Welcome to another episode of The COO Solution Podcast! This week, Derek Fredrickson is joined by marketing strategist and CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, Sara Nay. With over 15 years of experience helping small businesses simplify and succeed with smarter marketing strategies, Sara offers a candid look at how business owners can navigate today’s noisy marketing world with clarity, purpose, and efficiency.
In this episode, Sara breaks down why “less is more” is the new marketing mantra, how AI is reshaping execution and creativity, and why the most effective marketing teams are structured around clarity, not chaos.
In This Episode:
- The Marketing Strategy Pyramid (00:44): How to align business strategy, marketing execution, and team roles for seamless growth.
- AI’s Role in Elevating Team Capacity (03:24): Why AI isn’t replacing humans—it’s empowering them to lead and think more strategically.
- Strategy First, Tactics Second (12:09): Why jumping to funnels, ads, or content before mapping a strategy is a costly mistake.
- The Entrepreneur’s Role in Marketing (15:01): Sara shares how founders can stay involved without micromanaging every campaign.
- From Intern to CEO (20:50): Sara’s journey through Duct Tape Marketing and how her all-hands experience makes her a better leader.
- Marketing Horror Stories & Ownership (25:53): Why so many small businesses get burned—and how to protect yourself by owning your strategy.
- Building Internal Marketing Assets (28:57): How to stop outsourcing everything and start taking control with the right guidance.
- Sara’s Final Insight (33:05): “Do less, but do it better”—why human connection is the competitive edge that still matters most.
Action Steps for Listeners:
- Audit your current marketing efforts—are they aligned with your business strategy?
- Involve your leadership team in building a customer journey map.
- Consider where AI can enhance—not replace—your team’s productivity.
- Focus on marketing activities that actually build relationships.
Resources & Links:
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Transcript:
Derek Fredrickson
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to the COO Solution podcast. I’m your host, Derek Fredrickson. Very excited to be with you today. We’ve got a great guest and a great topic we’re going to be talking about marketing, all things marketing. And I’d like to introduce Sarah Nay, who is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing. Sarah, it’s great to have you on the show with us today.
00:22
Sara Nay
Thanks for having me on, Derek.
00:24
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah. So before we dive into all things marketing, I know there’s so much that we can cover with marketing. We’re going to be strategic about what we talk about in terms of marketing and how it pertains to team and operations, especially as entrepreneurs and business owners are scaling and growing to the next level. But I’d love for you to just take a moment, introduce yourself, tell our audience a little bit about you, what you’re all about, and duct tape marketing.
00:44
Sara Nay
Yeah, I appreciate it. And I like the fact that you said we’re going to focus on being strategic. I think that’s a huge piece when it comes to marketing and what we’ve been preaching, honestly, for the last 30 years that we’ve been in business as a company. And so I’m the CEO at Duct Tape Marketing. We have two core sides of our business. We work directly with small business clients as fractional CMOs. And so that’s one side of our business. And then the other side of our business that we’ve been doing for the past like 15 or 16 years is we actually certify and train marketing consultants, agencies, fractional CMOs, in our approach to lead with strategy and then transition to long term retainers with clients.
01:21
Derek Fredrickson
Wonderful.
01:21
Sara Nay
Duct Tape marketing, a nutshell. Yeah, great.
01:23
Derek Fredrickson
Wonderful. Welcome. So I’m trying to think, let’s just dive right into marketing. So one of the things that I know we want to talk about is, especially in the work that we do with our clients is usually almost every single client a big component of what we focus on is marketing. Right. Kind of the marketing strategy, the visionary, the entrepreneur, they make up the big idea, they have the big vision of the future, the big picture. And then we cascade that into, okay, what’s the marketing strategy? What’s the plan for executing that on the marketing level? But I wanted to start with, you have an interesting approach or an interesting perspective about how does the marketing strategy then get cascaded to the rest of the team and connection with operations and right people in right seats.
02:04
Derek Fredrickson
Just talk a little bit about that, if you could, and then we’ll kind of dive in from there, of course.
