally. that’s hope. That’s not a system. there are three parts to a an effective referral system. There is a specific ask, there is a specific moment.

John Jantsch (09:33.738)

And there is an easy path. So here’s what I would here is who I serve and I would like what I would like you to do. you do that at a moment when the client or the yes, the the client or the you know, the person, it’s the right time to ask them. It’s it’s the moment of truth, as I’ve called it before. And then you make it very easy for them. Most businesses are missing two and three. I mean, they think about like, yeah, okay, I I’m

Gonna go out and ask people for referrals, but I’m not gonna do it, I’m not gonna have it as a planned moment. I’m not gonna have it make sense, I’m not gonna actually make it really easy for them to do. You add those two pieces of it, and you know, right after the customer experiences something good, you make you make that ask land right then and you make it easy for them to do. Now, the the third channel is that you can own.

Is one that is a branch of referrals to some degree. not exactly. and that’s partnerships, strategic partnerships. I don’t know why more people don’t spend more time on this particular channel. non-competing businesses serving the same ideal client are are probably the most underutilized, underused lead source that any small business can have. And it’s it’s not even close. I built in the early days my entire following, my entire business.

My entire platform around these strategic partnerships because it was so easy for me to take the fact that I was early on producing content and others, people started realizing we need content, we need to educate, we need to bring our communities together. And all of a sudden I was a ready-to-tap source. And so they put me in front of their audiences. So the ideal client.

Every one of your ideal clients needs other professionals. every one of your ideal clients has other needs. If you’re in the home services business and you are an electrician, they also need a painter and a plumber and a roofer and a person to do landscaping. so if you could start to develop relationships with all the people that also serve your ideal client, and you can activate those relationships.

John Jantsch (11:49.54)

have them if if you have a podcast, have them on your podcast, you be on their podcast, write content for each other. There’s lots of ways that you can actually start developing these relationships so that these strategic partners then have a have a a real reason, but also your top of mind when it comes to referring you. And then the fourth one is is still just direct relationships. The more AI becomes invasive.

Is that the right word? In our lives and our businesses, the more human element is going to become important. So if you’re using AI to actually become more efficient and to free up time, take that extra time, take your team’s extra time and start doubling down on networking, on speaking, on associations, on in industry, in person industry participation. Spend more time doing those kinds of things because.

those still pay off and they they’re gonna pay off I think even more as people try to automate and and have you know robots theoretically doing their content. I I still don’t know that we’re ever gonna actually get to that point. But I think the real opportunity right now is to double down on the human content. So do that owned versus rented audit. Do it this week. if rented is more than half then really

The owned growth engine is really the work that you need to focus on. So this is step number five of the seven steps to small business marketing success. Hopefully you’re enjoying this series. You can go to our website at Duct Tape Marketing to find the rest of the episodes or the rest of the steps in this. and and obviously six steps six and seven are coming. These are all if you just want to get the ebook all in one shot.

It is dtm.world slash seven steps. you can get it for five bucks. if you want to actually talk to one of our consultants, it is duct tapemarketing.com consultation. So if these are making sense, that actually next step might make sense for you. Go grab the ebook or go grab a a strategy call with one of our advisors. All right. Thanks for tuning in, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.708)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and again, no guest. I’m doing this series of seven steps to small business marketing success. This is actually episode number five. So go to the show notes. You can find all the other episodes if you are behind on this. but I’m gonna dive into episode or step number five. and this one really talks about pipelines. Having a great, healthy pipeline is awesome, isn’t it? Unfortunately,

many people don’t own their pipeline. And this is going to be easy to test. I’m gonna really talk that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. But if if let me ask you this. If your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, the platform shuts down, alg algorithms change, cost doubles. how long before your pipeline would dry up? be honest. most of the folks that I encounter 30 days or less. and that’s really risky, and that is the cost of

Renting versus owning your pipeline. And I I want to talk about a little bit about those terms. If you own it, that means you control it. you decide who’s on it, what reaches them. no platform’s really going to change that is going to to to really make that go away. That’s that’s the true idea of owning. So I mean, you own your website, you own your email list, you own your social media.

