Weekend Favs May 4

Weekend Favs May 4 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one I took on the road.

• Suno – Suno transforms your ideas into songs, making music creation accessible to everyone, regardless of musical skill.
• IIElevenLabs – Elevenlabs offers an AI Voice Changer that revolutionizes audio content creation such as podcasts and voiceovers, with a broad range of customizable voices, voice cloning features, and regular updates to enhance your projects.
• Quizgecko– Quizgecko is an AI-powered tool that automates the creation of quizzes and tests from various types of content, including text and videos, which can be shared, exported, and embedded for educational or business purposes.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

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How to Navigate the New Era of SEO: Strategies for Understanding Consumer Search Behavior

How to Navigate the New Era of SEO: Strategies for Understanding Consumer Search Behavior written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Dale Bertrand, an SEO specialist with over two decades of experience working with Fortune 500 companies and startups globally. Dale has spoken at industry conferences, led corporate training events, and serves as an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Organization. Our conversation covers the ever-evolving landscape of SEO and how businesses of all sizes can adapt to the new era of consumer search behavior. From understanding the ‘dark web’ to proven strategies in repurposing content.

 

 

Key Takeaways

In this episode you’ll learn:

1. The Impact of AI on Search Engines: Discover how artificial intelligence is reshaping search engines and consumer search behavior.
2. Strategies for SEO Success: Learn actionable strategies to navigate the changing landscape of SEO and stay ahead of the competition.
3. Understanding Consumer Search Behavior: Gain insights into how consumer search behavior is evolving and what it means for your SEO efforts.
4.  Crafting Destination Content: Explore the concept of destination content and how it can drive engagement and conversions in the age of AI-powered search.
5. Future-proofing Your SEO: Get tips on future-proofing your SEO strategies to ensure long-term success in the dynamic world of search engines.

By implementing these strategies, businesses can effectively navigate the new era of SEO and capitalize on emerging opportunities to enhance their online presence and drive growth.

 

Questions I ask Dale Bertrand:

[02:04] Where are we in the rapidly evolving landscape of search engines and search behavior today?

[02:51] How are search engines or tools like Perplexity going to change what masters like Google does?

[04:51] How does this affect the perspective of brands that have spent all that money on traditional SEO?

[07:03] How will the need for Google to adapt affect its cash flow?

[09:10] What are some of the suggested things that people are just going to have to adapt to?

[13:07] As far as backlinks go: talk a little bit about guest blogging versus being a guest on a podcast as a specific tactic.

[21:52] is there anywhere you invite people to to connect with you or find out more about your work?

 

More About Dale Bertrand:

• Connect with Dale Bertrand on LinkedIn
• Visit his Website 

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

Duct Tape Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I've been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It's changed the results that I'm seeing. It's changed my engagement with clients. It's changed my engagement with the team. I couldn't be happier. Honestly. It's the best investment I ever made. What

John (00:16): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It's time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(01:02): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dale Bertrand. He's been an SEO specialist to Fortune 500 companies and venture backed startups around the world for two decades. His clients include global brands such as Citizen Watch, ExxonMobil and bva. He speaks at industry conferences, leads corporate training events, and serves as an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Organization. So Dale, welcome back to the show.

Dale (01:34): Yeah, well, thank you for having me again.

John (01:36): At least twice you've been on the show, I think maybe, and we've talked about SEO, the SEO, so last decade, right? Not really, but I want to turn the tables a little bit and talk about search specifically and behavior, consumer behavior when it comes to search, because that is probably driving a great deal of what people are doing in the world of SEO today, or at least it should be informing what they're doing in the world of SEO today. So where are we in the rapidly evolving landscape of search engines in general and search behavior today?

Dale (02:12): Well, we're in the middle of a lot of change. So I think anybody who's really paying attention to what's going on with Google, with consumer search behavior, things are changing pretty quickly. AI is part of that story. Marketers are just starting to use AI and wrap their heads around how it can be useful for what we're doing for SEO, and then Google is implementing ai, so generative AI on the search results pages, and that can be scary depending on exactly how Google implements it going forward.

John (02:42): And we're all for years trained. There's this little box I go and I type in this little thing and I get a result that Google deems is what I wanted. How are search engines or tools like Perplexity going to change how people view, I mean, I know some people aren't familiar with it, but essentially it's more of an AI engine. You go and ask it whatever you want to ask it, and it gives you a lot of different views. There's no ads around it. I mean, how is that experience, in your view, going to change essentially what the big monster Google does?

Dale (03:16): Yeah, so Perplexity is one of many generative AI search engines. Instead of just showing you a bunch of pages, which I consider a research project, I have to go through them in order to find my answer. It just gives you the answer for a lot of queries. If it's informational or if you're asking how many people sit on the Supreme Court, there's a definitive answer to that, a factual answer that it can give you without sending you to a website. So those types of search engines have a lot of implications when people start using them. You might end up with more zero click searches. So what that means is your customers are searching for your product or service, but they don't actually click anywhere, including clicking to your website. They're just getting the answer from the search engine. So that's going to be a whole new world. What we're talking about is destination content, which is the type of content that you create for SEO, where basically the searcher needs to go to your website to complete the next stage of their journey. And that looks different for a B2C journey versus a B2B journey. But the point is, you're not just giving the search engines information that they can pair it back to the searcher without ever sending anybody to your website. So we really need to think about how SEO needs to change.

John (04:32): So you were headed down that path. Let me back you up just a little bit. The traditional SEO method of getting your website or your page on a website to show up in page one of Google was always kind of the gold standard. How is, and what you just described is not that world anymore. So how does that immediately impact brands that have spent years and thousands of dollars of trying to get on page one? How does that change their view of the world?

Dale (05:03): Well, so I'm going to tell you the truth is we don't know, right? Because we don't exactly how this is going to play out. Give me the

John (05:07): Answer

Dale (05:08): Down, but we need to be prepared. So we want to feature proof, our SEO. So in the short term, what we want to be looking at is what's changing on the search results page? When is Google starting to release some of these features? And then also, honestly, even more importantly, we want to pay attention to how are the customers that we are targeting in our market, how are they changing the way they search? That's really what matters most because what we're expecting is are consumers going to get used to using chat GBT to find answers, or they're going to start using perplexity, or maybe Google starts to give them answers so they get used to the zero click searches or getting information directly from the search engine. Also, we expect consumers will figure out that they can type in much longer queries, not just restaurants in Seattle, restaurants in Seattle for a family of four with an infant, and the dad loves spicy food and oh, by the way, the wife is lactose intolerant.

(06:04): That's a long query. So we want to pay attention to whether customers in our market, and this is all going to be very market specific, are searching for longer queries. Are they using the follow up chat features? So what that is, is you do a query and then you follow up very similar to using a chatbot like chat, GBT. And then the third piece of it is are the consumers that we're going after, are they starting to use different search engines? So on the B2C side, that could be TikTok, Amazon, YouTube, and on B2B side, that could be maybe they're searching in LinkedIn or YouTube again, or software SaaS searching like Capterra or something like that. We want to pay attention to that when we really need to change our strategies.

