Want to grow your business and position your brand for success? One of the greatest ways to do so is hiring a CMO or Chief Marketing Officer, an experienced, result-driven executive responsible for all your marketing efforts. 

But with an average annual salary of over $330,000 many small to mid-sized businesses can’t easily afford a CMO. Facing tight budgets and strained resources, these companies must embrace the idea of the fractional CMO and outsource their marketing efforts if they want to grow. 

That’s what I want to discuss today. What is a fractional CMO and the services they provide for small to medium-sized businesses. 

What is a Fractional CMO

Let’s start by explaining something a bit simpler; What is a CMO?

CMO stands for chief marketing officer, and it’s the job of the person who defines strategic direction and marketing implementation in a business. The concept of a Chief Marketing Officer comes from large enterprises, but it is a role that has grown exponentially in the last couple of years.

A fractional CMO is basically a part-time version of this position. Just like fractional accountants, fractional Chief Financial Officers, or fractional Chief Technology Officers, a fractional Chief Marketing Officer is an executive that leads the marketing strategy and execution of a company on a part-time basis.

What is the difference between a marketing agency, a marketing coach, a consultant, and a Fractional CMO?

The number of options businesses have to get marketing help can be overwhelming. But if we focus on strategy and implementation, the choices you’ll come across are hiring a marketing agency, a marketing coach, a marketing consultant, or a fractional CMO. 

Marketing Agency

A marketing agency is a company that serves various clients in one or more areas of marketing. Agencies sometimes get involved in strategy, but they often focus on the implementation side of the business. They are useful for companies that have a strategy already in place and need some extra help with execution.

Marketing Coach

A marketing coach normally assists business owners or marketing teams with training material, acting as an accountability partner and recommending strategic actions, but is not involved in the implementation at all.

Marketing Consultant

Marketing Consultants are experts in a specific field who help companies by giving advice and developing their marketing strategies. However, they outsource implementation to freelancers or an external marketing team. 

Fractional CMOs are particularly relevant today because they have the strategic approach of a consultant, can execute as an agency, and act as a marketing coach for your team, while being accountable for delivering measurable results for your business.

Fractional CMO Responsibilities

A typical Fractional CMO has a mix of responsibilities, all designed to meet the needs of the companies they serve.

These can include:

Defining Goals and developing a marketing strategy 

A fractional CMO should be able to develop and communicate clear goals for the marketing team. And align those goals throughout the organization.

Fractional CMOs are also responsible for developing a brand's marketing strategy (budget, vision, team makeup, customer journey, systems, and tactics). They must narrow the marketing focus to crucial marketing channels and formulate a winning and repeatable plan for the business. 

Effective fractional CMOs can direct the strategy from a marketing standpoint. For example, they could help define the ideal clients, propose the best markets to target, and choose the most appropriate marketing channels that lead to more business.

This is the most important part of the role because it helps the company stand out from its competition in the minds of their ideal customer.

To develop a winning marketing strategy the fractional CMO should start with these four concepts;

1. Identifying the brand's ideal client
2. Finding the problem the brand is trying to solve and promise to solve it
3. Make content the voice of strategy and establish the brand as an authority online
4. Create a complete buyer journey

Managing the marketing department

Fractional CMOs may have their own team to implement the strategy or be responsible for managing an internal department. Hiring, managing, and sometimes promoting employees are commonly known responsibilities of a fractional CMO.

The job of a fractional  CMO is one of the most challenging. The average CMO lasts just 40 months, so they have to be prepared to make an impact fast. 

That’s why most fractional CMOs have their own implementation team, and based on our experience training successful marketing managers and consultants, having a network of professionals that can help you execute your plan is essential to achieving  consistent growth as an agency.

The Duct Tape Marketing Agency Workshop certifies fractional CMOs to license the complete Duct Tape Marketing System for their agency. Completion of the workshop includes an invitation to a community of like-minded business professionals who come together for strategic partnerships, continued training and events.

Establishing Marketing Metrics and KPIs

A fractional CMO is responsible for establishing clear marketing goals, metrics, milestones, and key performance indicators (KPIs). These are used to measure progress and determine if the marketing team is meeting the goals of their campaigns. 

Some of the commonly known metrics for a marketing department are the number of qualified leads in a given period, sign-ups or appointments generated, lead conversion rates, lead-to-customer conversion, cost per lead, monthly recurring revenue, and others.

Metrics can help fractional CMOs understand the challenges, and therefore deliver consistent and long-term results.

Act as a consultant for the marketing team

Successful chief marketing officers, both full-time and fractional, often have a strong sense of purpose and can implement a set of values within the organizations they serve. They are not just order takers, but they are strategists, consultants, and coaches.

Other responsibilities of a Fractional CMO are creating programs that support employees in different ways. For example, they could create and run mentorship programs or training for their team or their clients' teams.