To some degree, although those are really controlled as well. So I want to get into some of the things that I believe if you want to truly own your pipeline, you have to actually own all the assets that drive your pipeline to the extent that you can. Now, when you hear marketers talk about owned media, earned media, paid media.

When I’m talking about renting, really that’s what paid media is. And to some degree earned media, which is great, the publication writes about you. some

John Jantsch (02:07.638)

search platform sends traffic to you. Yeah the social media platforms, you know, people follow you and you know on YouTube or something and and then click over to your website. Those are all things that you you kind of earn mentions. But again, those are really not under your control. I mean those are things that could theoretically go away tomorrow. YouTube changes their algorithm and you no longer get any traffic from it. so that’s why I want to focus on this idea of own. you know someone else

on in on most pipeline, rented pipeline, somebody else owns it, you pay for access to it, you play basically by their rules. and and the the beauty of that, of course, is that that can happen instantly. If you’re a new business and you go to Google AdWords and you open an account and you start advertising, I mean you can actually generate pipeline, you know, immediately. But as many people have experienced, that pipeline

Can get more and more expensive every single year, less and less profitable every single year. they change the rules, and all of a sudden you can’t talk about your product or service in the way that you want to in your ads. I mean, there are all kinds of things that that are there. and a business and and the challenge is this rental model is very fragile, but it can be invisible too, right? A business can look very healthy.

Be chugging along, but it’s 70% of their pipeline, 70% of their customer growth comes from rented channels. And all of a sudden, you know, they disappear overnight because something changed. So here’s a here’s an audit that I would tell you to do. You can do this live. lift up list every lead source that’s produced revenue for you in the last 12 months. And I know sometimes that’s hard to attribute where the revenue came from, but

Spend some time thinking about where your revenue comes from, what lead source, and start marking: is this owned? Is this rented? or you know, rented is the same as paid. you know, and and really kind of look at what’s the ratio. All right. So I want to talk now. Now that you’ve done that, I’m gonna talk about the the the four owned channels and why you need to really put more emphasis, probably.

John Jantsch (04:30.828)

need to put more emphasis on those and less on the rented ones. So the first one is email. I’ve been around for a very, very long time. We started, we started, I think, heavily using email right at the end of like in the 90s, 97, 98, 99, all of a sudden email became a thing. everybody was, you know, really adopting it. And I swear, you know, once people, once people learned the marketing

value of having an email connection with somebody. Of course they started abusing it. And that’s why a lot of people have then declared almost every year from about 2000 and well, let’s say 2004 or so when social media started cropping up that the email was dead. How many times have you heard that one, right? At least for 15 years. But it still works. It’s still one of the most valuable channels. and I

contend that it probably will remain. Now it it it has gotten harder to make effective. and that’s really more because people have abused it and because people have other options that that they’ve spent on. And you know, there’s so much spam and cold, you know, outreach that comes through those that have have actually made people, you know, not like email, if you will, but but a qualified email list that you have built over five years, direct, reliable,

owned is really one of the most efficient channels that you can have. But again, qualified, nurtured, not abused, members of that list can can be really one of the most valuable marketing assets that that a business has. key word again, qualified. people asked to be on it. It was not scraped, it was not bought, it was not added. this is

This is actually your first layer of content, if you think about it. The principles that make content work apply. Genuine point of view, useful, specific. So when you’re sending email out, that is part of your content plan, right? So genuine point of view, built on one of your core principles, built on one of your hub page, one of your

John Jantsch (06:52.0)

elements that you’re using in all of your marketing, all of your content. Ca email in a lot of ways is a content channel. It’s not necessarily a sales channel. It certainly can be. You can earn the right to sell very directly in email, but it is first and foremost, it is a content channel.