John (06:46): So this is just a wonder question. Google, Google doesn't make money on search. Google makes money on ads that are placed all around search. How does the need for them to evolve so that people say, heck with this, I'm going over here. How does that need for them to evolve, impact their cash cow?

Dale (07:09): Yeah, Google's under a lot of pressure is what it comes down to. So they've got new competitors and then also new technology. The new technology is the generative AI that they invented, and they have the technology, but it just doesn't work well enough for them to really launch it the way they would want to. And then what you mentioned is that Google's more of an advertising business than they are a search business. So they're not going to change anything if they can't figure out how to put ads on it full stop. It just doesn't make any sense. So they've got a lot of pressures they feel like they need to change to keep up with competitors. The last thing they're going to do is let competitors take away their search volume and basically take market share. They want to be the default search engine, just like they are now for most internet searches, no matter what, full stop, that's the most important thing to them. But they don't want to change if they don't have to because it could end up affecting their advertising revenue. So where does that leave us as brands and marketers? Honestly, it leaves us caught in the middle where we don't know exactly how these forces are going to play out, but it will change the way consumer search and the way Google's search results work.

John (08:17): Well, and there was a point in time when if I wanted business, I wanted eyeballs, I just spun up a campaign for ads, and that got me those things. Now didn't necessarily turn 'em into customers, but at least I could buy that awareness or that exposure. How are brands that maybe got lazy doing that now, going to need to respond to create this destination content to actually realize that people are in places where we don't even see 'em anymore? Places that dark social, I guess what people are calling it, I mean, a lot of people are getting their information in those kind of places where again, it's unseen. I mean, I guess I'm anticipating a lot of marketers are saying, what do we do? I mean, the world's coming to head. So what are some of the suggested things that people are just going to have to adapt to?

Dale (09:14): Yeah. Well, I can tell you what I'm doing on my website. That's the best advice that I can give you. We know that there are fundamentals, like Google is looking for unique content, something called information gain, which is when you are adding content to the web, you're adding information that wasn't there before. So in other words, when you're creating content or service pages or even your website homepage, you're adding information that hasn't already been written about. Gone are the dates when you can write me too articles on a topic, and you're going to rank too, because Google just doesn't need your content. So what I'm doing on my website is making sure that we're focusing on our unique perspective on issues and digital marketing strategies, and then also telling our customers stories. We work with clients at my marketing agency, so telling their stories of their brands and marketing campaigns and really getting deep into the founder's story.

(10:06): And that's interesting, especially when it's basically a story that other marketers can learn something from. So we're definitely doubling down on unique content in that way. And then another thing that we've seen when it comes to our initial tests optimizing for generative AI search engine, like the chat TPT is really a lot of what they're doing is averaging what's on the web. So I want to make sure that my brand is mentioned in as many places as possible. So I'm actually from my agency spinning up a syndication campaign that we'd done a while back where I'm not just publishing on my website or LinkedIn, but I'm also publishing on many other websites. And John, I'll hit you up with an article later, but we're making sure that our brand is seen across the web so that when these generative chat bots like Chatt BT are averaging everything they know about my industry or the service that I provide, they see our name mentioned as many times as possible. So it's just some of the things that we're looking at, but that's how we're future proofing our SEO.

John (11:09): It's my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We've been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that's affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try Active Campaign for free for 14 days and there's no credit card required. Just visit activecampaign.com/duct tape. That's right. Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15% off an annual plan. That's active campaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only.

(12:14): So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. So one of the things you mentioned that was interesting talking about, and I would welcome anything you want to contribute, Dale, first off to Duct Tape Marketing, but talk to me a little bit about the whole guest blogging. I mean, that was for a lot of people seen as a backlink play, for example. And so talk to me, one of the things I'm really, I'm very bullish on is podcast guesting as opposed to guest posting. It is a form of content. Obviously, a lot of podcasters really want to promote their show, and so they will promote it, they'll give you back, you still get the same backlinks, but you also probably get more exposure, more content, I think, than kind of the guest blogging, like dumping grounds that exist on a lot of websites. So talk a little bit about that guest blogging versus being a guest on a podcast as a specific tactic.

Dale (13:14): Well, there's so much there because so much there that you're talking about guest blogging and then also blogging with video. Like we're doing it today, make sure that we have the video content and then also repurposing it for articles. So the reason why there's so much there is because we want to make sure that when we're doing all of those things and all of the other channels that we're on one plus one equals three, instead of I'm doing this over here and I'm doing that over there. And really, because everybody knows there's so many different channels we can be working on as marketers that we're stretched pretty thin in terms of what we're doing. So what we're seeing working for our clients is starting with video. So the conversation we're having today have an interesting conversation around unique perspectives on a relevant timely issue. And then from there you have video, you have a long form video, you can make short form videos.

(14:03): There's a number of channels that you can publish on LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, whatever works well for your audience. And then from there, we're able to do written content. So what I do is I'll take those videos, cut 'em down into the shorts that are all discreet ideas, and then transcribe those shorts, turn those into social media posts. For my work, it's usually LinkedIn, but there's many other channels. And then also create a content brief so that one of the writers on my team can write up the ideas as an article. So now I have a video, I have social media posts and I have an article, and I can take that stuff and build out more social media posts, also do my email marketing, and then I have something for my blog and my website. But that's all from one video. So that's what I'm saying. We're not doing these things as separate efforts. We're trying to figure out how we do one form of content, like the video we're doing today, get the ideas out of your head, the unique perspective, the type of ideas that Google's looking for, and then repurpose that in the right channels. The wrong thing you could do is say, I'm just going to put it everywhere. Well, guess what? Your customers are not everywhere. Figure out where your customers actually are, figure out what type of content that they want, and then repurpose it.

John (15:16): Well, and this might be a brilliant place for me to talk about AI frankly, because I think that what you just described, that's our approach as well. Video first, always even with clients, we interview them to get, because what we get out of video too, we get tone and style and voice and point of view because they basically talk, they talk and they talk in many cases their brand, if it's an owner or a CEO of a business. And I quite frankly think with that information, you can train a lot of the gpt in the world to actually now speak and repurpose content in a way that you would do it, or certainly a depth of knowledge about what you're talking about, case studies, example, clients, all that stuff can be fed now in there, and you're not just creating the generic content that the world is creating. So to me, that is one of the best uses, most efficient uses of some of the AI tools today.