Fractional CMOs might also implement the marketing strategy with their own team of experts. This can be far more effective than attempting to spread out these tasks throughout your company, or creating and hiring a whole new department.

How many leads and customers are you missing every day by not installing an automated Lead Management System?

But, I get it, there are just so many places and platforms to keep tabs on today.

People have countless ways to contact your business - it's no wonder you can't keep up with it all.
There’s; Email and forms, Text and SMS, Phone and voicemail, Website Chat, Google Business Messages, Facebook messages, Instagram direct messages, Reviews in 3rd party sites, And the list goes on…

It’s so complex, in fact, that some small business owners might think handling all interactions is impossible. Perhaps it demands too much work, or there’s no option to communicate with your audience as fast and personalized as they expect.

But, what if you had an automated way to funnel all of those potential inquiries from prospects and leads into one place that allowed you to elegantly and automatically respond immediately?

If managing a million channels sounds intimidating, don’t worry. I want to share my strategies with you for handling all of your incoming leads and lead communication with speed and personalization. All while feeling clarity, confidence, and control in your customer lead management.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to communicate with your customers and how small businesses can automate and unify those channels to better manage their interactions in today's dynamic, non-linear buyer journey—leaving you better prepared and one step ahead your competition.

Find out how to use an automated follow-up system by booking a free online consultation with us.

To help you jump quickly to the sections that interest you most – click on the links below

How To Automate Lead Management Today

Where business owners are missing tons of opportunity today

A big part of making your customers happy is understanding them and communicating in the way they want. But I get it. There are just so many places and platforms to be aware of today.

People are now contacting businesses from Google business pages, SMS, third-party sites, emails, reviews, social media, and 50 other channels. And yes, you're supposed to create content and engage in all of them, or you’ll lose many opportunities daily.

One way to help build a lead management engine is to start using the technology available to automate your communication. The primary way you can meet your customers where they are is by having an automated way to funnel all of those inquiries from prospects and customers into one place that allows you to elegantly and automatically respond.

 The holy grail of lead communication today

I always educate our clients on the importance of making it easy to collect customer information and creating a seamless communication experience with your audience. But, as a small business, it is practically impossible to do this right without using technology to automate the flow of lead management. Here are some helpful tips.

• Create unique online experiences, individualized for each site visitor
• Use automation with a human touch to creat great social content
• Take advantage of unified customer and lead communication tools for less work and higher conversion rates

How SMS is one of the drivers of change

Now that you understand why a business has to start automating lead communication let’s dive into some of the drivers of change. You can use these thoughts to change how you contact your audience or to explore new techniques and channels to get in touch with them.

One of the drivers of this change is SMS. Everybody has a phone, and every single one of those phones has SMS functionality. 

Some people don't think SMS has a place in business, but data shows the opposite. Surveys indicate that around 48% of people prefer to communicate via text with a brand, especially early on in the awareness stage of the buyer journey.

It means that if you’re not using that technology as a part of your overall communication strategy, you are missing tons of opportunities. In fact, I would suggest some buyers will not do business with you if they don’t see that functionality available. That's just where we are as consumers.

The role your Google Business Profile plays

If you’re a local business, you should optimize your Google Business Profile as much as possible.

There are several huge advantages to creating a Google Business profile. First, it’s free so why not? Secondly, the real estate on Google’s SERP is extremely valuable, especially on desktop. Having a Google Business Profile helps your business secure a good portion of that valuable first results page real estate.
To get setup you’ll need ensure that you have only one listing for your business, select the right business category and subcategories, and finally, take advantage of all the real estate and linking options available to you.

But that’s not enough. Google wants its users to have the best experience possible when looking for answers online. That’s why they are attempting to capture all forms of communication, including text messages.

If your Google business profile is showing up at the top of the search results, one of the functionalities that they've added recently is text messaging. So, instead of calling you, get directions to your business, or going to your website, customers can just send you a message.

Many small business owners don't know where those messages are going, resulting in lost business opportunities. Again, here’s where a unified communication platform will become increasingly important, particularly for local businesses.

Social Media Lead Management

It doesn’t matter what you sell or how you sell it. In today’s world, you need to be accessible to your customers through your social media presence.

95% of consumers, ages 18-34, are likely to follow a brand through social media channels (MarketingSherpa). And with 79% of American internet users on Facebook, it is the most used of those channels (Lyfe Marketing).

It means that your audience is there, and again, you have to meet them where they are. But how to use social media in your communication strategy? Here are some of my best practical tips:

• Create a great customer experience by giving your audience an easy way to communicate with you that they are already familiar with.

• Show your customers that you care by listening and responding to their questions and concerns quickly.

