Go Lean to Achieve More with Allan Dib

In This Episode

• [04:19] – Allan Dib emphasizes the importance of using the right tools to increase efficiency and productivity rather than replacing human input.
• [09:57] – Allan explains how tools such as AI can automate and augment marketing efforts.
• [13:30] – Allan discusses how tools like chat GPT and Claude have become force multipliers for his marketing team, enabling them to save time on tasks like data analysis, research, and content summarization.
• [19:23] – Allan highlights the significance of flagship assets, such as content, tools, and experiences, in building goodwill and lead flow in the marketplace.
• [24:23] – Allan shares how his book, “The One Page Marketing Plan,” serves as a flagship asset, attracting high-quality leads who resonate with his marketing philosophy.
• [27:02] – Allan discusses how offering resources in exchange for an email address builds an email list asset. This asset enables direct audience connection, unlike book platforms.
• [35:40] – Allan shares his experiences with surprising market reactions to podcast episodes and marketing campaigns. He emphasizes the importance of testing and measuring, letting the marketplace dictate success rather than personal opinions.
• [42:41] – Allan compares marketing processes to compound interest, highlighting the value of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. He emphasizes the need for an integrator to drive these processes.
• [49:04] – Allan enumerates steps for warming up a cold email list, including using validation tools, implementing technical email protocols, and gradually segmenting and engaging with the list.
• [53:47] – Allan talks about the marketing process, emphasizing the importance of email marketing. He mentions that the frequency of emails should be based on the type of business, with a minimum of once a week to avoid the list going cold.
• [58:15] – Allan shares his strategy for creating engaging email newsletters, where he features interesting content and trends.
• [62:29] – Allan discusses how his agency has rebranded to focus on lean marketing as the “anti-agency.” He emphasizes the importance of implementing lean strategies in marketing and how they can transform the industry.

Jump to Links and Resources

Allan, it’s so great to have you back on the show.

Hey, Stephan, it’s always a pleasure to speak to you and to be back.

Yeah. So, what inspired you to put out another book?

I think Seth Godin said you should only ever write a book when you have to. Right? And so I don’t believe in just churning out books on a cadence like many authors do. Nothing wrong with that if that’s what you want to do. But to me, it was a book that was really needed in the marketplace. It helps with marketing implementation. So, the first book was all about getting your marketing plan right, which is what you need when you get started. The next book is about marketing implementation, which is essentially the book version of our coaching program. It’s what we do in our coaching program: how we take someone through marketing implementation from zero to hero.

So, what is the process? Do you have a special framework that you dreamed up in the middle of the night?

I didn’t dream it up in the middle of the night. We have done it through blood, sweat, and tears with clients over many years. There are three real pillars of lean marketing. Before I get into the framework, the idea behind lean marketing is taking a lot of the principles from the world of lean manufacturing and lean thinking, which is about getting bigger results with less marketing. And the reason that’s important is because a lot of business owners don’t have huge resources to implement into marketing. 

A lot of big companies can spend millions of dollars and have years to get a result, whereas a lot of small businesses need to get bigger results by doing less marketing. And you read most marketing books or take a marketing course or whatever, and it’s just adding and adding and adding stuff to your to-do list. And a large part of the success that we’ve had with a lot of clients is how can we actually do less stuff? How can we do less stuff and get a bigger result? And one of the real turning points was when I looked at the most sophisticated, best marketers in the world, and I would include you in that list, Stephan.

Lean Marketing is important because a lot of business owners don’t have huge resources to implement into marketing.

They’re actually not doing a lot of things. They’re actually their not-to-do list, which is actually bigger than their to-do list. The number of things that they actually do is very, very small. They’re not doing; they’re not on every platform or doing millions of different things. They’ve honed in on one or two things and are getting an outsized result. And so that’s a lot of the core thinking around lean marketing, which is how we can do less stuff but get a much bigger impact. So, the core of that is leverage. For example, if you want to get a bigger result with less input and get more money, energy, or time by doing less, you need leverage. There’s no other way. And so what leverage is, essentially, is a force multiplier. So there are really three force multipliers I talk about in the book, and they’re broken up by the three major sections of the book. The first is tools. The second is assets, and the third is processes. So, tools, assets, and processes are how we get leverage from a marketing perspective, and I’m happy to dive into those as we go.

So, you have three force multipliers: tools, assets, and processes. How did you come up with three? Why not four? Why not five? Why these three?

Well, they’re the three that we found most impactful. So I’ll talk about a little bit about each, but really, they’re the ones that we felt moved the needle the most for clients. As I said, a lot of the principles of marketing and a lot of what we’re doing are coming from not something I dreamt up in a dream one day. It’s from actual work with clients over many, many years. They were the things that we found most impactful when we were to boil down. What were the few things that really made a difference for clients? It was those three things.

Well, let’s start with tools. I’d love to hear how you break that whole area down because I personally love tools. I geek out on tools. But I also know that you can get too bogged down in them and lose sight of the bigger picture.

That’s a very good insight, and I cover that in the book as well. So, look, tools are what really separates our species from every other species out there. Right?

Except for crows. I think crows are pretty good at using tools.

Well, there are. I think certain chimpanzees use basic tools and things like that, but there’s a very firm cap. They’re not constantly innovating. They’re not constantly moving like humans are. I think humans are unique in their use of tools and in the depth and breadth of their use of tools. So, tools are what really separates us from all other species. I mean, the rapid growth we’ve seen over the last 300 years is incredible.

Much of it results from new tools, technologies, and ways of doing things. And so if I think about a manual task that I need to do, let’s say I’ve got a brick wall and need to break down, I could probably do that with my hands, but it’s going to take a long time; it’s going to be difficult. If I had the right tool, like a sledgehammer, I could do that in a few minutes with no problem. So tools, similarly, from a marketing perspective, make a huge difference. Sometimes, a small tool that can automate, do, or give us leverage can make a huge difference. 

The core thinking around lean marketing is how to do less stuff but get a much bigger impact.