Dale (16:14): Well, absolutely. I mean, as you know, John, you and I have talked about it. I've been pretty deep into AI for the last two years, and I've tried a number of different ways of replicating my voice, my ideas, and I've worked with some clients and agencies to do the same thing. We've had a lot of success replicating the style and voice of content. And where that brings you when you're using AI is we don't want to use AI to write content for us. They need to be our ideas. But the way that I've been thinking about it lately is when we're writing, there's thinking and then there's writing, and I've been exploring other ways to do the thinking. For example, I'm putting a lot more effort into content briefs nowadays and researching and making them as solid as you can imagine, and making sure that they're infused with my ideas on the topics so that the final piece of content will be unique.

(17:02): And then the writing is something one of my writers can help out with. And my writers are using AI tools to help with all sorts of things, but it's human written content at the end of the day. But that's when we've been thinking about it. But then there's another agency that I'm working with, actually, they're in Europe, and they do a lot of content with subject matter experts and thought leaders where they'll interview the subject matter expert and write the content. And what we've been working on with them is for the first few articles, they interview the subject matter expert, but then we take the results of that interview and then also anything else that person is written, maybe a white paper's ebook or a book, and then train that into ai. And then going forward when they're writing articles on behalf of this person, they can consult the ai, basically ask the questions instead of the subject matter expert. And that mostly works, I mean, the tools that just aren't exactly where I would want them to be nowadays. But that's the sort of thing. Maybe when GBT five comes out the summer that it'll work a hundred percent. I don't know. But we've got the infrastructure, it works about 80% at this

John (18:07): Point. Well, and I think that's a great point because I mean, my belief is I don't care what you're doing, it's only 80% there. You can ask it to write metadata for you. You don't want an article and you're still going to have to look at it. So I think a lot of people feel like this is the magic fairy dust and they just don't have to work. And frankly, with that in mind, the fact that so much garbage content is now going to be out there, what does that do? Or what does that say the bar is now to actually have this destination content you talk about,

Dale (18:43): Well, the bar is high because there's just so much out there. So really you need to, the mistake that a lot of us made was we were writing informative content. If I'm working for a clinic that might do addiction treatment therapy or something like that, then we're writing about what is the therapy, what are the different types of therapy, what are the medications, the treatments, the side effects? And it's like, okay, well, all that stuff has already been written and it's been written by institutions like the Mayo Clinic that are much more authoritative than you are Corner clinic. So we just need to dump that whole attitude and instead think, well, what makes my brand or me unique? What is our unique perspective? We might be the only clinic in this neighborhood in Boston, and we treat the types of folks that live in that neighborhood, whatever that means.

(19:30): And we were writing about that or we're telling customer stories, like I said before, what problem did they have? How did they try to solve it before? How did we help them solve it? But it doesn't sound like a case study, but the point is making it useful. And what Google's looking at is engagement with the content that you create. So if you create content that people actually click on and they go to your page, then that's engagement. People stay on the site and they don't bounce back to Google to click on something else. That's engagement. If they dive deeper into your site to learn more or eventually buy something that's engagement. So what matters is it's unique, so it gets in Google in the first place, but then that people engage with it. So Google will keep ranking it and keep sending traffic to it. So it has to be useful. And the last thing I'll say about this, sorry, I'm going on my idea train here, but the last, it has to be useful in the way you'll know how to create actually helpful, useful content for your customers is to talk to your customers.

(20:24): We're not hiding behind keyword research tools anymore or analytics. Have real conversations with real customers, understand what they're searching for, the problems they have, the questions that they ask when they're making a decision around your type of product or service, but talk to them, figure it out. And then you can put something on the web that is unique. Nobody else has done it, and it's super valuable to customer.

John (20:48): Yeah, I've been saying for a number of years now, content's not a tactic. It's the voice of your strategy. And that when I hear you describe, that's exactly what it is. It's like, here's how we intend to compete and that's what we're going to write about.

Dale (21:00): Absolutely. So just to riff on it a little bit more, you're going to have to slow me down, but just to riff on it there, what's going to happen is brands that are personality driven are going to end up doing better. Or maybe if you're able to build a community around your brand, whatever that looks like online or in real life, or if you're able, because I've worked with a number of brands that tapped into a tribe that already exists, fire department coffee, it started by a firefighter who's also a Navy veteran. So he's able to tap into those networks to show Google that he's gaining traction and all of that. And there are also some brands that are aligned with a purpose where it's like a mission driven brand, and Google can also see that traction and engagement. So those are the types of brands that I expect to do well going forward.

John (21:47): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Dale, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. So you want to invite, is there anywhere you invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work?

Dale (21:56): Yeah, check out my website, fire and spark.com. I'll spelled out and you can hit me up on LinkedIn or my email Dale, DAL e@fireandspark.com. So feel free to shoot me an email. I love SEO and SEO questions, so always happy to talk.

John (22:10): Awesome. Well great catching up with you again, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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How To Tell Data-Driven Stories: Crafting Compelling Narratives from Original Research

How To Tell Data-Driven Stories: Crafting Compelling Narratives from Original Research written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Michele Lin. Michele is the founder of Mantis Research, where she helps marketers conduct and publish compelling original research. With her expertise in leveraging data to drive impactful narratives, Michelle shares valuable insights on how to craft compelling stories from original research.

Key Takeaways

Learn all about the the transformative power of original research in content marketing, with an emphasis on its role in establishing credibility and trust. I and Michele highlight the process of crafting data-driven stories, from defining research objectives to repurposing findings across various channels for maximum impact. By leveraging original research, marketers can optimize search engine visibility, attract backlinks, and position themselves as authoritative voices in their industries, driving deeper engagement and meaningful impact through their content.

 

Questions I ask Michele Linn:

[01:49] What is original research?

[03:11] How do you transform survey and data into a compelling story?

[04:35] Do you believe that sharing data builds thought leadership?

[06:00] Tell us about using data to validate a story

[07:28] How do you probe for data-manipulators?

[09:16] How do you draw conclusions from graphs, charts and data altogether?

[13:15] Is there a benchmark number of responses that can make a given data valid?

[15:06] Do interacting industries bring new thought to data collection?

[16:47] What are some of the great social media platforms for sharing data?

[20:04] What are your thoughts on search engines and how they view data?

[21:12] Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you and find out more about the work you’re doing?

 

 

More About Michele Linn:

• Connect with Michele Linn on LinkedIn
• Visit her Website 

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Porkbun

Go to http://porkbun.com/DuctTapeMarketing24 to get a .BIO domain name for your link in bio page for less than $3 at Porkbun today.

 

Duct Tape Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I've been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It's changed the results that I'm seeing. It's changed my engagement with clients. It's changed my engagement with the team. I couldn't be happier. Honestly. It's the best investment I ever made. What

John (00:16): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It's time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(01:02): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Michelle Lin. She's the founder of Mantis Research where she helps marketers conduct and publish compelling original research. Prior to Mantis, Michelle was the head of editorial at the Content Marketing Institute where she led the company's editorial strategy. She'd often been cited as a content marketing influencer and was named as one of Folio's Top Women in media. So Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michele (01:35): Thanks so much for having me, John.