John Jantsch (07:12.278)

And again, you know, a lot of I think a lot of people, partly because of spam and things that have gone on, you know, feel like, you know, email doesn’t feel that exciting anymore, right? And I think that that’s a lot of times the edge. you know, the the the real and and again, I’m not talking about necessarily all the ways that people are using it and abusing it. I’m talking about the ways that you have the ability to have a direct conversation. And that and that’s you know, that’s probably one of

It’s one of things I forget all the time, but it’s probably one of the core principles of email is we feel like, okay, this email is going out to 20,000 people. So we’re writing it like it’s going out to 20,000 people. What if you wrote it like it was going out to one person? That you told a personal story, that you were vulnerable, that you shared a a a point of view that might not be accepted by everyone. That’s how you have to think about all of your writing.

You’re writing it to one person. Whether it’s a YouTube video, an email, a social media post, it’s not, hey guys, hey everyone listening. It’s hey, you one person, I wrote this directly for you, or at least you’re gonna feel like I wrote this directly for you. That’s how you make email, certainly a potent channel. I wrote an entire book about this second channel called the Referral Engine. and I’m

Happy to say that that book has remained evergreen because the referrals are not some hack that come about because of the next platform. They are genuinely earned if you actually focus intention on them. Obviously, you’ve got to do good work to get referrals. But after that, if you are intentional about how they are are created, referrals are they’re probably for most of us, they are the best leads. they already

arrive kind of pre-trusted. they close faster, they’re less price sensitive. They’re more likely to refer other people because that’s how they came to you. most small businesses, I think most small businesses, hopefully you do, receive some referrals, but they happen accidentally. that’s hope. That’s not a system. there are three parts to a an effective referral system. There is a specific ask, there is a specific moment.

John Jantsch (09:33.738)

And there is an easy path. So here’s what I would here is who I serve and I would like what I would like you to do. you do that at a moment when the client or the yes, the the client or the you know, the person, it’s the right time to ask them. It’s it’s the moment of truth, as I’ve called it before. And then you make it very easy for them. Most businesses are missing two and three. I mean, they think about like, yeah, okay, I I’m

Gonna go out and ask people for referrals, but I’m not gonna do it, I’m not gonna have it as a planned moment. I’m not gonna have it make sense, I’m not gonna actually make it really easy for them to do. You add those two pieces of it, and you know, right after the customer experiences something good, you make you make that ask land right then and you make it easy for them to do. Now, the the third channel is that you can own.

Is one that is a branch of referrals to some degree. not exactly. and that’s partnerships, strategic partnerships. I don’t know why more people don’t spend more time on this particular channel. non-competing businesses serving the same ideal client are are probably the most underutilized, underused lead source that any small business can have. And it’s it’s not even close. I built in the early days my entire following, my entire business.

My entire platform around these strategic partnerships because it was so easy for me to take the fact that I was early on producing content and others, people started realizing we need content, we need to educate, we need to bring our communities together. And all of a sudden I was a ready-to-tap source. And so they put me in front of their audiences. So the ideal client.

Every one of your ideal clients needs other professionals. every one of your ideal clients has other needs. If you’re in the home services business and you are an electrician, they also need a painter and a plumber and a roofer and a person to do landscaping. so if you could start to develop relationships with all the people that also serve your ideal client, and you can activate those relationships.

John Jantsch (11:49.54)

have them if if you have a podcast, have them on your podcast, you be on their podcast, write content for each other. There’s lots of ways that you can actually start developing these relationships so that these strategic partners then have a have a a real reason, but also your top of mind when it comes to referring you. And then the fourth one is is still just direct relationships. The more AI becomes invasive.

