John Jantsch (00:00): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I'm doing another solo show today. I wanna talk about communication and business and working with customers and all the other various forms of communication. that go on in our business? I'm gonna make myself sound really old here, but back in the day, when I first started my business, the only thing we had to worry about was we got mail in the mailbox and we got phone calls, and then we got really fancy and got a codone or a, whatever. We called those things. And we got voice messages recorded. That was it. We checked the mail, we checked the message box on the phone and that was it. Or we answered the phone and we talked to people today. We do still get the occasional phone calls. We get voicemails, we get text messages.

People are now chatting into us from our Google business pages. Obviously we get email by the droves. People write reviews and we get notified about those. Facebook messenger is a way that people can get ahold of us. Instagram, DMS, I don't know WhatsApp chats. So the point is we now have opportunities coming at us from 55 different places. I won't even mention the fact that we got all these social platforms we're supposed to engage in. And so, you know, what is a person to do? Because I contend because of this and because people want to communicate the way they want to communicate with us, we're missing tons of opportunities. Business owners are missing tons of opportunities. People expect today to get instant replies or to, as I said, communicate in the way that they want to communicate. So of late, the advice I've been giving folks is we need to start using some of the technology to automate our communication.

And don't turn off the the recording yet. I'm not necessarily saying that we never talk to human beings, but I think what we need to do is we need to start automating even the flow of how we get these conversations, how we can be checking in on them, how we can respond. Imagine if you had like one place that you had to go to, or an app on your phone that you went to, and all of that stuff was sucked into that. That's what I think that's the holy grail of communication today. And the good news is the tools are there. The tools are getting there at least with a little bit of work and is my blatant pitch. That's a tool that we're working on. We're actually building this unified communication. It's not there. I can't send you to a website, but if you're listening to this and you think I want that, for my business.

It's just John at duct tape, marketing.com. Send me a note and we'll start talking about it. But one of the drivers of this, I think as well is SMS text messaging. Everybody's got a phone, every single one of those phones is equipped with that functionality. And it's becoming there's surveys showing that 50, 60, 70 pan upon the generation, you were born in 60, 70% of folks prefer to communicate via text, especially early on. I mean, if you were trying to close a deal and finalize some things, but if we're just trying to get information, we're just trying to say, Hey, I have an interest in getting X or I wanna schedule appointment for X text. Is it? I mean like it or not, there's still some people that don't think it has a place in business, but like it or not, it is a huge driver today of communication.

And if you are not using that functionality, that technology as a part of your overall communication or overall customer journey, you are missing tons and tons of opportunity. In fact, I would suggest there's some buyers out there that are, that are just gonna say, oh, you don't have text. I'm not gonna do business with you. I can't schedule automatically. I'm not gonna do business with you. That's just where we are. So rather than fight it, , let's start talking about ways that we can do it on your website. There should be a text to, there should be a chat functionality. And frankly, that's been around for a while. I mean, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago, people were putting those on, but they quickly found that if they weren't sitting there and somebody said, Hey, I have a question. Not much good was going to happen from that.

In fact it might be negative. So then version two became the bots. Everybody loves those, right? you ask a question, it spits out, you know, some pre-programmed answer. You ask another question. You're, you know, your 10 texts in and you still haven't gotten to close to where you want. You're just like, let me talk to somebody. And now let's hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load, handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you're ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com slash. Now that's Semrush.com/.

Now, today, what I think the, what we wanna be doing is if you think about this idea of text or SMS, being the huge driver of the hub of communication, what about having taken that chat bubble and driving people to a text conversation? So now first off you're getting, you're capturing that information. You're starting a conversation and theoretically, anybody in your organization, walking around with the app that, that has that info coming to it can respond. I'm not saying that they necessarily have to sit there and respond, but you know, you imagine you have a technician out in the field that, that, you know, instead of being there, sitting in front of a desktop on a computer, wait, waiting for people on your website, they're able to respond through that. I already mentioned Google business profile. Google is very well. I was gonna say very smart.