John (01:37): So you mentioned it in your bio, but also part of my interest was you had written about this idea of using original research in content production. So this may sound silly, but let's start with what is original research?

Michele (01:52): That is not a silly question at all. I feel like there's a lot of people here research, and it means a lot of different things to people. So when I talk about original research, I'm talking about that type of research that you take and you publish out for thought leadership, content marketing and so forth. So it's very different. I have some people contact me and they want to learn more about their audience and so forth. That's very valuable. But if it's not published, it doesn't really fit in the context of our conversation here.

John (02:22): So maybe give me an example of some that you've worked with that would be pretty concrete, that type of business, and here's the research they did and then we can get into how they used it.

Michele (02:31): Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of different original research that you can do. You can do anecdotal, you can do first party interviews, you can do first party data analysis. The kind that I do specifically is survey-based research. So for instance, like you mentioned, I used to work for CMI for many years, content Marketing Institute, and one of the things that we did there every single year is we conducted a survey of marketers to understand if and how they were using content marketing. So we took everything that we learned, we asked questions that we were asked and we're wondering about. We took all of those insights and then we published those out to help other marketers do their jobs better with content marketing.

John (03:11): So surveys and data are lovely. How do you turn them into a compelling story, particularly one that maybe age your cause of getting more customers?

Michele (03:21): So I think it's a really interesting question. I think a lot of people, I think some people want to do research as a way to prove the value of what they are selling. I'm personally not a fan of that so much. I look at as more I look at original research as a way to show your customers that you know them that will hopefully generate like and trust with you. So I always tell people think about what are those unanswered questions in the industry that you can answer with data? Or I tell people, what are those things that you see and how can you help people do their jobs better? How can we ask questions to uncover those or how can we uncover what their pain points are so you can help them? So I look at it as a way to be relentlessly helpful to your audience. And when you do that, it's not always a direct correlation to sales. Although I have had many people tell me that they do get direct correlations to revenue and sales and so forth, but for many, it's just a great way to do thought leadership.

John (04:18): Many years ago, PR was about getting media mentions, and we used to do some of this kind of original research just because a lot of people would be writing a story about something and they wanted research to validate their story. And so it was a really good way to get quoted. Do you find that sharing this kind of research is a way to also build your thought leadership, your mentions out there in the world?

Michele (04:46): Yeah, I mean, I have this graphic that I often share. I talk about the value of original research. So yeah, it helps people get mentioned. It helps people get interviews for podcasts. It helps people. They base speaking presentations off of their research. It helps with leads, it helps with sales, it helps sales have better conversations. They have something new and interesting to reach out about so it doesn't feel so salesy. And I think it even helps marketers just find joy. So many marketers get excited to do something new and meaningful and different, and I love just seeing people get energized about the work that they do. And then too, we're talking about today when you do a study, well, you can take it and you can repurpose it. So every single client that I work with, one of their goals is always we want to create this editorial engine based on this Swiss one research study. So it works on so many different levels.

John (05:37): One more question related to that and then we can maybe start breaking down. How are the ways that you would repurpose this, but what about creating industry benchmarks as a way as somewhat of a lead generator? I see a lot of people do that to say you're spending X on ads, for example, but in the industry, this is what's going on and here's why you're spending too much or not spending enough or talk a little bit about using data to validate a story.

Michele (06:07): Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think there's a lot of value, like you said, in using data to validate what people believe or using data. Like you said, if you could find that benchmark, which you can get via survey data or you can get via first party data analysis depending on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to analyze the behavior, sometimes first party data analysis is better. But anyway, if you find that benchmark and you can validate what someone believes to be true or they want to validate where they actually need to be, and then you can give them other data to help them get there, I think that's a really powerful thing to do. I once worked with this client and we had this whole model and we knew there was four stages. I can't remember what they were, but from beginner to advanced, and we wouldn't call them those four things, but you could see the beginners do this, the next stage, they do this and so on. So no matter where you were, there was very concrete data-driven evidence. If you're here do X, Y, Z things to get better. So I think that validation and those ideas of what to do, those insights are really helpful.

John (07:10): Well, and in some cases, just even telling somebody, Hey, your peers do this and you're not doing it, is also a way to get somebody's attention perhaps as well. So if you're listening and you are a true data scientist, cover your ears right now for what I'm going to say. There's a lot of people that can make data say anything they want it to say to support and validate any case they're trying to make. How do you sometimes look for like, let's probe for this because that'll give us the greatest opportunity to make something to tell a great story, or they're kind of proven things that you should be looking for to what you might even do research on.

Michele (07:49): Yes, absolutely. And to your point, John, I think people are smart and I think if your research neatly points or neatly proves, Hey, by the way, this proves that you actually need to buy X, Y, Z product or work with us, people see right through that. And I don't think that research is very credible, which goes back to really trying to be relentlessly helpful. So what I always tell clients to do is to think about things like, for instance, what are some things that you think people in your industry aren't doing but should be? What are those missed opportunities? How can we poke at that or how can we find disconnects? So for instance, I once did a survey with marketing profs and we asked a question to understand what would you like your B marketing? Which elements does your B2B marketing training have and what would you like it to have? We found these huge gaps in disconnects. People wanted examples and frameworks and so forth. So it's not a big fan of surveying for pain or to survey to, you need to do this, but really figure out, like I said, gaps, disconnects, missed opportunities and so forth. And then coincidentally, those are also great jumping off places to then share your thoughts and really use that for repurposing and so forth. So does that

John (09:02): Help? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Definitely the gaps. I think you might develop products and surfaces based out of that kind research, let alone this kind of editorial approach. But let's turn to the editorial part. A bunch of graphs and charts are lovely, but how do you make then say, what's our angle? What's our story?

Michele (09:24): So I start that thinking process at the beginning during the planning and the strategy phase. And as we're thinking, I always think about what topic can we talk about? What topic can we really dig into that says something new that's relevant to our audience and that aligns with our brand. And so once you have that topic nailed down, it then comes to, okay, well what are those headlines you want? What are those I call 'em big picture questions that you want to answer? What are those big broad stories you want to tell? We always figured that out at the starting place, like figuring out how can you be most helpful and then taking those questions and then answering them with the survey data so that by the time you get to the data analysis, you're then answering those questions and your themes and your stories are much more likely to rise to the surface because you've done the thinking work from the beginning.

John (10:17): So I mean, are you suggesting we have a hypothesis story almost and then hopefully the data validates that? Or are we going to just go with the story that the data tells us?

