Weekend Favs April 5th

Weekend Favs April 5th written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one I took on the road.

• Mint.ai is an AI-driven advertising platform that integrates AI agents, data, and workflow automation to optimize processes in marketing and media.

• Adzooma is an AI-powered platform that simplifies online advertising by managing and optimizing ads across multiple channels, including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

• Trapica utilizes AI to automate and optimize ad campaigns, targeting the most relevant audiences and adjusting strategies in real-time to improve performance.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

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Your Book Launch Needs a Marketing Plan

Your Book Launch Needs a Marketing Plan written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Alex Strathdee

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Alex Strathdee, CEO of Shelf Life and author of Before the Bestseller. Alex is an expert in book marketing, having helped over 1,000 authors across 50+ niches get real results. His insights challenge the traditional belief that publishers will promote your book and reveal the essential strategies every author must use to drive their own success.

During our conversation, Alex shared powerful and practical advice on how to sell books, create a compelling book launch plan, and avoid the most common book marketing mistakes. From free reader seeding to building an author email list, Alex outlines a repeatable book sales strategy that empowers authors to treat their book like a business asset—whether you’re self publishing or working with a traditional publisher.

Alex’s approach to nonfiction book marketing is data-driven, entrepreneurial, and deeply practical. Whether you’re a seasoned business owner or just starting out, the insights from this episode can help you avoid wasted effort—and get real ROI from your book.

Key Takeaways:

• Publishers won’t market your book. Authors must take ownership of their book promotion strategy.
• Think of your book like a product. If it’s good (and light, as Alex says), it needs only wind—your marketing—to take off.
• Pick a sales goal. Whether it’s 1,000 or 20,000 copies, defining a target helps guide every marketing tactic.
• Use free reader seeding. Get your book into the hands of people who can talk about it and create buzz.
• Break down your sales goal into channels. Consider email, podcasts, Amazon ads, or lumpy mail to move copies strategically.
• Your email list is gold. Start small with 100 engaged readers and build from there—this is traffic you own.
• Use VA support for outreach. Outsourcing book promotion tasks helps you scale more efficiently.
• Don’t overlook physical presence. Alex shares how one book sold millions after being spotted in a car wash!
• Design a book funnel. Use your book as a lead magnet for higher-ticket services like courses or coaching.
• Presentation matters. From soft t-shirts to custom editions, packaging your book with care can spark word-of-mouth and long-term publishing success.

Chapters:

• [00:09] Introduction to Alex Strathdee
• [01:03] Do Publishers Promote Books?
• [02:45] Mistakes in Book Marketing
• [06:54] How is AI Affecting Book Marketing?
• [08:30] What is the Goal of your Book?
• [09:39] Seeding Readers with no Audience
• [13:34] Team and Tools to Help You with Your Book
• [16:03] Positioning Yourself to get Lucky

More About Alex Strathdee: 

• Check out Alex Strathdee’s Website
• Connect with Alex Strathdee on LinkedIn
• Read Before The Bestseller: Your Proven Path to Book Sales Without Wasting Time & Money by Alex Strathdee

 

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:00.951)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Alex Strathdee. He is the CEO of Shelf Life, where he helps authors market books. After working with over 1,000 books and 50 plus niches, he wanted to know what advice to give authors whose books weren't selling. Clients include Mike McCallewitz, Alan Dibbs, Michael Bungastanier, Tony Fidel, Reid Hoffman. He hosts.

his own podcast, Before the Best Seller with authors who have sold over 10,000 copies, which include Dan Pink, Kim Scott, and others. But we're going talk about his book today, Before the Best Seller, your proven path to book sales without wasting time and money. So Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Strathdee (00:47.864)

John, it's a dream come true being here growing up with you as one of the marketing greats to get to have a chat with you is pretty cool.

John Jantsch (00:55.227)

I appreciate that. So I know the answer to this, but I'm just going to let you let you hit it out of the park. When I write a book, doesn't the publisher promote my book?

Alex Strathdee (01:09.422)

You would think that is why we exist is because Seth Godin, I know, has a good statistic that, you know, authors spend 90 % on or they make revenue from 90 % of the 90 % of the revenue is from their backlist and they only spend 2 % of their their budget on actually launching new books, which is a statistic that every author should be listening to and thinking, oh, so I can't expect my publisher to actually market.

John Jantsch (01:10.627)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:24.835)

Huh.

John Jantsch (01:36.725)

Yeah, I've actually published, let's say I self-published one book, six books have been with major publishers. And I can say that not only do they not promote your book, they don't know how, quite frankly. I mean, they're pretty rooted in some ancient approaches.

Alex Strathdee (01:56.43)

And that's how I came into this industry was actually getting like pretty much scammed by someone who was like, oh, here's what book marketing really is. And I was like, oh, wait, I'm going to be our famous rich, you know, author tomorrow. Wow, that's fantastic. All I have to do is become an Amazon bestseller. Cool. And then you quickly find out that's that's not how you become an author.

John Jantsch (02:11.458)

Yeah

John Jantsch (02:16.035)

Well, and the other thing of course, and I'm sure you're experiencing this, my first book came out in 2007. There weren't a lot of nonfiction books, quite frankly, particularly from marketers. Now there's probably been five titles that have come out since we started this show. I mean, it's crazy.

Alex Strathdee (02:32.942)

There's a marketing book for every niche now. There was one book that I was marketing that is, Kroll Space Repair. It's insane, the niches that you find these days. But I love niches. I think niches are some of the best places to market.

John Jantsch (02:47.285)

So where do you find, we'll start with the mistakes. Where do you find people making a mistake? I know the biggest one is they write a book and go, okay, now what? Probably, but what are some of the other common mistakes?

