Summary
Most small business owners waste money on a scattered, "buffet-style" marketing approach that yields poor results. Consider a more focused, low-cost, and high-impact strategy, recommending StoryBrand and Duct Tape Marketing as effective starting points for those with limited budgets.
By Vicky Franzsen, StoryBrand Certified Guide and Duct Tape Marketing Strategist
❝What stories teach us is that people’s internal desire to resolve a frustration is a greater motivator than their desire to solve an external problem❞
— Donald Miller: Donald “Don” Miller is an American author, public speaker, and business owner. He is the CEO of StoryBrand, a marketing company.
Thursday – October 09, 2025
Most small business owners treat marketing like a buffet. Grab a bit of Facebook ads, pile on some SEO, sprinkle a podcast or two on top, and hope you don’t get food poisoning.
The problem is that this type of buffet is quite expensive. And it usually leaves you just as hungry as before.
It’s not that you don’t care. It’s that you’re overwhelmed, broke, or both. And the experts telling you to “just be everywhere” aren’t the ones cutting checks to Meta every month.
If you don’t have an unlimited budget (and if you do, I’d like to invite you to sponsor my retirement personally), you need a plan that starts small, works fast, and doesn’t require hiring your cousin’s nephew who just discovered Canva and thinks he’s a marketing guru.
That’s where StoryBrand and Duct Tape Marketing come in. Not as expensive theories. As the lowest-cost, highest-impact starting points.
Step One: Fix the Words
Paid media refers to when an organization invests in advertising its content. This encompasses ads on social media platforms, search engines, or websites. The objective is to boost visibility, engage audiences with the content, or motivate them to take a specific action.
Google Ads and Meta Ads are the most popular paid media platforms. Google Ads enables you to advertise across Google’s services, such as Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail, whereas Meta Ads allows you to promote on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
In our digital age, businesses of all sizes can leverage these tools to market themselves and expand by enhancing their visibility and facilitating online transactions. Examples include:
◉ A small retail store using Google Shopping ads to sell products online.
◉ A local home service business is using Google Call ads to get more bookings.
◉ A nonprofit organization uses Meta Awareness ads to spread the word about its cause.
Step Two: Know Who You’re Talking To
Duct Tape Marketing refers to this as defining your ideal customer. Everyone nods like they’ve already done it, then immediately describes “basically anyone with money.”
No. That’s not a target market. That’s a wish list.
Write down the specific type of customer who is easiest to sell to, happiest to pay, and least likely to make you hate your job. That’s who you design your marketing around. Ignore the rest for now.
One client, a virtual assistant agency, thought they needed to serve everyone. Corporate executives, side hustlers, entrepreneurs, startups, you name it. When we narrowed the focus to small business owners drowning in admin, suddenly their ads became sharper, cheaper, and way more effective. They stopped wasting time chasing the wrong people and started closing deals with the right ones.
If you’re on a budget, clarity beats coverage. You can’t afford to market to everyone. Pick the right group of people.
Step Three: Don’t Build a Funnel. Build an Hourglass
Funnels are fine for people selling impulse buys. If you’re hawking protein powder or novelty socks, you can shove people into ads and hope they fall out the bottom with a credit card.
But if you’re selling services, you need more than a one-time transaction.
That’s where the Duct Tape “Marketing Hourglass” comes in. Instead of shoving people into Facebook ads and praying, you design the entire journey:
◉ Know you
◉ Like you
◉ Trust you
◉ Try you
◉ Buy you
◉ Repeat you
◉ Refer you
Think of it like a funnel with a pension plan. Customers don’t just buy once—they stick around, they come back, and they tell their friends.
A security company I worked with added a free assessment to their sales process (the “try” step). Instead of trying to close every deal on the first call, they gave people a taste of what working together looked like. Conversions skyrocketed because trust was built in. That’s the hourglass in action.
❝The only worthwhile idea is the one on which you take action.❞
— John Jantsch: John Jantsch is a small business marketing speaker, marketing consultant, and bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing
Step Four: Do Less, Better
The temptation is to try everything at once. A blog, a podcast, five social channels, and a dancing TikTok video that makes your teenage children stop speaking to you.
Here’s the low-budget truth: pick one or two things and do them correctly.
◉ A clear website
◉ A regular email
◉ That’s it. Everything else can wait until you’re not terrified of payroll.
Take email. One of my clients hadn’t touched their list in three years. We set up a simple monthly newsletter with one useful tip and a clear call to action. The result? Old leads re-engaged, new leads warmed up, and they started closing sales without spending a cent more on ads. Email may not be trendy, but it works.
Sometimes boring is better. Especially when boring pays the bills.
Step Five: Stop Copying Giants
This one isn’t an official StoryBrand or Duct Tape doctrine, but it matters. Too many small businesses copy what giant brands do—slick campaigns, vague slogans, endless social content.
Here’s the thing: Nike can afford to be vague. You can’t. Coca-Cola can spend millions on “brand moments.” You cannot.
Please note that their business goals are likely different from yours. They have shareholders to impress, quarterly earnings to manage, and global reach to protect. You have payroll to make and leads to close.
The playbook is different. While they chase “awareness,” you need clarity. While they can afford billboards that say ‘Believe‘, you need a website that ‘clearly’ states what you do and why it matters.
A small IT firm once asked me if they should “sound like Apple.” I told them no, unless Apple was secretly trying to sell cybersecurity services to mid-sized manufacturing companies in their town. Spoiler: they weren’t.
Stop pretending you’re Apple. Your customers don’t want you to be Apple. They want you to be clear, useful, and reachable.
Step Six: Measure Something (But Not Everything)
Another budget mistake? Measuring nothing at all—or worse, trying to measure everything.
You don’t need ten dashboards and a PhD in Google Analytics. Just pick a few simple metrics tied to your goals:
◉ Leads generated
◉ Sales calls booked
◉ Cost per lead
◉ Repeat business
That’s enough. If you can track those, you’ll know whether your system is working.
One client wanted a 25-page report every month. When I asked what they actually looked at, they admitted it was just one number: leads. Everything else was stuff they thought they needed data on. We cut the report down to one page and put the rest of their budget toward ads that actually worked.
Cheap, simple, effective. That’s the point.
Yes, The Point
In my last post, I explained why StoryBrand and Duct Tape Marketing are like having both a message and a map. Together, they cut through the chaos most small businesses create for themselves.
This time, you’ve seen where to actually start—without blowing your budget or your sanity.
StoryBrand gives you the words. Duct Tape Marketing gives you the order. Together, they let you start small without looking small.
And unlike the buffet, you’ll walk away full instead of wondering what happened to your money.
If you’re tired of guessing, wasting money, or trying to do everything at once, let’s talk. Schedule a call, and we’ll help you map out what to do first, what to ignore, and how to make marketing work for your business, once and for all.
Together, We Can Do This!
Is your Ministry, non-profit, or business success at a plateau, or perhaps they haven’t even taken off yet?
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Editor’s Note: Vicky is a tremendous asset to the ars team. She’s incredibly skilled and dedicated, which means she can consistently make your ministry or business run more smoothly and generate more interest in your services. She offers something unique: instead of just getting a StoryBrand or a Duct Tape Marketing analysis, you get the best of both. Additionally, her background as a journalist lends a special touch, making the writing and descriptions exceptionally clear and powerful—all this, plus a great sense of humor, which we also appreciate.
a rejected stone is very thankful the the Lord has brought us the team members we now have. All are very talented, and we hope to expand that even further, Lord willing.
Thanks for reading our blog post. If you have any questions, please feel free to write to us at talktous @ arejectedstone dot com.