• Receive and respond to reviews. While you can certainly get reviews from dedicated sites, don't forget that Facebook pages provide a place for customers to rate your product or service. Caring about reviews is key to providing excellent service, so getting as many as possible is important. And responding to the good and the bad quickly is even more important.

• Don’t make every social media interaction about business. The brands people want to work with today are the ones that teach people something and make them feel smart and empowered, so create content to help your audience and avoid talking about you and your product every time.

Especially if you have developed unique procedures internally that guarantee that somebody will get a great result, you have to show them that process.

Find out how to communicate efficiently by booking a free online consultation with us.

With an all-in-one customer and lead communication service, you can quickly respond to every query from customers on Facebook or Instagram easily and all in one place alongside email and other channels. 

How can Small Businesses apply unified communication?

As I said before, speed is critical when it comes to lead management. But what does speed really mean? Let’s have a look at two examples. Follow me on this one.

How many calls do you miss because you're on the phone or whoever was supposed to answer didn't get to it? Hiya discovered that, on average, Americans miss more than half the phone calls they receive. 

Imagine if you had the functionality that every time you missed a call, that person got an immediate text saying, “Hey, we missed your call. What can we help you with?”

They'll respond if interested, and now you have a real conversation going. 

Imagine that people could schedule an appointment and receive text reminders like, “Thanks for scheduling the appointment. Or “Hey, your appointment's in a day.” 

There’s no doubt that It’s becoming necessary to have that follow-up automated as a part of a lead management strategy, and there are platforms and businesses out there that have been doing it for a long time. Your dentist, famous restaurants, and maybe your AC contractor or plumber do it consistently.

Reviews

Now let’s look at our next example. Reviews. That’s another process I continuously encourage small businesses to automate if they want to scale and grow. 

Learn why reviews are essential for local search 

Imagine you just finished a great project, and now you just had to press one button in an app to send a text asking for a review automatically. And then, when that person did the review, you could respond smoothly within the app. 

Lead communication is challenging but highly beneficial if you do it right. To profit from it, ensure to meet your buyers where they are today and communicate with them efficiently. Doing so will help your local business stand out from the competition and boost your success rate.

I know it's challenging to find all the places people are interacting, but with sufficient enough commitment and the right tools, you can follow up with your customers within five or ten minutes, making them far more likely to convert.

We've built the solution that will allow you to have unified communication with your clients. Book a free online consultation with us if you want to hear more about this new way of running your business.

For more detail on how to automate your Lead management- book a free online consultation with us here

Many people assume that a website's purpose is to get new clients. Just create high-quality product pages, write a little content, add a CTA button then sit back and see if it works.

Yet the primary goal of a website isn’t only to obtain new clients. In fact, 92% of consumers visit a brand's website for the first time for reasons other than buying.

So, what is the job of a company website in the world of modern marketing strategy?

Sometimes the goal is to build trust for a potential employee. In other scenarios, the purpose is to be an influential part of a complex-non linear buyer journey.

There is no one "right" answer to this question, but based on my years of experience consulting for small businesses, the best answer is - the job of your company website it to increase someone’s WTP (Willingness To Pay) or even WTPP (Willingness to pay Premium).

This means guiding an end-to-end elegant customer journey, where the role of the website content strategy is to increase somebody's trust and likability until they are ready to pay.

So what are the website essentials for small businesses, and how do you start building a site that earns the trust of its visitors and increases WTP?

Let's get into the ten things that will help drive WTP on your website.

Use the following links to jump to a section quickly:

10 Critical Elements Your Website Must Employ Today

Learn how Lead Spark can help you build a SMS/Text strategy 

1. Make a Promise to solve the problem

No one wants what you sell - they want their problem solved.

The first thing that your website must do is - promise to solve a real problem. Avoid those big headlines telling what you do or what industry you're in. If people are on your website, they probably know that already.

Instead, tell them the most significant pain point that you solve. That’s the greatest opportunity to differentiate your business from every other company that does what you do.

For example, here's the homepage of a digital marketing agency, Tuff. Rather than promoting their marketing services, they tell us the problem they solve

2. CTAs

There are many reasons somebody might want to talk to you. So it is essential to help your customers move through the buying journey by using strategic calls to action or CTAs. 

Offer various stopping points where people can take action if they want. Don't wait until the bottom of the page, or just have a contact us link in your top navigation menu. “I want to know more,” “I want an evaluation,” “Set up a meeting,” “Get this free report, or “Learn more” - are all examples of different CTAs that could be used throughout your website to ultimately connect you to your site visitors.

You can have various CTAs all over your website for many reasons, but they should be clear, immediately visible, and at strategic stopping points throughout your customer's journey.

3. Who do you get resultd for?

The third website essential for small businesses is focusing your website content on a specific niche.