02:07
Sara Nay
Yeah. So we have a concept that we call our marketing strategy pyramid. And it aligns nicely with what you were just describing, where at the bottom of the pyramid, the bottom layer is business strategy. And so what is the business actually trying to accomplish? What are the goals, what’s the vision, where’s the direction it’s going, you know, one year and three year, what are we trying to accomplish? And so you have to have that information to then effectively create what the middle part of the pyramid is the market. Because the marketing strategy should support what the business is actually trying to do and what the direction the business is going to. And then at the top of the pyramid is the team strategy. And so it starts with understanding the business and then it goes to creating the marketing strategy.
02:46
Sara Nay
And then once the marketing strategy is in place, you have to answer the question of who’s going to actually get this work done. And the interesting thing with the team strategy is it’s shifted over the last, I would say, year and a half for us. Where before it was always, okay, what people do we need in what seats? And that’s still the conversation we’re having, but we’re also talking about, okay, how can we layer in different AI systems and solutions to elevate those people in those seats? Interesting, because, you know, previously, you know, we had a lot of people in the companies were working with that were more like marketing executors. So doing things like writing content and creating social updates and all of that good stuff.
03:24
Sara Nay
Now those people are moving from like strictly executing, like writing a blog post from scratch, to maybe managing more of a blog creation process with the assistance of AI. And so it’s really changed the whole marketing department from an operations standpoint, because the goal should be with any company is to elevate people from doing, doing to more overseeing and managing and being more productive in the work that they were doing previously.
03:51
Derek Fredrickson
Oh, that’s so interesting. I mean, you know, I mean, I can’t have a, a conversation or I don’t see something about AI in some form or another. But I love the way you just positioned it as like, it’s almost as a tool. We could talk a little bit about AI as an example, but as a tool that allows the team members to kind of elevate what they’re doing and more about the process and oversight as opposed to the execution element.
04:12
Derek Fredrickson
So can you give us a couple examples or just talk a bit, maybe more specifically on your experience, like you know, AI is just shifting the landscape in general, but, you know, is it more about shifting the landscape from a marketing perspective in terms of the execution, like the social media copywriting, et cetera, and content or how else is it changing the dynamic not just for marketing in general, but particularly for the team members that are responsible in an execution mode?
04:37
Sara Nay
Yeah, there’s a couple ways it’s shifting, I would say in a big way. And so let’s stick with like the execution piece first and then I’ll talk about the other example first. Like, so for someone that writes a lot of content, let’s say they’re writing a blog post. Like previously they would have to go out and do all of this research manually and write from, like create the blog outline from scratch, write the actual content from scratch, edited, all of those steps on their own. And now you’re able to use, let’s say deep research within ChatGPT to conduct really deep, thorough research on a topic, you know, by, you know, putting in a prompt and sending it out to do the research and it comes back.
05:12
Sara Nay
And then from there creating a blog outline and then writing a first draft of the content all within something like ChatGPT to then have a really massive starting point based on research. And so in some cases, maybe even better quality content because it went out there and spent the time researching that, then you’re able to take across the finish line. And so your role as an executor when it comes to like writing blog content, like there’s still a human role in there.
05:39
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah.
05:39
Sara Nay
But you’re able to do, I would argue, higher quality content at a quicker pace because you’re able to bring in these tools to help elevate you.
05:47
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah.
05:47
Sara Nay
And so that’s one key way where I’m seeing it really shaking up marketing is more of the execution, but also how I like to use different tools. Like, ChatGPT is as like more of a thought partner. And so anytime that I’m like thinking about a shift in our business or I’m thinking about launching a new service or product and I don’t know how to position it or how to name it, I’m leaning into different AI tools where I’m still essentially the thought leader in the scenario, but the tool is the thought partner to help challenge me and help think about things differently and help me be more creative than I was previously.
06:21
Sara Nay
And so I really think AI tools right now in marketing, specifically, because that’s what we’re talking about is really great for help with strategic planning and deep thinking and execution as well.