I have a whole chapter in the book on AI. It’s obviously a popular trend, not because I’m trying to jump on the trend, but because it is a powerful tool. If used the right way, there are ways to use it the wrong way. I’m happy to talk about that, but tools are a real force multiplier, and tools are a literal force multiplier; like in the case of a hammer or sledgehammer, it can multiply the force of what we do and very much the same from a marketing perspective. Some of the core tools that have made huge differences for our clients are CRM tools, content management tools, and artificial intelligence tools. All of those tools can make a huge difference and help automate and augment what they’re doing. Now, to tap into a point that you very rightly said, a lot of people feel like, “Hey, if I had Michelangelo‘s chisel and hammer, I’d be able to create the statue of David.” The tool was the special source, which, again, is not the right case. I think of tools as augmenting our abilities, not replacing them. So you’re not going to get an AI tool to write all the content for you because you’re just going to have crappy content, right? You won’t get an AI tool to do it all for you. They’re there to augment your ability. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Iron Man. He’s got that exoskeletal suit that gives him powers, right? He’s a normal geeky guy like you or me, but he puts on that suit and has new powers. He can fly, shoot lasers, and do all sorts of things. And that’s kind of the way I think of marketing tools, that they’re not to replace us, not to do the work, but to massively augment our abilities and multiply the force of our inputs.

Well, just the word lever and leverage.

Totally.

Is that a force multiplier? You can lift a huge boulder with not very many pounds of force.

Yeah, that’s very much the case. So many times, a tool was there to help my clients or me just be able to do much more with less. That’s very much the core principle of lean marketing. How can we use the right tools to do a job faster, quicker, easier, and cheaper so that we don’t have to invest a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure into the operational stuff and allow you to spend more time in the creative work and element. 

So, like I said, I see many people using AI tools, and all sorts of tools are wrong, right? They’re like, “Hey, I’ll create a bunch of content with AI.” Like, you’ll see all these TikToks and reels and saying, “Let me show you how you use ChatGPT to create 100 Instagram posts in two minutes,” right? And, like, when you look at your Instagram or your TikTok or whoever you’re following on any of those platforms, you’re probably not following some crappy account that’s just posting cliched quotes or whatever. You’re following interesting people doing interesting stuff. You’re following someone who’s doing something interesting, who’s a storyteller, who’s got interesting experiences. You’re not interested in following these mass-volume crappy motivational quotes or whatever.

Tools, assets, and processes are how we get leverage from a marketing perspective.

A lot of people are on the wrong track when it comes to tools. So, you want to use tools to augment your abilities.

So, what are some examples of tools that augment your abilities or clients?

I’ll give you an example direct from my team. So recently, I started a new podcast, and I’ve got the multi-camera setup and everything going. And there’s a tool called Descript where you would normally have to have someone, an editor, painstakingly go through it and choose when someone was the active speaker. So if we have two video feeds, one from you and one from me, normally an editor would have to go through them, and when you start speaking, switch to your camera. When I start speaking, switch to my camera when we’re both speaking or whatever and have us both in shot. And with Descript, a tool automatically selects the active speaker and boom, boom, boom. In a 1 hour interview, it’ll highlight the active speaker.

Now, is it 100% perfect? Would I just use that and upload it immediately? Of course not. However, it probably reduces 90% of the editing labor involved in creating a multi-active speaker video. So that’s an example of an AI tool that we’ve used to massively reduce the amount of labor needed for editing. And generally, as an editing tool, it’s quite good—almost like the Google Docs of video editing.

Yeah, it is amazing. You can highlight words, then hit delete, and then they’re gone from the video. You can take, let’s say, a sentence, highlight that, and then drag it to the beginning, and it moves that part of the video to the beginning. You can click a little box that says, remove all the filler words, and then boom, they’re all gone from the video. Take another box that says to remove all the space where you’re just not saying anything, and then all that’s cut out, too. It’s amazing.

Exactly. It is amazing.

It’s taken away. It hasn’t removed the need for an editor, but my editor can now be more efficient. My editor can do ten times more volume and ten times more work, or I can reduce the number of editors I would have needed. I might have needed five editors on my team, and now I can do it with one. And that’s an example of a tool giving us a lot of leverage. It’s a force multiplier.

CRM, content management, and artificial intelligence are some of the core tools that have made huge differences for our clients.

That’s great. How about using tools like dashboards, analytics, and business intelligence to extract actionable insights from your marketing?

I love using large language models, and ChatGPT is one of them. And there’s another one that I use called Claude. I also use some of the APIs in those tools; they’re great for data analysis and handling, but I have needed a lot of repetitive work, sometimes helping as a research assistant. So, like I said, never use those tools to say, “Hey, write me an article on how to do SEO with blah blah blah,” right? Because it’s just going to come out with crappy, cliched content. But how I use them is, for example, when I was writing my book, a lot of it involved doing research.

So an example would be, give me ten examples of Silicon Valley companies that have had a major pivot, and then boom it gives me Netflix, Slack, etc. At the same time, it might have taken me 3 hours to research with just Google and reading articles. So it gave me that data.

Of course, we know those tools at the moment. They’re not perfect. They do hallucinate. So, you need to verify that what they come up with is true. But they’re a massive time saver, with summarization of text or data or whatever. 

For example, I gave it a prompt. I said, “summarize the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in two sentences.” Right? And it just did it. That would have been something I could have done manually, but it would have taken me maybe half an hour to do, whereas that did it in seconds. Again, the output is not perfect. I need to edit it to be in my voice and style, and maybe not exactly how I would have put it, but it’s a massive time saver that way. So, as a writing companion, tool to analyze data, and tool to generate code, I’m not a coder by any stretch, but I’m a little bit of a tech geek. So sometimes I’ll want to create a shell script or something that does really powerful for that. Anywhere where it’s doing repetitive work that you could do but might take you a few hours.

Maybe you need to do a lot of testing to get the correct answers. Things like legal documents, code, and research are super powerful, so you need to use them the right way. You need to use them as an assistant rather than as something that’s doing the work.

Yeah. You can’t replace a human with it, though. You can empower a human with that exoskeleton.