Go as far as you can to narrow the focus on who makes an ideal customer for you and make them an essential part of your website content strategy. You might even go as far as saying, “If you're not this type of company or person, we're probably not a good fit for you.”

Be specific about who you serve and what problem you solve for them. Be explicit about who gets the best results from your services because those will be your best customers.

Showing your clients in different industries or situations is an effective way to show others who you work with. The more they recognize themselves on your website content, the easier it will be for them to go deeper on a buying journey.

4. Core offerings

So many companies offer too many things. They write about every possible way they could work with somebody on the homepage. But the reality is that there are often a few services, products, or offerings that generate 80% of the profit for the organization.

Keep it simple. Avoid trying to feature everything. Pick two or three rock-solid offerings you can do better than any other company and really showcase those throughout your site.

For example, this website’s tagline is “We build software from start to finish.” But rather than featuring every single product or platform they can build, they picked full lifecycle services and technologies as their core offers. It’s simple, but it works perfectly.

5. Marketing Your Process

So many companies offer too many things. They write about every possible way they could work with somebody on the homepage. But the reality is that there are often a few services, products, or offerings that generate 80% of the profit for the organization.

Keep it simple. Avoid trying to feature everything. Pick two or three rock-solid offerings you can do better than any other company and really showcase those throughout your site.

Especially if you have developed unique procedures internally that guarantee that somebody will get a great result, you have to show them that process.

6. Your Team

In my experience, the second most visited page on any website is the “About Us” or “Team” page. This is because people want to know you are real; they want to know who they will be working with and what they stand for.

Additionally, most clients will experience your brand through the people in your team. So show them who they are and let them know their values and backgrounds.

Check out the below 'About Us' page sample. This company has snippets representing an everyday conversation at work. It gives a real insight into the company culture, what they stand for, how they operate, and how they appreciate each other. It also makes you, as a consumer, want to work with them.

Many buying decisions today are based on the ability to connect with your audience.  So reveal your stripes, tell people what you're all about, and show them who they will work with if they become clients

7. Trust and Proof

When we land on a website, we first determine whether or not the company can solve the problem. If they do, the next step is to look for details about how they've helped like-minded people.

That’s why you need case studies, customer testimonials and examples right on the homepage. This will help your audience trust you by giving them proof. 

The case studies above are right on the homepage of this company's website. Actual results that they've gotten for people and specific numbers as a form of proof. 

531% increase in six months, 192,853 in additional sales, how they outranked Home Depot. Nothing says more for your brand than the word of people who have used your products or services before.

Don’t have any case studies? Use your Google reviews to create a testimonials page. Look at this amazing website content from Basecamp.

8. Video

Video is one of the best ways to develop trust with potential buyers, especially for small businesses. Still, it has to go beyond just putting a video of the owner talking about what their company does. 

Video is a key part of a website content strategy. I see brands summarizing long-form blog content with a video that says, you want the short story here? Click on the video. It not only sends a message of trust but also, many people just want to consume content that way. 

You can have more genuine customer testimonials, reveal how your product is made, create how-to videos solving a problem, explain your unique approach to the market, or just have videos showcasing your company culture.

9. Segmentation

Most businesses have at least a couple of target audiences. You could have beginner vs. advanced level customers, customers based on title, or even customers with different needs based on their geolocation. 

Each of these potential customers fits into a different segment for your business, and the more tailored you can make their journey on your site, the better their experience will be with your brand. 

You can start to segment your site based on your target audience in several different ways. You could create specific content, prompt your audience to self-select who they are, or even use automation and AI to do it for you.

Here’s a typical scenario on B2B marketing: 

Suppose you are selling to businesses with several stakeholders. The CEO cares about something different than the CFO and the COO. So, solutions by role can be a great way to segment. 

For example, at Duct Tape Marketing, we work with small business owners, but we also train marketing consultants looking to learn our methodologies.

So by asking a simple question on our homepage, we let people select their content path and deliver a more personalized journey for each segment we serve.

10. Contact Options

Make contact easy, give options and let people interact with you how they want and when they want. To explain this to new clients, I tell them that it's like when businesses used to take cash, credit card, or checks. Now we have to take email, text, chat, and phone.

If you are using forms, make them easy to fill. Many design tools can help you design elegant forms in minutes. And once somebody fills out that form, make sure you use that opportunity to redirect people to a page where you can greet them with a short video, share more content with them, and connect them to your social media channels.

By doing this you are continuing to engage with them, showing them other elements of your business and giving them clear instructions on what to expect from your business next. 

Bonus Essential Website Element! - Think Mobile First

Many websites are still designed and optimized on a 40-inch monitor. But the reality is that 80% of website traffic of many businesses comes from mobile devices—which means that you not only need to optimize your site for mobile, but you need to have a solid mobile-first strategy.

