EntreLeadership - #250: Ryan Deiss-The Top Marketing Trend Now

Episode Date: March 6, 2018

In part two of this special four-part episode, Ryan Deiss, founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer.com, shares the best way to spend your marketing dollars now. Rather than making your product or brand the focus of your marketing efforts, he says you should concentrate on one thing: your customer. Tune in to find out how to make that important shift. entreleadership.com/podcast Ryan Deiss' website: Digital Marketer Free tool: EntreLeadership Goal Tracker Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message for Ken with the details. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. From the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, four leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Hey, this is a special week here on Entree Leadership, bringing you something a little different. We're going to be focusing on marketing, because marketing is a huge part of what you're doing in growing your business. So we're going to bring you four experts this week.

Our four experts this week will be Pat Flynn, Ryan Dice, Rachel Hollis, and Jen Severson. Our feature conversation in this episode is Ryan Dice. He's a return guest. If you remember Ryan, he is the founder and CEO of Digital Marketer, a fantastic business. So you're going to love that conversation. And you're going to get a great free resource from our Entree leadership team. Ryan Dice's company is Digital Marketer. You can find them online, DigitalMarketer.com.

Ryan has had some explosive growth. He's somebody that we enjoy and respect around here. This is a very important conversation when we talk about marketing trends. So here is my conversation with Ryan Dice. All right, Ryan, great to have you back, man. Always great to have you contributing to our audience. Let's go right to this. This is some stuff you understand.

Customer-centric marketing. What does that mean and what does it look like? Sure. It's probably easier to describe it by saying what it isn't. And in the past, really, businesses define themselves by either, you know, the product or service that they sold, right? So I'm an electrician. I'm a carpenter. You know, I'm an investment banker, right?

Or they defined themselves by the brand, right? So we're Coca-Cola and we identify by the brand. So those are kind of the two worlds, right? You're either a product-centric company or a brand-centered company. But really, I mean, the trend in where this has been headed for a while is customer-centricity. Business is beginning to define themselves not by the product they sell or the service they deliver. but by the people that they serve. And it was Jeff Bezos who put this in, you know, very eloquently. He said the singular mission of Amazon has to become the most customer-centric company in the world. I think you do worse than to

follow the lead of Amazon. So yeah, I mean, everything's shifting, you know, away from this is what I sell to this is who I serve and we want to serve him well. Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit more because that's a, that's a wonderful description there. But let's just think of the mom and pop retailers, the small businessman and woman listening in right now. And they're going, okay, how do I, how do I, first of all, how do I change that almost not so much fundamentally, but conceptually. Okay, wait a second. I'm in the electrical business or I'm a plumber or I'm selling cakes or bakery, whatever it is. Okay. Right. And they're going, well, this is what I've always done. This is what I'm known for. How do I make the mind shift necessary and then the brand and the marketing shift to make

about my customers. What does that look like? Give me an example. Sure. So it has less to do with completely upending your business model, right? And more to do with tweaking how you go about talking about your business. So I'll give you an example. Here where I live in Austin, Texas, there's a shoe store. And what they realized is that they were really selling a lot of kids' shoes because a lot of grownups, they know the size of their shoe. They know this other foot, right? They're beginning to order those online and the shoe store was getting really nervous. How are we to compete against Zappos and, you know, the internet, right? When it comes to this and what they found was that their sweet spot was kids, because kids' feet always changing. You want to, you know,

have them try stuff on. And so they really, you know, they were still the same store, but they began advertising proactively to parents of kids. And they did this through working with children's book authors and bringing them into a book signing. Like, what is a children's book or having a children's book have anything to do with shoes, right? But they brought them into this place and the kids showed up to do the book signing, the book reading, and some of them left with shoes. And you know, when the parents were there, the parents bought some shoes, too. So it's less about completely changing what you do and more about repositioning and speaking to a specific market.

And it's not like you necessarily just have to pick one. But the key to out Amazoning Amazon, in my experience, most businesses are really freaked out about Amazon, I think appropriately so. I mean, they are eating retail and other major businesses and whole categories alive. The way that you compete with Amazon is you outlove them. And how do you out love them? You serve a very specific niche in a very specific and meaningful way to them that Amazon would never be able to do. Amazon is never going to host a children's author in their warehouse.