Alex Strathdee (02:56.77)

Yeah, the first. I'll first start with a piece of education and it's how to think about your book, and it's a analogy that I actually stole from Ricardo Fayette of Reidsy, and it's it's the book is a ship analogy where essentially your book is a ship and how good your book is is how and how, you know, the word of mouth will spread for that book is how light the material of that ship is made of. So if you have a really, really good book, you have a really young.

think I was reading your Wikipedia before this as well. You like your woodworking, so we'll use a nice wood reference here. You know, if you have a really good book, then it's a light piece of wood, right? So, you know, then your book, all that that ship needs is some wind in the sails and it starts to cruise along. If your book is made of lead, meaning it's a terrible book and people don't want to share it, then yeah, you can strap rockets to the side. But the second you turn off those rockets, it's going to sink to the bottom of ocean. So the first thing is to think about your book as a ship.

John Jantsch (03:46.563)

You

Alex Strathdee (03:54.72)

And so the next question you get is, well, how do I know what my book is made of? And the answer to that is by product testing it. So it's by committing to. this is, your question was, where do people actually start with their marketing? The starting point is picking a number. So that is the Bill Gladstone, who's the late former literary agent to people like Eckhart Tolle, Marie Kondo, Jack Canfield. His whole thing is that in order for a book to be commercially successful, you need to see 20,000 copies into the wild.

Now, if your book is about crawl space repair, the odds of you seeding 20,000 copies is pretty low, right? So you get to realize that there's some nuance in here, depending on the industry that you're a part of. Rob Fitzpatrick says that number only needs to be 1000. He's a author of right. You saw books. He focuses more on like writing really, really good nonfiction books. And the truth is the numbers somewhere between 1000 and 20,000. And it's up to the author to figure out what that number is.

John Jantsch (04:29.559)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:43.478)

It's a book.

John Jantsch (04:51.053)

So.

I mean, again, I'm trying to process that comment. if I've published a book or self-published a book or I'm thinking about putting a book out, am I now then one of my first tasks is I need to get a thousand people who I think would be interested in this and send them a copy?

Alex Strathdee (04:58.094)

Yes. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (05:12.46)

That is one of the ways. we call that free reader seating and the the but yeah, essentially once you have your number, what that is, is that's empowering because where most authors start in their book marketing is just talking to, you know, like marketing salespeople of, you need this program, you need this program, you don't really know what you're trying to achieve. You just kind of think that like, well, if I make the New York Times bestseller list, then my book did what it's supposed to do, right?

John Jantsch (05:13.709)

Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (05:36.814)

And so just having an understanding of what you're actually trying to achieve with your book is that will solve half of your marketing issues. Because once you have your number, you break that down into, OK, I'm going to move 200 copies through podcasting. I'm to 100 copies through my email list. I'm going to move 200 copies through Amazon ads. Right. And then you actually break that seeding number down into many goals. And those are the different tools of book marketing that I talk about with him.

John Jantsch (06:02.263)

So we've probably all encountered a book that you're like, this is really bad. Why is it selling so many copies?

Alex Strathdee (06:11.852)

Yeah, yeah. The one of my one of my shocking things, it's kind of like, you know, Febreeze didn't sell until a marketer figured out how to make it sell right. Like until someone was like, it shouldn't have no smell. It should have a smell because that indicates to people that the room is clean. Right. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think you can have a pretty mediocre book. And if you have a really good marketing strategy behind it, it's going to do a whole lot better than a book that has no marketing and is, you know, the best book in the world. And

You know, so that's one of the things I tell authors is like, you know, I know we have a fellow friend, Mike McCallewitz, you he and get different, you know, are you like, you have a responsibility to market if your thing is the best thing on the market. You know, you're being selfish by actually not having a marketing plan behind that book. And there's a lot of authors would be bestselling authors that get stopped because they're, think that marketing their book is beneath them.

John Jantsch (07:05.763)

Yeah. So we're, always make a joke of this. We're seven minutes in the show. I'm going to mention AI for the first time. so how is, how is AI affecting in your view, both the written word as well as the, marketing component of, of marketing.

Alex Strathdee (07:14.542)

Let's do it.

Alex Strathdee (07:28.844)

I think what it comes down to is brand at the end of the day, you know, there's, that's one of the big issues on Amazon right now is there's a lot of people selling courses for like make a million dollars writing AI created books or whatever have you. Yeah. And it's like, you can put those books up there, but you're still going to have the same issue that the regular author has, which is to market those books. Like, so I think that

John Jantsch (07:40.023)

Right, 10 books a day, right, yeah.

Alex Strathdee (07:52.518)

I'm not afraid of, you know, I think it comes back to your marketing, right? Like if you have a really good marketer who's empowered by AI, then maybe they'll start moving some AI books, but we're starting to look into using tools like make.com to automate like social media creation and posting based on like best practices in the industry. So think make.com is a great low code platform for some people who are a little more tech savvy to start looking at. But I mean, there's, lots of ways, you know, like we use chat GPT to write our job descriptions.

John Jantsch (08:14.765)

Yeah, yeah.

Alex Strathdee (08:20.44)

You know, like you have someone on your team that takes half a day to write a job description, just ask ChatGPT to ask you for a meta ads expert and hire them in the Philippines, right? So I think there's a lot of things that like from on the surface level, ChatGPT can start to really help authors with, you know, where they don't have to know how to write a full on job description. They can have ChatGPT do that for them. And then on a deeper level, you can start using platforms like make.com to create workflows and go a little bit deeper with the tools.

John Jantsch (08:20.76)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:26.573)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:48.675)

important do you think it is, particularly I'm talking about non-fiction books, so business authors, how important do you believe that it is that most authors should also have a course and maybe a certification or a coaching program or something like that that actually comes from the book?