It’s the Iron Man suit. It’s the Iron Man suit for marketers.

Awesome. Well, let’s move on to the next big bucket in your framework: the assets.

So, assets are another massive force multiplier for marketers, and they’re a force multiplier in general. So, if you think about it, I grew up in pretty average circumstances in terms of finances, so I didn’t grow up wealthy. And so my first introduction to wealth.

The very first book I ever read on money or wealth was Rich Dad Poor Dad. Like many other people, the book definitely has its flaws, but one of the things is that it was just beautiful, the way it explains what an asset and liability are. So, an asset is something that puts money in your pocket. A liability is something that takes money out of your pocket. For someone with no financial literacy or financial background, that was such a brilliant, easy way to explain an asset and liability. The thing that I learned is the difference. But, many people complain that the rich get richer.

The reason that the rich get richer is because they derive most of their income from assets, not from labor. There’s nothing wrong with earning from labor. You work, earn an hourly wage or whatever; there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s not a great path to getting wealthy because when you stop, the income stops, and there’s a cap on what you can earn hourly. It’s not saleable. You can’t sell your job to anyone, even if you do an amazing job. So, the wealthy derive most of their income from assets. So, if you own stocks, you can derive dividend income.

If you own property, you can derive rental income. The income comes in whether you work or not. The asset is often upgradeable. For example, if I improve the house’s value, I can charge a higher rent. The asset is saleable. So I could sell an asset and get my capital back. So that’s a lot of why the wealthy get wealthier. And now, this applies to marketing: if you’ve got marketing assets, you can derive a lot of lead flow, you can derive clients, and you get a lot of inbound inquiries if you’ve got marketing assets in the marketing place. 

Now, if you don’t have marketing assets, you’ve got to compensate with labor, lot of hunting, got to do cold calling, outreach, and networking. Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very difficult way to go about marketing. I think a good marketing infrastructure is a combination of both hunting and marketing. But if you have a lot of hunting and farms, I would call it hunting and farming. Farming is kind of predictable, right? You sow a field, water it, take care of it, and then harvest pretty predictably unless something horrible goes wrong. Generally, it’s pretty predictable. Similarly, you want marketing assets that generate lead flow and new people.

What’s a marketing asset? An example of a marketing asset using my business as an example is my books. Right? You and I are speaking today because of an asset I’ve got in the marketplace. You’ve read a book once. And I don’t remember how we initially connected.

The reason that the rich get richer is because they derive most of their income from assets, not from labor.

It was through James Schramko.

Yeah, that’s true. I think I spoke at that James event because I was the book’s author. And so every day, somebody emails saying, “Hey, can you speak at my event? Can you be on my podcast? Can you tell me about your coaching program?” 

So, we get tons and tons of inbound because of the assets we have in the marketplace. That’s regardless of whether or not I show up to work every day. That’s an asset that continues generating lead flow, continues generating clients, and continues generating revenue. So, there are tons of different types of assets out there.

You’re building an asset in terms of your podcasts as well. Your podcasts, as they create more audiences, as more high-profile people come on, and as more people listen, they become more valuable. Similarly, we want to create assets in the marketplace that generate goodwill, lead flow, and all of those sorts of things that will create a huge influx of people interested in what you do. Now, I’ll talk about a specific type of marketing asset in a moment, but I’ll stop there and let you ask any questions you’ve got there.

Well, let’s talk about the different kinds of typical assets, and I’m guessing things like lead magnets, webinar recordings, replays, and other short-form videos that you upload to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram will be on the list. That sort of stuff is probably the obvious stuff, but I’m especially interested to hear about the less obvious stuff.

Okay, so the not-obvious is what I call a flagship asset. A flagship asset is an asset you’re famous for in the marketplace. So, it’s my book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan.If you would think of someone like Tim Ferriss, it might be the Tim Ferriss podcast. It’s an asset in the marketplace that you’re famous for. It generates a lot of value and goodwill, which is what lean marketing is all about. Lean marketing is about creating value in the marketplace for people who will never buy from us. We just want to create that goodwill in the marketplace, even for people who will never purchase from us. So we’re generating a lot of goodwill and value.

A fraction of the people who interact with our asset, download it, use it, or become clients will pay us in a similar way to how, let’s say, you’re a musician. The dream come true for a musician is to have a lot of airplay. Why? A percentage of those people will buy albums, go buy merch, attend concerts, spread the word, and all that sort of thing. Probably, 99% of people will never do anything other than stream their music for free at home, which is also fine. 

Similarly, we want to be famous for something. A book is an excellent flagship asset for someone who’s a thought leader or wants to be perceived as a thought leader. I think a podcast is a powerful flagship asset. So they’re content kind of flagship assets. 

In email marketing, we should create an intimate connection. Make it feel like a one-on-one email. Share on X

Then, you can potentially have tool assets, or you can have experiential assets. A tool kind of asset would be a tool that helps someone do something. So it could be a calculator, it could be a scorecard, it could be a quiz. There’s a quiz called the Love language Quiz. So you go through it and figure out what love language you are that helps you with your love life or whatever else, right? So, that’s an example of a flagship tool that’s out there. 

Then, there are flagship experiences. So, can you give someone a taster or an experience of what they will experience when they work with you? So, at the most basic level, if you’ve ever walked through a mall and people are giving out free samples, that’s an example of an experiential one. A basic one. I’m a BMW customer, so frequently, I’ll get invitations from a BMW dealership to come on a drive day.

Now, what’s the point of drive days? It creates a lot of goodwill. You network with other BMW customers, but you also get to try the different models, the 7 series, the X, and all that sort of thing. So again, you’re experiencing what it’s like to use your other products and services. I break flagship assets down into three sorts of subcategories. There’s flagship content, experiences, and tools. And so you might find one or more are right for you. Usually, there’ll be one or two flagship assets that you really put all your effort into, giving you the most return. And I kind of differentiate them a little bit from lead magnets.

A lead magnet is usually very specific to the ad you run. And if you’ve got ten different ad sets, you might have ten different lead magnets. So they’re very specific to the ad copy and the promise you’re making, whereas a flagship asset is more expansive. It’s kind of like thinking of it as your broad-spectrum lead magnet. It will get you a lot of notoriety in your marketplace.

