Danny Decker is a speaker, author, podcast host, direct-response copywriter, and marketing consultant for ambitious entrepreneurs. In 2018, he successfully sold his marketing agency which he built from zero to seven figures in just five years, despite operating in a highly competitive industry.
Danny is the author of Marketing Simplified, available through Amazon and all major book retailers, and he is also the host of several popular podcasts, including Marketing Simplified Podcast. Danny is the co-author of a forthcoming book, The Automatic Marketing Machine, which he wrote to help ambitious business owners learn how to stop wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work and learn how to create simple, effective marketing systems that generate a profit.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Danny Decker about simplifying marketing.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How you need marketing in place that brings in new prospects and clients to claim entrepreneurial freedom.
– How working in a specific niche doesn’t mean giving up business opportunities.
– Why marketing isn’t as complicated as people make it out to be.
– How there are four primary components to a marketing system and what they are.
– Why you want your new clients to come from a referral.
Connect with Danny:
Links Mentioned:
dannydeckermarketing.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@DanielJDecker
Instagram
@dannydecker_nc
Facebook
facebook.com/DannyDeckerCoaching
LinkedIn
Linkedin.com/in/danieljdecker
Rob Kosberg:
Welcome, everybody. It’s Rob here again with another episode of the Publish. Promote. Profit. podcast. As usual, I got a great guest for you. Danny Decker is the author of Marketing Simplified, which you can find on Amazon and various other places, and I just found out is writing a new book, which we’ll learn a little bit about as well, that’s going to be out very shortly. Danny’s a speaker, author, podcast host, direct response copywriter, and marketing consultant. In 2018, he successfully sold his marketing agency, which he built from zero to seven figures in just five years, despite how competitive it is to run an agency, and how difficult it is to run an agency. He’s the coauthor of, as I mentioned, the upcoming book The Automatic Marketing Machine. That’s the book that is going to be coming up very soon, which he wrote to help business owners learn how to stop wasting money on marketing, we all want that, that doesn’t work, and instead, learn how to create simple, effective marketing systems. So, Danny, good to have you on, my friend. Thanks for being on the podcast today.
Danny Decker:
Rob, it is a pleasure to be here. I am a fan of your work. I’m a fan of your podcast, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, thank you, brother. I mentioned before to you, before we started recording, that I love marketing, and of course, that’s your whole business and your whole game. Not everybody does, and so I don’t know how many people will enjoy listening to this, but they need to pay attention because if you are not focused on your marketing, then you are out of control of one of the most important, if not the most important part of the business. I always like to ask my clients, “Hey, what business do you consider yourself to be in?” and they always say whatever they are. “Oh, I’m an attorney. I help people with this,” or, “I’m a financial advisor. I help people with this,” and the reality is we’re all in two businesses. We’re in the business of doing whatever we do, and we’re in the business of marketing and selling. Otherwise, you’re not in that other business.
You’re going to have to go to work for someone else. So, talk to me a little bit about your agency world. Tell me about the steps and the things that it took to go from zero to seven figures, and then sell your agency. Talk me through that. I imagine you talk about that in Marketing Simplified as well, your current book.
Danny Decker:
Correct, and I will tell you a little bit about that, but you got me so fired up in your intro just now that I just must quickly comment on what you just said. I think it’s so important, and one of our central premises in the automatic marketing machine is that to really claim your entrepreneurial freedom, you must have marketing in place that delivers you prospects and new clients. If you don’t have that, you don’t have your freedom as an entrepreneur. You can be the best lawyer, the best financial advisor, the best dentist, and it doesn’t matter if you can’t get clients and customers. So, I sincerely hope, even for those of your listeners who don’t love marketing and who don’t gravitate towards it, that the importance of this subject is not lost on them because I think you hit that nail right on the head.
Rob Kosberg:
Thank you. Thank you for the emphasis on that.