Alex Strathdee (09:06.102)

Yeah, and that's an interesting, you know, because even fiction and nonfiction have entirely different business models that you're working with. Right. And so like one of our first steps with authors is always to figure out what is it you're actually trying to achieve with this book? Because, know, someone who has a this is also like something you have to realize when you're bidding against people on a lot of the ad platforms like, you know, Amazon.

is oftentimes, especially in the nonfiction niche, you're bidding against people who aren't trying to make money on book royalties. They're trying to sell a twenty thousand hundred thousand dollar course on the back end. So the days of making money through Amazon ads, one of the questions we get a lot. The days of making passive income with Amazon ads is over. They like very few books do that nowadays and very few traditional or self published authors. And I'm talking about self published to get full royalties are actually at that point in their, you know, in their book journey.

John Jantsch (09:34.967)

Yeah, right, Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (09:59.181)

So how does somebody who, like in my particular case, by the time I put my first book out, I had a huge email list. I had actually been publishing other stuff online, a blog and all podcasts and all that kind of stuff. So I had a decent live audience. How does somebody who, and let's jump to fiction maybe, has no audience and is actually not known for writing Western literature, romance novels, all of sudden writes one. mean, how does that person

Seed some readers.

Alex Strathdee (10:30.466)

Yeah, that's that's a really great question and to to which does mean that it's it's more challenging. So let me let me try to make this as concise as possible because I could ramble for the next how much time you got, John. So when it comes to starting, I mean, you mentioned the number one thing and the most important thing is always to have a newsletter list. That's the one traffic you control. You've had plenty of episodes talking about the importance of that. Right. So.

John Jantsch (10:34.039)

Which means it's a hard question.

Alex Strathdee (10:56.654)

When it comes to your email list, one of the best ways and I stand on the shoulders of great marketers, know, so like Tim Grahl, who wrote your first 1000 copies, you know, he has a great way to start your Facebook, you know, your email list through Facebook, just reaching out to your friends and family one by one and saying, hey, I'm going to start, you know, writing about this topic.

you would you like to come along for the journey? And like, you know, if you're running ads, do you know, to your webpage, you might get a conversion rate of like, well, like 3 % on your web on your website. As if you're messaging people one by one on Facebook, like start with finding a hundred people to put on your email list, start sending out like a new valuable newsletter each week and happy to dive into that if you want. But you know, I just start with like who the people, you know, and ask them, Hey, here's what I'm going to do. It's kind of an experiment. Would you like to join and make that your first 100?

So that's the first step. Any questions about like the email list side? I'm sure you probably were already already on top of that one. And the other way is I'll actually use an example of a fictional author, John Strelecki. He's the author of a cafe on the edge of the world. He's now sold over 8 million books and he, kid you not, just went to chamber of commerce meetings and it hits a, his book is somewhat of a fable.

John Jantsch (11:50.007)

No, no, no, I think, yeah, yeah, we have definitely.

Alex Strathdee (12:11.48)

capable if you haven't heard of it's kind of like the go giver sort of that situation that has like a deeper meaning to it that's easy to pick up on short read. And he went to Chamber of Commerce meetings having one on one conversations with people until he had personally handed out 10,000 copies of his book. He has now sold over 8 million copies of his book. Clearly that worked. And so a genuine conversation you like finding a local group that you can go to and know, hand copies out one by one with a genuine conversation. Now.

John Jantsch (12:14.018)

Yeah, yeah.

Alex Strathdee (12:38.286)

There's a way you can do this the wrong way and there's a way you can do this the right way. And I'll use an example, you know, I'm out here in San Diego, if you couldn't tell by the mustache and the long hair. we have namaste yoga, cliff side here on the ocean. You know, can picture it, beautiful blue sky, you know, right? You hear the waves breaking and, you know, a nice way to relax on a Saturday and Sunday morning. And this woman was walking by.

handing out post-it notes that just had nice messages on them. Like, you you're pretty or like, you know, you're smart or whatever. And on the back of those post-it notes was, you know, a Lincoln invite to grab her book. But like she was starting with value. was like, would you like a positive note? And of course, like, you know, it's also her, her audience, right? Like an audience of yogis on a cliffside on a, on a Saturday morning at 10 a.m. is, is her demographic. And you compare that against, I was hosting a barbecue for a friend, you know, here at my, my apartment complex.

John Jantsch (13:20.472)

Yeah, yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (13:33.534)

And this man, I guess, saw a gathering of us down by the grill and walked down and began telling people about his AI book that we should all go by and read. like most of the people were like service workers, like baristas, no interest in learning about AI. And he's like forcing AI on everyone. It was the most uncomfortable situation. So like when you're having these conversations, be the first, not the second.

John Jantsch (13:48.653)

Yeah

John Jantsch (13:57.995)

Yeah, that's awesome. What would, so if somebody's, I know there's wide ranges and variances on all kinds of, depends, but if somebody's getting started with a nonfiction book, they've got a business as well. They're doing a couple of things. What's the team, the system, you know, the approach that kind of like they need to be doing this, this, this, this kind of thing.

Alex Strathdee (14:21.646)

Yeah, yeah. And I'm all for systems like one of my favorite marketers, Alan Dibb, know, random acts of marketing don't work. That's like I will sing that from, you know, the mountaintops until the day I die. And so, you know, having VA's is great. You know, I have a whole section. I talk a lot about VA's and I know you've covered a lot about VA's as well. But the system is start with your high number, break down into the littler numbers, pick out the tools that you're you're you know, whether it's and I've got, you know, a few of the tools that

John Jantsch (14:37.933)

Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (14:50.114)

you know, we've seen great success with is like free reader seatings, like finding people on LinkedIn. And so having a team member who is actually finding your ideal person on LinkedIn, on Instagram and messaging them one-on-one saying, Hey, we've got this free book. Would you like, you know, a copy of it for free? And most of it's like a free gift. Like, yeah, people are all for, you know, I know you're a fan of lumpy mail. Like I love lumpy mail. And so, you know, that's, that's something that works really well. We're doing that with like Dan Heath right now that he just launched reset.

