The Ultimate Marketing Engine is a book by John Jantsch that provides a step-by-step system for creating customers and clients for life. It covers topics such as developing a marketing strategy, creating a powerful brand, and building relationships with customers that will lead to long-term success.
The book provides detailed advice on how to attract the right customers, convert leads into sales, and retain customers for future success. It also provides practical advice and real-world examples of how to effectively market a business in the ever-changing digital landscape.
Tune the Engine
What is the Ultimate Marketing Engine?
The Ultimate Marketing Engine is a successful customer.
The school of thought that says the purpose of a business is to profitably acquire and retain customers is not entirely wrong. It’s just limiting and hard to sustain.
The key is to recognize the value that you, your products, and your services bring; to appreciate what an ideal client looks like; and then to understand and promise to solve that ideal customer’s greatest problem.
Creating a marketing engine means helping your customers go from where they are now to where they want to arrive, to experience the transformation they seek, and to get the best result possible.
The story framework
Here is the framework we will use to create your story:
- Define the problem that exists today.
- Explain the outside force driving the problem.
- Paint the picture of the reader’s world without the problem.
- Explain that a solution exists today.
- Call the reader to take action.
The Steps
STEP 1. Map where your best customers are today and where they want to go.
STEP 2. Uncover the real problem you solve for your ideal customers (the transformation they are seeking).
STEP 3. Narrow your focus to the top 20 percent of your ideal customers.
STEP 4. Attract more ideal customers with the narrative they are already telling themselves.
STEP 5. Scale with your customers by serving their entire ecosystem.
Narrow your focus Contd.
- Once you’ve got a good idea of who your customers are, it’s time to group them into one of four boxes. First, you’ve got the profitable customers who also refer business. These are your golden geese – the customers you need to understand, find, and cultivate.
- Then, there are the profitable customers who don’t refer business. These folks are still good to have, but maybe there’s a disconnect somewhere. Figure out what’s going on, and see if you can improve your communication with this group.
- Next up, you’ve got the unprofitable customers who refer business. Sure, you appreciate the referrals, but maybe these folks shouldn’t be customers in the first place. Take a hard look at who they’re referring, and see if it’s a good fit for your business.
- Finally, there are the unprofitable customers who don’t refer business. These guys are your detractors – they’re not making you money, and they’re not helping you out by sending new customers your way. Take a close look at this group and see if they represent work you should no longer be doing.
Remember, the key to success is often focusing on what really matters and cutting out the rest. By narrowing your focus and honing in on your ideal customer, you can make sure that your business is thriving and growing.
Where Your Best Customers Want to Go
The seven behaviors of the marketing hourglass are: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.
These seven behaviors represent logical stages of the customer journey as well as activities that customers want to engage in as they decide whether or not to do business with an organization.
We want to know who can solve our problems. We want to like what they have to say. And we won’t even consider buying from them if we don’t trust that they will deliver. We often want the ability, if possible, to try what it might be like to work with this company or acquire their products.
The primary purpose of the like, trust, and try phases is to educate your prospective customer on the value of doing business with you over others, on how your business is uniquely suited to solve their problems, on self-discovery of whether or not they are an ideal customer, and if so, why.
Ultimately, the like, trust, and try phases help you weed out non-ideal customers and appeal to ideal ones who, because they now understand more about your value, are not as concerned about working solely with the lowest price offer.
The Narrative Is the Story
First, know exactly where your customers are, where they want to go, and what they aspire to. Then, map the milestones that will get them there. Now you can attract even more ideal customers through the story that you know they are telling themselves.
In step 4 we will dive into the tactical and practical aspects of using everything we have worked through in the first three steps to create the foundation of your attraction engine. After all, none of this benefits you or your potential customer until both of you get to experience it.
This story will have many uses. You will tell it in a video on your homepage, as an element of a presentation at an industry trade show, as an email in a welcome sequence created for new subscribers, or as a way to introduce yourself at a networking event
Scale with your customer
Building relationships with customers, partners, and the market is key to scaling your business. Creating processes and routines that put you in front of them in new and helpful ways will deepen those relationships.
The key to success is measurement, so keeping track of your relationships, referrals, and conversations is crucial. You must be committed, consistent, and dedicated to outreach, and tie tactics to measurable revenue to know if there’s a return on investment.
Many CRM tools can help you tag referral partners and create recurring tasks based on your contact rhythms, while niche tools like Contactually or Pipedrive can aid in relationship building. By teaching and building relationships, your business can enjoy the fruits of your students’ successes while cementing your referral culture and reputation.
The Real Problem You Solve
People don’t buy products or services because they want them, but because they believe they will solve a problem.
Now, they get to define what that problem is, but in this step, we will explore how businesses that understand, communicate, and promise to solve the real problems their ideal customers face can make a giant leap toward rendering all competition irrelevant.
You make a product or sell a service, hone your pitch, and then get busy prescribing all the benefits, all the solutions, all the award-winning attributes of what you sell to anyone who will listen.
That’s the way it works. You know what people need, and you’ve tailored your solutions to meet what they need. You’ve even given your unique methodology a fancy name and constructed a branded process to deliver results.
Then one day you wake up and conclude that sales aren’t what you had hoped; that sometimes your proposals go nowhere; that you simply cannot get over the hump.
Here is some tough love to get us started. No one wants what we sell. They want their problems solved, period.
Narrow your focus
Alright, let’s talk about narrowing your focus. Now, some people say that finding your niche is the key to success, and they might be onto something. If you’re working in the B2B world, for example, clients often want to work with people who have already worked with companies in their industry. They want to know that you’ve got the chops to help their business thrive.
But, hold on a second. There are also some downsides to getting too caught up in one industry. For one thing, you might miss out on new, innovative ideas from other fields.
So, whether you’re already focused on a niche or just getting started, it’s important to keep your mind open and your focus narrow.
Try to figure out what your ideal customer looks like by experimenting and paying attention. You’ll start to recognize who you want to work with, and who you definitely don’t.