The graph above is website traffic data from a local remodeling contractor. When we looked at the numbers, almost 60% of their traffic came from either a mobile device or tablet. These results prompted this contractor to audit how they were showing up on mobile and improved their overall mobile audience experience. 

Odds are the majority of traffic to your website is on a mobile device as well. That is why the bonus essential element to designing a great website today is to focus on designing your website with a mobile-first mindset. Providing a great mobile experience compared to your competitors could drastically improve your customers WTP or WTPP.

For even more detail on essential website elements - check out the Small Business Guide to Website Design.

Running a business is hard

But with a good referral program it doesn't have to be

As a small business owner you are probably thinking about helping your current customer or trying to figure out how to increase sales. But you've also got to think about increasing leads, and that is where referral programs come in. 

As a business owner myself, I know you just want your customers to be happy with their purchases. But wouldn't they be even happier if they could get something more? One of the best ways to accomplish this is by having good referrals program in place.

In a recent survey of 2,000 business owners by Texas Tech, 83% of the respondents claimed that they have a business that they love so much that they'd recommend it to others, yet 29% do so.

There is a lot of potential and profit in closing that 54% gap, but where do you start? You start by building referral programs. Read on to learn more

Most importantly, referrals remove risk. Referrals help us solve a problem. They reduce the amount of work we have to do to find the right solution to our problem, and they come prepackaged with answers to common questions: Will they work? Will they know? Can I trust them?  

That is the best way to think about referrals, as the ultimate way to lend and borrow trust.

Why do referrals programs matter so much?

Easily attract your ideal customer.

Frankly, most of the people that get referred to me are much closer to my ideal customer because my ideal customer is the one referring them. They understand our business and they know who would make a good fit for us. 

Shorten the sales cycle

A strong referral program can significantly shorten the sales cycle. Referred leads were likely sent to you from someone you trust, so you can skip the know, like, and trust stages and jump straight to the try stage. 

Increase your premium pricing

Referrals also allow you to diversify your pricing portfolio and charge a premium for your product or service. Customers that are familiar with your brand and have a positive perception of you are willing to pay more. 

Magnify Lifetime Value

Referral programs increase the lifetime value of your current customers. A real estate agent might receive 12 to 15 new referrals from just three initial leads if he or she creates an exceptional experience for those first three leads. Therefore, your customers' lifetime value can be multiplied to a great extent if you focus on referrals.

Referrals are invaluable to any business. By ignoring customer referrals or not incorporating customer referral program ideas into your marketing strategy, you're missing out on a valuable source of revenue.

7 Types of Referral Programs

How can you start building referral programs that actually work and what do they look like? That is what I am going to share with you in this post;

• Client Referral Programs
• Champion Referral Programs
• Ecosystem Balancing
• Internal Referrals
• Partner Network Referrals
• Expert Networking Referral Clubs
• Masterminds for Referrals

Every Client Referral Programs

Every business should have everyday referral offers that work for any type of customer.  So what do these referrals look like? How can you make them successful? And what elements should they consist of? 

I like to group client referrals into four main types; direct, implied, tangible and community. For more explanation on these referral types see my post, How to Make Your Business More Referable. Every client referral programs are probably the ones you are most familiar with, a gift certificate, refer-a-friend model, donation matching offers, etc. 

Each of these types of referrals offer something different, but they all need the same elements to be successful.

Client Referral Keys to Success

First, everybody needs to win or feel like they have won. The person giving the referral should not be the only one rewarded. If that referral turns around and does business with you, they should be rewarded too. 

Next, there should always be a strong tie back to your brand. A referral program with a strong connection to your brand should also have a strong connection to your most loyal customers.

The last key is consistency in your approach. You need to be consistently nurturing and developing these programs. Referral programs are not set it and forget and they are not a one time play. These programs need to be scheduled regularly. They should be weekly, monthly and quarterly depending on the program type. 

Client Referral Elements

Create easily shareable content

If you want to increase the likelihood that you will be referred then you must make it easy. Build content for your referral programs that are clear and concise so your customers can easily find what they need. This can be done through special referral program landing pages or posts. You can also offer pre-written emails or social content for your referral clients to seamlessly share with their followings. 

Have a special process for referral leads 

Not all referral leads will be ready to buy right away but they are definitely at a different stage in the sales funnel than your regular leads. They have a far more intimate relationship with your business through direct recommendations and should be treated as such with a special funnel built for them. 

Recognition is important to everyone, especially those who go the extra mile 

Your referral clients should receive a special thank you note. You can also publicly thank them through your newsletter or on social media. These thank-you notes can also include special offers for just your referral clients. 

Appreciation is a wonderful thing; It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. - Voltaire

Find Your Referrals Champions

Customers and clients who are already referring business to you are what I call 'Referral Champions'. They are a great customer, they are a returning customer, and they have had a good experience with you. In a lot of ways they are your ideal customers and they know how to connect with someone like themselves. 