John Jantsch (15:09.795)

Yeah. Right.

Alex Strathdee (15:18.586)

And so for him, like that's already led to two additional, like one lady wrote back and was like, wow, I'm going to make this my book for the book, my book club of like 80 people. Right. It's like putting yourself a lot of the seating number that you, you pick is putting yourself in a position to get lucky. But like, I find that when it comes down to systems, a lot of the research is, can be outsourced. So like finding those people on LinkedIn, messaging those people on LinkedIn, like you don't have the time to be there messaging these people one-on-one. and the great thing is, you know, like you mentioned, these people have businesses.

John Jantsch (15:26.381)

Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (15:48.48)

If they have, know, like you're essentially sending them like your business card at the same time, like your, your guess, you know, you, it's a, yeah, you got to pay for shipping and handling or whatever. even traditionally published authors will oftentimes be able to get a deal with their publisher for like six bucks. Always look at your, author, author copy price if you're a traditionally published author, but, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:53.272)

Yes.

John Jantsch (16:06.307)

Well, would also tell you those books cost them nothing. I always negotiated a thousand bucks that they gave me.

Alex Strathdee (16:12.053)

Yeah. Good. That's great. Yeah. That's I'm going to start using that. That's really smart. I didn't know you could, you could get away with that. But, yeah, having people who are doing the researching and the messaging, I think like anytime you're doing cold researching or cold messaging, like that's a great opportunity to start bringing in an assistant for that stuff.

John Jantsch (16:31.245)

Yeah, and that kind of thing can be had, you know, fairly inexpensively. I want to go back something you just touched on a little bit, putting yourself in a position to get lucky. I know you spent a lot of time in the book on that. You've even got a couple examples in the book. You want to share any Oprah moments?

Alex Strathdee (16:48.21)

One of my favorite stories and a lot of people don't know this is Robert Kiyosaki. Everyone's heard of Rich Dad Poor Dad, right? So what a lot of people don't know is that is how that book became the best selling personal finance book of all time. And the way it was done was Robert called up his buddy who owned a car wash and he said, hey, do you mind if I sell some copies of Rich Dad Poor Dad in your car wash? And his buddy was like, sure, whatever.

John Jantsch (16:54.147)

Sure. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (17:14.026)

There's he is a bookstore of one at that point. There is no you know, like customers are looking over at you know, at air fresheners to buy while they're waiting for their car to get washed or they're using the unusable bathrooms that you know at car washes and Then they walk, know to the over the cashier and wow, it's this personal finance book. Let me pick that up I have a little time. Let me read it and So one of the people who happened to walk through that car wash was one of the founders of Amway

John Jantsch (17:17.315)

You

John Jantsch (17:34.477)

Right.

Alex Strathdee (17:40.534)

Now not talking about, whether Amway is a good company or what you think about, you know, rich divorce or anything, but the person picked this book up and loved it so much that he then took it to the other executives. And he's like, this is a powerful tool for us to educate and empower our people. so Amway started to fly Robert Kiyosaki all around the country to speak at events. And that book quickly became their Bible. And he found his micro community, a lot of

Authors will find their micro community early on. Like Mike McAuliffe did this with Profit First. He was speaking on college campuses and kids were taking home those books on spring break and moms were picking up those books and reading and fixing their company's finances or the company business or the family business. And that was his following. And he never meant for the book to find its way to those people. yeah, mean, putting yourself in a position to get lucky is what a lot of that picking your number to begin with is doing.

John Jantsch (18:33.911)

Yeah. And really the seating probably, I mean, you have no idea who it's going to, I mean, maybe you targeted somebody, but you have no idea who, what their circle of influence is. And I think that's, just becomes a numbers game at that point as you're, as you're kind of stressing, isn't it?

Alex Strathdee (18:49.41)

And that's why people will be like, give away my book for free. it's like, well, first of all, a lot of people will put their book up for expensive on launch. And it's like, yeah, their mom buys it, their cousin buys it, their son buys it. But at end of the day, are you actually solving for any of those people? that's a big part. Are you actually solving the problem of any of those people? And so that's a big part of it is your number has to consist of people whose problem you're actually solving for. Because if you're not, then no one's going to get excited about your book.

John Jantsch (18:53.111)

Yeah

John Jantsch (19:18.979)

It was a book that I actually had the author on here. He has since passed away, but called Giftology by John Ruhlman. And he did what I thought was a really interesting thing. His book was published by a publisher, but he talked to publisher into letting him create a special edition of the book. It was hard bound, like kind of leather, you know, had, you know, gold lettering on it. And, you know, he sent out like 4,000 of those.

And it was in this really incredible package and it just, people couldn't not talk about it. And it just really launched his book because he just got so much word of mouth before anybody had really read it just by the presentation.

Alex Strathdee (19:59.598)

Packages can be a really fun way to do it. Brian Johnson, who recently really released art and actually sent giftology funny enough, like two weeks ago, I had a partnership and I was like this, like do this. So it's funny that you bring that up. the yeah, and he sent if you're going to send this is a little like, you know, people love these small little things. If if you're going to do T-shirts, John, make them the softest, most comfortable T-shirt you've you've ever worn so that people actually wear it. I have so.

John Jantsch (20:03.094)

Eh.

John Jantsch (20:08.738)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:21.091)

Right.

John Jantsch (20:26.049)

Yep.

Alex Strathdee (20:27.096)

Bryan Johnson sent me two of the literally softest shirts I own and they've become my travel shirts. So I have walked through about like 30 airports wearing these shirts and been a walking billboard for this guy. So that's like, if you're going to do like shirts for your book, make sure the title is on there and make them the softest that you could possibly make them.