They're not necessarily innovative , but they certainly read the writing on the wall. And so in their overarching effort to never have anybody actually leave Google, they are capturing or attempting to capture all the forms of communication. So if your Google business profile is showing up at the top of a search results, increasingly, and I've seen this time and time again, one of the functionalities that they've added recently is text messaging. So somebody who's on their phone, they've done a search instead of calling you, instead of going to your website, instead of just getting directions to your business, they can send you a message where those are going. Quite frankly, many people don't know or they're having to put in of somebody's mobile device. Well, again, capturing those in that unified communication platform is going to become increasingly important spec, particularly for local businesses.

Here's a, another functionality that can be built into this idea. I wonder how many phone calls you miss because you're on the phone or because it's after hours or because whoever was supposed to be answering the phone, didn't get to it. Now, maybe the phone's equipped with a voicemail and so great. You captured it there, but now that person has to go and listen. And you know, maybe it's a insurance pitch or better yet an SEO person that wants to sell you services. So you still got all that time invested. Imagine if you had the functionality and I'm not saying you never answer the phone, but imagine if you had the functionality that every time a call was missed and not picked up, that person got an immediate text back. Not everybody calls on a mobile device, but I don't know, probably 90% do so they immediately get a text back and it says, Hey, I saw we missed your call.

What can we help you with now, if it's that person selling SEO services? Well, they're probably not gonna respond, but if it's a customer, especially a customer who would actually prefer to, to use a text anyway, it's like cool text away. And now you've got a conversation going calendars, you know, are a big part of what is going to make this work. Imagine if people could on their mobile device, have the ability to not only, um, schedule an appointment, but that you would then have the ability to text them. And you've probably all gotten this. Your dentist probably does it, right? Dentists are crazy about this, but you get the, Hey, your appointment's scheduled. Hey, your appointment's in a day. It's in 10 minutes. I mean, it, I'm not saying you should do that to the, to that extent, but the ability to actually have that follow up automated as a part of it, and there are platforms out there that, you know, that kind of scheduling and things have been going on for a long time, your dentist does it, your hair salon, does it, you know, maybe your, uh, H V a C contractor or plumber does it.

But I think every small business should have that ability now reviews. So you go, you do the work you're done. What if you just had to press one button in that app that we're talking about? And all of a sudden the person gets a text that says, we love reviews. We're so happy that we did business. You please review us here, automate the process of that. And then when that person did review right there in your unified communication platform, you'd have the ability to respond to that review a Facebook review or a Google review. So this technology is all there now, and I'm not selling G whiz technology. I'm selling the fact that I think you're missing. Most people are missing massive amounts of opportunities because they haven't automated this because it's hard to go find all the places people are leaving clues. It's, there's no question that if somebody gets followed up with in five, 10 minutes in maybe one or two different ways, they're far more likely to convert.

We're all busy. Life is inconvenient. Sometimes, especially getting stuff done is inconvenient sometimes. And so that company that responds first, that company that responds in the way that I want to talk to them, or the way that I want to be communicated with. I mean, we're going to give that company, our business. So today, increasingly I'm not talking about, you know, I'm not talking about messaging today. I'm not talking about your overarching strategy, but a huge part today of the customer journey has to be automated. And you have to get much more efficient at tapping into all those communication avenues that are coming at you and SMS and text is going to drive this for the foreseeable future. If you're not, if you're not participating in this, and I'm not talking about the spammy, sending out text, I'm talking about in ways to drive the customer journey, to serve your customers, to get reviews, to get repeat business.

If you're not using that technology for that, you are missing the boat. As I said, this is such an important thing. We're building it. We're building this engine that will allow you to have that beautiful unified communication place will allow you to have the app that, that you or whoever all of your team can carry around. And the person who, who needs to reply can reply. But I think that's a place where we're at today. That software has to be installed in small businesses today. Every small business, I don't care what industry you're in. All right, that's it for today. Please hit me up, John, at duct tape marketing. If you wanna hear more about this unified communication, beautiful way to run your business, take care out there, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find [email protected] not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketing assessment.co I'd. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.