For you, it started with the one-page marketing plan. Hopefully, the Lean Marketing book will be your next flagship asset, with hundreds of thousands or millions of copies sold. For me, it’s The Art of SEO. I have three books currently, but The Art of SEO is the one I’m most known for. It seems there are different ways to leverage a flagship asset. Like a book, for example. Inside the book itself, you could leverage that. You could also create companion pieces or assets for the book, for example, an online course, a video-based series, workbook, planner, guide, or something like that.

How are you leveraging your one-page marketing plan to make it a flagship asset with all these additional side assets?

So, people read the book, which educates them about our philosophy around marketing and how we approach marketing. Some people may not agree with that, and that’s fine, but many people do. They’re like, when they reach out to us, when we get a lead that comes through, and we have many leads that come through every single day because, as a result of the book, they already know what it’s about. They already know the value of it. They’re not like, “Okay, what is this about? And how much does it cost? Right?” They’re like, “Cool, I’m on board. I love the book. I agree with the philosophy around it. I agree with the gaps that I’ve got in the marketplace; how do we work together?” Right? We’re working with leads that are so much higher quality than someone who just comes in and says, “all right, what do you do? Why should I buy it? How much is it?” So it’s much more powerful than that. 

Throughout the book, we’ve got links to resources that go beyond the book because books are awesome but limited in that they’re very difficult to update. You can’t include screenshots, how-tos, and all of that in the book because that’ll be out of date in a very short amount of time. And a book might be in print for years or decades. 

For those faster-moving resources, we point people to download links where they can download courses, worksheets, templates and other similar materials. My team and I update these on a regular basis. We often ask people to enter their email addresses to get those resources for free. This builds another asset in our business: our email list. Our email list is a huge asset because we connect directly with our audience. 

As you know, Amazon is an author, and no book platform really gives you any insight into who your readers are. They don’t give you their details or anything like that. So, by including resources throughout the book and asking people to enter their email addresses on our website, we generate another asset that works for us: our email list. So whenever we’ve got something to offer or share with our audience, we’ve got that direct connection where we don’t have to pay a toll booth to access that audience.

Our email list is a huge asset because we connect directly with our audience.

One asset compounds on another. And that’s kind of like the analogy that I was using in the beginning. The rich get richer, right? So, if you own assets and those assets generate income, you can use that income to buy or build more assets. The same thing is true from a marketing perspective. My book is an asset out there, and it generates a lot of goodwill. It creates people who opt-in on our website, creating a new asset. That’s the email list. Now, I’m about to launch another asset, which is a podcast.

Having an email list with thousands and thousands of people makes it much easier to launch and make that asset successful. You get that compounding effect where one asset improves, and another improves another. You’re just getting this snowball effect of leads, customers, and revenue.

Amazing. Now, you mentioned experiential assets. What are you doing for your agency that is very experiential for your client or prospect?

So, we mainly focus on content-style assets. Experiential assets tend to be ideal for when you want to communicate a type of feeling or whatever. I’ll give you an example. Red Bull is great at creating experiential assets. Now you see those Red Bull channels where they’re jumping out of airplanes and all of that. What Red Bull is trying to do is communicate the feeling of energy, creating energy because of their energy drink. Right? So, for us, the most powerful flagship asset we found is content for us. So it’ll be different for every business.

An experiential asset is probably the most powerful. Whereas when what you do is knowledge or information, often a DIY version of what you do is the most powerful. A lot of people worry about that. They’re like, “If I gave away all my secrets, why would anyone hire me?” But you know firsthand that you’ve given away all your secrets in your Art of SEO book. You’re giving away exactly what you do, the method of what you do, how it’s all done. Yet, people pay you a lot of money to help them with their SEO. So what we found is that giving away a DIY version of what you do is a very powerful flagship asset because it drives people who are genuine buyers to come to you and say, “Look, I read your book,” or “I read your stuff,” or “I heard you on this podcast or whatever. Sounds amazing. Can you help me do it?”

So, something like a podcast, which you are now embarking on, can be experiential. It can be an experience for, let’s say, the guest. Of course, it can be an experience for the listener, too, if you can involve them in, let’s say, the questioning of the guest. So email your questions or use a speaker pipe to record audio. You might include your question for the guest in a Q and A episode or something like that. That might be a way to increase participation and make it more experiential. What ideas do you have cooking for your podcast to make it stand out?

And for sure, the lines are blurred between what’s an experiential flagship asset, what’s a content asset, and then what’s just a marketing process, which we’ll get to in a moment; what’s just the content? What’s content marketing in your business? So, there are lines that blur between them. Sometimes, it’s not easy to say, “Hey, this is what it is, and that’s all it is.” For my podcast, I’m going to experiment a lot. So, I’m experimenting with solo episodes, interview episodes, and answering questions. 

Experiential assets tend to be ideal for when you want to communicate a type of feeling.

But I find some of the most powerful content in anything I’ve ever done is answering the questions we get in the sales process and answering questions we get from clients. And that’s something I learned from our mutual friend, James Schramko. He answers questions to his clients in many ways, such as by making a podcast episode about it or posting it on social media. I thought that’s a very clever way because, first of all, you’re answering the question for that specific person, but also, if that person asked it, there are probably about 100 other people who asked the same question but just haven’t asked it. And so you’re now creating content, not by just dreaming some random stuff up. You’re creating content that people want. People are wondering, what’s the answer to that question? And they read, listen, or watch your content, and they’re like, great. Answered my question.

You know what I’m thinking? I’m going to riff with you here. What would be cool is if you could do hot seats, and you’re the hot seat, and then your guest is the expert on whatever. The thing is that they’re kind of doing a tear down on or a deconstruction. So, for example, the LinkedIn expert does a tear down on an audit of your LinkedIn profile and presence. I could come on and do an SEO hotseat for you. And I was talking to you offline before the recording and saying, “Hey, your new book isn’t in your Google knowledge panel yet,” so that could be a way to involve the listener in a more engaging way than just, “Oh, this is theoretically good stuff,” but what if I’m learning on the fly from the application of this knowledge? You know, you can’t do that for every listener. So using the host of the show, using you as the guinea pig, I think, would be a perfect idea.