Is that the right word? In our lives and our businesses, the more human element is going to become important. So if you’re using AI to actually become more efficient and to free up time, take that extra time, take your team’s extra time and start doubling down on networking, on speaking, on associations, on in industry, in person industry participation. Spend more time doing those kinds of things because.

those still pay off and they they’re gonna pay off I think even more as people try to automate and and have you know robots theoretically doing their content. I I still don’t know that we’re ever gonna actually get to that point. But I think the real opportunity right now is to double down on the human content. So do that owned versus rented audit. Do it this week. if rented is more than half then really

The owned growth engine is really the work that you need to focus on. So this is step number five of the seven steps to small business marketing success. Hopefully you’re enjoying this series. You can go to our website at Duct Tape Marketing to find the rest of the episodes or the rest of the steps in this. and and obviously six steps six and seven are coming. These are all if you just want to get the ebook all in one shot.

It is dtm.world slash seven steps. you can get it for five bucks. if you want to actually talk to one of our consultants, it is duct tapemarketing.com consultation. So if these are making sense, that actually next step might make sense for you. Go grab the ebook or go grab a a strategy call with one of our advisors. All right. Thanks for tuning in, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.708)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and again, no guest. I’m doing this series of seven steps to small business marketing success. This is actually episode number five. So go to the show notes. You can find all the other episodes if you are behind on this. but I’m gonna dive into episode or step number five. and this one really talks about pipelines. Having a great, healthy pipeline is awesome, isn’t it? Unfortunately,

many people don’t own their pipeline. And this is going to be easy to test. I’m gonna really talk that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. But if if let me ask you this. If your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, the platform shuts down, alg algorithms change, cost doubles. how long before your pipeline would dry up? be honest. most of the folks that I encounter 30 days or less. and that’s really risky, and that is the cost of

Renting versus owning your pipeline. And I I want to talk about a little bit about those terms. If you own it, that means you control it. you decide who’s on it, what reaches them. no platform’s really going to change that is going to to to really make that go away. That’s that’s the true idea of owning. So I mean, you own your website, you own your email list, you own your social media.

To some degree, although those are really controlled as well. So I want to get into some of the things that I believe if you want to truly own your pipeline, you have to actually own all the assets that drive your pipeline to the extent that you can. Now, when you hear marketers talk about owned media, earned media, paid media.

When I’m talking about renting, really that’s what paid media is. And to some degree earned media, which is great, the publication writes about you. some

John Jantsch (02:07.638)

search platform sends traffic to you. Yeah the social media platforms, you know, people follow you and you know on YouTube or something and and then click over to your website. Those are all things that you you kind of earn mentions. But again, those are really not under your control. I mean those are things that could theoretically go away tomorrow. YouTube changes their algorithm and you no longer get any traffic from it. so that’s why I want to focus on this idea of own. you know someone else

on in on most pipeline, rented pipeline, somebody else owns it, you pay for access to it, you play basically by their rules. and and the the beauty of that, of course, is that that can happen instantly. If you’re a new business and you go to Google AdWords and you open an account and you start advertising, I mean you can actually generate pipeline, you know, immediately. But as many people have experienced, that pipeline

Can get more and more expensive every single year, less and less profitable every single year. they change the rules, and all of a sudden you can’t talk about your product or service in the way that you want to in your ads. I mean, there are all kinds of things that that are there. and a business and and the challenge is this rental model is very fragile, but it can be invisible too, right? A business can look very healthy.

Be chugging along, but it’s 70% of their pipeline, 70% of their customer growth comes from rented channels. And all of a sudden, you know, they disappear overnight because something changed. So here’s a here’s an audit that I would tell you to do. You can do this live. lift up list every lead source that’s produced revenue for you in the last 12 months. And I know sometimes that’s hard to attribute where the revenue came from, but

Spend some time thinking about where your revenue comes from, what lead source, and start marking: is this owned? Is this rented? or you know, rented is the same as paid. you know, and and really kind of look at what’s the ratio. All right. So I want to talk now. Now that you’ve done that, I’m gonna talk about the the the four owned channels and why you need to really put more emphasis, probably.