06:31
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, I love the analogy of the thought partner. It’s exactly how I use it as well. I mean, I think in the beginning everybody was like, oh great. You know, it’s like a way to do research more efficiently or more effectively at a basic level. But now that I think organizations that are really leveraging AI, specifically ChatGPT from a strategic partner perspective. I know it sounds a bit grandiose because we’re talking about, you know, AI, but also when you lean in and leverage it as a resource, as a tool to strategically partner with you, to give you feedback, to give you ideas, to contradict or validate your line of thinking and prompt it to support you in that way, it just moves the needle so much more beyond just the execution or the tactician, the tactical way of thinking about using it.
07:16
Derek Fredrickson
I love that approach. I remember I was in a conversation and somebody had said ChatGPT is something like, it’s like autocomplete on steroids in the beginning, but when you really leverage it for all of this deep research and thought and analysis and then strategically ask it, her. Him. Whatever you want to name.
07:35
Sara Nay
Yeah, whatever you call it.
07:36
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, yeah, give it a name, personalize it, make it more of your partner. Like I, I said as a joke, like, you know, maybe it should exist on the organizational chart because we’re utilizing ChatGPT as such a resource. But where. Can you give me an example OR 2 on AI specifically? Where does the line still exist where there’s that human element that is still at the forefront? Right. We’re leveraging AI and leveraging ChatGPT as you mentioned. But where are we? Not yet. And maybe we will, the time will tell. But we’re still relying on the personal human element to make that distinction between the two.
08:14
Sara Nay
Yeah. Just give you an example. Whenever we start working with new clients, when we’re more in the fractional CMO role, we always start with about a 30 day engagement where we’re creating an overall marketing strategy for the business. The nice thing is with the adoption of these AI tools, we can speed some of the research were doing manually up. And so, for example, we used to do. Well, we still do competitive research and that used to be a very manual process. And now we’re able to use AI to go out and do a deep research report on the top five competitors and have this just like really solid information. And so there areas in marketing strategy that you’re able to move faster and get deeper on because of AI tools.
08:52
Sara Nay
But there are, there’s also a lot of things that humans, I believe, still need to do to your question. And so one of the things that we’ve done over the years is we’ve always interviewed our clients’ clients to understand their perspective on the business and why they decided to go with them and what were their pain points and why did they move forward and what does success look like now and really capture that story. So we can use customer stories in their marketing efforts moving forward to develop things like Personas and messaging. And so humans still need to have a conversation with humans to capture that information to then put into a chat GPT or a tool to then analyze it and build it as part of the marketing plan.
09:30
Sara Nay
We also do a lot of interviewing with our clients on to the leadership team for our clients in terms of like, what their story is and why the company was founded and all of that stuff to then feed that information into an AI tool. And so for marketing strategy, a lot of it is, you know, doing some manual research, but it’s having conversations with people. Yeah, Recording, transcribing those conversations and then ultimately putting them into a tool to then help shape the rest of a marketing strategy from there. And so that’s an example of like humans plus AI is where I think the most impact can be.
10:05
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, yeah, the human element is essential. But I think the idea here, and we could do a whole conversation on AI by itself, but we’re going to get back to marketing. But yeah, there’s such an interesting balance and I love the idea of it being the thought partner and a partner in the execution, but also in the strategy development while obviously utilizing and relying on the human connection and the stories and the conversation that comes out in order to be that input, if you will, to everything else that’s happening. So coming back to marketing, so I’m all about frameworks and structure and process and everything else. And I know that you have a very distinct kind of what you call the three Ps framework for looking at marketing. Marketing strategy. Can you talk a little bit about that for a bit?
10:45
Sara Nay
Yeah, yeah. Well, so for marketing strategy, that’s the thing. We’ve been in business for 30 years. We’ve been doing strategy first for 30 years. Like it’s always a foundational piece of our business. And so that’s what I was kind of mentioning earlier about, you know, the initial 30 days when we’re working with clients. But what we work through as part of strategy is first starting with more of a marketing and brand audit. So understanding, like, where the business is today. And then we do competitive research using the support of AI tools. We interview, you know, ideal clients for the business, and then we develop Personas and messaging.
11:19
Sara Nay
And so that’s really the first phase of strategy, is really researching and understanding the business on a deep level to understand their target market and messaging that resonates with them, because you need to know who you’re talking to with what message before you can do absolutely anything else.