Michele (10:29): I think you can certainly can have an hypothesis. Sometimes the data shows it to be correct, sometimes it doesn't. But I think if you thinking to yourself again, what are those questions that my audience has or what are those things that I want my audience to think differently about? How can we structure questions to poke at those particular things and answer those questions? So it's almost figuring out what big broad questions you want answered knowing that the data's going to be what the data's going to be. Oftentimes it's not that surprising, but sometimes we hear things that aren't expected what we expected. So a hypothesis is great, but I wouldn't lean too heavily on that. I would lean more onto what would be relentlessly helpful to answer for our audience,

John (11:15): Your website, your domain, I mean, that's real estate that you want to own. If you're an influencer, online creator, blogger, or really anyone who cares about their personal brand, then you need a unique domain. And now you can get your name, do bio, right, John Jantz, do bio, right, create a bio page to house all your various interests. It's short, simple, easy to remember. Put all your links in one place instead of a laundry list of locations you want to send people in a profile, you can reserve your own link for around three bucks right now at pork bun.com/duct tape marketing 24, that's right around $3 right now. Pork bun.com/duct tape marketing 24. Do you have an example of how you've taken maybe numbers and charts and really created or Yeah, an example would be helpful, but if nothing else, just your approach too. The most impact comes if you can make the data tell a really great story and use even storytelling techniques. So do you have an approach to getting there or even a great example where you've used data to really enhance some storytelling?

Michele (12:35): Yeah, absolutely. So in that example I mentioned with marketing profs, they were studying how B2B marketing teams were approaching training. And so one of the things that we did is we dug, we decided we want to understand what is the culture of training in the organization. We had a four C model. I'm trying to remember all of the Cs. What is the personal commitment to actually training? What is the composition of training look like? Does it include the examples and so forth? So it's really nice sometimes just to base your story around some kind of model or some kind of framework. I think it makes it really easy to tell that story at the end if you kind of ask questions around that particular model.

John (13:15): One more sort of technical question. Is 10 responses valid enough? Do we need 200? I mean is mean obviously people that do this kind of true research for a living would say you need X and there's a margin of error and all that kind of good stuff. But I mean, a lot of ways we're almost just looking for themes and things, right? So talk a little bit about the validity part, I guess.

Michele (13:39): Yeah, that's a great question. It's something people ask all the time. I'm also a very big proponent of not doing survey-based research if it's not going to work for your case. And one of those reasons, like you said, if you thought you could only reach 10 people, don't do survey-based research instead, interview those 10 people, get into more nuance, pull out those themes that way. That's very valid and useful. I tell people in general, if you're doing a niche B2B audience survey, at least 125 people at the bare minimum, anytime you can survey more than that is even better. Because one of the great values of doing research is that you can start to compare segments. What are those who are more effective doing differently, or what do different industries do and so forth. And obviously if you have a smaller sample size, you're not able to slice and dice the data. And because those segments all become so very small, so long answer is more is always better. At least 1 25 for B two, B two 50 is even better. And then for consumer based studies, I mean typically I would say 1000 people is a good benchmark.

John (14:45): So one of the types of surveys I guess I've had the most fun with is when you have both sides of a market. So the sellers of something and the buyers of something and to find out how off they are. So a great one might be home buyers and real estate agents, how their opinions about what the market wants or what they want are so vastly different. I think there's a lot of opportunities, and I think there's a lot of industries that have that kind of approach they could bring in, don't they?

Michele (15:12): Without question. So I've done a lot of those studies and I actually am fielding a couple of studies right now that we're looking at two different audiences and we can find stories within that audience. But our bigger story is going to be to show the gap and the differences between those two audiences that work together. There's slightly more complicated because you need to survey two audiences, but they are so interesting and the stories you can tell I feel are exponentially more interesting, exponentially more. So that's a great way to do it, John. Yeah,

John (15:40): So we recently did surveyed fractional CMOs and buyers of fractional CMO services, and one of the things that just immediately jumped out was we asked them what was the most important in, we asked the fractional CMO, what did you think was the most important aspect of why they were hiring you? And then we asked the business owner, and the business owner was very interested in, they have deep experience in our industry. And the fractional CMO was like, no, that's almost bottom of the list. Like a vast, it's this multiple industries that we work with, and really we can dive into what it means necessarily. But I think it showed a real disconnect between the two as far as what they thought was valuable. And those kinds of things to me are also great in messaging for just even our sales materials and things because it's like that's an objection almost that we have to bat down in our initial messaging.

Michele (16:39): Yes, that's a great example. And they're great conversation starters on social media. Why do you think this is?

John (16:46): Yeah, so let's talk about channels and format and how do we get the most out of this stuff editorially, I know you come up with a whole plan for week one, week two, week three kind of thing. So talk a little bit about the basic plan and the channels.

Michele (17:02): So what I like to do, and I'm just going to back up for one quick second because one thing I think is helpful. I think so many people here reuse research and they don't even know what that means. So if you don't mind, I'm just going to talk about that really quickly, then I think that that flows into really well into how to use those things. But when I talk about repurposing research, I look at it, I have a model called the five R is of repurposing research, but the first R is all around reuse. So just taking that chart and putting it on social media or in your blog post, it's very easy, but there's nothing that you really change. The next one is repackaged. So taking that and taking your key findings and turning those into a webinar or something like that where you really make it fit the actual channel.

(17:41): The third thing, and these last I think are far more interesting, the third way to repurpose research is to reflect on it in public, just like we just talked about. Have a conversation, share your thoughts, get other ideas and perspectives. It makes the data really meaningful. It's my favorite way to use research. I think it brings joy to people, but you could also take your research and you could use to reveal solutions. So what are those missed opportunities and then pain points and how would you solve them? And then the last way is to reimagine it. So what is all of those different segments that you can compare? How can you look at data that you haven't already published and then take that to the market to give people a different insight? So I think it's just helpful to help people think it's not just taking charts and placing them in different things. It's really taking that one study and trying to think what are all of the stories that I can tell from it holistically, and how can I tell them in a way that's going to be really meaningful to my audience?

John (18:38): And obviously every channel's got a different format that the data seems to work better in, or the story seems to work better in, right. LinkedIn and YouTube are completely different in how you would package the content, right?

Michele (18:50): Absolutely. Like you said, YouTube and LinkedIn are very different. And I have this, I've worked through this, but you can use LinkedIn in 10 different ways to actually share your research. So there's a lot of different ways, no matter what channel you're on, you can think about using your research in a lot of different ways.

John (19:08): One we haven't really touched on because I think when you talk about repurposing content, people immediately jump to a blog post or LinkedIn posts, but what about presenting it live? You talk about speaking and webinars and maybe even doing pure round tables. Could you see those as channels for doing this as well?

Michele (19:27): I 1000% see those as channels for this. I think especially webinars. And the other thing I think about too is what is the goal with your research? If your goal is to get leads, do stuff like webinars. I talk to so many clients and their webinar is their best lead generating thing that they're actually doing. But if your goal is brand awareness, speak at those events or be on other people's podcasts. So really try to think of what are your goals and what are the channels to help you get there? And that's how I would prioritize all of the opportunity that you have in front of you.

John (20:01): Okay. One last question on the content itself and using it, do you have an opinion on how search engines view this type of data and research and backing as opposed to theory and opinion?