I love that.

What have you found to be the most powerful sort of podcast episode? You’ve been playing the podcast game for quite a while now. What have you found works best and gets the most engagement?

Oh, well, this will throw you for a loop. So, I have another show, a personal development podcast called Get Yourself Optimized. Some of my favorite and most popular episodes were with psychic mediums and with hypnosis, hypnotists, hypnotherapists, etc. So Marissa Pier, Sheila Gillette, etc. And if they’re going to do channeling in the episode, that’s my favorite because then it’s not just, “Hey, tell me how this all started. How did you first learn you were psychic? What are some of the most profound experiences that you’ve had?” That’s all good stuff. But “Can I speak to the twelve archangels now? Can you step aside, and we have a conversation with them?” and they do that like Paul Selig and Sheila Gillette. Amazing.

So that’s kind of one of my secret sauce things. Can’t do that on a marketing show, though?

Probably not. But is that because channeling is a hot topic, or why do you think they’re the most popular episode?

Well, they’ll have a following, for sure. I think it’s pretty fascinating. I think even the skeptics want to maybe listen, to try and find something to debunk, perhaps, I don’t know. But I get a lot of engagement, listens, downloads, views, and all that stuff for those episodes. Paul Selig is probably one of my most popular guests. He’s been on three times now. It is pretty unusual for me to have a guest on multiple times. I’ve had Sheila Gillette on twice. There are guests that, “Oh, this is quality stuff,” and it doesn’t hit. It’s weird how one of my favorite episodes will not do that. Well, I guess it just doesn’t have the hook or something.

Isn’t that interesting? Some things just hit an audience, and some things fall flat, and often, it’s very hard to predict. Sometimes, a campaign that I thought would have killed just falls flat. Sometimes I don’t even know if I want to launch this or whatever, and then that’s a smash hit. So much of what we’re doing as marketers is testing and measuring, and we want the marketplace to tell us. Many people will send me their ad or whatever for critique and say, “Hey, what do you think of this?” I can give them a technical critique. I can say, “Look, you should have the opt-in box here or there, or you should remove this or add this to your landing page.” But in terms of things like offers and things like that, I mostly say, “Look, it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s kind of irrelevant.”

So much of what we’re doing as marketers is testing and measuring, and we want the marketplace to tell us.

It’s what your market thinks and how it will react. The best way to do that is to test it. So, like a scientist, we can have a hypothesis and a theory of what may happen, but really, we’ve got to get into the lab and see what actually happens.

So, what’s an example of a campaign that fell flat and surprised you?

There have been tons of them. I’ll give you an example. For the book, Lean Marketing, I had about ten or 20 subtitles that I wanted to test. And I had a theory about which one would go best, and I was nowhere near it. So, I think the subtitle that worked best was one that I almost discounted. I almost didn’t even bother taking the test. So, we ran some Facebook ads and saw which one hit the most. So that was an example. 

In the past, we’ve launched products where I’m like, “this is amazing. People will love this,” and again, it kind of fell flat. That was like a membership program that we launched. It did okay, but it certainly wasn’t the smash hit I was expecting to be. Then, we kind of launched a side.

So, back in the day, in our coaching program, I think this is probably an issue with a lot of coaching programs; they’re adding stuff to people’s to-do lists. So let’s say if you were a client, you and I would agree on a strategy and say, “All right, Stephan, we’re going to do this, that and the other to promote your podcast. So I need you to do this. I need you to hire that person. I need you or whatever.” We get it back on a call in a week or two weeks, and you haven’t done anything. “Why haven’t you done anything?’ “I’ve been busy putting out this fire, had this employee problem or whatever.” Very typical for most entrepreneurs because they’re just across so many different things. They also tend not to be great micro implementers. They tend to be big-picture people and visionaries, which is a very important role, but they’re just not great implementers.

They’ll usually implement either a little bit, get bored, get distracted or whatever. And so a huge shift came into place when we said, “All right, we will hire a marketing coordinator for you. We will train them and get them to execute the stuff.” And that was a smash hit. And I never expected that. First of all, in the recruitment business, where we’re hiring a marketing coordinator, where we’re training them, where we’re implementing, but that was a smash hit. So,  clients started getting really good results. 

Staffing your weaknesses and doubling down on your strengths is important for an entrepreneur.

We were removing stuff from the entrepreneur’s to-do list, and things were getting done. Social media posts were happening, emails were going out, and stuff was happening, and we were just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole with an entrepreneur like Stephan. You’ve got to send two emails a week. Your email list is going to go cold. And you’d say, “Yes, I’m going to do that.” We get back on a call next week. You haven’t done it. You haven’t implemented the process, which is very typical for entrepreneurs. I’m one of those people. I’m more of a big-picture thinker.

I’m more prone to getting bored, to getting distracted by something or whatever. And I need my team to do the implementation to ensure that scheduling gets done, that emails go out, that posts go out, and all that sort of stuff. So often, it’s a matter of staffing your weaknesses and doubling down on your strengths. And so really recognizing as an entrepreneur what’s a weakness and a strength is super important, as well as staffing those weaknesses. So that’s what we did with that program. We helped entrepreneurs staff their weaknesses. And, like I said, I never expected that to be a hit, but it was.

That’s awesome. How do you go about finding marketing coordinators? Are these people on your payroll or on the client’s payroll?

No, they’re employed by the client. We just help them hire and screen the right person, and then we’ll work with them to implement. So we’re kind of the opposite of an agency. So an agency will do this stuff for you. We help you develop your capability. That’s a huge differentiator.

I think it’s hugely important because marketing has gotten way more complicated. Also, no one’s going to know your business as well as you do. No one will care about your business as much as you do. And so for an agency, even if they do really well for you, which very few agencies do, I mean, you’re in the agency business, and you’ve seen every sort of cowboy and crazy promises and things like that. You know that someone can’t deliver what they’re promising for that low price that they’re offering. Some agencies promise to deliver amazing results at very low prices. And you know for a fact that there’s no possible way that they can do that.