And then the second phase of strategy, first for us is then saying, okay, what are we actually trying to accomplish from a marketing perspective? And then we talk through content strategy, growth priorities for the next quarter, and then ultimately put that all into an execution calendar. And so you really need all of those pieces. Oh, and the customer journey as well. We work on that I mentioned. So we work on, like the whole customer journey because you really need all of those pieces in place to market effectively.
12:03
Sara Nay
Where I see a lot of businesses miss over the years is they say, oh, I have a marketing strategy. And it’s essentially just a list of tactics.
12:09
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah.
12:09
Sara Nay
And so that’s not a marketing strategy. You need to know, again, who you’re targeting with what message, where you’re guiding them on the customer journey, what content you’re going to and how that all supports and talks to each other. And so you really need to put that deep work in to then be a lot more effective in your marketing in the long term.
12:26
Derek Fredrickson
So I want to ask this question, like, as an example with entrepreneurs, right? They’ve got. They have the big ideas, they’ve got their focus on the big picture, the future and everything else. And sometimes, you know, when it comes to marketing, I often say there’s so much that they could do, but there’s only maybe some things that we really should do. And so oftentimes, in some cases, not all entrepreneurs were like, you know, I think we should be doing ads, I think we should be doing, you know, funnels. I think we should be completely doing rebrand our website. And how do you rein that in to kind of really align them into the strategy first? Like, those are more of the tactics, but the strategy first.
13:06
Derek Fredrickson
Because sometimes it’s like the bright, shiny object I’m seeing on Instagram, we should be doing this. And I want to be doing more funnels, and I want to recreate my brand and website. Like, I’d be like, okay, we could do that, but we have to really focus on this because this is what we should be doing in order to connect the dot back to the business strategy and the vision. But how do you do that with a client or an entrepreneur that is thinking that’s where they want to go. But we know in some cases, I don’t want to say we know better for them or better, you know, but like, how do you get them back to be like, but this is actually what we should be focused on and what we should be doing.
13:37
Derek Fredrickson
So how do you get them from, like from instead of tactics than strategy to be like more focused on the strategy than the tactics?
13:44
Sara Nay
Yeah, that’s a good question. And a lot of people do get shiny objects ideas, entrepreneurs, visionaries, like they get excited about things easily, which is just part of the role. And so for us, like we go through the initial strategy first, we put a lot of work into that and they go through the process with us and understand like the why behind why we’re recommending things over the next quarter. And then when we go into actually execution for clients, when we’re in the long term retainer, like we’ll map out three months at a time because it’s our belief, you know, that you should be doing as a business quarterly planning and marketing should be a piece of that as well.
14:19
Sara Nay
And so typically we’re analyzing, you know, we’re analyzing metrics for our clients on a weekly monthly basis, but we’re doing a deep dive every single quarter to then understand like what’s working, what’s not working, where do we need to shift, where are we being impactful moving forward to then map out the next three months of priorities? I think it’s hard to map out beyond that, especially right now with how marketing is just shifting and changing. And so really, you know, going back to like these decisions were based on research and data, not just what we think we should be doing, try to bring it back to that, but also not planning out more than three months at a time. So it’s a little bit easier to stick to a plan versus if were to plan out a year from now.
14:59
Sara Nay
And just things change so much.
15:01
Derek Fredrickson
Right. So another kind of two questions about that, which is, this is great. I love that we’re kind of going into this direction a bit. So I firmly believe that entrepreneurs, in the way that they look on their business, not in the business like the day to day, but on the business. Marketing is something that they can’t delegate completely, meaning they need to be a component, they need to be involved in some element of the Marketing. And how do you balance that? If you agree, how do you balance that with the execution, the implementation and the kind of tactics approach, you know, in terms of whether the entrepreneur needs to be involved in creating messaging or creating content or shooting video.
15:40
Derek Fredrickson
And then sometimes it’s like the doing part where they feel like, I just want somebody to handle all my marketing. How many times have I heard I just want somebody to do all my marketing? You can’t just have everybody do all of your marketing. You can have somebody or some resources do a lot of it, but there’s still a component as the business owner, the visionary that needs to be involved with marketing. How do you balance that with a client? That feels like, great, I’ve got this resource on board. I don’t need to do anything about marketing and I can kind of move on to something else. But in my belief that they need to be involved, but they need to be involved in the right way. How do you approach that?