Tell me about how you marketed and built your agency. I’d love to learn a little bit more about that and how you sold it.
Danny Decker:
So, I started it with a partner back in around 2011, so around 10 years ago. I was in my early twenties at that point, I guess mid-twenties, had done a few jobs in marketing, worked for a small marketing agency, and just caught the vision for, wow, it is possible to build your own business. I didn’t grow up in an entrepreneurial family. Neither of my parents are entrepreneurs, so I had never considered running a small business myself. It just wasn’t even on my radar screen. But then working in a small business and seeing, okay, number one, I could do this, and it’s pretty cool, and number two, really starting to fall in love with marketing, I just took the leap and went for it and started with a partner. We started the business in Miami, Florida, and we were just offering internet marketing services for anyone and everyone who needed us in the Miami, Florida area, which is a common mistake that somebody who’s new at business makes, because we just wanted… We would do anything.
Listen, if you could write us a check, we were going to design a shirt for you. We were going to design a billboard for you. We were going to build a website for you, electrician, restaurant, landscaper, lawyer, it didn’t matter. So, we kind of scraped by for, I would say, a year-and-a-half, two years, before we finally got smart enough to realize that we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we engaged a coach. Again, this was probably 10 years ago or so. One of the first things he told us was, “You guys really need to find a niche. You really need to focus down.” So, we sat down and we looked at our list of customers, and we realized that many of our best customers, our favorite customers, our most profitable customers all happened to be small law firms. So, we said, “Hmm, there’s something here.”
So, we made the strategic decision to focus our marketing on attracting small law firms, which then allowed us to streamline our operations, because instead of doing billboards, insurance, and all these other things, we were able to focus in on a specific suite of digital products that small law firms needed, and it just took off because suddenly, we had clarity. When we focused in on small law firms we said, “Okay. Now there’s a specific set of trade shows that we need to hit. There are specific podcasts we need to advertise on. There are specific…” It gets real simple to figure out where you need to market yourself. So, long story short, we went from a two-man shop to a team of about 14 full-timers, grew from barely paying the bills to well over seven figures, and it all happened very quickly once we narrowed in and found that niche.
Rob Kosberg:
So, one of the things we talk to our clients about all the time is they want to write a broad book. They figure if they write on a broad topic, then that’s going to mean more sales, and of course, that’s the exact opposite. That’s doing t-shirts and doing law firm marketing, which you need to really pick one of those things. So, great, great, great tip out of the gate is if you want to build a business, you must have a niche that you’re working in, and it needs to be as narrow as possible, in my opinion. You even said small law firms, which I’m sure you had an ideal of what that meant, if they were whatever, 250 to a million or something like that, which is very, very smart.
Danny Decker:
It’s scary because listen. I have this conversation with clients and business owners all the time, and it’s scary because the idea of narrowing your niche and focusing on a small… It feels like you’re closing yourself off to all of these opportunities, and as business owners, as entrepreneurs, the last thing we want to do is close ourselves off to opportunity. So, it’s a really counterintuitive, hard thing to get people to embrace, and I struggled with it myself, but I’ve just seen time and time again that when you zero in on a specific target market, you make yourself more attractive to those people, but maybe even more importantly, you create a focus for yourself, and it becomes so much easier to market and find your customers when you’re able to focus in on some specific areas.
The last thought I have on this, because I think this is a really valuable topic, I always tell people, “Listen. If you’re so worried about turning away opportunities, you can still say yes. You can still focus your marketing on the niche you want to go after, but until you get there, until you are as busy as you want in that specific niche, and you have people reaching out to you from other industries, if you want to work with them, you can still work with them.”