So a lot of what we do is help empower the business owner and develop their intellectual property in-house because, in my opinion, there’s no intellectual property that’s more valuable in your business than the ability to get a client reliably over and over. So that’s something that I want our clients to own. So, like I said, even if an agency did an amazing job for you, they still own that intellectual property. They’re still the ones who’ve got that black box, who know what to do. Now, that doesn’t mean I’m an anti-agency. I think agencies have their place for specialized tasks, not your general marketing, but super highly specialized tasks. So we will absolutely work with an agency for pay-per-click ads or someone who’s an expert on whatever platform, a TikTok, Pinterest, or whatever, for highly specialized tasks.

I want the propeller head who spent all his life trying to figure this stuff out and hack it together. But for your general marketing, for someone who wakes up in the morning and thinks, “all right, what are we going to do?” From a marketing perspective today, that person should sit inside your business.

I like that angle; it’s certainly a differentiator of being the opposite of an agency. So, let’s get into your processes. I want to get back to something you mentioned earlier, which was whether your email list has gone cold. If you haven’t been sending emails once or twice a week, your email list is going to be cold. And I want to know how to warm that email list up if it has gone cold. But first, I want to get through the processes.

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Sure. So, I think Einstein said compound interest was the Eighth Wonder of the World. The marketing equivalent of compound interest is processed. Many people think of marketing as an event rather than a process. It’s the big rebrand, it’s the website launch, it’s the whatever.

You and I know, as sophisticated marketers, that you’re going to get the big results by doing the daily, weekly, and monthly stuff that’s just going to compound over time. It’s the podcast episode you do once or twice a week; it’s the emails you send to your list twice or thrice a week. That’s how you will get that compound interest, that snowball effect in your marketing. 

So you’ve got your tools, let’s say you’ve got the perfect CRM system, the AI tools, all of that sort of thing. You’ve got amazing assets in the marketplace, you’ve got a book, podcast, flagship experience or whatever. Processes are where we put those to work, right? So it’s where we’re doing the outreach, email, podcast, and content marketing. Again, like I was alluding to earlier, most entrepreneurs, despite their best intentions, they’re not the best people to run processes. Gino Wickman talks about an integrator type and a visionary. Most entrepreneurs tend to be visionaries.

And you need that integrator type just showing up every day, driving the bus, who’s gonna say, “All right, it’s Monday. We’ve got to get an email out. It’s Tuesday. We’ve got to get content out. It’s Wednesday. We’ve got to get that podcast done.” So entrepreneurs tend to be not that person. So you need either, you can call them your COO, marketing coordinator, or whatever. Still, you need that person who’s that integrator in your business who’s getting those processes done, those daily, weekly, monthly processes. That’s how you will generate that compound interest from a marketing perspective.

Gino Wickman was a guest, by the way.

Awesome. He was very generous in endorsing Lean Marketing. So we’ve got him on the COVID as well. 

Oh, that’s awesome. Congratulations. Yeah, he’s super cool.

Gino is a super smart guy, and we’re big fans of Traction.

So, for our listener who’s not familiar with Gino Wickman, he is the creator of the Entrepreneurial Operating System or EOS.

No one’s going to know and care about your business as much as you do.

Again, this is very much process-driven. Those systems are the boring stuff—daily, weekly, monthly.

I think a lot of what we see on Instagram, TikTok, or people’s highlight reels looks like someone with a cell phone riffing and having a great time. And you don’t see those 20 people they’ve employed behind the camera, who are editors, scriptwriters, and all that sort of thing. You just see Gary Vee spitting cool sayings and things like that. But you don’t know about his team, the 20 people who wrote a script, edited the video, put it all together, pushed it out to different platforms, etc. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need 20 people, but you need someone taking care of that daily, weekly, monthly process. So, from looking in from the outside, it looks like just it’s really easy. That podcast just is doing interviews or whatever, but you don’t see all of the behind-the-scenes work that’s going on in terms of editing, promotion, email, and all of those sorts of things.

You really need those processes and force multiplier within your team so that you can definitely create that compounding effect.

All right, and what’s your favorite case? An example or cautionary tale, perhaps, regarding processes?

A typical scenario we encounter is an entrepreneur who’s been quite successful in their business or industry. They’ve got a massive database because they’ve just got lots of clients, and they’ve usually done that through their blood, sweat and tears because they’re good at whatever they do. They’re in manufacturing, construction, medical space, or whatever, and they kind of hit a plateau. They hit a plateau because there are only 24 hours in a day, and they need to sleep for roughly seven or 8 hours. They need to do other things. And so, most of their work has resulted from their labor. And so it’s a massive turning point when we can put in some assets and processes in those businesses and massively compound what they’re doing. 

Much of what we’re doing is just turning common sense into common practice.

In most cases, we will work with a client, and they’ve got this big database of emails or whatever. I’m like, “How often have you emailed that list?” And, they’re like, “Pretty much never. We just collected those email addresses because we sold them stuff right where.” So they’ve got these big assets that they’re sitting on, and they’ve never really used them. They’ve never really used them, not because they’re dumb, lazy and whatever, but just because they don’t have those processes in place. They don’t have Jenny, who wakes up in the morning and works the email list, or Bob, who wakes up in the morning and sends out content or whatever. They just don’t have those processes in place. So often, a big unlock is just putting in those daily, weekly, and monthly processes.

Sometimes, it’s also about doing simple stuff, like a handwritten note to some of your best clients or a gift basket at an important event for one of your clients. Your client had a baby or something like that and is sending something out, so somebody’s going to be taking care of those processes. Often, like I said, the entrepreneur is not the ideal person to do that.

As I said, many people have criticized some of my work. They said, “It’s just all common sense,” and I 100% agree with that criticism. It is common sense, but it’s not common practice. So, we know that collecting email addresses on your website is a good idea, but most websites don’t do it. We know that regularly contacting your email list is a good idea. Most people don’t do it. We know creating powerful story-based content in your content marketing is a good idea, but most people don’t do it. So, a lot of what we’re doing is just turning common sense into common practice.