16:11
Sara Nay
Yeah, as you said, to be involved in the right way. And so we get them involved where needed. And so strategy, like they should be involved in messaging, they should understand the customer journey, they should be on board with the Personas that we identified. So it’s getting aligned with them initially in the strategy. And then typically we meet with the CEO founder like once a month and then we have more regular meetings with anyone on the execution. So they’re not in like the weeds meetings with all the execution, but they’re in the higher level monthly reporting meetings. Like this is what your metrics are saying. Like this is how we’re shifting, this is what we’re prioritizing for next month. So they’re aware of everything that we’re and recommending from a marketing perspective. And again the why behind it.
16:52
Sara Nay
But as you said, there are components as well depending on the business and the industry. But if they’re wanting to be seen as like the face of the business or a thought leader in their industry, like there does need to be some level of involvement from them. And so, you know, some things that we do with clients, for example, is like if they’re not doing a lot of video and they’re not comfortable on video, well then at least schedule like an interview with them where it’s just like a conversation like this where we’re asking them a bunch of questions, we’re capturing how they answer things in their words, how they address certain things. And then we’re taking that and we’re turning that into different forms of written content.
17:27
Sara Nay
So we really Capture their point of view and their tone and their style and all of those things because it originally came from their mind, then were able to take and turn into emails and blog content and social content and everything from there.
17:41
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah.
17:41
Sara Nay
And so. But there are also other business owners that it’s about the brand and the company and we can handle a lot of the marketing from them. So it’s just really, it’s dependent on, you know, how much they need to be out there and be the face of their brand. And that’s more important than certain industries versus, like, we work with like a lot of home service companies, so remodeling companies, HVAC contractors. And in that scenario, we do handle a lot of the marketing components and we essentially just report back to them as to what we did.
18:09
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, it’s a good distinction, you know, if it’s a personal brand thought leader, where. Yeah, you know, the positioning, the messaging is about the individual. Of course they need to be kind of front and center. But if it’s more about the brand and the. I’d say the company in that regard, you know, they can be kind of more backstage, but they’re still in the visioning part of it. So I think the other thing I was going to mention about that is oftentimes, you know, looking at, from a marketing perspective, where does the entrepreneur get involved? Of course, where they need to, versus, you know, in all of the different aspects. But I often say, you know, leverage the entrepreneur as an asset in their own business. And where do we leverage that asset from a marketing perspective?
18:49
Derek Fredrickson
Sort of we’re getting the best return on the investment, but we’re not kind of exhausting it or we’re not kind of overdoing it and doing it in balance and moderation. And I think it depends. Some, you know, some entrepreneurs love marketing. They love to be involved in so much of it and they like to be doing the videos and doing the content and sometimes they just need to do maybe like the first 10% and then everything else happens up to the last, you know, 10%. Then they finish it or they approve it or they tweak it or whatever it might be.
19:17
Sara Nay
There’s definitely a balance on that.
19:18
Derek Fredrickson
Sorry.
19:18
Sara Nay
There’s definitely a balance because we work with a lot of people over the years, as you said, like, they want to do absolutely everything. They want to read every piece of content that we ever put out and they want to have final say. Then there’s Other people in the end of the spectrum, as you said, where they’re just like, just do it. I don’t care. I trust you. So I think there’s that happy medium, as you said, like, being involved on like a maybe a 10% level where they’re overseeing, but, you know, as an entrepreneur, like, you shouldn’t be fully running the marketing department as well.
19:43
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah.
19:43
Sara Nay
Or you’re not really running the business and focusing on other things that make more sense. In terms of your zone of genius. And so I think there’s that happy medium of, like, being involved, high level, but not in every single detail.