John Jantsch (20:32.523)

You

John Jantsch (20:46.403)

Love it. Love it. Well, Alex, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and find out more about before the bestseller?

Alex Strathdee (20:56.204)

Yeah, I'm always up for a conversation. know, we pride ourselves in like just having very honest conversations with authors and kind of like where they're at. We prefer to work with authors for years. So if we don't think like an engagement is going to work out for more than like a small period of time, then like we'll tell you that. Yeah, reach out to us. Our website is get shelf life dot com. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have a question about book marketing. Alex at get shelf life dot com.

And yeah, check out our book before the best seller on Amazon now.

John Jantsch (21:27.267)

Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Alex Strathdee (21:32.952)

This is a bucket list item, John. Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (21:35.395)

You

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The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Carlos Gil

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Carlos Gil, global marketing leader, bestselling author of The End of Marketing, and Brand Evangelist at GetResponse. Carlos is known for his bold approach to digital marketing, particularly in how brands can rise above the noise in a world dominated by AI, social media, and content creation.

Carlos challenges the status quo with his core thesis: Marketing as we know it is dead. The future isn’t just about technology—it’s about reconnecting with people. As AI tools like ChatGPT reshape the landscape of content marketing and digital advertising, brands must refocus on what can’t be automated: human relationships. From employee advocacy to authentic storytelling, Carlos shares actionable strategies for creating a brand strategy that thrives in a tech-driven world while staying rooted in human connection.

Carlos Gil’s perspective is a timely reminder: in the race toward automation, don’t lose the human heart of your brand. The brands that will win in the future are the ones that embrace empathy, connection, and authentic communication—at scale.

Key Takeaways:

• Marketing is evolving—not ending. Brands must adapt by becoming more authentic, relational, and human-centric.
• AI in marketing is powerful, but limited. Tools like ChatGPT can support email marketing and content creation, but they can’t replace real brand relationships.
• Employee advocacy beats influencer marketing. Instead of outsourcing trust, Carlos encourages companies to empower employees to become true brand evangelists.
• Omni-channel marketing is essential. Businesses must diversify their presence across platforms while prioritizing ownership of their audience through email and direct communication.
• The most effective marketing strategy? Human connection. Creating real value through stories, vulnerability, and engagement helps brands rise above algorithm-driven sameness.

Chapters:

• [00:09] Introducing Carlos Gil
• [02:23] Brands Need to Humanize
• [07:46] AI and the Need for Human Relationships
• [12:25] Communicating the Human Element of Your Brand
• [15:49] Omni-channel Marketing

More About Carlos Gil: 

• Connect with Carlos Gil on LinkedIn
• Read The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media by Carlos Gil

 

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:01.09)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Carlos Gill. He's a global marketing leader and author. He's a US brand evangelist at GetResponse with over a decade of experience helping brands thrive in the digital age. He's also known for his bold results-driven strategies and insights on leveraging AI, social media, and email marketing to drive growth and engagement. Today we're going to talk about his latest book,

The end of marketing, humanizing your brand in the age of social media. So Carlos, welcome to the show.

Carlos Gil (00:36.991)

It's great to be here on the show, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:39.232)

So wait, marketing is over, it's not just evolving? Like it's the end? What do mean by the end?

Carlos Gil (00:45.635)

the end is just that look, you know, the first line, then the marketing, it's real provocative, the title itself is intended to be a provocative, engaging title to real people in and the first line of the book, not to spoil it for anyone, because I hope you go out and buy it, but it's marketing as we know it is dead, right? And like, that's the caveat that as we know it, and I say this, because I myself being millennial, right? I've been around now for multiple decades and generations, I've been able to see

John Jantsch (00:47.477)

You

John Jantsch (00:53.72)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (01:05.699)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carlos Gil (01:14.079)

it's kind of shift throughout my lifetime from once not having digital technology to having digital to having the web to now everywhere we turn, we're seemingly connected and there's this just friction between brands and consumers. And, I know we're going to talk about the books. I don't want to give too much away early on, but the whole premise of the end of marketing is that brands want to be able to rise above all the digital noise that's existing today.

John Jantsch (01:15.918)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (01:42.377)

they need to become more human. And look, to be transparent with you, I wrote this book in 2019. It came out in 2019. The very end, this was before COVID. I then sat down and wrote the second edition during COVID in 2021, the second edition came out. And I have folks that reach out to me through social media, just about every single day, John. And they say like, wow, like, did you predict what was going to happen, especially with like the whole AI piece? Because I would say then the marketing speaks more so today.

John Jantsch (01:44.632)

Yes.

John Jantsch (01:48.302)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (02:05.752)

Yes.

Carlos Gil (02:10.335)

to a 2025 reader honestly than in 2019 when I wrote it.

John Jantsch (02:16.685)

You know, think though that that's actually, mean, I've been around a little longer than you, uh, Carla said, so I've been doing this, uh, a little longer. And so I've seen these ups and bounds and I mean, people have kind of used this idea of the end of marketing numerous times because anytime something really changes, they're like, Oh, the old way is dead. Um, so I, I, I, I 100 % agree. It's changing faster than ever. This idea of, you know, all AI is creating.

more sameness and more noise than ever before. So touch a little bit more on this idea. I've been really preaching lately that I think branding or brands are going to become more important than ever. You use the word humanizing brands. How does a business need to be looking at that today?

Carlos Gil (03:06.803)

Look, when I wrote Dundee marketing, one of my inspirations behind the whole thesis, which is that if brands want to survive this AI apocalypse that we are like right now in, right? Whether you want to accept it not. Yes, it's still the early days of AI, but what does that really mean? Like AI is evolving really fast. So early days of AI might mean that a year from now, like everything that you know about business is just completely flipped upside down on its head. So

John Jantsch (03:16.75)

Cheers.