I like that. So, I want to circle back to my question about whether your email list has gone cold. So what do you do?

So, the first thing I do with the client is run it through a validation tool. So there’s never bounce, and I can’t remember the name of the other. There are tons of them, anyway. So get rid of email addresses that are invalid or suspect or whatever. So, clean up your list that way. Then, the next thing that I would do, and I think particularly since February 2024, is make new changes in how emails are delivered. So, there are a few technologies. There’s one called SPF, and there’s one called DMARC and DKIM. Make sure that you’ve got those implemented, and you know you don’t have to get into all the technical details.

You can get your tech geek to help you do that, but just make sure that emails are technically signed properly. So it’s kind of like the equivalent of posting a letter, making sure that there’s a stamp, a valid address, a valid return to sender, and all that sort of thing set up. So, set up some of the technical details for your email domain, and then I will just start warming up that list. So, it depends on the size of the list.  

If your list is under 5000 records, you could start emailing them all. If it’s a lot more than that, then you might start emailing segment by segment because one of the things that you don’t want to happen is for email services to kind of mark you as spam because you had this massive surge of outbound emails. So they kind of look at patterns, right? So if, on average, your domain generates 1000 emails per month and suddenly you’re sending 500,000 emails, that’s kind of a suspect activity that might get flagged as spam. So, you want to make sure that you’re gradually warming up your domain, your IP addresses, and the system that you’re sending from. Then, I’d look at the content factors.

I’d look at what you are actually going to send and what will actually create a lot of value for your target market. We can discuss my view on formatting emails and where they should come from.

But does that add something curious? I know that Dean Jackson came up with a 9-Word Email concept, which I really like. It’s kind of anti-marketing in that it doesn’t even look like you used a professional or a tool or anything to send the email out.

That’s exactly right. A lot of what we recommend: Dean Jackson is an awesome email marketer, so his stuff is solid. The 9-Word Email is excellent. What we’re trying to do with email marketing is create that intimate connection. The mistake I see many people make is they’ve got this big HTML email with tons of graphics. It comes from a role-based email address like info@, sales@, or whatever. So, if you look at the emails that we send out, they come from Allan@ our domain. 

They’re also very plainly formatted. We don’t have our logo; we don’t have a lot of graphics or whatever. So, even though we’re sending thousands of people the same email, I want it to feel like a one-on-one email. If you think about an email you would have gotten from a friend, it will probably not come from info or sales. It will probably not be a big graphical HTML email with lots of graphics and things like that. It’s probably just going to be a plain text email. So it’ll be like, “Hey Stephan, I’d love to catch up with you for lunch next week. You are around on Wednesday afternoon or whatever, right?” It’ll be plainly formatted and signed off with the person’s name. So we’re trying to replicate as much of that as possible.

So we’re trying to make it feel like it’s just an email I sent to you. And what we want to do with a lot of that is encourage replies. That’s another big mistake that people make with email marketing. That’s the worst. When it comes to no-reply, why would you want someone not to reply to one of your marketing emails? I mean, they’re the warmest clients. Someone who replies and says, “Great email. Tell me more about this, or can you explain that? Or whatever.” That’s now a lead. So that’s someone who’s now engaged with your content and interested in what you’ve got to offer.

So, we encourage replies. We’re like, hit reply and just tell us what’s a challenge, or hit reply and tell us your experience with this or that. Again, that’s a process within my team now, including replying to and handling those replies. Here’s the thing: now we’re mailing it to our list. In our case, we mail our list twice a week and get heaps of replies to those. So if we’re encouraging replies now, we need to man that help desk and ensure that people are getting responses to their prize and their replies are handled appropriately. You can see how those assets and those processes are compounding on each other. We’ve got the book that gets people on our email list.

Our emails go out twice a week. That’s a process. Those emails generate replies. If they look qualified, those replies often go to our sales team. Our sales team will give them a call, follow up, or do whatever else. We’ve got that team working those processes. We’ve got those assets out there in the marketplace generating the inbound, and we’ve got the right tools facilitating all of that.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, I’m curious if you’re going to add another email to your weekly regimen because of your podcast to let people know. The podcast episode hit this week. Here’s the topic, and here’s the guest. Here’s what we did, and here are some of the takeaways you might want to listen to this episode. Is that in the works?

I’m going to experiment with that. We used to email three times a week, and I decided to cut back to two as a test, and we found that that was a good balance for our business. Frequency is something that I’m most often asked when it comes to email marketing. So how often should I mail? That’s something that will depend on your own business. I’ll give you a couple of examples. If you’re a stockbroker, it wouldn’t be weird to email your list twice a day, right? In the morning, you might say, “Look, these companies are going to report today what these potential buy and hold recommendations or whatever.” 

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And then in the evening, it might be a wrap-up of what’s happened in the market. Today, there was a big movement in Google, Meta, or whatever, which is what this means for tomorrow. And the coming week or whatever. So, a business like that might email twice a day, whereas I don’t want to hear from my plumber every day or twice a day. As a baseline, for most businesses, once a week is the minimum. So, if you email less than once a week, you risk your list going cold. And by the list going cold, people don’t remember that they subscribed or forget who you are, whatever.

If you think as an entrepreneur, how much stuff happens in the course of all week, it’s a lot like you’re dealing with your team, clients, and employees. So, that’s the case with all of your audience. If I think back on what happened a week ago, I can probably do it. I can’t even remember. I have to look at my calendar. That’s the case for most people. I would say as a baseline, the minimum that you want to email your list is once a week, and it could potentially be twice or three times a day, depending on your business and your type of business and what the expectations of your customer base are.

Yep. And you constantly have to course correct. It’s not like you just set in the course for, I don’t know, New York City and you’ve left London, and you just leave it to its own devices. You have to keep course correcting. Otherwise, you’ll end up at the North Pole or something.