John Jantsch (04:30.828)

need to put more emphasis on those and less on the rented ones. So the first one is email. I’ve been around for a very, very long time. We started, we started, I think, heavily using email right at the end of like in the 90s, 97, 98, 99, all of a sudden email became a thing. everybody was, you know, really adopting it. And I swear, you know, once people, once people learned the marketing

value of having an email connection with somebody. Of course they started abusing it. And that’s why a lot of people have then declared almost every year from about 2000 and well, let’s say 2004 or so when social media started cropping up that the email was dead. How many times have you heard that one, right? At least for 15 years. But it still works. It’s still one of the most valuable channels. and I

contend that it probably will remain. Now it it it has gotten harder to make effective. and that’s really more because people have abused it and because people have other options that that they’ve spent on. And you know, there’s so much spam and cold, you know, outreach that comes through those that have have actually made people, you know, not like email, if you will, but but a qualified email list that you have built over five years, direct, reliable,

owned is really one of the most efficient channels that you can have. But again, qualified, nurtured, not abused, members of that list can can be really one of the most valuable marketing assets that that a business has. key word again, qualified. people asked to be on it. It was not scraped, it was not bought, it was not added. this is

This is actually your first layer of content, if you think about it. The principles that make content work apply. Genuine point of view, useful, specific. So when you’re sending email out, that is part of your content plan, right? So genuine point of view, built on one of your core principles, built on one of your hub page, one of your

John Jantsch (06:52.0)

elements that you’re using in all of your marketing, all of your content. Ca email in a lot of ways is a content channel. It’s not necessarily a sales channel. It certainly can be. You can earn the right to sell very directly in email, but it is first and foremost, it is a content channel.

John Jantsch (07:12.278)

And again, you know, a lot of I think a lot of people, partly because of spam and things that have gone on, you know, feel like, you know, email doesn’t feel that exciting anymore, right? And I think that that’s a lot of times the edge. you know, the the the real and and again, I’m not talking about necessarily all the ways that people are using it and abusing it. I’m talking about the ways that you have the ability to have a direct conversation. And that and that’s you know, that’s probably one of

It’s one of things I forget all the time, but it’s probably one of the core principles of email is we feel like, okay, this email is going out to 20,000 people. So we’re writing it like it’s going out to 20,000 people. What if you wrote it like it was going out to one person? That you told a personal story, that you were vulnerable, that you shared a a a point of view that might not be accepted by everyone. That’s how you have to think about all of your writing.

You’re writing it to one person. Whether it’s a YouTube video, an email, a social media post, it’s not, hey guys, hey everyone listening. It’s hey, you one person, I wrote this directly for you, or at least you’re gonna feel like I wrote this directly for you. That’s how you make email, certainly a potent channel. I wrote an entire book about this second channel called the Referral Engine. and I’m

Happy to say that that book has remained evergreen because the referrals are not some hack that come about because of the next platform. They are genuinely earned if you actually focus intention on them. Obviously, you’ve got to do good work to get referrals. But after that, if you are intentional about how they are are created, referrals are they’re probably for most of us, they are the best leads. they already

arrive kind of pre-trusted. they close faster, they’re less price sensitive. They’re more likely to refer other people because that’s how they came to you. most small businesses, I think most small businesses, hopefully you do, receive some referrals, but they happen accidentally. that’s hope. That’s not a system. there are three parts to a an effective referral system. There is a specific ask, there is a specific moment.

John Jantsch (09:33.738)

And there is an easy path. So here’s what I would here is who I serve and I would like what I would like you to do. you do that at a moment when the client or the yes, the the client or the you know, the person, it’s the right time to ask them. It’s it’s the moment of truth, as I’ve called it before. And then you make it very easy for them. Most businesses are missing two and three. I mean, they think about like, yeah, okay, I I’m

Gonna go out and ask people for referrals, but I’m not gonna do it, I’m not gonna have it as a planned moment. I’m not gonna have it make sense, I’m not gonna actually make it really easy for them to do. You add those two pieces of it, and you know, right after the customer experiences something good, you make you make that ask land right then and you make it easy for them to do. Now, the the third channel is that you can own.