Carlos Gil (03:35.453)

When I wrote this book, I started thinking about what's the competitive advantage from a marketing standpoint for any business or any brand. And that's relationships. And I know this having worked previously on the inside of brands, leading social media, having previously worked for LinkedIn, being a social network that you can't really scale or automate relationships. Right? So when you think about what AI is able to do, yes, AI can

write copy for you a lot of the AI that we refer to as more so language models, such as chat GBT. So yes, AI can write website copy and social media copy and it can operate a lot faster than human being great. I love it. But at the end of the day, is it as effective as a human behind the controls? I think that's that's TBD. What I can tell you that AI cannot do is automate relationships between humans. That's like a core theme of the

John Jantsch (04:32.162)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (04:33.427)

book. The core theme is just that like at the end of the day, whether you use technology to help you do your job or not, a relationship means means a lot, especially in this era that we're in where I fully believe by 2030, the value of a relationship. I'm not talking about social media follower, I'm talking about real relationship being able to, you know, hop on a webcast, do something like this with you, connect people, sit down, have human to human interaction, there's going to be an immense

John Jantsch (04:53.686)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (05:03.263)

premium on that experience. And for brands in order to stand out, you can't automate that. So how do you stay competitive when you're a multi billion dollar brand and you're looking to stay competitive within your own category? Well, it's simple, right? You've got influencers, right? That is one solution. But influencers, as I write in the marketing, they're really just a band aid. They're a temporary solution, right? You hire an influencer.

They promote your brand. see a little temporary bump in traffic to your website, right? It looks good. But when that influencer goes away, they take their following with them. So in order to sustain that success, you need to start making people the faces of your company. And ironically, the role that I'm doing now, what I've been doing with GetResponse for the last year, GetResponse being an email service provider that was created in the late 90s, is they brought me on board to serve in this brand evangelist role.

I really was that mean. So I wear multiple hats, right? Internally, I'm a marketing, you know, strategist, thought leader within the brand, but on the outside, I'm doing this, I'm on podcasts, I'm a company spokesperson, I'm speaking on behalf of the company at events. I just came back from South by Southwest, I was on the scene, creating video content. This what you're kind of seeing in action through myself is honestly, John, like the perfect bow to put on my own book.

John Jantsch (06:01.004)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (06:30.163)

that I wrote the end of marketing because I'm living it, I'm doing it, I'm showing other organizations out there. This is how you humanize your brand through people. It's not always hiring influencers, it's having a really strong and effective employee advocacy strategy, it's training your employees to really humanize your brand through their own content. And then it's also going out and finding individuals that can embody your brand and bringing them within whether it's hiring an influencer in house, right, to work for you for a year.

John Jantsch (06:46.52)

me

John Jantsch (06:58.541)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (06:59.475)

whether it's hiring someone like myself to go out and create content on your behalf, it puts a human face and voice on the company. And I tell you what, this, I believe, is the new wave going forward for brand marketers and the smart ones that figure out that balance of how to still sell, how to still market, but doing it in a way that feels authentic. You're doing it through a real human being. Those are the ones that are gonna stand out. Otherwise, I really believe you're gonna start seeing a lot of companies

Start scaling back on social, start even scaling back their digital presence because, you've got AI that now is able to operate faster, move more lean, create content for you. And that in itself creates a real challenge for brand marketers.

John Jantsch (07:45.452)

You know, I'm seeing actually there's, this whole kind of AI is going to replace people, you know, kind of a meme that that's out there very wide. And, and there's no question it's replacing functions. but I actually had someone on the show the other day that has created it's an AI tool. And they said that what it's actually doing is they're using AI to do a lot of, I don't know, let's call it grunt work, that, that people used to have to spend their time to do. And it's actually freeing their people up to

to do more relationships and to spend more time, you know, just meeting with people, over lunch, you know, or whatever it, you know, it might be. And I think that that's actually the way, the smart way that people are going to invest in their people is to not, to not look at this as like, we can, we can go down to two people now because we can have AI do all this. It's like, no, we can actually re align or refocus what our people actually do that is going to, you know, establish this brand, you know, as a different, know, standout brand.

Carlos Gil (08:36.575)

100%.

Carlos Gil (08:43.263)

Yeah, look, 100 % I have a love hate relationship with AI. use AI throughout my day. But what I will say is that it's very easy as a marketing professional to become reliant on AI to the point where it almost makes it hard for you to think for yourself. And that is free slope of all this technology, right? You become super reliant on it. And then chat GPT goes down. It's like, oh my god, like, I forgot how to I forgot how to write. Right? Like,

John Jantsch (08:59.471)

It's just

Carlos Gil (09:09.369)

It literally becomes like that. So what I always say is like, look, you need to find ways to make AI your trusted assistant. Historically, you have a marketing agency that you work with, you lean on them to write your social media ad copy, you lean on them to help you ideate like you have to build a relationship. You're using chat GPT, right? You have to build a relationship with your chat GPT. There's no other way around it. I have now spent a couple of years finessing and refining

John Jantsch (09:31.394)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Carlos Gil (09:37.203)

But what I will say is the way that I use AI helps me actually be much more creative. Because I know now that I have a trusted companion within Chad GBT that if I'm, for example, in an airport and an idea comes to my mind, I can speak into my phone and I can get real time feedback. Right? I can help, you know, ideate with the help of AI without having to call someone, without having to pay an agency. Right? So like there's that aspect of it that I believe has it's good.

John Jantsch (09:46.232)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:55.736)

Yeah. Yeah.