You know, that's kind of one example. Thinking less about, it's not so much about what I saw. How do we build community? How do we build real long-lasting community? I believe community is the new brand, even more important than having a brand. It's about building that community. So that's kind of one creative idea. Yeah, I really like that.

I love that you throw a word out there, community, that sometimes in business, we think community, it's, well, it's just some outreach and it makes us look good. You're not talking about that. This is about building that tribal passion where people run into each other and they connect to each other around the actual brand, the service, the product that they all seemingly love. Yeah, and there's a great litmus test for this, right? if your business were to go out of business, would you be missed? Yeah.

And if the answer is no, then you should be very, very, very concerned. But if you're out there advocating, and this applies, again, to brick and mortar in a local area, but it also applies, you know, online, a digital marketer, you know, my company, we have a rabid community of over 10,000 people sharing experiences, talking, serving one another, helping one another within a Facebook group, right? So the tactics are the same, right? I should say the strategy is the same, whether it's deployed by, I'm going to have a children's book author come to our kids, you know, to our shoe store, or I'm going to really begin to build a true community inside of a Facebook group, right? Where community takes place now, we have options and that's great. But it doesn't change the strategy and it doesn't change the critical nature of building community. I truly believe that the word brand and the word community, they're almost going to become inseparable in the next few years. The idea of like, oh, I recognize. recognize that logo, that's not going to be enough to establish a brand. You have to build community and you know you've built community if you were gone, you would be missed. People would miss

that community. That's good. Okay, so giving us some really good, I think, practical thoughts here that we need to be really figuring out, okay, how do we now plug this in? But I want you to just be stark. Let's just lay it out here for a moment. If people miss out on this, they go, this is good advice. This guy Ryan's pretty sharp. He obviously knows what he's talking about, but things are fine. This is 2018, and this train is moving. What happens to the business who does not take heed of what you've told us? I think what's tragic is somebody who probably isn't as good as you are at doing the thing that you do is going to come along and they're going to beat you, not because they're better at delivering the product or the service that you deliver, but because they're better at communicating in this

new way and in this new medium. I'll give you another just very tactical example. Chat, conversational marketing, right? This idea that retailers and service-based companies have always been good at. The phone rings, they pick it up. They know how to talk to prospects and answer the questions. And yet when it comes to the web, they don't know how to do that. And we now have tools like Facebook Messenger, right? There's chat apps out there like drift.com. Again, no, you know, no association or affiliation, you know, but there are these chat tools that when somebody arrives at your website. You have the ability to engage with them in real live online conversation. And we have to remember that today there are people falling in love and proposing marriage to folks that they've

never really even met in some cases in real life. Now, we can mock that, but that's the reality. That is the new world that we live in. And the people who are growing up in this world, who, yeah, they may not be as good at you are in terms of like, you know, installing a toilet or, you know, running a new, you know, dropping a new line in somebody's house, but they're really great at conversational marketing. They're comfortable with these modern tools. And if you're not careful, they're going to come out and they're going to win, not because they're better, but because they are loving your customers in a way that you aren't. So I think that's the stakes. Good stuff, Ryan. You're always on top of what's happening. And we appreciate you, giving us some really

practical wisdom. Appreciate how you're a friend to the Entree tribe here in our offices. And then You're a great friend to our broader audience because you always deliver value when you hang out with us. So look forward to having you back on again and we're better for hanging out with you. I appreciate you. Thanks for having me. Well, I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Ryan Dice. Really good stuff there. I'll tell you what else is good stuff. The free resources we bring you every episode.

The resource from our Entree leadership team this episode is the goal tracker. It's going to help you create unstoppable momentum, everybody and every organization. needs goals. And you've got to empower yourself and your team to create the goals and then execute against them. This tool is something that you can use and your team can use. Print it out, hand it out, educate your team on how to use it. This chart is giving you a goal, an action plan, and a target date. Couldn't be any more simple, but it is very, very powerful. Here's how you get it. Text goals 2018. That's one phrase, no space. Goals, 2018.

Goals, 2018, text that to 33444. Or you can go get the link in this episode's show notes. Well, that's going to do it for this episode on behalf of Will the producer, Jim the engineer, and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.