Is one that is a branch of referrals to some degree. not exactly. and that’s partnerships, strategic partnerships. I don’t know why more people don’t spend more time on this particular channel. non-competing businesses serving the same ideal client are are probably the most underutilized, underused lead source that any small business can have. And it’s it’s not even close. I built in the early days my entire following, my entire business.

My entire platform around these strategic partnerships because it was so easy for me to take the fact that I was early on producing content and others, people started realizing we need content, we need to educate, we need to bring our communities together. And all of a sudden I was a ready-to-tap source. And so they put me in front of their audiences. So the ideal client.

Every one of your ideal clients needs other professionals. every one of your ideal clients has other needs. If you’re in the home services business and you are an electrician, they also need a painter and a plumber and a roofer and a person to do landscaping. so if you could start to develop relationships with all the people that also serve your ideal client, and you can activate those relationships.

John Jantsch (11:49.54)

have them if if you have a podcast, have them on your podcast, you be on their podcast, write content for each other. There’s lots of ways that you can actually start developing these relationships so that these strategic partners then have a have a a real reason, but also your top of mind when it comes to referring you. And then the fourth one is is still just direct relationships. The more AI becomes invasive.

Is that the right word? In our lives and our businesses, the more human element is going to become important. So if you’re using AI to actually become more efficient and to free up time, take that extra time, take your team’s extra time and start doubling down on networking, on speaking, on associations, on in industry, in person industry participation. Spend more time doing those kinds of things because.

those still pay off and they they’re gonna pay off I think even more as people try to automate and and have you know robots theoretically doing their content. I I still don’t know that we’re ever gonna actually get to that point. But I think the real opportunity right now is to double down on the human content. So do that owned versus rented audit. Do it this week. if rented is more than half then really

The owned growth engine is really the work that you need to focus on. So this is step number five of the seven steps to small business marketing success. Hopefully you’re enjoying this series. You can go to our website at Duct Tape Marketing to find the rest of the episodes or the rest of the steps in this. and and obviously six steps six and seven are coming. These are all if you just want to get the ebook all in one shot.

It is dtm.world slash seven steps. you can get it for five bucks. if you want to actually talk to one of our consultants, it is duct tapemarketing.com consultation. So if these are making sense, that actually next step might make sense for you. Go grab the ebook or go grab a a strategy call with one of our advisors. All right. Thanks for tuning in, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.708)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and again, no guest. I’m doing this series of seven steps to small business marketing success. This is actually episode number five. So go to the show notes. You can find all the other episodes if you are behind on this. but I’m gonna dive into episode or step number five. and this one really talks about pipelines. Having a great, healthy pipeline is awesome, isn’t it? Unfortunately,

many people don’t own their pipeline. And this is going to be easy to test. I’m gonna really talk that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. But if if let me ask you this. If your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, the platform shuts down, alg algorithms change, cost doubles. how long before your pipeline would dry up? be honest. most of the folks that I encounter 30 days or less. and that’s really risky, and that is the cost of

Renting versus owning your pipeline. And I I want to talk about a little bit about those terms. If you own it, that means you control it. you decide who’s on it, what reaches them. no platform’s really going to change that is going to to to really make that go away. That’s that’s the true idea of owning. So I mean, you own your website, you own your email list, you own your social media.

To some degree, although those are really controlled as well. So I want to get into some of the things that I believe if you want to truly own your pipeline, you have to actually own all the assets that drive your pipeline to the extent that you can. Now, when you hear marketers talk about owned media, earned media, paid media.