Michele (20:15): So I will say I feel like I had a better sense of it a couple years ago, and my searches has changed so significantly, so I'm not going to say I have the end all be all answer. That said, that's a really great question. You're posing that said, I know so many people who are doing research and you look in tools like consumer or tools that track links, their research is their best source of getting back links because if you're answering those unanswered questions, then people link to you as the source. So I don't know if that's changed recently, but I know historically research has been wonderful if you're trying to get back links, build your domain authority and so forth.

John (20:53): Yeah, I mean, I have hundreds of speakers that go out there and they make presentations and they always have somebody's research or somebody's statistic to validate their point, and they probably just went and did a search and grabbed it. So I'm certain that a lot of, well, I know for a fact backlinks are coming that way. Well, Michelle, I appreciate

Michele (21:09): A hundred percent. It works well.

John (21:10): Taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, is there someplace you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about the work you're doing?

Michele (21:17): Yeah, I would recommend connecting me with me on LinkedIn at Michelle Lynn. I'm also in the process of updating my website, so it's a little, but you're welcome to visit my website too, mantis research.com.

John (21:28): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment. I think, well, I see you in Boston in the fall at B2B or at Marketing profs.

Michele (21:35): I don't have plans yet, but I'm still kind of getting my whole schedule together. Okay.

John (21:39): I think you've spoken there before, have you not?

Michele (21:42): I have. Yeah. It's a great event for anyone who's thinking about going go without hesitation. That's fantastic.

John (21:47): It is. It's a lot of fun. Alright, take care. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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How to Be an Entrepreneur in 2024: 15 Tactics Revealed

How to Be an Entrepreneur in 2024: 15 Tactics Revealed written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Paul Cheek, a serial tech-preneur, educator, and software engineer. Paul Cheek is also a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management and the co-founder of Oceanworks. Our discussion covers the intricacies of entrepreneurship, focusing on the 15 tactics outlined in his latest book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship Startup Tactics.”

 

Key Takeaways

In this episode you’ll learn:

• The importance of structured goal setting
• a disciplined approach to business for today’s entrepenurs
• Market testing for product validation
• Effective marketing and sales tactics, and strategies for overcoming fear and uncertainty. By implementing these tactics, aspiring entrepreneurs can navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship with confidence and drive their ventures toward success.

Questions I ask Paul Cheek:

[01:47] What is disciplined entrepreneurship

[04:02] Do the tactics of disciplined entrepreneurship begin with vision?

[06:30] How do you ensure the vision is shared organization-wide?

[07:50] How do you tie OKRs to shared vision and goals?

[09:59] How are OKRs, visions and goals applied in OceanWorks?

[12:00] How do the illustrations in the book augment the entire message?

[14:39] Do you have a favorite tactic?

[18:52] Talk about the easter eggs laid across the book for reader to discover?

[22:53] Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you, and grab a copy of Discipline Entrepreneurship Startup Tactics

 

More About Paul Cheek:

• Connect with Paul Cheek on LinkedIn
• Visit his Website 

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

Duct Tape Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I've been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It's changed the results that I'm seeing. It's changed my engagement with clients. It's changed my engagement with the team. I couldn't be happier. Honestly. It's the best investment I ever made. What

Speaker 2 (00:17): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It's time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

John (01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsh. My guest today is Paul Cheek. He's a serial tech entrepreneur, entrepreneurship educator and software engineer. He is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management, the executive director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the co-founder of Today we're going to talk about his new book, disciplined Entrepreneurship Startup Tactics, 15 Tactics to Turn Your Business Plan into a Business. Paul, welcome to the show,

Paul (01:42): John. Thanks for having me.

John (01:44): Alright, so first let's define what is disciplined entrepreneurship as opposed to, what's a good answer now? Unruly entrepreneurship?

Paul (01:54): Yeah, yeah, it's a good question, right? And you think about it, it's not what people would usually jump to when they think of entrepreneurship, this idea, and I think even before we do that, John, we've got to define what is entrepreneurship. Well, that's true, and this is first couple sentences of the book, right? Entrepreneurship is about more than just startups. It's about more than just going and building new companies. It's about doing more than is probably reasonable with however much time, however much money you have control of. And that might be in a startup, it might be as a founder of a startup, it might be as an early employee, as a startup. It might also be in Big Co. It might be in a big large company. It could be in a nonprofit, it could be anywhere. And so what is discipline entrepreneurship? It's taking a structured systematic approach to having an outsized impact, whatever your goal or your vision might be.

(02:45): And so when we think about that systematic structured approach, we're thinking about this engineering approach to entrepreneurship. A lot of people think, and this is one of what I believe to be one of the most common misconceptions in entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, they wake up in the morning and they do whatever they want all day long. They spend their time however, they so choose whatever they're going to be most interested in. And I believe that's wildly misguided. The best entrepreneurs build structure into their lives, into their business to help them work towards that ultimate vision. And so discipline, entrepreneurship thinks about what's the most structured approach we can take that's going to increase our odds of success. And startup tactics is a continuation of the original discipline. Entrepreneurship, looking at not just what do we do to go and to start a new venture, whether that's a new startup or within a larger organization. Startup tactics looks at how do you actually do it right? A lot of people know that they want to go start a company and they know generally what to do. The question is how do you take those first steps? How do you make sure you're being as efficient with your resources as possible?

John (03:49): So a lot of times when people hear tactics, they start jumping to, oh, we need Facebook campaigns or whatever tactics you start, of course, and this is the right place to start. But I think a lot of people probably jump right over this with the idea of vision. You mentioned already, I mean, before we decide any kind of tactics, doesn't it start there?

Paul (04:09): Yeah, absolutely. Right. It's like, Hey, why are we doing this? And discipline entrepreneurship looks at this idea of personal detri or a reason for existence. We've got to know what's our vision, where are we going? And the first tactic that entrepreneurs need is a really strong approach to setting goals. Like I said earlier, this idea that entrepreneurs wake up in the morning, they do whatever they want know. It's like entrepreneurs have goals. They know what they're working towards. Oftentimes what I see happen is entrepreneurs may have an amazing vision. They may have some goals, but then if you look at their daily to-do list, right? If we pull out the to-do list, there's a bunch of things on there that don't actually work towards that next milestone, that next goal. So we start with goals. We don't have goals. We're going to wind up doing a lot of things using our most precious resources to go and to achieve something, but that something doesn't move us towards the end goal.

(04:58): And when I think about it, it's something that everybody thinks they're good at, everybody thinks they're really good at setting goals, but when the rubber meets the road, when we actually look at those goals, we analyze 'em like, are those really good goals? We got to take a step back and revise. And the more we can build this skillset of setting goals, the better those goals are going to be on a recurring basis. Whenever we go and we begin that next stage of growth, whenever we think about what's happening with our resource pool, are we getting, are we fundraising? Have we raised money? Do we have more people on the team? Have we lost a couple people? Were those people part-time? Were they full-time? Are we losing or gaining time or money? If we are, then our goals should evolve. They should change in an instant because if we have more time, we have more people on the team where we have more money, our goals should be more ambitious than they were prior. Likewise, if we lose somebody from the team, we've got less time and we need to reset on our goals. We've got to set realistic goals for our team.