Types of Champion Referral Programs

Offer Lunch

Get a handful of your best customers together for a free lunch. The lunches and get-togethers are offered as a thank-you, but the networking that occurs can be mutually beneficial to you, your business, and your referral champions as well. 

Peer-2-peer Teaching

Gathering all of your champion referrers to meet creates an opportunity for them to build a peer-2-peer teaching relationship. This could have further positive impact for everyone involved. 

Exclusive Events & Offers

Create exclusive events or offers just for your high value clients that have continually supported your brand. Track who these people are and target them with something that is more lucrative or enticing than your Every Client Referrals. Highly exclusive offers are more than $10 of your next purchase. These are offers for premium products at cut-rate prices. 

Exclusive Content or Advisory Board

You can create exclusive content or an advisory board of your champion customers. For example, the advisory board could facilitate a quarterly meeting to brainstorm ideas on topics such as expand your target market or unique ways to broaden your customer reach. There could even be incentives involved such as product discounts for ideas that win. 

Keys to Champion Program Success

Have a specific ask

There needs to be a very specific ‘ask’ for champion referral programs. The more specific you can when describing exactly the kind of customer you are seeking, the better your chance of success. 

A client of mine used to take his champion referrals to lunch and show them a list of people he wanted to meet in this client's church or club. This approach was very direct and as a result, the customer had an easy time connecting my client to the names on his list.

Make it easy and reward them

With any champion referral program, you should make your champion referrers' job as simple as possible, and you should definitely acknowledge them and publicly thank them for referring your business.

Ecosystem Balancing

Ecosystem balancing is the idea that you should take your existing clients and think of everyone else who serves them and find ways to form relationships with those people in order to add even more value. 

The benefits for B2B companies

If you work with clients that also work with other professionals or have a B2B model, ecosystem balancing is a great option for you, but not only for referrals. Knowing the individuals in your mutual client’s ecosystem can help you understand what they do for your customer and help you to better serve your customer.

Speaking from experience

A past client of mine, who is an author, wanted to expand her brand.  When we were developing her marketing strategy she told us that she employed an executive coach and an accounting professional. So after we built her brand plan, with her permission, I reached out to the executive coach and the accountant and had a quick session with each of them explaining the newly created plan. Afterward, they had a better understanding of our mutual clients business than ever before and were able to better serve her. 

They were both so blown away by this process that those two individuals actually became referral sources. They wanted to introduce me to their clients because they realized their other clients needed that level of innovation and collaboration. 

Understand the client ecosystem

If you work with any clients that also work with management consultants or executive coaches or accounting professionals, or even have advisory board members, think in terms of how you could actually add value to the relationship that they have with your mutual clients by holding strategy sessions or giving presentations. 

By doing this you will have a better understanding of who the other players are in that person's ecosystem, because there is real value in meeting those other professionals. For the right business, the ecosystem balancing approach could be really potent. If you want a deeper understanding, I talk more about ecosystem balancing in my book, The Ultimate Marketing Engine. 

Internal Referrals

One of the most valuable referral systems you can build comes from within your organization. When given the right information, incentives, and tools, your internal team can be a great referral source.

Teach your team marketing strategy 

Teach them about the core message, explain who your ideal customer is and what makes your business unique. By doing this, they will feel more involved and have a better understanding of the business. Ultimately leading to a better understanding of your ideal customer and improved internal referral generation.

Make it easy for them to share good news about the business

You can do this by developing simple ways for your employees to share business news and offer their feedback or opinions. For example, you could produce easily shareable content for you internal team to re-post on their social media platforms.

Create buzz

Keep things exciting by offering rewards or contests for referrals. This adds an element of fun to the work and can create a positive and productive internal culture for your business.  

Customers and Hiring

Use your referral system for hiring. Some of your best candidate recruitment people are the ones that already work for you and love what they do. Use them as a resource and leverage their insight.  

Your Referral Partner Network

Create a strategic partner network by building a best-in-class team that offers services your customers might need. 

Start by identifying key players and recruiting them for your partner network. You can find them by polling your best clients and seeing who else they work with, who else helps them, and who else solves their problems for them. 

After you have identified six or seven potential strategic partners it is time to begin the conversation. Start by writing, what I call, the perfect introduction in reverse. Which is a process that lets a potential partner tell you exactly how to refer your customers to their business.

After you have built the relationship, establish how you can continue to work together to build up each other's referral business.

Some examples are; create content together, create special offers for each other's clients, create co-marketing opportunities, interview each other, host webinars for each other's audiences, hold events together, etc. 

I built a great deal of my following by going to organizations that I knew had small business owners as part of their universe and offering to do educational webinars for their audience or offering free eBooks that could be co-branded. These deals helped me gain exposure to new referrals and helped them win with their audience. 