When I’m talking about renting, really that’s what paid media is. And to some degree earned media, which is great, the publication writes about you. some

John Jantsch (02:07.638)

search platform sends traffic to you. Yeah the social media platforms, you know, people follow you and you know on YouTube or something and and then click over to your website. Those are all things that you you kind of earn mentions. But again, those are really not under your control. I mean those are things that could theoretically go away tomorrow. YouTube changes their algorithm and you no longer get any traffic from it. so that’s why I want to focus on this idea of own. you know someone else

on in on most pipeline, rented pipeline, somebody else owns it, you pay for access to it, you play basically by their rules. and and the the beauty of that, of course, is that that can happen instantly. If you’re a new business and you go to Google AdWords and you open an account and you start advertising, I mean you can actually generate pipeline, you know, immediately. But as many people have experienced, that pipeline

Can get more and more expensive every single year, less and less profitable every single year. they change the rules, and all of a sudden you can’t talk about your product or service in the way that you want to in your ads. I mean, there are all kinds of things that that are there. and a business and and the challenge is this rental model is very fragile, but it can be invisible too, right? A business can look very healthy.

Be chugging along, but it’s 70% of their pipeline, 70% of their customer growth comes from rented channels. And all of a sudden, you know, they disappear overnight because something changed. So here’s a here’s an audit that I would tell you to do. You can do this live. lift up list every lead source that’s produced revenue for you in the last 12 months. And I know sometimes that’s hard to attribute where the revenue came from, but

Spend some time thinking about where your revenue comes from, what lead source, and start marking: is this owned? Is this rented? or you know, rented is the same as paid. you know, and and really kind of look at what’s the ratio. All right. So I want to talk now. Now that you’ve done that, I’m gonna talk about the the the four owned channels and why you need to really put more emphasis, probably.

John Jantsch (04:30.828)

need to put more emphasis on those and less on the rented ones. So the first one is email. I’ve been around for a very, very long time. We started, we started, I think, heavily using email right at the end of like in the 90s, 97, 98, 99, all of a sudden email became a thing. everybody was, you know, really adopting it. And I swear, you know, once people, once people learned the marketing

value of having an email connection with somebody. Of course they started abusing it. And that’s why a lot of people have then declared almost every year from about 2000 and well, let’s say 2004 or so when social media started cropping up that the email was dead. How many times have you heard that one, right? At least for 15 years. But it still works. It’s still one of the most valuable channels. and I

contend that it probably will remain. Now it it it has gotten harder to make effective. and that’s really more because people have abused it and because people have other options that that they’ve spent on. And you know, there’s so much spam and cold, you know, outreach that comes through those that have have actually made people, you know, not like email, if you will, but but a qualified email list that you have built over five years, direct, reliable,

owned is really one of the most efficient channels that you can have. But again, qualified, nurtured, not abused, members of that list can can be really one of the most valuable marketing assets that that a business has. key word again, qualified. people asked to be on it. It was not scraped, it was not bought, it was not added. this is

This is actually your first layer of content, if you think about it. The principles that make content work apply. Genuine point of view, useful, specific. So when you’re sending email out, that is part of your content plan, right? So genuine point of view, built on one of your core principles, built on one of your hub page, one of your

John Jantsch (06:52.0)

elements that you’re using in all of your marketing, all of your content. Ca email in a lot of ways is a content channel. It’s not necessarily a sales channel. It certainly can be. You can earn the right to sell very directly in email, but it is first and foremost, it is a content channel.

John Jantsch (07:12.278)

And again, you know, a lot of I think a lot of people, partly because of spam and things that have gone on, you know, feel like, you know, email doesn’t feel that exciting anymore, right? And I think that that’s a lot of times the edge. you know, the the the real and and again, I’m not talking about necessarily all the ways that people are using it and abusing it. I’m talking about the ways that you have the ability to have a direct conversation. And that and that’s you know, that’s probably one of

It’s one of things I forget all the time, but it’s probably one of the core principles of email is we feel like, okay, this email is going out to 20,000 people. So we’re writing it like it’s going out to 20,000 people. What if you wrote it like it was going out to one person? That you told a personal story, that you were vulnerable, that you shared a a a point of view that might not be accepted by everyone. That’s how you have to think about all of your writing.