That’s exactly right. What have you found works best with podcasts? Do you email for every podcast or highlight a particular podcast episode to your list? Or what have you found works best?

What I’ve settled on is a weekly newsletter called My Thursday Three. And these are three things. One thing that intrigues me inspires me, and challenges me at the beginning of all this is that I feature the two episodes for the week. One is on Get Yourself Optimized, and the other is on Marketing Speak with a quote from each one and a little not video, but it’s an animated GIF with a few seconds of the person talking, so it looks like something they might want to click on. So that used to be that I would send out an email all about the episode, but it didn’t take hold. It wasn’t as engaging. In this approach, they get really interesting stuff that they probably haven’t heard about, some new trend, tool, idea, or something counterintuitive. 

I used to use a Pocket, but now I use a Readwise reader. I add things as I discover them, whether it’s a YouTube video, a podcast episode or whatever. Then, my team logs into my Readwise reader account, pulls from that, and drafts an email newsletter for the week. So it’s not even me writing it.

Well, that’s awesome. And there you go. So that’s a process you’ve got in your business, and it’s getting done. And in all likelihood, if that was left on your to-do list, it may get done sometimes and never get done.

Actually. Probably never.

Exactly. I wanted to ask you, and I’m asking this of many successful podcasters, what are your thoughts on YouTube in terms of podcasts? Are you finding audio much more powerful, or is the YouTube segment growing? What are your thoughts?

For me, the YouTube segment is growing, and it’s becoming more and more important. I used to do audio only and didn’t even record the video. And that was for a number of years. And then I finally realized I should be recording the video, too. And so I recorded it but didn’t do anything with it. Then, we started posting them to YouTube, and we got very few views per video. It didn’t seem like it was worth the time; the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, whatever the expression was.

And then we started playing around with shorts. And those have been working out pretty well. Some will get hundreds of views, but then some standout successes will get thousands of views from the same guest. So we’ll do four or five per guest and find that maybe one hit and the others don’t. We’re finessing and fine-tuning as we go along. I think that’s an interesting growth opportunity with the short-form video content on YouTube. And it does have more staying power. It’s more evergreen than posting it as an Instagram reel.

I found my behavior as a consumer. I’ve almost switched completely to YouTube as where I consume my podcasts because, I can have the audio component or if I’m in a position to watch the video as well, like, for example, if I’m working out or whatever, I’ll, “Yeah, sure, I’ll watch the video component up.” Part of the reason my behavior is that way is because I’m a subscriber to premium YouTube, where you don’t get the ads and can have the audio play in the background.

How can anyone survive with the free YouTube? I just couldn’t imagine it.

You just get assaulted with ads and all of that. But my view is if YouTube made that feature free, they would dominate podcasts. That’s probably the only thing stopping them from dominating podcasts: you can’t play them in the background unless you’re a subscriber to the YouTube app. That’s still the case, isn’t it? It was definitely the case a while ago. But if you played a YouTube video, you couldn’t have it running in the background unless you were a YouTube subscriber, like on your phone or whatever. But yeah, if they made that feature free, they would dominate podcasts.

Well, I think one action item for our listeners is clear. If you’re not a YouTube Premium subscriber, pay the $10 a month or whatever it is. It’s worth your time to get that back. Get that time back and not be assaulted with ads.

Totally. 

Well, this was great. I’m glad to have you back on the show, and you’re creating such great content for the world. You’re making people accountable for their marketing. So it’s not just about dumbing it down to something actionable in terms of a strategy. Now, you’re helping them implement that one-pager. That’s awesome.

Thanks, Stephan. I’m hopeful that people get a lot of value out of the new book. It’s really about implementation. It’s about getting that leverage, that marketing leverage in your business.

And it’s a no-brainer. It’s $3.

Awesome. Again, the website, social media, and all that. Also, the book where to get that from.

The book is on Amazon. My website is leanmarketing.com. On social media, I’m @allandibb on all platforms. So feel free to connect. Say hi; I’d love to hear from you.

Awesome. And Lean Marketing isn’t just the name of the book; it’s the name of your agency, right?

Yeah, we’ve rebranded because I’m going all in on lean. 

I should say Lean Marketing anti-agency.

That’s exactly what it is—the anti-agency. I’m not an anti-agency. As I said, I think agencies have their place for very specialized tasks, but lean is certainly an important concept. It’s been transformational in many industries, and I think marketing is ripe for transformation as well, especially when implementing some of the lean strategies.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Congratulations on all your success, and thanks for coming back to the show.

Thanks so much, Stephan

All right, and thank you, listener. Get out there and make the world a better place. We’ll catch you on the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Identify and remove invalid, abuse-reported or spam-trapped email addresses from my list. This improves deliverability and prevents issues with email providers.

Implement proper email authentication (SPF, DMARC, DKIM) to ensure deliverability. Get my tech team to properly configure these authentication protocols.

Start by emailing in segments if my list is very large (e.g., over 10,000 emails) to avoid spam flagging when re-engaging a cold email list. 

Use plain-text, personal-sounding emails over heavy HTML graphics/templates. Plain text emails feel more personal and get higher open/reply rates. HTML templates with logos/graphics can come across as too marketing-heavy and impersonal.

Encourage replies and have a process to respond to make my emails more engaging. User engagement is invaluable.

Email my list at least once a week, more for certain niches like finance, while others likely only need weekly touches to stay top-of-mind.

Leverage AI writing assistants as supporters, not replacements for human creativity. They accelerate research, drafting and data analysis when guided.

Focus on creating a handful of powerful flagship assets, such as books, podcasts, tools, etc., over scattered, low-impact assets across many platforms.

Develop robust marketing processes executed by an integrator, not just the visionary. The integrator should be responsible for daily or weekly marketing processes.

Learn more about Allan Dib’s lean marketing strategies on his website, leanmarketing.com.

About Allan Dib

Allan Dib is a serial entrepreneur, rebellious marketer, technology expert, and #1 bestselling author. He has started, grown and successfully exited multiple businesses in various industries. Allan grew his business from startup to being named by Business Review Weekly (BRW) four years later as one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies.