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(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, no guest today, just me all solo show. Today I wanna talk about a new tool that, um, we’ve created. It is a gap analysis. So the idea behind a gap analysis is, and in the consultant toolbox, , forever, pretty simple concept. It’s a way to go into a business and say, okay, here’s where we are today in a certain area, but here’s where we wanna go, or here’s like perfect state in that area. Where are we now? Right? So it’s what’s the gap, right? Does that make sense? So, um, one of the things that I kind of recently discovered is that while the gap analysis has been around forever, there haven’t really been anybody that’s created, uh, an effective marketing gap analysis. And in other words, just we’re gonna focus on the gap in various areas of marketing.

(02:13): Ultimately, what these gaps circle around quite often is a lack of vision or strategy, uh, for marketing or for the business. And so by, by at least analyzing the areas that are key to understanding a marketing strategy and then going to work on those, I, I think you can effectively build some momentum around marketing in a way that gets rid of some of the chaos and some of the idea of the weak and some of the, I don’t know, what’s working , is it working? So that’s why we created this tool. So the areas, I’ll just go over quickly the areas that this gap analysis gets into, and you’ll see hopefully . It’s a pretty comprehensive idea. All right, so the first area is vision and objectives. So we’re gonna ask you to describe your current vision for your business. Do you have a marketing strategy that aligns with this vision?

(03:08): Are your company business objectives aligned as well? You know, answering questions like that might, you know, you may say, well, I’ve, we’ve done mission, vision values, but I find that for a lot of people, those are just academic exercises almost. So keeping kind of the current state of your vision, the impact that you want to have, where you’re going, I think is a great start for marketing. It’s really obviously important for the business as a whole, but certainly gets into some of the marketing areas. So the next one of course is revenue and profit marketing is driving a lot of that, right? So is your revenue growing compared to, you know, performance maybe in the industry or you know, what about profit margin? Have you even really considered that ? Is it abstain, uh, sustainable? Do you have a goal for it? So again, just looking at and asking yourself, you know, here’s where we want to go, as opposed to just merely focused on here’s where we are is a great way.

(04:07): Next one I wanna talk about is ideal client. Do you know who makes an ideal client? I mean, what problems and needs does your product or service really solve for them? And my experience is an ideal client is probably represents about the top 20% of your client base and not your entire client base. And that really has a lot to do with the fact that we don’t, if we don’t focus on identifying who that ideal client is, we’re really just gonna attract anybody who shows up. So this can really be a great filter for all of your marketing, for all of your messaging, for everything you do in terms of your website and things that you send out is, uh, meant to be focused on that ideal client. Next one is core message. Do you even have one? Does it differentiate you from your competitors?

(04:55): So many businesses basically talk about what they do. Here’s the service we offer, here’s the product we sell. And nobody really caress about that until they can connect solving a problem with your product or service. So quite often businesses solve very unique problems. They just don’t know what they are, or they certainly don’t use them and communicate them as part of their marketing.

(05:18): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller Business Made Simple takes the Mystery out of growing your business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams. Listen to Business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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(06:38): Do you understand this is the next area. Do you understand the extent of the customer journey mean? How does somebody, how does your ideal client, I should say, or customer find businesses like yours, what would make them want to engage with a business like yours?

(06:55): What’s their buying process is really what it comes down to because with all the, talk about all the changes in marketing, and there certainly are plenty , the biggest thing that’s changed is how people buy now. Uh, how they make their decisions, how their entire research process. So do you fully understand that? And if you do, are you actually using that information to guide a customer through those stages, or at least impact the journey that they’re making? Do you understand what your competitors are? And, and a lot of times people, there are competitors that we see every day, maybe you truly compete and win and lose business with, but there are also a lot of other competitors out there. I mean, people that rank ahead of you in search engines, for example, you know, are a bit of competitor even if you don’t know who they are today.

(07:42): So understanding what their marketing strategies are, what their messaging is, what their strengths and weaknesses in some cases helps in your sales process as well. Of course, then we get into some of the channels, you know, does your website perform? Does it produce any results? I I can’t tell you how many, you know, everybody realizes they have to have one. And so they go out and they hire a designer and they build one, and then they, they say to themselves, well, this doesn’t do anything for us. So understanding how to convert traffic, what the purpose, I mean, when somebody visits, what do you want them to do? Those types of things are part of a, a great gap analysis. Content marketing. I mean, uh, there again, a lot of people are writing blog posts and writing content, but is there any thought about how that content could perform for you?

(08:29): I could go on and on social media, email marketing, paid advertising. You know, where are you today? Are you using platforms? Have you decided it’s too expensive? You’re using other ways? I mean, we’re, we’re really, you don’t have to use all of these channels, but having some integration between all of these channels is part of where I see quite a gap. Let’s talk about your sales funnel. Do you have stages, of a sales funnel? Do you know what your conversion rate is? We’ll go beyond sales to retention referral. Is there a focus? These are all parts of the customer journey, but is there a focus, the proper focus on repeat business and retaining business and generating referrals? And then the last one, nobody in marketing likes to talk about math . Well, unless you do like to, right? There’s like 20% of the people out there, uh, that are very into tracking and metrics and data.

(09:24): And then there are a lot of business owners that it’s a necessary evil, but in some cases it just doesn’t even get dealt with. So what are the key performance indicators? A lot of people will say revenue, certainly, but what about profit retention, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, lead generation, lead conversion, all those types of things that if you focused on where you are today, where you want to go, then the, the logical question is, okay, what action steps do we need to take so that we are going to make where we want to go or we’re gonna close, uh, these gaps? So that’s the entire idea behind the gap analysis. If you looked at those areas and you know, measured kind of where you are, you could actually come up with a number one through 10. You could come up with a, Hey, here’s a current description of your current state.

(10:18): If you would like us to take a look at those, I’d love to meet with you and go over this process with you because I think you’ll get a tremendous amount of insight about what you need to focus on and consequently what you maybe need to stop or not focus on . So the way our process works on this is you’ll actually complete a questionnaire asking you about various state where you are, current state, that’s the idea, current close the gap, right? And then we will meet with you, we’ll go over your results, we’ll meet with you and create actually six to 10, you know, action items that we think would actually help you close those gaps. Kind of give you a close the gap plan, if you will. And I think what it’ll do is it’ll help you identify a handful of areas that are very important for you to spend some time focusing on fixing and closing the gaps.

(11:12): You’ll have a plan so you won’t just be guessing anymore. It is, if you wanna find out more about this, obviously we’ll have it in the show notes as well. But we are calling this the Marketing Gap Analysis and you can find it @dtm.world/closethegap. So that’s: dtm.world/closethegap, and I would love to help you close those gaps. All thanks for listening, tuning into another episode. We love those reviews. Review us on all the websites where you listen to your show. If you have been a long time listener, I truly appreciate you. Love to hear from you anytime, just john@ducttapemarketing.com. Alright, that is it for today’s show. Take care.

(11:58): 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 it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.