Carlos Gil (10:06.815)

But then there's the other aspect of it that if you rely so much on AI to do all the heavy lifting, all the grunt work as you call it, or the menial tasks, now you are removing the human element out of things like copywriting or even writing an email or a text message. Like it's crazy. I see people all the time now. I'm on airplanes a lot and they're writing a text message and they go over to ChatGBT.

to almost like copy, edit the text and then they go back. It's like, my goodness, like this is going to continue to create this friction as I like to call it between humans and technology. And it goes.

John Jantsch (10:37.038)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:45.566)

Imagine when we have an entire generation that that's all they know.

Carlos Gil (10:49.821)

Well, like imagine what's really scary is imagine you and I not even have to record a podcast because there's so much content of you and there's so much content in me over the years. The AI knows my face and my voice and it could just recreate this conversation. Like it exists right now. There's AI conversational platforms that you can record 15 seconds of your voice and it will just record a podcast for you. It's insane what it can do. And that's great. We're going to continue to see that.

John Jantsch (11:04.94)

Yeah, people are doing it. Yeah.

Carlos Gil (11:16.127)

I firmly believe that we're entering an era where there'll be bestselling books written by AI, top podcasts on Spotify that are created by AI. There's gonna be new billionaires are created. There will be new billionaires created because of AI, because of systems. My whole point here though is don't lose sight of human to human relationships. Like that will always outweigh

John Jantsch (11:22.822)

totally.

Carlos Gil (11:43.487)

what technology can do. And the reason for that is because, you know, this is like just old school business, right? It's like, I'm going to speak right now that the Gen Zers out there, they're listening or watching, like business has always been predicated based on who you like, trust and relate to. So if you like someone, you have a higher likelihood to do business with them. If you trust them, if you relate to them, you want to do business with people that you like, trust and relate to. And I'm sorry, in an AI driven world, where it's really noisy,

John Jantsch (11:48.866)

Yes.

Carlos Gil (12:10.367)

Yes, it becomes challenging to sift through that noise. But inevitably, if you're able to connect with people, IRL, or you're able to connect with people online and kind of weed out the AI element of that relationship, like, yeah, man, it's just old school business 101.

John Jantsch (12:28.238)

You know, a lot of times people, think everybody gets that, you know, that idea of be more human, be more human. But this sounds really silly, but I have a lot of people who are like, well, how do you do that? You know, how do you, how do you communicate that? And I, and I think the, the real thing that AI doesn't do is it can't make up a story that only I know, never will. Um, you know, right. So storytelling, uh, vulnerability, uh, I don't see too much AI kind of saying, look, I made this mistake and here's what I learned from it.

Carlos Gil (12:46.099)

Right?

John Jantsch (12:54.827)

So, I mean, think some of those elements need to be in our marketing to kind of show or communicate the humaneness, don't they?

Carlos Gil (13:02.139)

Absolutely. And look, like the other element of this that I want to reel and it's something I'm very passionate about right now is this whole notion of owning your data, right? Like AI aside, AI is great from operational standpoint, but we are living right now in this just noisy digital ecosystem. And I write about this in the book. I talk about this one when I'm on stage. I take it you've seen the movie Cast Away, John? Right. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. And anyone that follows my work, whether you read it or you read my podcast,

John Jantsch (13:10.712)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:25.198)

yeah, sure, sure.

Carlos Gil (13:31.795)

like this, or you see me speak on stage, I always make analogies. I'm like, what kind of has helped me as a marketer define my voice in this whole space is I'm not a textbook marketer. one these guys that I've been in the trenches, I've done the work, I've worked in corporate, I've started businesses, and I learned and I go out and teach. And I use a lot of analogies. So my point of where I'm going with this is that in the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks is stranded on this island. And throughout the movie, he's talking to a volleyball named Wilson.

And I often use this comparison that we as digital marketers are the equivalent of Tom Hanks speaking to a volleyball, right? We produce all this content. We spend all this time in the lab making videos, making shorts, making reels, writing blogs. And if no one consumes them, right? No one's listening. Then that is the equivalent of Tom Hanks speaking to Wilson. So you have all this noise that's taking place every single day. And it's not just brands competing against other brands. Like way back in the day, I used to run social media for a brand named Winn-Dixie.

there's supermarket chain here in Florida. And the primary competitors was Publix and Walmart, and Albertsons and a couple other stores. Well, nowadays, if you're a supermarket chain, just using this example, you're not competing against supermarkets, so we're talking about food, you're competing against bloggers or vloggers, you're competing against influencers, cooks, you're competing against anyone that's in your category, that's taking market share away from your brand, which is why I go back to the basis of

relationships be important. And one of my passionate topics right now in this era that we're in is this notion that you need to own your data. You cannot rely on these social networks to give you reach. You cannot rely on the little breadcrumbs that Metta or Instagram give you. You just can't. We recently saw TikTok go through a very scary situation where they were temporarily banned. And that I believe should be a wake up call to every single business, every single creator, influencer, anyone.

John Jantsch (15:15.15)

you

Carlos Gil (15:25.545)

who's relying on these technologies to grow and promote their business, you cannot rely on them. You need to use them for reach. You need to use them to create awareness for your business. But inevitably, you need to be taking those relationships, i.e. those followers, you to move them over into systems and platforms like email. You need to own data and you cannot be reliant because unfortunately, when you do become reliant on these systems, you are just putting too much control in their hands.

John Jantsch (15:53.71)

Yeah, you know, it used to be, mean, when, I don't know, let's say 2005, 2006 or so when social media started, you know, popping on the scene, it was very much seen as a top of the funnel. Like here's how to get reach. Here's how to get exposure. Here's how to get seen. But you got to drive people back, you know, to the property of your own. Mainly, we tried to drive people back to our websites, right? We'd post our blog and say, here, come read my blog here. Well, now a lot of those platforms.