19:55
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah. Yeah. So I want to come back to another point, but I first want to jump. Jump back even a bit more because you mentioned something about, like, the why. The why of the entrepreneur. That was one of the things you said. I want to know about you. Why marketing? Like, what was the thing? Tell us a little bit about your journey, your story, like, what brought you into. I always. I like these types of questions because some people like talking about finance, some people like talking about sales. Some people really love about, you know, operations or team or, you know, developing, you know, talent and everything else. But, like, why marketing? What was it that, like, how did you get started and what kind of evolved to say, okay, my lane is marketing, and this is what I love.
20:33
Derek Fredrickson
It’s my zone of genius. It’s my jazz. And then also I’d love to know a little bit about how did you transition from that marketing perspective? Because you obviously, you know your stuff, but now CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, like, there’s a different hat that you have to wear as like, marketing and then kind of CEO. I’d love to hear a little bit about that.
20:50
Sara Nay
Yeah, of course. So I started duct tape marketing 15, almost 15 years ago now as an intern ever since. Yeah. So I’ve pretty much had every role in the company since then. So I was, you know, intern, community manager, operations, sales, obviously CMO to some of our clients as well. Marketing strategies. Like, I’ve kind of moved in all the different areas of our business. And so last December, I officially stepped into the CEO seat. And it’s been a really great shift for me because I’ve done all of those different roles. I think it makes me a better leader because I understand what it’s like to be a fractional CMO to our clients. I understand what it’s like to be in the sales role. And so it helps me work with our team a lot more effectively. And so honestly, like, the why Marketing question.
21:38
Sara Nay
On top of that, I think there’s a lot that’s wrong in the marketing industry.
21:43
Derek Fredrickson
Okay, good.
21:44
Sara Nay
To be honest, Yeah, I think there’s. I, I’ve been selling the small businesses in this, in marketing for at least 10 or 11 years in this role. And I can’t tell you how many horror stories I’ve heard about just marketing and failing and marketing and trying to work with different agencies that they never knew what they were doing and they never got results or they tried to bring it in house and they couldn’t train them properly because they don’t have the experience. And now with everything that’s changing so rapidly right now, there’s just a lot of confusion in the industry.
22:16
Sara Nay
And so I’ve been really passionate over the years of building, helping build a company that tries to solve some of those problems by leading with strategy, by over communicating with our clients, by getting them real results, by teaching them as much as we’re actually implementing as well, so they have a deeper understanding of marketing. So that’s really, it’s not necessarily why I got into it originally. I think it was just a, you know, starting as an intern. I was just kind of trying to figure out if this is really even the place I wanted to be. But that’s what’s driven me over the years is trying to create a company built on trust and relationships that actually solves small business problems.
22:53
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, it’s like from intern to CEO, like that could be a podcast topic just by itself. I don’t know if I shared this, but when I started, you know, I mean, this is not about me, but it’s interesting because when I got started in entrepreneurship, it was kind of by, I don’t want to say by accident, but you know, I, I used to, my, my previous career where I got started was in corporate on Wall street. And then when I started to work and partner with my wife and our coaching business, this is back in 2008, I didn’t know anything about entrepreneurship. I didn’t know anything about business coaching. I don’t know anything about marketing, let alone online marketing.
23:26
Derek Fredrickson
I think at that point it was still mostly, you know, in person, networking and referrals and word of mouth and speaking. That’s a big component. But now it’s completely shifted the landscape with online and everything that’s going on and PPC and social and content, you name it, but same sort of thing. I mean, I had to come in like I kind of make the joke that I started out in the mailroom and just like figured out what do we do and how do we do these things and what is marketing, what’s an email list and what’s a launch and what’s a funnel. Oh, we send an email, we get response and so that’s direct response marketing. We put up a landing page and we get conversions. That’s a conversion and we drive traffic through ads.
24:03
Derek Fredrickson
And so I kind of figured all that out and then all the way now to CEO of The COO solution. It’s a bit interesting and same sort of thing. I have that perspective because I’ve been in it and doing it not just for our coaching company, but for other clients.. So you mentioned, I don’t know what the words were exactly, but you were saying upset. Not to say upset with what’s out there for marketing. But what was the word that you use? How did you share?
24:37
Sara Nay
I can’t remember. I just said there’s a lot wrong in the marketing space.