There’s no one saying you can’t work with clients outside your niche, but when you focus your marketing and who you want to attract, that’s the important part of the conversation, because when we made that transition from working with any business to working with small law firms, it was a solid year before we were exclusively working with law firms. Honestly, it may never have been exclusively with law firms. We still had a few straggler clients from other industries. So, we really didn’t lose any opportunities. It just feels scary.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. That’s good, good, great point, and a good way to reduce the fear and the concern that someone might have over choosing a niche. But the best thing in the most important thing that you could do is to choose your niche, and then move forward, deal with the fear, just like Danny said to, but absolutely, choose and move forward. So, besides choosing a niche and making that a focus, talk to me more about the points of Marketing Simplified. I want to talk about your new book as well, but let’s hit Marketing Simplified. I assume that there’s pillars or core parts of the strategy that you teach for a small business or a company to simplify their marketing. Talk me through those core tenets.
Danny Decker:
So, my premise in Marketing Simplified is, as you can tell from the name, first off, marketing is not as complicated as many people perceive it to be. Your average small business owner, whether they’re an accountant or a lawyer or a dentist, they want to be a dentist or an accountant and a lawyer first and foremost. They are not trying to spend all of their time and all their brainpower learning marketing. Consequently, they are somewhat easily taken advantage of by marketing vendors, unfortunately. There are a lot of great marketing vendors out there, but there are also, unfortunately, a lot of agencies that aren’t so great. What happens to a business owner that doesn’t understand at least the basics of marketing is that they are easy victims for an agency or a vendor, even an employee sometimes, who can use fancy terminology and talk about the latest gizmos and gadgets, and pull the wool over their eyes, and behind you know it, that dentists or lawyer or accountant has spent two years and $100,000 on marketing that’s basically produced nothing in terms of measurable returns.
So, that was the spirit behind Marketing Simplified, and I do basically break it down and say, “Listen. There are four primary components of a marketing system. One, you need to have a brand identity created, and what that means is your brand answers the question, who are you in the marketplace? What problems do you solve? What makes you different than your competitors? How do you make your customer’s life better?” Then there is a component of marketing that I think does not get nearly enough focus, which is referral generation. Most businesses get, especially smaller businesses, especially in the professional services world, their best clients and customers come from referral. That’s just fact of the matter.
We all probably intuitively know that to be true. So then, my question is why aren’t we in the small business professional services world more proactive about driving referrals? Because the mindset of a lot of business owners is just, “Well, I’m going to do great work. It’s going to take care of itself. My products are great, so I don’t really need to do anything.” But my point is that-
So, my point is that you really need to have a proactive strategy in place to drive referrals, and then the third pillar is retention. Another way to think about that is just increasing customer lifetime value, turning it away from a one-off transaction into a lifetime relationship with each customer. That makes each customer much more valuable to your business, and that means you can spend more to go acquire that customer. So, now you have an advantage in the marketplace where you can spend more than your competition because a customer is worth more. Then finally, the fourth pillar is lead generation, and that’s going out on cool lead generation, generating leads in the marketplace, and my belief is that you want to have a referral system in place. You want to have a retention system in place in addition to lead generation. A lot of businesses just think all they need to do with their marketing is generate leads, but that’s only a small piece of the pie.
So, that was a lot, but that’s the central premise.
Rob Kosberg:
That was good. I love how well round it is. The one thing that surprises me is you put lead generation last, which a lot of people put it first. Was there any thinking behind putting it last?
Danny Decker:
Yeah. The thought process is pretty simple. It’s easier to generate customers and clients through referrals, and it’s easier to improve lifetime value of your customers. All those things are easier to do, quite frankly, than going out and generating new cold leads.
If I’m having a sales conversation with a potential new client, I would prefer that it came to me through referral than a cold lead because I’m going to close it at a higher rate. They’re already preconditioned to trust me. They’re likely to be comfortable spending more money with me, all of those things. Lead generation is more effective when you have retention systems in place and lifetime value systems in place, so that’s the thought process.