Below are some examples of partner network ideas 

Notice how they all are unique to the industries involved, provide value to clients, and both businesses involved win.

• A partnership between wedding caterers and florists. This could include a third party, a wedding planner, and they all offer each other's services to their clients that are getting married.
• Service technicians and painting contractors. Upon completion of services the technician can offer 10% off of the painting contractor services, increasing exposure for both parties. 
• This one is creative; a financial planner and massage business. Once a year around tax season the financial planner can bring in a masseuse for a 15-minute shoulder massage while the customers are waiting to speak to their accountant. The masseuse could hand out their business cards and give samples of their services. In the mean time the accountant is getting more business because all of their clients will be talking about their unique practice.

Start Your Very Own Expert Club

Create a program for your ideal customer by starting an expert marketing club. You can host a monthly breakfast or webinar for your audience and bring in additional experts to speak.

Best Practices

There's an example in my latest book, The Ultimate Marketing Engine, where I worked with a real estate agent who moved to a new town. She was having trouble establishing her business so we brainstormed how she could start reaching out to the local community.  

The result; she started her own networking club for business owners where she talked about social media and marketing because she was also experienced in that field. In these meetings she didn’t sell her business as a realtor at all, but guess who the members thought of when it was time to buy or sell a home? She built her entire massive real estate business by hosting these monthly networking clubs.  

Another great example is Derek and Melanie Coburn in Washington DC. They have an organization called Cadre. Derek was a financial planner who wanted a better way to network. He brought a group of folks together and they started curating content for their businesses. This small group turned into a 300-person networking organization. Eventually he sold his financial planning business and now he and his wife run the networking organization full-time.

Referral Mastermind

Lastly, you can create a mastermind group for referrals. This option is very beneficial to B2B industries. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer it is a no brainer. The referral mastermind approach is similar to the partner network approach, but you work directly with your own clients instead. 

How to get started

Start by setting up monthly training for your clients around a specific topic. You can charge money, but my gut feeling is that it would generate so many referrals for you that it would be worth it if you made it complimentary. 

Once you build a reliable audience for these smaller training sessions you can start to offer them the mastermind concept. You wouldn’t even need to teach anything necessarily, just facilitate everyone coming together to learn from each other.  

Offer even more value

If you wanted to add another layer to your referral mastermind you could offer to run one for your client in exchange for referrals. In this system you would bring their clients together to help them make their business more successful, but it would benefit both parties in the long run.

Through the mastermind process you are naturally sharing referrals with each other. And that is where the magic really happens. When you start working together and build up each other's businesses, leading back to that everybody wins mentality. 

Now it’s time to implement some of these referral program ideas and best practices to generate your best customers yet. Don’t wait, get started today!

The 4-step marketing strategy - How to stand out from your competition in the minds of your ideal customer  

With the current obsession around marketing tactics, it has become increasingly harder to figure out the best marketing strategy for your business.

From hacks and quick fixes to the next big idea and new trending platforms. It is harder than ever to decide the right direction for your marketing. 

In order to help alleviate some of the marketing confusion, I’ve created a definitive outline for you in this post, 4 concrete steps to the perfect marketing strategy. You can use this article to help you create a clear marketing message, direction, and plan.

The 4 steps needed to create a perfect marketing strategy in 2022;

Want to get all the worksheets you need to complete your perfect strategy?

Customer Focus

First, you need to narrow your focus to somewhere around the top 20% of your clients. This doesn't necessarily mean that you chuck the other 80%, but experience tells me that if you are working with customers and clients today, some percentage of them are not profitable for your business. 

The majority of your customers are actually detractors from your business because they didn't have the right problem or they didn't have the right business situation for your product to solve. 

Think about your client base today and rank them into groups by profitability with your most profitable customers at the top. You want to think in terms of profitability because profitability is linked to an ideal client fit.

Typically a client is a profitable client because they received value, they had a great experience, their problem was solved, and they referred your product to others. If you understand who your profitable clients are you can start to do two things;

First, you can generate more business from that top 20% of customers because that top 20% want to do more business with you. It is far easier and less costly to continue to do business with people who already trust you vs trying to gain a new person's trust. If you focus your efforts on creating an amazing experience for those clients who already trust, get value, and are referring you to others. You could actually build our business around serving and attracting them and no one else. 

Second, if you know who they are and what brought them to you, you can begin to build the ideal customer persona for your business based on historical data and profitability. Then you can design your marketing around that customer persona and attract more of the ideal customer, more of the top 20%.

When building your customer persona you want to organize your customer base into three customer groups; must-have, nice-to-have, and ideal.