24:41
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, yeah. So what is it? What do you think is causing some of that? Like is it the, the marketplace is growing, it’s expanding. There’s more and more people I think that are confused about what are the right resources, what are the trusted solutions that I can rely on to help me, whether it’s my marketing or going my business or whatever it might be. Why do you think that’s been happening? What is that? What is the cause of that to some extent do you think?
25:09
Sara Nay
Yeah, I mean a lot of it like especially in the small business space is people start a business, not necessarily become marketers and then all of a sudden they have to learn marketing and then they have to like figure out what solutions to bring in. And to your point, like there’s just so many options. There’s fractional CMOs, which is what we lean into. There’s consultants, there’s agencies, there’s freelancers, there’s full time staff. Like there’s to be so many different options also with a lot of those options there’s no very like you don’t have to be certified to start a business. You don’t have to have experience to start a business. And so unfortunately I think a lot of people get into the space, promise the world under deliver, people get burned a number of times because they don’t know enough about marketing themselves.
25:53
Sara Nay
And then they bring in a marketer that’s promising them the world, but they don’t know enough to make the decision. And so I think that’s a big challenge. And then also marketing is evolving. I mean, like I said, I’ve been at the company for a while now. Like the last two years we’ve been like trying to sprint to stay ahead of all the things that are changing. And so like to complicate things even more, like marketing itself is evolving.
26:16
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah.
26:17
Sara Nay
So there’s just a lot that makes it challenging. Ultimately, I do think a lot of that can be solved by like really taking a step back and focusing on like the strategy, the market, the business strategy, marketing strategy and team strategy and just like analyzing what makes sense and maybe moving a little bit slower. But then if you are listening to this and you’re thinking about bringing in marketing support, definitely do your research. If you’re bringing in a marketing company by, you know, going through the process with them but also like speaking to some of their active clients, finding what you can online about them. And then my advice is really like don’t commit to a long term contract. Because I’ve also worked with a lot of people where they’re like, I’m locked into a year contract with this agency.
27:02
Sara Nay
I’ve heard that I have no idea what they’re doing, I’m not getting any results, but I can’t leave. Or another horror story that I hear is like this marketing company built my website, they own it. If I, I’ve heard that I lose my website.
27:14
Derek Fredrickson
Yes.
27:15
Sara Nay
And so yeah, so starting like doing your research, starting slow, you know, building a relationship before you move forward with the client with a marketing company long term is my advice. And so like when we work with clients we always start with an initial 30 day period and then from there like our longest client is like or 16 years at this point. But we typically, we’re always month to month with our clients. Like we want to make sure you’re happy working with us. We want to be happy working with you. We can end the engagement at any point. You can end the engagement at any point. And I think that’s an important piece to consider also if you’re thinking about like what solution makes the most sense.
27:51
Sara Nay
But another thing that we’ve been and all that and I can wrap this up, this is kind of a long thought process but we’ve been really focusing on over the last few months of helping businesses take ownership back of their marketing versus relying on outside agencies fully, even though we are an agency ourselves. So we’re coming in and for the businesses we’re working with, we’re creating a strategy and then we’re helping them train their team and bring in AI systems into their business, set them up strategically so they ultimately can be more impactful and take ownership back of their marketing. I think in those, like, in those scenarios, you still need a marketing leader.
28:29
Sara Nay
And so oftentimes they’re keeping us in as like a fractional cmo, where we’re still overseeing the marketing direction, but we’re really helping them build internal assets that they can keep regardless if we stay involved long term or not. And I think that’s the solution that small businesses should be thinking about right now is now that we have access to these tools, like, how can we own as much of our marketing as possible and then bring in leaders and advisors as we need to help direct it?
28:57
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, I love that. It’s like, you know, you’re building how we do. Marketing is like a foundation. It’s the structure that’s there. It’s like, this is the process, these are the people. And once that’s got, you know, momentum. And it’s difficult with marketing because it’s always evolving. But when you get those fundamentals in place, it gives them more control and ownership. It’s the same thing we often say to our clients, which is, you know, we help run your business for you, or in some cases, we run your business with you. And it’s not about taking control, it’s actually giving you more control back, especially for as an entrepreneur, where you need to be and where you want to be within your business, obviously not in the weeds, but more in the bigger picture.