John (05:56): So goals, vision, I think are really easy, especially sometimes in the startups. It's like, this is why we're doing this. This is what I'm passionate about. And then chaos hits and diversity hits and more people come onto the team. How do you take that vision and make sure that you're aligning it and that it's shared and that it's the right one still?

Paul (06:13): Yeah, it, it's a good question. Is it the right one still? That one that's so context specific, that's hard to really dig into the details of, but is it a shared vision? That's a good question. And that has to be evaluated with every single person who comes onto the team. The thing that I do with companies in the earliest stages, we do this in our class at MIT, we will sit the founders down next to each other and we'll say, why don't you each grab a pen, grab a piece of paper, write down your vision of the future state of the world, what does the world look like with your innovation, with your business, once it's been wildly successful, what is that future state of the world that you are working towards? And nobody's allowed to talk during that exercise. And then we'll say, all right, put your pens down.

(06:58): Let's see what you came up with. Does it match what the other co-founders wrote down? And if it doesn't, then we need to reevaluate as a team, because if one co-founder has one vision and another co-founder has another vision, even if they're slightly different, they're going in different trajectories. And over the course of time, they'll move further and further apart. And the same thing is true of goal setting. Making sure that as we, and this is covered in the book, it's like as we write down a goal, how clear is it? Is it open to interpretation? Are we going to come back if we're doing quarterly goals and come back and in a few months and then look at them and say, yes, I think we achieved it, and somebody else says, no, we obviously didn't achieve that. How open to interpretation are these goals? The clarity is super important.

John (07:38): Yeah. Yeah. So there's a concept in the book that I was introduced to it. I want to give credit to Google or folks at Google, but called OKRs that shows up in this book as well. How do you tie OKRs to shared vision and goals and the fact that the founder has maybe different goals, I mean shared vision, but different specific goals than maybe team leaders?

Paul (08:03): Yeah, absolutely. Well, OKRs is introduced as one wait to set. Well, people say, oh, do we have to use ok? It's like what goal setting methodology you choose. It doesn't matter to me. What I care about is that somebody actually sat down and thought about these goals and we know why we're doing what we're doing. Our daily activities mapped to those goals and those goals mapped to our vision. When I think about it, it's in the early stages of that entire co-founding team needs to be aligned on what these goals are and the fact that they do actually work toward that vision. As the team grows, as we add additional people, you're going to have different goals for each team, and those teams are going to be responsible for having achieved their objectives. When I think about it, it's, it's got to trickle down, but in the early stages, when there is that chaos that you described, John, we've got to make sure that while none of these goals are open to interpretation, we have flexibility in them because things might change, our segment might change.

(08:56): We might run an experiment. We say, alright, we actually, we need to pivot that market segment a little bit. We're going to have to revise the goals that are associated with it. And so just allowing for that flexibility and really just the constant communication around these goals. It's not like we set them today and we come back to them in a few months. We could be constantly talking about these, and if those lines of communication are open, people are going to fall out of line Just in terms of where we're going as an overall organization. But one of the things that we connect, a lot of these tactics are all interrelated. When we get to, for example, the tactic on building a product roadmap that has to directly tie to the organization level goals. So in the early days, everybody's doing everything, but once you have a product team, making sure that the elements of the product roadmap tie back to the organization level goals is just so important. The same thing could be true with the marketing team and the sales team. Finding that alignment between each team's goals with the overall organization level goals, to the point we try to drive home.

John (09:53): I love examples. People learn from examples, and we had a case of an example business called Ocean Works. How does Ocean work vision and goals and OKRs, and as you've kind of grown folks there, how are you applying this or how have you seen it applied at Ocean Works?

Paul (10:09): Yeah, I mean, for Ocean Works, you set goals, and as the business evolves, those goals change, right? The timescale for those goals has changed over the course of time. The goals themselves have become more refined. The team has gotten more familiar with the goal setting methodology, how to set them and to make sure that everybody is on the same page. So a lot of the stuff we're talking about is absolutely manifested at Ocean Works in the first years of building the business and of course beyond as well.

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John (11:50): So the book is beautifully illustrated. Obviously we don't have all the pictures here to show, but I'm curious. That was probably an investment decision that you made. How do you feel like that? What do you feel like that adds to the book, particularly when it comes to the specific tactics?

Paul (12:06): These illustrations are so important, John, so important and all credit on the illustrations that you see here, Maria, Versace, fabulous, just fabulous. Those illustrations are really important to this book. Why? Because entrepreneurship and the pursuit of building a new business, that seems like something only entrepreneurs can do. Not everybody thinks of themselves immediately as an entrepreneur. So the illustrations are designed to make the book approachable. They're designed to give it a little bit of life. You can go through and we can look at all these experiments and define variables and hypotheses, and then looking at database outcomes. That's not as approachable as something that has some visual elements to it, but the illustrations are also designed to communicate. One of the elements of entrepreneurial math that we talk about, PDOs, John PDOs, you may know PDOs for solving equations. We look at it at MIT as an order of operations, not of parentheses and then exponents, et cetera.

(13:10): We look at it as what is the order of operations that we need to follow in terms of our actions to take that business plan and turn it into a real business? For us, that looks like starting with setting goals, those foundations. From there, it says, let's go test the market before we've ever built product. Once we've got that line of customers waiting down the street to use this product, we think they want, but we haven't built yet, let's go build it. Right? Let's go start that product development process. And then once we've got customers and we have products, we know what we need to continue to grow and scale this business, the time, the money, the team, and then we look at resource acquisition. It's the order of operations through these different stages of the tactics that the illustrations help to convey. When we look at it, John, you go through this and the big thing that I really wanted to communicate is this idea that you're starting down here in the jungle, in the foundations at the bottom, you're working your way towards the big city in the background, but these tactics, it's not like once you do them, you're all done.

(14:12): You see the floor of the jungle in the beginning. It carries all the way through to the end. You see the green stripe going in the distance, and that's because these tactics always carry on for you. You can learn them sequentially, but they're executed in harmony, and I think that's something that's really important for entrepreneurs to understand. You can learn these as you go, and that's a really important thing to do, but you can't just say, oh, well, we set our goals now we're done. Every time you take an action, those goals are revised.

John (14:39): So we've hit on a couple of the early stage tactics. I always love to ask authors this, especially when they have a number in their title. Is there one that's like a favorite of yours or one we haven't talked about that? Think I don't want to talk about that one?