You’re writing it to one person. Whether it’s a YouTube video, an email, a social media post, it’s not, hey guys, hey everyone listening. It’s hey, you one person, I wrote this directly for you, or at least you’re gonna feel like I wrote this directly for you. That’s how you make email, certainly a potent channel. I wrote an entire book about this second channel called the Referral Engine. and I’m

Happy to say that that book has remained evergreen because the referrals are not some hack that come about because of the next platform. They are genuinely earned if you actually focus intention on them. Obviously, you’ve got to do good work to get referrals. But after that, if you are intentional about how they are are created, referrals are they’re probably for most of us, they are the best leads. they already

arrive kind of pre-trusted. they close faster, they’re less price sensitive. They’re more likely to refer other people because that’s how they came to you. most small businesses, I think most small businesses, hopefully you do, receive some referrals, but they happen accidentally. that’s hope. That’s not a system. there are three parts to a an effective referral system. There is a specific ask, there is a specific moment.

John Jantsch (09:33.738)

And there is an easy path. So here’s what I would here is who I serve and I would like what I would like you to do. you do that at a moment when the client or the yes, the the client or the you know, the person, it’s the right time to ask them. It’s it’s the moment of truth, as I’ve called it before. And then you make it very easy for them. Most businesses are missing two and three. I mean, they think about like, yeah, okay, I I’m

Gonna go out and ask people for referrals, but I’m not gonna do it, I’m not gonna have it as a planned moment. I’m not gonna have it make sense, I’m not gonna actually make it really easy for them to do. You add those two pieces of it, and you know, right after the customer experiences something good, you make you make that ask land right then and you make it easy for them to do. Now, the the third channel is that you can own.

Is one that is a branch of referrals to some degree. not exactly. and that’s partnerships, strategic partnerships. I don’t know why more people don’t spend more time on this particular channel. non-competing businesses serving the same ideal client are are probably the most underutilized, underused lead source that any small business can have. And it’s it’s not even close. I built in the early days my entire following, my entire business.

My entire platform around these strategic partnerships because it was so easy for me to take the fact that I was early on producing content and others, people started realizing we need content, we need to educate, we need to bring our communities together. And all of a sudden I was a ready-to-tap source. And so they put me in front of their audiences. So the ideal client.

Every one of your ideal clients needs other professionals. every one of your ideal clients has other needs. If you’re in the home services business and you are an electrician, they also need a painter and a plumber and a roofer and a person to do landscaping. so if you could start to develop relationships with all the people that also serve your ideal client, and you can activate those relationships.

John Jantsch (11:49.54)

have them if if you have a podcast, have them on your podcast, you be on their podcast, write content for each other. There’s lots of ways that you can actually start developing these relationships so that these strategic partners then have a have a a real reason, but also your top of mind when it comes to referring you. And then the fourth one is is still just direct relationships. The more AI becomes invasive.

Is that the right word? In our lives and our businesses, the more human element is going to become important. So if you’re using AI to actually become more efficient and to free up time, take that extra time, take your team’s extra time and start doubling down on networking, on speaking, on associations, on in industry, in person industry participation. Spend more time doing those kinds of things because.

those still pay off and they they’re gonna pay off I think even more as people try to automate and and have you know robots theoretically doing their content. I I still don’t know that we’re ever gonna actually get to that point. But I think the real opportunity right now is to double down on the human content. So do that owned versus rented audit. Do it this week. if rented is more than half then really

The owned growth engine is really the work that you need to focus on. So this is step number five of the seven steps to small business marketing success. Hopefully you’re enjoying this series. You can go to our website at Duct Tape Marketing to find the rest of the episodes or the rest of the steps in this. and and obviously six steps six and seven are coming. These are all if you just want to get the ebook all in one shot.

It is dtm.world slash seven steps. you can get it for five bucks. if you want to actually talk to one of our consultants, it is duct tapemarketing.com consultation. So if these are making sense, that actually next step might make sense for you. Go grab the ebook or go grab a a strategy call with one of our advisors. All right. Thanks for tuning in, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.