29:32
Derek Fredrickson
And I want to come back to something you also, you mentioned about the confusion in the marketplace or, you know, kind of like how it’s been complex and what’s going on. And I mean, I believe that you have the same thought as I do is like, people can be people that are really good marketers can front as being really good at what they’re marketing, if that makes sense. And so I’ve seen people that, you know, present where they’re like, I, I’m a coach or I’m an influencer, I’m a guru or I’m a subject matter expert or a thought leader, like, they’re really good at marketing. But then sometimes what’s actually behind the scenes. I know this is like a little bit of a touchy topic, but I’ve seen it where behind the scenes, like the stuff doesn’t work. Like there’s no real substance there.
30:16
Derek Fredrickson
They haven’t been doing it like, you know, duct tape marketing’s been doing this for how many years? It’s like there’s no credibility, there’s no real track record. But their marketing is amazing. So they get a lot of visibility because it works, because they’re really good marketer, but not really good in the topic that they’re marketing. Does that make sense? Does that, does that resonate for you as well? I’m assuming?
30:35
Sara Nay
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I unfortunately see it all the time and I’ve fallen prey to some of those over the years as well. You know, when people promise the world and yeah, I mean I think for us like we have, our certification program has been around for 15 years. That’s for certifying consultants and agency owners. And I hear all the time like, oh, I joined this other program because they promised the world. And then I joined it. And it like the structure, the support, the actual credibility wasn’t there once I was in the program. And so we try to do a bit of the opposite experience where we try to blow people away, you know, with all the material access, training, resources they get when they actually join our program.
31:10
Sara Nay
And so we’re, I mean maybe this isn’t the right way of doing things, but over the years we’ve like under promised, I would say a little bit as part of the sales process to absolutely blow them away. Because when we’re thinking about the whole customer journey, for us it’s how can people get to know like trust, try, buy, repeat and refer from a business. And so we put a lot of emphasis on the repeat and refer pieces because when you can do that, obviously you get longer term recurring revenue, but also referral sources move through the beginning of the customer journey a lot faster. And so we’re big on absolutely blowing people away from a customer experience standpoint. So it turns to long term retention. So you’re not always having to go out there and look for the next sale.
31:51
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, I mean know like, and trust is like a cornerstone of marketing that’s been around for, for decades. And I feel like in some respect more recently it’s something that is unaware, like that’s not a pillar by which some marketers are, you know, using marketing as a way to build credibility or trust or getting clients or selling their services. Or whatever it might be. But thanks to individuals like you, Sarah, and what you’re up to at duct tape marketing, we’re. We’re helping to combat that. So this has been super insightful. I’d love to just, like, how can people find out more about you, about duct tape marketing? Because Duct tape marketing, how long has the company been around? It’s been decades, correct?
32:31
Sara Nay
About 30 years. Yeah.
32:32
Derek Fredrickson
30 years, yeah. Yeah. So how can people find out more if they want to reach out to you and find out more about duct tape marketing?
32:38
Sara Nay
Of course. So we have a page on our website, DTM World Growth https://ducttapemarketing.com/ , and there’s a bunch of free resources there that you could check out to learn a bit more about us. And then on LinkedIn is a great way to connect with me personally. So, Sarah Nay is my name on LinkedIn.
32:54
Derek Fredrickson
Awesome. Wonderful. Any other kind of final thoughts, final words of wisdom, lasting comments about anything to do with marketing that we’ve talked about or anything else to do with marketing if we didn’t talk about?
33:05
Sara Nay
Yeah, yeah. I think just right now kind of sum up everything that we talked about, like, less is more right now in terms of marketing. And so it’s not about just more content or more channels or more things. It’s really getting focused on, like, the things that are working for your business and really focusing on human connection, I think, is where you’re going to continue to compete moving forward. So do less right now in terms of marketing, but do it well.
33:30
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, the mantra we use and, you know, do less better.
33:33
Sara Nay
Yeah.
33:34
Derek Fredrickson
So, yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much, Sarah. It was great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. And we’ll see you next time on The COO Solution podcast. Thanks, everybody.
33:44
Sara Nay
Thank you.