Don't ever want you to leave. And so, you you get penalized for doing any of that kind of drive people back. And another thing I'm seeing happen is, you know, on TikTok, you're seeing entire journey or entire, you know, funnel happening on TikTok. It's no longer just top of the funnel. People are actually transacting. So, so how, how do people kind of balance that idea that I now need to be more places with like a full, you know, full range of content as well as, you know,

I 100 % agree, own your own data.

Carlos Gil (16:56.157)

You know, I've been saying this, John, since probably about 2015 when I started speaking. I go back and I look at some of my earlier content. I'm like, man, I've been saying the same thing for a decade now. And one of the key terms I have said to folks, and this goes back to when I worked in corporate marketing running socials, have an omnichannel presence. Don't be married to one platform. Use these platforms the way that they use you.

And I'll just tell you as someone that has spent a lot of time in these platforms as a user, and again, having worked for a major social network, these social networks at the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They're all digital advertising platforms. And I think this is something that's lost upon the majority of creators because again, like let's think of it, your average business owner, your average influencers using platforms, they're just trying to get rich. They're trying to continue to build a community, get followers. The name of the game should not be to get followers.

Your objective as a business needs to be to generate more revenue, right? Followers, it's a vanity metric, right? Like, you know that you've worked in the industry for a very long time as well. So I always am constantly preaching this. Use these platforms the same way they use you. The way they use you is they're using you because you're creating contents, keeping people on the platforms. And as long as you're keeping people on the platforms, they're selling more ads and they're making more money, right? Like they are in the business of making money. That's what these social networks do. And again,

John Jantsch (17:52.878)

Yes.

John Jantsch (18:20.184)

Yeah. Well, and let's throw Google in under the bus too. mean, that's what Google's, you know, existence is as well.

Carlos Gil (18:25.193)

Yeah, it doesn't make them bad. Like by any means, like if anyone from Google or LinkedIn or better, any of these platforms are listening or watching, like this doesn't make them bad. It's just understanding the game. Like these are businesses. So if I am running a business, right, I always use this analogy again, going back to the analogy, if I, for example, am running, let's just say a flea market, right? We all know what a flea market is. You cannot walk into my flea market and set up a table and sell without paying a hundred bucks to the owner of the flea market.

John Jantsch (18:35.554)

Right. Yep.

John Jantsch (18:49.762)

Right.

Yeah, right,

Carlos Gil (18:53.929)

to rent for a day. If you're a barber, you can't go to a barber shop and cut hair and not expect to give the owner his or her cut. That's just business. Social media networks operate the same exact way. And again, it doesn't make them bad. You just have to understand the rules of the game. And normally when I do my talks, have like, sorry, I have this slide behind me and it has like a casino and like Zuckerberg's face in front of it. And I always say like,

look at meta, for example, and like they are a form of casino, because they'll give you a little dopamine, they'll let you win here and there in the form of a viral video or your post might reach, you know, more than 1 % of your following audience. But they're not gonna let you win all the time. And they're not gonna let you do it for free. And you have to pay to play inevitably. And again, man, like I love this space. Like, I know we've talked about AI, and we're trying to get as much in and in the time that we're together. I love I just love the space, man.

John Jantsch (19:24.654)

Yeah.

Carlos Gil (19:50.911)

I've worked in social media professionally since oh wait, I got onto social media in 1995, back then when I was 12 and it was known as AOL. I have grown up evolving with this in my life. I've made a lot of money as an entrepreneur using it. I've made a lot of money as a creator using it. I've helped businesses make a lot of money using these tools. Like I love them. They're great. However,

where I do keep it 100 as a thought leader and speaker in the space is what I've already said. And I'll repeat it one more time. If it's cool, you cannot rely on these networks alone. You have to have an omni-channel strategy. And that means go wide, have a presence on multiple platforms, build a community within those platforms. Don't just rinse and repeat your content because now you're not giving people an incentive to go follow you in different channels. And most importantly, you need to find ways to own your data, which is pretty simple. Start up a newsletter, right?

John Jantsch (20:33.038)

you

Carlos Gil (20:45.671)

to get response, sign up, get a newsletter. And then as you're creating content that people enjoy seeing, remind them, hey, if you want to see more of this, if you want to be a part of my insider circle, my club, my mastermind, however you frame it, now you have a solution to give people that you own. So you don't have to rely on the out.

John Jantsch (21:02.435)

Yes.

Yeah. I, know, just another practical nod to that idea is that a lot of times people have to bump into you in about five places before they start paying attention. you know, so it's, it's the old, gotta hear, you know, I gotta hear your message or see your sign or whatever it is multiple times before I'm really going to, to start tuning in. Well, Carlos, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Where would you invite people to find, to connect with you first off, but then find out more about the end of marketing.

Carlos Gil (21:34.303)

Yeah, for sure. So once again, John, thank you so much for having me on your podcast today. It has been a pleasure. You can learn about the end of marketing by going to Amazon. Just look up end of marketing. There's the first and second edition. Also, I want to call out, get response, shout out, get response, go to get response.com. You can sign up for a free trial there. If you have any questions with regards to setting up a newsletter, email marketing, please be sure to reach out to me. You can connect with me on all the socials, Carlos skill 83 and LinkedIn.

is my go to platform of choice if you want you can connect on me there but I love Instagram I love tiktok love Facebook I am a proponent of look let's get to know each other LinkedIn is great but you only get to know so much about me and me of you on LinkedIn it's professional social network and at the end of the day so if you're on Instagram look me up at Carlos guilty 3 let me know that you heard this episode of the duct tape podcast and any way that can help you out let me know I'm here I got you

John Jantsch (22:32.878)

Awesome. I appreciate it, Carlos, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Carlos Gil (22:37.599)

All right, John, I appreciate you.

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