Paul (14:53): Yeah. I think for me, John, when I look at the different tactics in this book, there's no silver bullet in entrepreneurship, right? Everybody. That's important for entrepreneurs to understand, right? It's not like the thing that I would call out in this process. It's not one of the 15 tactics I would call out the market testing stage in particular. Everybody thinks, oh, I'm going to go build a product and then I'll sell it. It's like, well, what if you build it? You waste all the time and money that you have available to you and you go to try to sell it and nobody wants it. We've got to validate that there are customers who are going to buy our product before we've ever built the product. So when I look at market testing, it goes through four tactics. First and very importantly is market research. Market research specifically.

(15:33): Primary market research is one of the most important tactics that entrepreneurs can gain because that's our process of learning. When we are a new business, we don't have a whole historical data set like a big company hacks. We need to build up our own unique dataset of who are our customers in our new market that we are creating? What do they care about? We need to get to know them as well as we know some of our best friends, we use the information, we learn from them about the problems that they face. We're going to try and communicate that out to the world. The problem is you hear a lot of startup pitches and they go on and on. They have so much to say about a new complex innovation that they're developing. As a new startup though, you don't have people who are going to pay attention to you forever.

(16:09): And so for that reason, entrepreneurs need to figure out how do we use the assets tactic? The second in the market testing stage, how do we communicate the value that we're creating and how we create it in 10 seconds or less? How do we use an animation or a video or something that's going to show our end users the value that we can create before we built a product in a very short period of time? While we can hold their attention, we use those assets in the two tactics within market testing that help us to actually talk to real customers and market to them and sell to them. That's marketing and sales. Marketing. It's like you think about corporate market. We could go take a class in marketing when you're in the early stages of building a new business or when you're in the early stages of building a new product at an existing organization is so different.

(16:54): Why? Because we need to be thinking about what is the fastest, cheapest, most data rich approach we can take to running a marketing experiment? It's all rooted in kind of a scientific method, the marketing and the sales. It's we have a hypothesis about what people want, who wants it, who those customers are. We've got to define our variables, run the experiment, come back with real data, and so specifically the market testing and marketing tactic looks at how do we leverage this mousetrap model, the mousetrap model of saying, we think this customer segment wants this value prop. Let's put this value prop in front of that customer segment and see do they react? Not will they pay us, right? Not can we drive revenue? Can we drive conversions? It's can we get them to give us the smallest form of currency that they have available to them?

(17:39): Things like an email address. Will they give me the email address to stay updated on the progress of this product? Will they join the newsletter? Maybe will they pre-order? If we can get them to give us just a little bit to validate and we come back with data and say, yes, a very large segment of the people who we've targeted with these demographic psychographics want what we think they do, that gives us the competence and conviction to move forward. It gives us data to say, yeah, we should go and invest and build this new product, this new innovative product. And the sales tactic looks at things like, how do we run that first outbound sales campaign? We don't want to reach out to anyone and everyone. Let's build a really targeted lead list of our core end user group. Let's craft some messaging towards them with that value prop we want to test.

(18:22): Let's start sending it out and watching this really closely, just like we would watch a science experiment and see what happens. What are the results? Do they come back to us? Do they click links? Things like that that give us the data. We need that unique data set to keep moving, and when nothing works, I think that's a wonderful thing, right? Because we haven't wasted a lot of time and money. We didn't buy a billboard, we didn't name a stadium. We ran a sub hundred dollars marketing experiment to see do people want what we really think they do?

John (18:51): So great deal of more to cover in this book, but I want to focus on the Easter Egg hidden in the book.

Paul (18:58): Which one's that?

John (18:59): Well, I didn't necessarily, the folks that Wiley, I think told us that there was several instances where you did some things in the book that you wanted people to discover.

Paul (19:10): There are a few things. I mean, the biggest one, the most exciting one to me is that within the book, you are going to find me in one of the illustrations and you can find one instance in the disciplined entrepreneurship, expanded and updated version, and one version in the startup tactics version. So that's the biggest Easter egg there could possibly be. When I first saw it, I was so excited. On a more serious note, as you go through these books, there's a couple Easter eggs. Most of those are right within the case examples. Every tactic has a case example that shows you not just, alright, here's what to do, how to do it. Here's an example of somebody who actually did that, and there's two, I'm going to give you two because they're tightly aligned. We think about how these tactics can be used in the course of building a brand new business, something that's brand new to the world.

(20:01): We haven't raised any money, we don't have a team. We're just trying to figure it all out, and there's an amazing story. Within that references two students, co-founders, their names are Anisha and Madeline, and they started a business using this market testing and this marketing tactic that we just talked about, their company's called Livy, matches up women who moved to new cities to make friends in small groups. Instead of one-on-one, and they didn't build their product. They decided that they were coming through one of our classes at MIT. They said, look, we've got an amazing business plan and they do fabulous business plan. They said, let's go see if we can get some people who really resonate with this value proposition. They took a very structured approach to testing different value propositions with their target core customer segment. What they did, the example, the detailed analysis that they did of the data that came back is hugely valuable to entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial marketers, folks who want to test value props because they came back with a list of 1500 women.

(21:03): It was actually 1800 women who wanted this value prop before they'd ever built any product. So that sure number, the volume of people who wanted what they could build provides confidence and conviction to go to build it. Definitely go check out their business too. Livy app is the website, and it's one of those things, you just see this data come back. It's so compelling. That's a new business. The other Easter egg example I'd give you is a gentleman named Camilo Foco, a PhD student in the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence lab. Camilo amazing. He was kind of off of the race and he'd already raised millions of dollars, had a team of at least 20 people, if not more, when he sat down and used these tactics for the first time. There's a wonderful example of how he conveyed his extremely complex artificial intelligence advertising software and all that it can do for a brand running advertisements to improve the effectiveness of those advertisements in sub 10 seconds. Extremely complex technology, huge value prop, a number of different functionalities to convey their animation, which there's a link in the book for people to go check out the live animation. It's one of the best examples of how to leverage that tactic, and Camillo and his team did a lot of other things leveraging different tactics, but I just think that example is gold. It's something that entrepreneurs, that innovators can leverage to go and test, much like with the Libby example, test the value prop before they go much further to minimize investment in any new idea.

John (22:37): Don't want to be out there solving problems that people don't know they have. Right?

Paul (22:41): That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

John (22:43): Awesome. Well, Paula, it's a pleasure having you on the show for a few minutes today. Is there some place you'd invite people to connect with you or certainly learn where they can pick up copies of discipline, entrepreneurship, startup tactics?

Paul (22:55): Oh, absolutely. Come find me on LinkedIn. Visit the books website, it's startup tactics.net, and of course, grab a copy of the book and leverage all the tactics within to take that idea and turn it into a reality. Amazon, Barnes and noble bookshop.org available everywhere, and my big goal is to get this in the hands of more and more entrepreneurs. So if you know somebody who's going to start a business or somebody who's going to build a new venture within a large organization, get them a copy of the, let's get this in the hands of everybody who can put it to good use.

John (23:28): Awesome. Well again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you on these days after on the road.

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