For example, a remodeling contractor must-have customers who own a home that they want to remodel. Imagine that same remodeling contractor works with his wife who is an interior designer. Now customers who are looking to remodel and redesign their home go in their nice-to-have bucket. Next, that husband and wife decide they want to focus the business on high-quality materials and modern home design. Now their ideal customer owns a home they want to remodel and redesign with a modern theme and is in the top 10% income bracket.

Ask yourself, what are those ideal customers for you? Who are your must-haves, nice-to-have, and ideal customers? My ideal customer workbook contains the same tools and worksheets Duct Tape Marketing uses to create our ideal customers. 

Solve the problem

Now that you know who your ideal customer is, the next step in creating the perfect marketing strategy is to figure out what problem you are actually solving for your customers. 

The truth is, nobody wants what you sell. They just want their problem solved. So instead of just selling a product, communicate to them that you understand and that you get their problem. Help them see that your product or service is the solution to their problem. That is when they will start to listen to you and begin to trust you. 

So how do you do this?  

- You create a core message that promises to solve that problem. 

For example, public universities have a problem. In many cases, their funding is dictated by their graduation rates. How many students graduate is directly correlated to the funding that universities receive and therefore what they must charge for tuition. They are constantly looking for ways to curb tuition rates. So we have a client that provides scheduling software for universities. We went and talked to the universities that used this company's software. They confirmed that the software worked well, but what they really loved was the great data and analytics the software provided. It allowed for more efficient scheduling and ultimately made tuition more affordable. We discovered that this software company makes great software, but they also make tuition more affordable. Tuition cost was the differentiator, the problem that they were solving.

Now, you are probably asking yourself, how do I do this for my company? How do I know the problem I am solving? What you need to do is get on the phone or in-person and talk to your ideal clients and ask them; how did you find us in the first place, what made you hire us, why did you stick with us? 

Those are some questions you can start with, but be sure to go deeper in your line of questioning. Have your customers go into detail with their answers. Don’t just ask, “Were you happy with my service?” Instead ask, “Can you tell me a specific time when we provided good service and what we did to make it such a positive experience?”

After enough of these informational interviews, you are going to start hearing themes that are addressing the real problems that you solve. 

Another great resource is Google reviews. But instead of just paying attention to five-star reviews, read the actual reviews line by line. When people voluntarily turn to a third party like Google and leave a glowing review it is an indicator that they have been thoroughly impressed. You have exceeded their expectations. You have solved their problem. 

What is the real problem that you are solving? That is what you need to uncover. And once you know it needs to be what you lead with for all of your messaging, it is your core message.

Create an end-to-end customer journey

A lot of people talk about the customer journey like it's a funnel. As if we create demand through this funnel. We shove them through this funnel process, they pop them out the other side, and voila that's the end of the journey. Well, that is not at all true, at least not anymore.

In just the last five years, marketing has undergone many changes. The thing that has changed the most about marketing is how people choose to become customers. That marketing funnel and that linear path no longer exist. The customer journey today is holistic and nonlinear. You no longer see an advertisement for a product, visit the store, and purchase that product. The steps between awareness and purchase are diverse and varied and oftentimes intertwined. People make decisions about the products and the services that they buy out of our direct control. Marketing today is less about demand and more about organizing behavior. 

This obsession with funnels and funnel hacking and tactics is really driving a lot of challenges for small businesses. First and foremost, we have to understand how to guide people on the journey that they want to go on. 

I know it is hard to keep up when it seems like there's some new thing that we have to do as marketers every single week. There is so much we have to do across so many platforms just to stay relevant, look at the data.

61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact the local business if they have a mobile-friendly website. So we've gotta really look at our websites and all these different devices.

87% of potential customers won't consider a business with low ratings. Now there are all these sites where people are able to go and leave reviews about our brand. And we have no control over that narrative.  

64% of consumers say watching a video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision. So not only do we have to be on all of these channels. Now we have to mold all of our content to the exact same way or to the specifications and algorithms of the platform of the month.

92% of consumers will visit a brand's website for the first time, for reasons other than making a purchase. Our website is not there to just take orders. It provides a service as well.

So I get the obsession with tactics and channels, but with this constantly changing landscape how can you possibly stay up to date? The answer lies in rethinking the customer journey. 

86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience and 83% of business owners claim their main source of new business is referrals. These stats prove that the customer journey does not end at the point of sale. There is profitability in focusing on what happens after somebody becomes a customer.

This leads me to the third and linchpin element of the perfect marketing strategy; the marketing hourglass. 

If you think about the hourglass shape the top of the hourglass borrows from the traditional sales funnel idea. After all, you have to get some percentage of the market out there to know about you and an even smaller percentage to realize that they are an ideal client for your business.

For so many businesses, that's where it stops right at the throat of the hourglass. But with the marketing hourglass, the excitement really needs to happen again, after the sale.