On The Hill: Radar Hill Blog

Shawn recently went down to Texas for a Duct Tape Marketing Deep Dive workshop to learn from some of the best results-driven marketers in North America who specialize in trades and service industries. As a result, he learned the secret of how to take the knowledge and experience in "your brain" to create articles, newsletters, sales emails, and social media posts to attract your ideal target market. These are tactics no one in this area are doing. You don't need to write anything - he will guide you along the way and is excited to share it with you. So this is what he got up to!

By Shawn O’Hara

I started by booking my travel through Clare Martin as I always do, because she’s a commercial travel agent and if I run into any issues I know that I can reach her and she will solve it. I don’t like the idea of getting stuck somewhere and needing to fix it myself. I don’t want to run the risk of delays disrupting me, which almost happened back in October on my Utah trip when I went to another Duct Tape Marketing Conference, when the plane circled around the runway in Seattle for too long, and I had to do a mad dash from one plane through customs all the way to the next gate. Luckily this one went very smoothly, but it’s nice to have that backup support just in case. Plus it’s just so much easier to use a travel agent, I give her the parameters, and Clare sets everything up.

Clare arranged an Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle and from there straight to Dallas. When leaving Seattle the pilot said the flight would be three hours and seven minutes, so I started my stopwatch. And when we landed it had been exactly three hours and seven minutes. I was impressed with that.

Dallas Fort Worth Airport is huge, a hub airport with many flights and airlines, which is exactly the reason that the Duct Tape Marketing Consultants Network chose to do it in Dallas, because it's easy for people to get there from all over.

To leave the airport and get to the hotel in Irving, a suburb of Dallas, I took a shuttle and had a great conversation with the driver, Phil. He has been to Victoria as he frequently takes cruises from Seattle up to Alaska, and he’s planning on coming back in October so I gave him some suggestions of what to see. He recommended some local restaurants in Irving to try.

I checked into the Embassy Suites by Hilton in Irving just in time to join my twice-monthly BNI BC regional support team Zoom call. Luckily, I had upgraded to the paid, and therefore better, Wi-Fi. Every room was a suite with a living room and a separate door to the bedroom, which turned out to be quite practical.

I then went to one of the restaurants recommended to me by Phil, the Aspen Creek Grill. I had asked him if I could walk there from the hotel and he said ‘this is Irving, no one walks at night’. While there was a path that was close to the hotel, it involved walking under a highway. Not the most pedestrian friendly place, so I got a ride. The restaurant was really good, with the steak and fries special.

When I travel I always like to add a day before whatever conference I’m attending so I can enjoy where I’m going, but this time I had a lot of preparation to do for the workshop. I did manage in the morning (after a fabulous breakfast with made to order omelettes) to have a walk around the area. The hotel is beside a canal and green space. Victoria is green year round with lots of trees and great scenery. Irving is not like that. It’s very flat and very industrial. And it was unseasonably windy while I was there.

I never made it to the city of Dallas itself. The whole area is called Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington and is the 4th largest metropolitan area in the USA, so a few days is not enough time to see even a fraction of it. The hotel was 14 miles from the downtown core and I didn’t leave the area, too busy with the workshop and meeting people.

 That first evening there was a Meet & Greet and it was nice meeting new Duct Tape Marketing Consultants and some familiar faces. Not that all of the attendees made it, because there was some bad weather around and flights got delayed. Several missed the Meet & Greet and a couple even gave up attending the whole event, so I was quite pleased I had a nice clear direct trip. I also had a nice talk with John Jantz, the founder, which was a big thrill for me.

The next morning was the first session of the workshop, more details on what we learned below. Lunch was in the atrium of the hotel and there was a buffet lunch with drinks provided. Everyone had iced tea and I don’t usually drink iced tea but I tried some and it was very good. There was no sugar in it, and I even complimented the staff on how nice it was. Then we went back for the afternoon session.

In the evening I got takeout from a nearby Somali restaurant and had it in the hotel, so there was a whole group of fellow Duct Tape Marketing consultants in the lounge. It was great to talk to people from all over, most were Americans, a few Canadians, and even somebody from Colombia.

The next day was the rest of the session. Once it wrapped up I took a shuttle with some other consultants back to the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport where I got on a flight to Las Vegas where my wife had flown in that morning to meet me. We spent a delightful weekend there, we’ve been several times and love to walk around the different hotels, the malls, the shops, the galleries and of course the restaurants and buffets. Plus we went to the Sphere, overall a very fun way to end my USA trip.

The biggest takeaway from the workshop was these tactics that no one else here is doing: the secrets of creating great content. This is a way to help businesses who are struggling with content. They know they should be creating content for their website and social media, but have no strategy and it’s all very chaotic if they’re doing anything at all. They’re not blogging and feel overwhelmed by it all. They don’t know what to do for social media or how their Google Business Profile ties in with their marketing or how to use it to drive traffic to their website. Their content lacks direction and impact and wastes their time and money.

All of this ultimately means that their online marketing efforts are not hitting the target. They’re not getting anywhere and so they give up. 

It is not their fault. Many businesses do the same thing as their competitors and market themselves the same way. The problem is that, in the absence of any other differentiator, customers use price to decide who to use. The secret and tactics I’ve learned is a new approach to marketing, to do business differently, to help trades and service businesses to stand out and reach their ideal customers, and get paid for the value they provide, and not be ground down on price.

With this proven process, we create high quality blogs to be published over the year, along with social media posts to go out on various platforms, including Google Business Listing. And we can even do video shorts and email marketing. It’s a valuable system that any business can benefit from, and it was great to learn how other top ranking Duct Tape Marketing Consultants are implementing it and achieving phenomenal success for their clients.

Book now and input ‘Content Sprint’ as the reason for the meeting.