Rob Kosberg:
I like the way you’re thinking there, and if someone goes through these pillars or steps, they’re more than likely to get some kind of result, which will trigger a desire to do more if they focus on the easier stuff to do. If they try to figure out Facebook ads and they’ve never run Facebook ads before, then more than likely, they’re in for a world of pain, and they’re better off focusing on something where they can make an immediate impact in their business. So, good stuff. All right. So, talk to me about The Automatic Marketing Machine. What does that mean? I know the book is yet to come out, but what does that mean to you, and as someone reads that, what are you wanting them to understand or envision?
Danny Decker:
Yeah. So, I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story in answering that question. So, I grew up in West Africa. My parents, when I was five years old, joined a mission organization, and we moved from Minneapolis to Minnesota, across the ocean to Liberia in West Africa.
One of the things that you can’t help but notice very quickly, even as a five-year-old, is that there is a level of poverty in much of West Africa, and really, the African continent in general, that’s incomprehensible to us in the United States. One of the things that I learned is that a big driver, a big cause of this poverty is because so many, we’re talking billions of families across the African continent, don’t have access to freshwater. So, instead of where we in America can turn a faucet, instead of being able to do that, women, primarily, it’s almost always women, spend billions and billions of hours collectively, often as much as eight hours a day, dragging buckets to the river, walking five miles to the river, filling up their bucket, and dragging it back home just to meet the daily needs of themselves and their family. They need water for drinking and cooking and bathing and all of that.
So, half of their productive workforce is tied up in a highly manual process of walking back and forth to the river day in and day out. So, one of the cool things about living there is there are all these organizations that are working to create access to freshwater, and they do it by rain catchment tanks and creating pumps and plumbing, and with the ultimate intention of making it so that no matter where you live, you can turn the faucet and get the water out of the faucet automatically. When that happens, all of a sudden the women of the village don’t have to spend all their time walking back and forth to the river just to meet their daily needs. They can do things like plant crops, go to school, start a business, and it’s completely transformative.
It occurred to me in my time working with businesses, is that so many small businesses are in the exact same place metaphorically. They spend all of their time, they wake up in the morning, they’re not thinking about how to be a great lawyer or a great dentist. They’re thinking about, “Oh, my god. Where’s the next client going to come from?” and they’re doing this highly manual… They’re going to BNI meetings. They’re calling people. They’re working their… None of which is bad, by the way, but it’s just highly manual and unpredictable, and they’re spending all their time in a manual process of gathering leads and prospects for their business, and so they never have the time to invest in actually growing their business to its full potential.
So, that’s where the name comes from. There is some very practical how-to stuff in this book, but really, it’s about changing the mindset around marketing. I don’t want marketing to be something that your average lawyer, CPA, accountant has to think about day in and day out. I want them to have an automatic machine in place that brings them qualified leads on a regular basis so that they can scale their business and hire and invest back into their business with confidence because they’re not afraid that their supply of leads is going to be shut off overnight.
Let me add one more because there’s one more important piece of this, which is kind of what we touched on at the beginning. The other piece of it is that it’s not only going from manual to automatic. It’s also the change and the power, frankly, that it creates from an entrepreneur when they have a steady supply of qualified leads that’s being brought to them automatically, because all of a sudden, if you have a flow of leads coming into your business, you can be a lot more selective about who you work with.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been here, Rob, but I’ve been here, and I know plenty of other business owners who find themselves taking engagements from crappy clients and customers that they really shouldn’t work with because they’re desperate for cashflow.
Rob Kosberg:
Yep. They can’t say no.
Danny Decker:
Yeah. When you have a marketing system that brings you qualified leads on a predictable schedule, that gives you the confidence to say no, and that is just completely transformative. It allows you to do business on your terms instead of having terms dictated to you by whatever customer happens to show up at your front door that day.
Rob Kosberg:
Right, right. Love it. Love it. Obviously, as we talked about in the beginning, this is a pillar of having a real business, being able to build something that will produce the right customers that you can enjoy serving and that you can make a real difference in their life, and obviously, you can’t do that if you’re doing t-shirts and law firm marketing. You need to niche down and you need to have some automated pieces in place. So, let’s switch gears just a little bit, if we could. You’ve written one book, and we talked about that. You have a new one that’s coming out.
This podcast is for authors or would-be authors, many of them businesspeople that are wanting to make a difference in other people’s lives, but also, they want to grow their business. They want to build more authority, perhaps get speaking, et cetera. So, I always like to learn, what have you done, how have you used your book to get customers, to grow your business? Talk to me a little bit about your current book that’s already out, how you’ve used that, and then let’s switch over and talk about what your plan is with your new book as well.
Danny Decker:
So, talking about Marketing Simplified, and I’m going to answer this in two ways. There is the obvious authority credibility that’s created when you write a book. You know? You write a book, and you have demonstrated that you know what you’re talking about, and I don’t think I have to talk about that. You obviously understand that, and I’m sure your listeners understand that.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s powerful, though. There’s no reason to glaze over it. I mean, it’s powerful. A lot of people, they write a book and they don’t even realize… I spoke to a lady yesterday. A lawyer called me about doing business, and her words were, “Wow, I’m a bit starstruck talking to you.” Why is that? I’m not a lawyer. I don’t have a… It’s because of my books and the authority that comes from them.
So, it’s surprising often just how much authority a book does give you. I’m still surprised by it. Anyway, go ahead.
Danny Decker:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I could not agree more with that. It’s almost funny in a certain way, and it’s similar to the credibility you get when you speak onstage. Just as a sort of funny personal experience, I’ve had times where I’m speaking at a conference or whatever, and I’ll get there a day early and just hang around, and usually just part of the crowd, then the next day go up and give my presentation, and then you come back down, and all of a sudden the same people who were just walking past you without thinking twice yesterday are all of a sudden like, “Oh, my god. Let’s talk. You’re a really big deal,” and it’s like… I feel like the same is true with the book.
But there’s a few, I think, maybe less obvious benefits that have been powerful for me of publishing a book. One is it’s actually a great way to get yourself invited on podcasts and speaking gigs. It opens a lot of doors that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
So, that’s one big piece, but the other one that took me a little while to even realize, one of the things that I’ve done, and I did in Marketing Simplified, and I do even more in Automatic Marketing Machine, is offering resources throughout the book, additional bonus resources. So, as an example in The Automatic Marketing Machine, we talk a lot about managing marketing vendors and how it’s important that you have KPIs, and so we offer this resource where you just need to pull out your phone and scan the QR code, and you get to go download this really great KPI tracking spreadsheet that we created.
Obviously, when that happens, now we get their contact information and we can follow up with them, but it’s been… I did this with Marketing Simplified as well. It’s actually a really great way to attract qualified leads, because somebody who buys your book, cool. They may or may not be a great fit for you, but someone recommended their book, cool, but if they actually read the book, and if they actually resonate enough with it that they pull out their phones and they’re willing to go download something, now they’ve raised their hand and said, “Hey, I like you. I like your content. I’m interested in your tools,” and so they’ve really identified themselves. So, I’ve generated of number of clients for mastermind groups and consulting gigs and things like that who bought my book, and then I don’t even know when they bought the book, but then at some point they pulled it out, read it, decided to download one of my resources, get their information plugged into my marketing system, and they started getting my emails, and lo and behold, they call me up and they say, “Hey, can I hire you to consult?”
Rob Kosberg:
I imagine you’ll use The Automatic Marketing Machine the same way, but any new things that you’re doing? Anything that you’re thinking about using that book in maybe a different way than you’ve used Marketing Simplified, or pretty standard fare?
Danny Decker:
I would say it’s more embedded. Automatic Marketing Machine is doubling down on the things that worked. We had packed it with resources. I mean, there are literally probably 18 or 20 different free resources that we give away to people who read the book. They just scan the QR code and download it. So, we’ve really doubled down on that. We’re in the process of creating some digital course curriculum around the book for people that want to go deeper in the book. We’ve actually already created and run some workshops around the book. So, it’s just a bigger step towards the power of publishing a book where it’s also powering our workshops and our courses and a number of other things. Yeah, really excited about it.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Love it. Hey, man, congrats. Congrats on how well it’s already gone, and congrats on what’s going to be happening with The Automatic Marketing Machine when that comes out. I’d love to hear about it. Let me ask you one quick thing. You mentioned the QR code a couple of times, which I love that as a strategy. My assumption is it goes to a landing page, and you’re requesting name and email address. Is that correct, or you requesting anything else?
Danny Decker:
That’s correct, name and email address.
Rob Kosberg:
Great, and then you deliver it to them either directly after on the landing page, or they must make sure they give you the right email and you email them the spreadsheet or document or whatever the resource was?
Danny Decker:
Yep, correct.
Rob Kosberg:
Obviously, for people that are savvy in marketing, this is a very, very common and cool strategy, although using QR codes is a little bit different, which I think is smart, especially with a book, because it’s easy to scan, and they don’t have to type in a URL or anything like that. So, I think that’s smart.
Danny Decker:
Thank you. I mean, COVID taught all this. Right?
Rob Kosberg:
Right.
Danny Decker:
Now we’ve been trained, whereas two years ago the technology for QR codes was here, but nobody really used them. We just hadn’t been trained. But now we’ve all been trained, so in my opinion, really, most print marketing should have QR codes at this point.
Rob Kosberg:
Totally agree. The Super Bowl was just last week, and Coinbase basically spent six-and-a-half million dollars for a 30-second commercial with nothing but a QR code going across the screen. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know it was Coinbase. I don’t think there was… If I recall, there wasn’t anything that showed up, so I immediately pulled out my phone and checked it out. I’m like, “Oh, it’s Coinbase, man.” Very, very smart. So, even the intrigue around the QR code was enough to get people to take action.
Danny Decker:
Well, and what’ll be interesting, because I had the same reaction, and it’s going to be interesting, I imagine they’ll say something about it, I’m very curious to hear how many clicks and downloads they got from that campaign because they had a very smart offer on their landing page.
Rob Kosberg:
They did.
Danny Decker:
I don’t remember what it was, but it was a simple, smart offer, so it would be interesting.
Rob Kosberg:
It crashed their site. Their site crashed. I got on, too. You obviously got on. I saw it, but I read afterwards that they had so much traffic, it crashed their site, which blows my mind because it’s like, it’s 100 million people or whatever watching the Super Bowl. You need to expect you’re going to get a lot of traffic. But evidently, there was even more traffic than they anticipated, which is pretty cool, pretty cool.
Danny Decker:
Yeah, very cool, very cool.
Rob Kosberg:
Danny, great stuff, man. Thank you for sharing. Where can people either get The Automatic Marketing Machine, or where can they learn more about you, what you’re doing? Let’s give them some links.
Danny Decker:
Yeah. So, the best thing to do is just visit automaticmarketingmachine.com. We’ve got a link to pre-order the book. We’ve got a ton of free resources and case studies, and just all kinds of really great educational resources, all at www.automaticmarketingmachine.com. You can also find the book on Amazon. We’re active on Facebook and LinkedIn, but really, the best place to go is just to the website, and that’s the central hub for everything. So, I invite people to check that out.
Rob Kosberg:
Good, and all the free resources, obviously, they can get, and that’s all there at automaticmarketingmachine.com. Beautiful.
Danny Decker:
That’s correct.
Rob Kosberg:
Danny, hey, thanks, brother. Thanks for being on. Great to have you on the podcast, and look forward to hear about the success with your next book, and maybe we can have you back on, and we can talk about it after it’s launched and such.
Danny Decker:
It would be my pleasure, Rob. Thank you so much for having me.
