Funnel Reboot podcast: Recent Episodes
Glenn Schmelzle
This podcast aims to solve common problems that digital marketers have with the strategy and tactics used to generate leads.
"Black Swan" author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says "understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit"
He might have been referring to B2B marketing. Think of it. Internal teams have internal data that give insight into customer accounts and lifetime value. Their agencies are close to different data: media auction signals, campaign trends. But both of them are data-poor, disadvantaged by limited access to each others' systems.
As long as we tolerate the status quo, both sides will keep making false assumptions and poor decisions that harm their relationship.
The same problem's existed in occupations and athletic pursuits, where having one person do it all brings the risk of making a wrong move. The solution is a two-person-team, where each compensates for the others' blindspot.
One of the earliest examples comes from a young French acrobat in the mid 1800s who experimented with an aerial act he and a teammate performed over a pool. He was Jules Leotard, and yes, his name's become synonymous with the gymnast outfit he wore.
His most dangerous maneuver started up high on his trapeze, with a teammate who'd dangle by their legs as they swung from their trapeze. When they were at the apex of their swings, he'd vault off into the air, to be grabbed by his teammates' arms. Talk about trust!
There are many modern equivalents where people work in pairs: we have baseball pitchers and catchers exchange signals, synchronized swimming pairs vault each other out of the water. Airplanes are flown by captains and co-pilots, police and military cover for each other in tactical operations, or train Locomotives which are jointly operated by an Engineer and a Conductor.
Our guest strives for 360 degree views of data shared between his agency and clients.
He has done B2B marketing for startups and brands like Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent.
In 2023 he founded Zinc Marketing, working for B2B technology companies. Beyond this, he has been featured in ABC, BusinessWeek, as well as tech and healthcare publications.
He is also co-host of the B2B Marketing Pint podcast, and his love of camera gear helped us still record when some of my equipment broke.
Head with me to a local pub to hear about trapeze performances done by agencies and clients, from Brendan Ziolo
Chapter Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:08 Meet Brendan Ziolo
03:22 Agency vs In House Data
06:00 Beyond MQLs to Revenue
11:25 Funnel Alignment Fixes
12:42 Radical Transparency
16:48 Qualifying Clients Fast
19:22 Directional Targets and Scaling
24:30 AI Needs Humans
29:56 Quality Over Quantity
30:52 Email Autopsy and Wrap
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Talk of Content marketing started appearing online around 2007. One of the few people who started talking about it was former Funnel Reboot guest Joe Pulizzi. It wasn't until 2014 I became aware of marketers who were staking their career on the profession of creating content. I found the idea of giving-away-expertise a bit unsettling. Maybe it was because for a dozen years prior to that, I'd mainly communicated with audiences through paid ads. Gradually, Content marketing won out - we simply expect content on social media brings marketing results.
Only one problem, our guest says most of us aren't doing content marketing right. One of her main critiques is that we're making too much of it..
I'll use myself as an example. Let's look across the various accounts I've had on twitter/x; that have a combined 40,927 posts. Of those, analytics says only about 200, or 0.5% of them were home runs. If I'd known how our guest turns less into more; my marketing results could have been very different. I would also have been less stressed and would have slept better.
Our guest is founder of Globia Content Marketing agency. After earning two Bachelor's degrees, from the University of Puget Sound and Boise State University, and completing her Master's at the University of Colorado Boulder, our guest spent two decades as an in-house B2B marketer. Wanting to improve how content marketing's done, she started posting on LinkedIn and built a sizable following and hung out her shingle in 2023. In 2025, she published her book Content Simplified.
Let's go to boise idaho to speak with Lee Densmer
Chapter/Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:34 Meet Lee Densmer 02:46 Why Content Fails 04:08 Quantity Trap 05:47 Three by Five Framework 07:27 Set Three Goals 09:23 Burnout Social Example 10:48 Pick Three Buyers 15:14 Choose Three Themes 17:09 Mission Statement Focus 19:29 Stay In Your Lane 21:08 Avoid Endless Debates 22:28 AI Limits And Guardrails 25:54 SME Interview System 28:30 Chatbot Announcement 28:59 CEO Approval Bottleneck 30:59 Channels Promotion Repurpose 33:48 Metrics That Matter 36:29 Proving ROI And Budgets 37:21 Book details & Wrap Up
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Small businesses run on lean marketing teams and tight budgets, but don't count them out. They're the overwhelming majority of businesses on earth. Small companies have one function that's poised to figure out AI through experimentation, analysis and strategic changes in direction. It's marketing, and it may very well determine the winner of the AI race. After graduating from Laurentian University, our guest worked in corporate and consulting positions across Canada and even in Korea. He then founded a business which he grew to a successful exit, which led to mentoring students at Algonquin College and eventually teaching in their Business Management and Entrepreneurship program. Hungry to understand what AI could do for businesses, he went back to school in 2016 — to Carleton University for a Master's degree. In 2025 he heard about the AI Collective and founded its local Ottawa chapter. He is now CEO of ScarlettNova, an AI company dedicated to building artificial intelligence solutions for businesses, and Founder of Rogue Ventures, an AI venture studio. Let's go to a coffee shop to talk with Chris Doré.
Chapters Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:47 Why Chris says Marketers will endure 02:50 Why Pay for Pro Models 04:50 From User to Builder 08:02 Automation vs Agents 10:33 Context and Company Brain 13:36 Document Workflows for AI 17:47 Adoption Gap and Learning Curve 19:06 Token Costs and Budgeting 22:01 AI Energy Debate 22:19 Quantum Boost Ahead 23:00 Marketing Rapid Fire 23:18 Websites Get Personal 25:22 Vibe Coding Limits 26:06 Skills Over Knowledge 26:38 Events Still Matter 28:43 Paid Media After SEO 30:17 Winning With Niches 32:06 Trust And Adoption 34:32 Full Spectrum AI Help 36:02 Adoption Is Human 37:45 Venture Studio Spinoffs 39:20 Wrap-up
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Everyone makes content now. But having content doesn't automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that carve out time for their content, while other brands' programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What's different between content that's adored and content that dies in obscurity?
The brands that win make content that audiences don't see as branded content. Where the work they made was so genuinely useful, or surprising, or true — that instead of feeling exploited, the recipients felt like they were being favored.
A gift doesn't need your logo on it. Your fingerprints are already there.
Our guest knows how to do this. His early career was working in production at AOL and several TV and radio networks. Then in 2014 he launched Pacific Content, an agency he built into the one brands trusted when they wanted to stop making noise and start building audiences. It was acquired by one of the country's largest media companies in 2023. What he learned doing that became the book Earn It, which came out in 2026.
Let's go to this talk with Steve Pratt.
Chapter Timestamps:
00:00 Why Content Gets Ignored
01:00 Meet Steve Pratt
02:12 Attention Is Finite
04:38 Be The Party Host
06:52 Marketing As A Gift
08:23 From You Not About You
09:55 Bravery And Commitment
12:46 Promote The Gift
15:03 Podcast Case Studies
21:07 Measuring Time And Trust
24:04 Fewer Things Better
25:35 Expertise Over Platform
27:04 Pacific Content And Wrap Up
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
I can't prove it, but I think many marketers wish they could improve how they're perceived by corporate leadership.
I have felt this way in more than one role, and racked my brain on how to fix it. I've entertained everything including coming to board meetings with a dozen custom-branded donuts.
Thankfully, the a solution I have come up with isn't extreme and it doesn't require donuts.
I was recently given the chance by a local association - the OPMMA - to give a talk and I picked this problem.
I hope as you listen to how I think it's solved and the three moments where this method demands doing the opposite of what our gut says to do.
So give a listen to 'From Adversaries to Advocates'
All references in this show are linked in the Shownotes for this episode on the Funnel Reboot site.
We humans like conversations that keep moving forward. Every time we share some detail about ourselves, we expect the other person to remember it.
If they bring that detail back up in our next interaction, we feel pleased and want to keep that relationship going. Conversely, we get annoyed when they blast us with messages we had already said didn't interest us.
This is severely problematic for us sales and marketing professionals. The sheer volume of people and details we all encounter is too much to keep straight in our outbound emails, let alone in our heads, and that's why we use CRMs.
But there are many CRMs out there and to fit a business, they all need to be customized. That's where our guest comes in.
A graduate of CalState in information systems, he worked in data analyst roles for several tech companies, including a Customer Relationship Management company that sold to enterprises. Wanting to work more with solopreneurs and SMBs, he decided to go out on his own as a CRM consultant to show them sustainable relationship-building techniques. Suffice to say, he is able to deliver immediate benefits to his clients under this business model. He also has a passion for coaching people on their nutrition, which explains why both components are blended in the name of his business - the health data guy.
Let's go to Laguna Beach to speak with Brandon Drake.
Chapters/Timestamps:
00:00 Why Memory Matters 00:34 Meet Brandon Drake 02:19 From Burnout to Health 03:44 Back to CRM Consulting 07:00 Relationship First CRM 09:14 Automated Nurture Emails 11:20 Crowdsourced Content Engine 12:11 Bio Form Data Hack 16:11 Progressive Profiling Scores 19.45 PSA: Funnel Reboot Reading Room 20:29 Segmentation Beats Spray 26:46 Protect Email Reputation 28:16 AI Needs Process First 32:28 Where to Find Brandon
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 233
In the 2009 movie "Up" there's a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel.
We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let's be honest and admit that we get caught on a treadmill of activity without stopping to ask ourselves if it's having an impact.
How do we break this habit? This month's book says it's by creating a Go-To-Market plan with detailed tactics. A plan reminds us why we're sticking with those tactics, so we don't get distracted by any tactic that comes along.
Our guest has an MBA and 25+ years of marketing leadership experience in the US and Europe. Her consultancy, Transformation Insights, offers Fractional CMO services that help companies grow by building go-to-market strategies that are consistent and effective. She is also a speaker and the author of The Marketing Growth Formula which came out in late 2025.
Let's go to Miami Florida to talk with Heidi Hattendorf
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 232
There is a quiet, enduring power in wisdom that resists the urge to conform. Wise people refuse to abandon their convictions. It's not obvious who will be the Wise character in These Stories, the role often casts them as having lowly beginnings or in the shadow of others who are more powerful. But they speak out anyway, even if they are mocked or sidelined. Take:
Don Quixote's sidekick Sancho Panza, whom Quixote usually makes fun of, becomes so well known for his practical wisdom that he becomes a Governor. In the story of Sidharrtha, when the prince leaves his palace, he is called a fool and so-called teachers treat him as an outcast. They never reach enlightenment but he ultimately does.To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch, the lawyer in the deep South who was shunned by his community for taking on an unwinnable case. Though he lost, townspeople credited him as "the only man in these parts who can keep a jury out so long in a case like that." Sheherazade, the woman in One Thousand and One Nights who was facing execution at dawn, but who told cliffhanger tales that stalled the king's command, saving her life. Lastly, the Young boy In The Emperor's New Clothes, where everyone believed the lie that only smart people could see the emperor's clothes, so no one said anything as he walked by. The boy's exclamation brought what everyone knew to be true into the open.
These fictional characters remind us that while the truth may be unpopular at first, people eventually realize they should listen to, and follow the person who said it. They remind us that when leaders step up, share their convictions, act as the voice of reason, they will ultimately triumph.
Our guest's new book says that any company wanting to lead their category.must fearlessly shout out what they know to be true. The title "Market Eminence," refers to the position of category authority that leaders who do this can reach. Its tone is as bold as his previous books Do It! Selling, Do It! Speaking and Do It! Marketing. He is also an advisor who works with marketers, salespeople and executives, host of a 500+ episode, top-ranked podcast called The Selling Show.
Let's welcome back this previous show guest from Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, David Newman.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks.
When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don't have to raise N very much to see it balloon in size. Each increment it jumps by represents its value going up by a factor of ten.
The question of how we reach scale then isn't how to change financial numbers by a basic percentage; it's how do we grow them by a factor of N?
Our guest knows how sales and marketing can scale their organization without snapping them. *come with their own jargon like batch mode, local vs global maximums, and WIP bottlenecks.
He graduated from the University of New Brunswick with an engineering degree and then went into technically heavy roles, working in IBM's semiconductor division. He pivoted into leading sales and marketing teams for tech organizations until the late 2000s, when he founded a product startup with an app that helped salespeople gain visibility into their funnel activity. He also teaches sales practices and scaling up in the engineering faculty at the University of Ottawa.
Join me now as I sit down in person with the head of Ottawa's Scaling Up initiative, Peter Fillmore.
Chapters/Timestamps
00:00 Intro 02:10 My guest Peter Fillmore 03:27 What Changes When You Scale 05:37 Making the Funnel Visible 08:58 Sales Fundamentals and Urgency 09:55 PSA 12:03 Saying No and Off Ramps 13:26 Marketing Segments and Messaging 15:31 Discipline Metrics and Cadence 22:53 Connect with Peter & Ottawa Scaling Up Initiative
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales.
This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven't always been this way.
A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet's governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would be able to vote on changes to the internet - and at their peak 158,000 people were on the voting rolls. This was a radical global experiment in direct democracy.
That model didn't take off, partly because to be a voting member, Internet users everywhere would have to (at least temporarily) upload some Identification - and most weren't willing to share that kind of data.
What happened instead was the rise of social networks owned by a handful of companies, who conditioned us sellers to post promoted content with attention-grabbing messages because that could be used by the algorithms to keep buyers on the platforms. And I've got to call out how , as buyers, we're also complicit because we now give those platforms way more data than the Internet governing body ever asked for. How ironic.
But our guest maintains that it's in our ability to regain our equilibrium. While we're all collectively responsible for how we communicate, marketers can be an ideal catalyst of change. We can make content that prioritizes authentic interaction over consumerism, be it on the current platforms or ones yet to exist. We should remember the saying of the American philosopher Thomas Paine: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."
My guest has been leveraging social media to grow audiences and income since MySpace was around. In that 20 year timespan, she has leveraged her social media knowledge both by working for sports organizations and corporations like AT&T, iHeart Radio and DirecTV to running the agency Next Step Social that does this for health and wellness brands. She's also a speaker and a podcaster.
She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughters. Let's go now to speak with Katie Brinkley
Chapters/Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 03:01 Meet Katie Brinkley 04:01 What Community Means 06:03 Attention Economy Shift 08:58 Audio Beats AI 10:40 Discovery On Rented Land 11:48 Four Post Strategy 16:10 Platform Culture Matters 17:35 Metrics True Fans 19:47 Beyond Consumption Mindset 23:35 Katie Origin Story 28:03 Burnout And Conversation 32:16 Audit Your Feed 33:29 Where To Find Katie 34:00 Closing Thoughts
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 229
We need to talk about what's been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta's ad platforms.
A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy images, and a vague 'goal,' and we'll take it from here."
Performance Max (PMax) and Advantage+ are the ultimate "Trust Me, Bro" of the marketing world. They've turned "manual control" into a dirty word. They want us to believe that the algorithm knows our customer better than we do—even though that same algorithm once tried to sell me a pair of shoes I bought three weeks ago.
The platforms are no longer just tools; they're aggressive backseat drivers.
- Google is constantly "recommending" that you switch to Broad Match (conveniently spending your budget faster).
- Meta is hiding the "Manual" button behind three layers of "Are you sure? This is less efficient!" warnings.
- The "Auto-apply" Trap: If you don't uncheck a box buried in a sub-menu, the platform will literally change your strategy while you're sleeping.
They aren't optimizing for our ROI; they're optimizing for their inventory. It's getting a little ridiculous. It feels like we're being slowly evicted from our own accounts.
AI is a great engine, but it's a terrible pilot. It has no "common sense." Media buyers aren't here to fight the machine; but they are there to keep the machine from driving a brand off a cliff.
After gaining her B.A. from Butler University and working in B2B, she had her first brush with digital channels like SEO and paid search and saw how they could drive business better than traditional methods. That came as a pleasant surprise, given how her sales role relied totally on making cold calls. Bringing that sales-focused grit to DTC, and honing her digital expertise over the last 14 years, she now serves as its CEO. When she's away from agency business, she is likely to be spending time with her husband & two sons, often at Wrigley Field catching a ball game.
Let's go to Chicago, to meet Lyndsey Maddox
Timestamp Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:05 Lyndsey on whether experts still matter
04:51 PMax Leads and Nuance
09:55 Honest Forecasting with Clients
15:41 Humans in the Loop
24:22 Agency Size and Fit
30:00 Connecting with Lyndsey
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
How do you amplify a message when you can't lean on traditional justifications like "because we'll make a profit out of this"?
In the for-profit world, the justification for marketing spend is straightforward: you put money in to get more money out. But how do you amplify a message when you can't lean on traditional bottom-line justifications? For non-profits, associations, and social enterprises, the "profit motive" is replaced by a mission, yet the fundamental challenge remains identical—you must find and keep your "customers," whether they are donors, members, or beneficiaries.
Marketing in the non-profit sector isn't just about "pulling heartstrings"; it is about solving a business problem using the same tools as the private sector. Whether you are a plumber looking for a lead or a foundation looking for a donor, revenue is the common denominator that keeps the lights on.
In this episode, we explore how organizations can move beyond "waiting to be found" by using paid traffic as an accelerant. We will dive into why Mission-Based organizations should look at paid Traffic. Specifically The Google Ad Grant program.
Whether you are a for-profit marketer looking to apply your skills to a "3-dimensional" cause or a non-profit leader ready to fill your funnel, it's time to stop treating marketing as an afterthought and start treating it as a vital utility.
Our guest is a marketing consultant who supports both for-profit and non-profit local service organizations. Through his agency, Harvest Demand, he blends smart digital strategies with practical storytelling to help these organizations grow. He also brings experience in search and AI optimization, as well as leveraging digital advertising, including managing ad grants for non-profits. In other words, Sean's all about making a real impact for a variety of organizations.
Let's talk with Sean Moher.
Timestamps/chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:41 Sean defines the Nonprofit Landscape
02:24 What Is Marketing Without Profit? "Finding and Keeping Customers"
03:13 The 3-Party Value Exchange: Mission-Based Value Beyond Transactions
07:06 Emotion vs. Action: Telling Stories That Still Drive Donations
08:02 Measurement Reality Check: Analytics, Funnels & the Awareness Gap
10:39 Why Paid Traffic Matters: Stop Waiting to Be Found
11:34 Google Ad Grant 101: $10K/Month in Search Ads (and Why It's Not Magic)
14:01 Rules, "Loopholes" & Eligibility: What You Can (and Can't) Advertise
15:54 Grant Limitations & Strategy: CPC Caps, Leftover Inventory & Testing in Parallel
18:20 AI as a Utility: Faster Research, Better Campaigns & Knowing Your Donor Avatar
23:34 Doing Pro Bono the Smart Way: Aligning with Interests, Boards & Real Impact
26:28 Where to Find Sean + Final Takeaways
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 226
Positioning is an element that's so foundational to Marketing, it's taught in every introductory class alongside the "Four Ps" of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price.
But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail?
Take Microsoft Zune: Because how people thought of MP3 players had already been set by Apple
Colgate Frozen Entrees: Sure, both food and toothpaste enter our mouths, but other TV dinner brands don't plant the taste of toothpaste in your head.
Harley-Davidson's "Legendary" Cologne: People buy a fragrance for the impression they want to leave, not one whose name evokes burned rubber and gasoline.
Cosmopolitan Yogurt: There are plenty of brands in the dairy aisle. People didn't think a fashion brand belonged there
Frito-Lay Lemonade: Marketing a salty snack and chasing it with a "Thirst-quenching drink" strikes people as a cynical cash grab
The reason these brands flopped is they tried positioning themselves on a competitor's turf. The correct way to position yourself is to start with customer needs and work outward from there. To do this right, we've got to flip the traditional concept on its head. Instead of positioning, the author we're talking with today says we must deposition our brands.
He is the founder and chief strategy officer of brand strategy firm Fazer. Over three decades, he has led strategy for Fortune 500 companies as well as venture-backed disruptors. His work has been featured in the New York times Forbes and MIT technology review.
Let's go now to New York City to speak with Todd Irwin.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 225
At the time I'm recording this it's a new year. This is a typical time when people plan what they're going to achieve fitness-wise, financially and professionally. If you're working on that last one and wonder about what marketing reads you should try, I have some marketing books that could do just the thing. There are Five in all. - Let's dive right in.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Thinking up a new product and commercializing it is not easy. All products face Financial, Technological and of course Competitive market barriers. But doing this in the field of Healthcare is not like any other industry. In healthcare, there exist extra regulatory hurdles that make product innovation even more difficult.
Before every medical device is introduced, they must find academics who will research them and publish articles that are heavily scrutinized by peers. Then they have to endure clinical screening before receiving government approval, which applies tight restrictions on what you can say about the product and how it's used. After they enter most markets, the products must be coded so insurers will reimburse patients who use them. So if you have a health or medical technology product, how can you market it when you face all these limits?"
For the first time here, the mic will be in somebody else's hands. That person is Cindy Grabowski, founder of Mind Grove, a US-based training platform built specifically for MedTech professionals. Have to disclose that I have no affiliation with Mind Grove, other than giving them a no-charge review of the marketing course on their platform. Anyway, she turned the tables on me to hear me answer how you can market in the Healthcare space with so many constraints.
As I present my points on healthcare marketing, listen for tips on:
- Building your digital assets throughout your product's lifecycle
- Setting up campaigns on digital channels without breeching privacy
- Engaging your patient population to create your content for you
- Getting buy-in from decision-makers on upgrades to your marketing program.
So give this unique talk I have with Cindy a listen - I imagine even if you aren't in Healthcare Marketing, you'll come away with better ideas on how to overcome your own constraints. Let's go hear how we can navigate around constraints.
Timestamp Chapters:
00:00 Introducing Cindy Grabowsky
01:07 Glenn takes a turn as guest on the show
03:09 What we'll cover in Healthcare Marketing
04:33 The Big Question: Why is Healthcare so hard?
06:38 Leveraging Data in Healthcare Marketing
09:56 Case Study: EndoGastric Solutions
17:27 Optimizing Digital Presence and Compliance
33:57 Skills for measuring, managing Healthcare Marketing
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I'm talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it every day without noticing. Taking just language, be it English, French, Spanish or Italian, they all use words with origins that tie back to ancient law, institutions, arts and sciences. The concepts they gave linguistic expression to are stitched into everything that comes out of our mouths.
You'll hear a passionate discussion today by two guys who both did an undergrad in classics. But you won't need to know anything about this to get great marketing lessons from today's talk. Believe it or not, the ancients can teach us a fair bit about marketing!
Our guest's undergraduate courses taken at the University of Oxford in Classical Greek Language and Literature inspired him to write the book we're discussing today.
He is a trainer, author, strategist, and lecturer who applies Storytelling, Behavioural Economics, and insight-driven thinking to brands and communications. Serving as a Course Director for several professional institutes, he also delivers TEDx talks and has spoken on stages around the world. His clients span organizations such as the BBC, Panasonic, Nokia, The Royal Albert Hall, and the UK National Health Service. An accomplished writer, he has published several award-winning books, including The Storytelling Book, which has sold 40,000 copies.
His seventh book, The Classical Marketing Book, is being released in North America at the start of 2026. Let's go to the UK to speak with Anthony 'Tas' Tasgal.
Chapters Timestamps
0:00:00 Introducing Tas Tasgal
0:02:48 How Ancient Cultures Inform Modern Marketing Today
0:06:29 Uncovering Marketing Power in Word Origins
0:10:26 Using Ancient Myths for Market Segmentation
0:13:33 Connecting Behavioral Economics with Storytelling Power
0:17:21 Strategies to Avoid Marketing's 'Junk Folder'
0:21:52 Crafting Persuasive Frames with Historical Stories
0:26:43 The Power and Peril of Condensed Language
0:30:53 Mastering Persuasion with Ethos, Logos, and Pathos
0:34:48 Satire and Timeless Human Patterns in Marketing
0:37:57 Tapping into Ancient Wisdom for Modern Marketing
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don't hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments. That's especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It's a live feedback loop marketers can't get anywhere else. Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other's meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly. Our guest today understands that better than most. He's a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He's known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance - something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach's tone to get them back on track. And he doesn't restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let's go talk with Karl Ortmanns.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Is your Brand truly memorable? Would a person who bought from you a year ago be able to recall your name or say what they found compelling about you? The reality is that a lot of brands are instantly forgettable.
You don't have to wallow in a world of Meh - you can turn your brand into something memorable - we're going to hear a process that's been codified in a book that came out in 2025 called BrandJitsu. .
Listen in as we delve into the book's process, which begins not with a funnel but with a Loop we've got to Embrace. We'll hear how to plumb the depths of our brand by thinking of it as an Iceberg. Lastly, we'll drill into a brand's DNA to find out how we can spread its unique outlook.
Our guest was tired of working with brands that felt like they were screaming into the void, so he designed a process that let customers feel, remember, and advocate for a brand. He honed his methodology as a creative director, and founded the brand agency called Make More Creative to help brands that had this problem solve it outright.
He is also Host of TheRebelRebelPodcast and Speaker and mentor for the Canadian Trade Accelerator Program. Let's go to Calgary Alberta to speak with Michael Dargie.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Here's a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities When it's so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities?
The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful communication with buyers contains elements that just don't scale - this takes more than a trivial amount of work. But that is precisely why you need to do them.
A new book came out in 2025, called Human Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. Even though Gen AI that's all around looks set to marginalize content marketing, this book predicts that AI's knock-on effects will bring old retro practices back into vogue. If Wired Magazine were to meme it using their Wired/Tired/Expired phrasing, it might say that
Humans Interacting with no machines = Expired
Machines Monopolizing Interactions = Tired
Human-Human interaction via Machine = Wired
The book also argues that marketing & communications folks have to make different types of content for segments of the buyer journey, all held to different goals and different time horizons. Don't dump random content on social channels. Like instruments in a score, your pieces need to work together—not add noise.
It also said being Human-Centered extends to where and how we use our messages. Our leaders have to go to trade shows, make podcasts, meet people, and have real conversations. Trust grows when customers feel seen and heard.
The author of the book is by day, a speaker and is currently Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Canva. By night, she's a Singer, actor, and fitness fiend. Let's go to Northern California to talk with Ashley Faus.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Up to the 18th century, making and trading things was harder than it needed to be. You had to deal with a bewildering patchwork of local constants and norms. It was actually the French Revolution & administrators who came out of it that started to codify how we measure things. The standards they adopted were ultimately formalized in 1875 at a Convention whose name you may recognize, the Metre - or should I say Meter - Convention.
The Standard set at the convention spread beyond France to most of Europe, removing friction in commerce and everyday life. Engineers could spec parts to the same tolerances; pharmacists could dose reliably across borders; food producers could print consistent nutritional labels; shipbuilders and container makers could agree on common dimensions; and architects and builders could order materials that matched on site. Over decades that shared language of measurement turned local guesswork into dependable infrastructure for industry, science and trade. Today, About 95% of the world's population lives in countries that have officially adopted the metric system.
"Metric" in that sense solved disagreement about how much — it replaced local guesswork with a shared language of measurement so engineers, traders and regulators could trust one another.
Businesses face the same problem today — only the units have changed. Instead of metres and kilograms, modern organizations trade in clicks, sessions, impressions, cost, conversions and revenue. These are the metrics that power decisions, budgets and boardroom arguments. If one team's "conversion" counts form submissions, another's counts purchase intents, and a third's counts paid signups, you get the same mess Europe lived with before standardization: wasted effort, mistrust, and bad decisions.
That's why the digital-era equivalent of adopting the metric system matters: a single, governed vocabulary of business metrics (clear definitions, lineage, owners and calculational rules). Give everyone the same definition of "revenue," "LTV," or "ROAS" — and the same ability to trace where those numbers came from — and you turn noisy arguments into aligned action. In short: standardize the units, restore trust in the numbers, and your dashboards start to behave like the modern factories that metrication once enabled for Europe.
Turn to how many marketing teams are now constrained by the disparate marketing measures we have - it's the choke-point preventing us from sharing dashboards between groups, asking bigger questions, and getting full bang for money spent on our analytics infrastructures. If we're going to keep our sanity, we must get on with Metricizing our metrics. Going down a path where business metrics are treated as standardized units opens up possibilities as big as the Metric System opened up for our global economy.
Our guest is a Proud Swiss-Canadian, technologist and entrepreneur. In 2001 he co-founded analytics software company Klipfolio, one of whose products aims to address metric management. Note that I'm having him on today to give his personal perspective - there's no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. When he's not working in or talking about analytics, you'll find him cycling in the city we both call home. Let's go talk to Allan Wille.
For links to people, products or concepts mentioned, visit the Funnel Reboot site's page for show #219.
For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we'll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey,
For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey's, surgery isn't an if, it's not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations.
But throughout all that, he's displayed unwavering courage. His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him insights that he shares in his book, "Scar Tissue." And whether your difficult situations have come on the operating table or in the workplace, you'll appreciate the unique perspective Danny brings.
Let's get ready to reevaluate our perception of weaknesses and why they might be strengths…with Danny Covey.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn’t win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of.
That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn’t find anything notable looking back at his track career. Back in high school he’d struggled to master all the motions used in the high jump; and coaches noted how little he practiced; when time came for track meet qualifiers, his jumps came up short.
But when he got to University for civil engineering, he began to experiment with other ways of jumping. In his studies he learned that our ability to jump is limited by our centre of gravity. Lifting our whole body over a bar at the same time demands that we raise our centre of gravity to that same height. So Fosbury analyzed to see if there was a way to get a human over the bar one part at a time, which temporarily moves our whole centre of gravity to somewhere below us, even below the bar. That means that without jumping any higher, we can clear a higher bar - it’s playing a trick on physics.
Fosbury used the technique selectively for 2 seasons because his coach still went by the tried-and-true technique, and the heights he cleared got higher & higher. It wasn’t until a month before Mexico City that he secured him a spot on Team USA.
The Olympics was the first moment where everyone saw Fosbury’s new backflip maneuver - the press coined it the Fosbury Flop. Everyone also noticed his performance - he didn’t miss a jump right up to the metal round. I bet as international competitors watched him advance while they hit the bar must have felt pretty disarmed by that flop. The bar was raised in the finals to 2.24M or 7 ft 4¼ in, higher than at any games before. Fosbury missed on his first two attempts, but cleared on his third, winning the Olympic gold medal and broke the Olympic record
Ever since, this back-first technique has been the obvious way every jumper has used. Fosbury’s style so clearly solved the high jump problem, we don’t even question it.
Lots of problems seem unsolvable until an obvious solution is posed. It’s a phenomena today’s guest commonly sees on websites. Her recently-launched book puts it this way: “The solutions we implemented may seem obvious in hindsight, but the problems and opportunities remained hidden until we analyzed their data in depth-and that's the point!”
Our guest has spent 25 years teaching digital marketing strategy and analytics at business schools and consulting to companies whose websites generate hundreds of millions of dollars. She is the author of “42 Rules for a Website That Wins” and came out in 2025 with “Website Wealth: A Business Leader’s Guide to Driving Real Value from your Analytics”. Let’s go to Northern California to speak with Philippa Gamse.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 216.
Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here’s what OpenAI’s Sam Altman said “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”
What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence.
This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI.
Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today’s guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows.
Today’s guest graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group.
He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025.
So let’s go to Chicago now to speak about “The Path to AGI” with its author. Let’s welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Hey, Glenn here. It’s the middle of summer when I’m recording this; a time we don a pair of shades, a beach towel and a good book. Funnel Reboot usually shares talks with marketing book authors, but for this show I’m going to share some reads that go a little farther afield.
Come along with me through six books that are all amazing. The subjects range between business, humanities, technology and science fiction.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:01:44 The Discoverers
00:12:43 Blindsight
00:19:05 How Big Things Get Done
00:24:12 Private Truths, Public Lies
00:27:41 Seveneves
00:30:01 Other SF recommendations
00:31:00 Earth Abides
00:34:57 conclusion
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode, #214.
Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths.
In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane’s entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they’d taken enemy fire and either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel.
Wald’s team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed.
Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren’t examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn’t make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn’t sample could have been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they’d been lucky! the returning planes weren’t the rule, they were the exception.
Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that’s not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution.
This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today’s episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we’ll get a bit more comfortable using them.
Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning - and statistics - to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he’s learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs.
Let’s now go hear from Ateeq Ahmad.
Note: Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
We as consumers do a lot of things just because the people around us are doing them. For proof, look no further than some historical examples—from the 17th-century tulip bulb craze in Holland to doomsday cults and prepper movements in the lead-up to Y2K. Buying fads such as pet rocks, fidget spinners, Beanie Babies, and NFTs all show how easily prevailing thoughts influence individual behavior.
The science behind this is well understood. The evolutionary drive to fit in with our peers is very strong. When a group of people’s purchases are plotted as a histogram, we always see the majority of them clumped near the centre - we see it so often we came up with a term for it - the Bell curve.
So even when people think they are expressing themselves, showing individuality by their brand choices, they are only veering slightly away from the norm.
Hey, Glenn here—welcome to Funnel Reboot. Our guest today—who I really do think has positively impacted marketers’ careers—argues that marketers are just as susceptible to conformity as consumers are. We get caught up in prevailing marketing practices when doing our job, while ignoring better marketing options. That’s a recipe for mediocre results.
Our guest is the author of three marketing books and the co-founder of an eight year old digital agency that has attracted clients whose annual spend ranges from thousands to millions of dollars. What does he credit for this marketing success? The time he’s spent on the edges of the Bell curve - doing things that most of us view as too far outside of our comfort zone. And he says to be a better marketer, you too should reject the orthodoxy of conventional marketing.
Unorthodox is the name of his latest book, and I’m glad to welcome back for a second time, Gil Gildner.
All people, products and concepts mentioned are available on the Funnel Reboot site's shownotes page.
Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives. In a recent post put out by OpenAI’s head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says “We will figure out new things to do and new things to want...Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.”
Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: “Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change”
This all sounds wonderful; it’s used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it’s been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It’s essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that?
Where we are here in 2025, it’s a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that “many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]” by then. How do we unlock AI’s activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks?
I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on “Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales” at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada - please get the links to each of them in the shownotes.
The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress.
I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends.
And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Since July 1st, 2023, the world of web analytics has undergone a seismic shift—and if you're still reeling from the transition to Google Analytics 4, you're not alone. In this episode, we unpack what many are calling the 'Armageddon' of digital measurement. You'll hear why GA4 isn’t just a new version of an old tool, but a completely different ecosystem
In human years, GA4 is still a toddler. But it is growing rapidly and some are giving it a chance to mature.
Many marketers took their licks in the forced transitioning to GA4 and there are still some raw emotions about how this tool was rolled out. But our guest says that even though change is hard, he guest believes GA4 is the change we didn't know we needed.
Our guest grew up in the New York tri-state area, which gave him two passions. The first one is hockey and watching people grow up playing the game they love - he’s a lifelong Islanders fan. Working in Manhattan, he also worked a lot with numbers. Over time, he morphed from analyzing financial data to analyzing digital marketing, in tools like Google Analytics And Adobe Analytics. He built this expertise at industries giants like American Express travel and entertainment’s NBC Universal. Wanting to use these skills without the constraints of being in a big corporation, he went independent and relocated to Las Vegas, where he now gives all kinds of companies insights into their analytics data.
Let’s go talk to Neil Shapiro.
See Shownotes page for all people and products mentioned in the episode.
Episode 209
When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example:
The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who’d commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it’s a posterchild for poor projects because it didn’t open until 1973.
Another example:
Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B.
A last example:
In 1998 NASA’s Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe.
These failures are so huge, it’s bound to bring out our inner cynic. It’s natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: “what were they thinking?”
I don’t scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions.
When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited.
Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest.
At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You’ll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn’t tell us what would happen if we didn’t.
All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I’s hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van, carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we’d come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset.
Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher.
My guest also believes it’s our fault that projects fail as they do, and she’s got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we’re all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success.
She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let’s go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer
00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects
00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs
00:25:07 PSA
00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating
00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows
00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers as a foreign language?
00:43:12 AI's potential role
00:47:55 About Nilufer, book
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 208
People resist change.
They only stop resisting when they’re convinced the change is needed.
They’re only convinced change is needed when they grasp the truth.
The best way to present them the truth is with data.
You might think that what works on people is a dry statistical presentation of the data in all its Indisputable, inscrutable glory.
Nope. Those avoiding change give themselves offramps by arguing about your data. History shows that to persuade people to take an action, it takes taking them through data in a way that grabs them emotionally. Some examples include:
Florence Nightingale, 1854
Al Gore, 2006
Princess Diana, 1997
Numbers prove, but a story compels.
This has so much to do with marketing. Here’s why. To do what we do, our bosses / clients must be convinced in how our work is yielding results. That is the core of every story that a marketing presentation tells. Our guest is a Data Storyteller. After graduating from Massey University in 2002, she moved into data analytics. She earned a digital design degree in 2015, combining her design and analytics skills, which led her to specialize in data storytelling. In 2016, she founded Rogue Penguin, a company focused on bridging analytics and business operations.
She now leads workshops for professionals in data science, marketing, and design. And she’s the author of “the data storytelling handbook”
Let’s go to New Zealand to speak with Kat Greenbrook
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro 00:05:48 Welcome Kat 00:07:45 when data storytelling is needed 00:09:00 two ways of communicating data 00:13:55 Data stories improve communication between groups 00:26:38 PSA 00:27:18 Canvas for making time stories 00:30:05 making visuals relevant to the business 00:33:19 How to present when you only have part of story 00:39:06 Conserving data-ink 00:43:00 More you show - the less you contrast 00:48:20 Getting the book or contacting Kat
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 206
There’s no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI’s do amazing things.
Extrapolating how far they’ve come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We’re impressed by how clever they sound, and we’re tempted to believe that they’ll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do.
But according to many AI experts, this isn’t what’s going to happen.
The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked.
The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they’re word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it’s usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences. The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying:
“During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words.”
All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn’t be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a “what if”, building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something, and they would have chained this together with reasoning by others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what’s written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work.
This doesn’t mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there’s more than one branch of AI - each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn't just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen by building a model of something in the real world. That distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it’s what enables this type of AI to recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI.
My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.
He has written five books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don’t hear very much about, Causal AI. So let’s go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:36 Welcome John
00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI
00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for
00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal
00:26:50 PSA
00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling
00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery
00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 205
Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine. He founded The Agents of Change a weekly podcast that has over 550 episodes. He is a nationally recognized speaker on using digital channels like search, social media and mobile for marketing to your audience. Rich also hosts the Agents of Change conference which takes place October 9th and 10th both virtually and in his hometown of Portland, Maine.
Timestamps/Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
00:02:49 welcome Rich
00:08:56 using GPT to make text seo-friendly
00:17:32 blending generative text with your own content
00:22:47 expanding to image & video
00:27:11 PSA
00:27:45 managing projects and events with AI
00:38:36 when to use a human vs aGPT
00:47:52 info on Rich. his podcast & his conference
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 204
Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion - this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation.
But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that’s tuned for people’s minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication.
That’s a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she’s helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action
She’s a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We’re going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.” Let’s go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Chapter Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica
00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to
00:18:04 Building meeting's name around message
00:32:14 PSA
00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas
00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides
00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs
01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 203:
How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples:
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”
Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode”.
JFK “the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”
Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said “The view we take is, there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Hilary Clinton 2008 when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said "we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time," but added proudly, "it's got about 18 million cracks in it," a tally of her primary votes.
Having heard those, you’ll agree that this is doable.
Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people
What’s more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves. Our guest is storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and a 2024 Recipient Ottawa’s top 40 under forty.
Timestamps/Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:04:23 Welcome Shea Cole
00:11:27 Build deck & meeting around vision
00:18:04 Slide 1
00:29:20 PSA
00:30:00 Slides 2 through 6
00:36:25 Adding parts that turn strategy into dollars
00:46:06 Contacting Shea
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 202
One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that the belltower at the University would sound its bell to announce the start of Hegel’s lectures
People may have flocked to hear him, but that doesn’t mean they understood Hegel. One student who went on to write a biography of him was Karl Rosenkranz, who said “His lectures were not clear and systematic presentations, but profound expositions of the inner movement of concepts, which often raised more questions than they answered”…..in another part, he said “The students often complained that Hegel was difficult to understand.”
Many moons ago, I was a Political Science major, in which I had to take a philosophy course that covered Hegel - I had the toughest time understanding him and Hegel still confuses me to this day. I read & re-read his words, but I don’t get what he’s saying.
Same with Superintelligent AI like ChatGPT - when we ask it questions, there always seems to be a randomness factor. Sometimes it gives you amazing results, while other times it leaves you scratching your head at its hallucinations…its stupidity.
If you have this problem, it might not be the AI—it might be your prompts! There are hacks to how you craft them - and this has given rise to a whole field - prompt engineering.
Our guest co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder. He has designed courses on LinkedIn Learning & Udemy that 350,000 people have taken. And he was a very early user of Large Language Models - the brains behind Generative AI.
In 2023 he came on Ep 168 of this show for the book “Marketing Memetics.” In 2024 he came out with an O’Reilly book titled: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Let’s go to Liverpool, England to talk with Mike Taylor.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:28 Welcome Mike
00:11:27 Expressing all that's needed for a GPT to produce good response
00:20:24 Using AI context window
00:34:48 PSA
00:35:26 Training GPT on proprietary data
00:41:19 Agentic use of GPT
00:47:52 Training GPT for writing
For links to all people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 202’s shownotes page.
Episode 201:
While our guest wasn't the one who invented content marketing, by founding the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience.
These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He's showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He's urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur.
This business model’s definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they've acquired and
The next criteria - content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time - be it in increments of hours or years.
Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It’s possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content.
This isn’t exactly a typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we’re starting on a new bicentenary. Let’s use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new.
So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi.
Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro 00:04:41 Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea 00:11:21 Content mktg's more than a wrapper 00:20:27 Audience vs community 00:23:11 PSA 00:23:52 Thinking of offers for your audience 00:31:13 Having media calendars 00:36:11 Business model may incorporate web3 00:45:34 About CEX & Joe's book
For links to all things mentioned, go to the show 201's shownotes page at the funnelreboot.com website.
Episode 199
Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.
Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen.
With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job. He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this.
My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”
Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.
Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.
Episode 198
A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.
But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand.
Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?
We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack.
Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits.
His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.
Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a team that has performed over 100 shows together.
This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let's head there now to meet Bob Moore.
Timestamps / Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken
00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope
00:26:13 PSA
00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices
00:31:38 Pooling together data
00:55:06 Contacting Bob
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 198
Episode 197
Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.
Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.
Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.
As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.
There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.
Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.
Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.
Chapter Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:35 Welcome John Wright
00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking
00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods
00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables
00:23:14 PSA
00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars
00:42:13 Contacting John
For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode’s page on the Funnel Reboot site.
Episode 195
We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best.
But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It's hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this.
But there’s no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven.
We’re going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today’s guest.
Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis' first Analytics Hire.
In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts.
Let’s talk with Luke Komiskey.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:14 - Welcome Luke
00:17:38 - PSA
00:18:16 - Calculating value of having good data
00:49:29 - The MSP model
00:49:59 - Where to contact Luke
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 194
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it’s just different.
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Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar
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Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC
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Programming can be done in various languages
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Films can be made with a variety of filming equipment, anything from an iPhone up to an IMAX ALEXA 65mm
This also applies to what we use as our analytics tool. And though Google Analytics gets a lot of attention, including in this podcast, to be fair, it is not the only game in town. The industry has a second tool, Adobe Analytics and I wanted to talk with an expert, and to my mind, today’s guest is the person to talk to about it.
She has 15+ years of experience helping enterprise organizations solve their analytics problems holistically, no matter where they are in their digital measurement evolution or what tool set they use.
Few can go as deep on pixel implementation, tag management, and data layers as she.
As a consultant at boutique agency 33 Sticks, she helps clients streamline the implementation process and get more value out of their tools, decreasing costs and headaches for developers, project managers, and analysts alike. On the side, she’s used her background as a developer to create free industry tools like the Adobe Analytics Beacon Parser and the mobile app PocketSDR.
She loves helping and collaborating with others in the industry, and most days can be found in #measure slack or twitter doing just that.
Let’s go to the Atlanta-area to talk with Jenn Kunz
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:21 - Welcome Jenn
00:03:37 - How Adobe's used by larger orgs
00:20:55 - PSA
00:21:32 - Navigating the Interface
00:41:48 - How to contact Jenn
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
Episode 193
Those of us in the digital economy think a lot about growing our business, but we don’t think as much about the tech that enables customers to interact with our business. When our sites don’t run smoothly or aren’t available, our customers suffer and it stops working as our sales and marketing engine. Terms for these episodes: the site crashed or it croaked, give us a perception that sites are either alive and well or completely dead, when its health really resembles our own human health. Meaning, a website can give off warning signs that can be diagnosed and treated before anything really bad happens. It doesn’t take invasive tools to catch these; monitoring services that run without any special site access can detect issues. These tools that take a site’s pulse are also good to gauge the site’s fitness - its ability to handle business growth.
Our guest has always called Ottawa Canada his home. He has also always had an entrepreneurial spirit, supporting the local startup scene since the 2000s, which is where I first met him.
After earning his computer science degree, he began his career working at local web tech firms. A stint at a design agency stoked his enthusiasm for websites, and in 2010 he joined the parent company of Internet Service Provider and web host Rebel.com, and domain registrar Internic.ca.
He took on the role of CEO for both companies, where he saw first-hand how the internet fueled communication and value-creation. In 2013 he took on additional responsibility as a Director of the not-for-profit Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), where for the last decade more or less he has staunchly pushed for the internet to be used as a force for good in Canada.
Workwise, after stepping away from Rebel and Internic, he returned to his technical and startup roots. Based on his observation that while websites were getting easier for non-experts to build, they could make mistakes hurting their user’s experience of their site with equal ease. That led him to launch ONIK, a product that monitors website fitness.
Let’s go talk with Rob Villeneuve
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:06 - Welcome Rob
00:09:19 - Monitoring site health
00:29:09 - PSA
00:29:59 - How much access is needed to monitor a site
00:41:01 - Holding different patrs of site to different standards
00:42:12 - How alerts help
00:45:21 - Knowing when enough is being measured
00:49:50 - How large sites do monitoring
00:53:09 - About ONIK.IO, how to contact Rob
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
We've all heard of 1970's Apollo 13 mission that was supposed to send a 3-man crew to the moon, but once NASA became aware of an on-board explosion, it became all about rescuing the crew.
Ron Howard's 1995 movie gives a glimpse of how mission control staff in Houston reacted to information about the explosion.
When an alarm on the command module flashed, signaling a power drop, Flight Director Gene Kranz (portrayed by Ed Harris) turned to the mission controller in charge of emergencies and said "is this an instrumentation problem, or are we looking at real power loss here?" That officer, named Sy Liebergot and played by the director’s brother Clive Howard said "It's, it's reading a quadruple failure - that can't happen! It's, it's got to be instrumentation."
But by following their procedures, NASA confirmed it wasn't an instrumentation problem, the ship had actually suffered a devastating explosion, and at that point they swung into rescue mode.
NASA aren't the only ones who, on seeing data put in front of them, are so quick to dismiss it.
Dashboards - and the work it takes to implement them - isn’t trivial. Yet many of them fail…meaning that once they’re built they never get looked at.
There are those who blame technical problems for this, but just like in Apollo 13, the main failures are due to people problems. The technology can be used to visualize exactly the operational data that people literally asked for…and present them with self-serve solutions, but they ignore the data, waving it away as some sort of instrumentation problem
Our guest is going to tell us the right way to pull off dashboard projects.
He’ll show how to engage the stakeholders to express what metrics they really need, ones that show how the organization is tracking towards reaching its vision.
Nicholas Kelly, currently the principal consultant and trainer at G&K Consulting, holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from University College Cork. Formerly a Deloitte Analytics Senior Manager, he specializes in designing and developing dashboards for major global companies, including banks and Formula 1 teams. Nick is a frequent speaker at international conferences, having trained thousands of professionals in data visualization and analytics adoption. As a management consultant, educator, and author, his focus is on teamwork, inventive methods, and bridging technical gaps to increase data literacy. He is also the creator of business board games and the author of the book "Delivering Data Analytics."
Let’s go to Seattle where I caught up with Nick Kelly.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:57 - Welcome Nick
00:08:18 - Why dashboard projects fail
00:34:46 - PSA
00:35:35 - Building the dashboard
00:57:12 - Where to get book; contact Nick
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 190.
My sister-in-law Janice works at the forefront of Medical Sonography. You may know it by the name Ultrasound, where non-invasive sound waves are sent into the body, which bounce off tissue and get displayed on a monitor. It has the ability to evaluate anatomy in an increasingly wide range of structures such as abdominal organs, the heart, vasculature and muscles in patients of all ages as well as the most commonly known purpose of obstetrical ultrasound.
In the past 35 years, ultrasound has changed from a tool that was used solely by Radiology and has now expanded into being used by almost every medical disciple: cardiology, emergency medicine, anesthesia, nursing, physical therapy and more. Training these non-traditional users had a huge boom, and now ultrasound is being taught in the first year of medical school as it is known that no matter what type of medicine one chooses, ultrasound will play a part. Janice and others have shared their love and knowledge of ultrasound to help and aid the expansion of ultrasound into new realms in all areas of healthcare.
In a similar way, to be better marketers, developers, or website owners, there are aspects of web behaviour that we need surfaced: specific user conversions, page views, scrolls and many other interactions. These aren’t visible to Analytics tools out-of-the-box. Our equipment must be configured to highlight them, and that’s done with tags that fire and alert our analytics software of specific interactions, the same way that medical monitors show the echoes of specific sonar frequencies.
We’ve evolved from coding tags right on our sites to operating them with tag management systems, the most common one being Google Tag Manager. Without these tagging tools, our visibility into site performance would be limited the same way that doctors before ultrasound couldn’t see what was going on inside their patients.
Another similarity these tools share is that they both come with ethical and safety considerations, and laws covering user privacy and data protection. Gathering insights, whether by ultrasound or tag technology, must respect the digital autonomy and privacy of users.
We have a guest to take us through all facets of tag management and I hope that after hearing him, you won’t think of tagging as just some machine that should be relegated to technicians, but a tool you can use on the front-lines, as something you yourself should get hands-on with. So let's talk about tag management with Ricardo Cristofolini.
With a background in Tourism and Hospitality Management and International Trade, Ricardo Cristofolini's Analytics professional journey began when he arrived in Canada in 2015 to study at Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, where he earned an Ontario College Diploma in Computer Programming, Networked Environment, and Programming Languages from 2015 to 2017. There, he had the opportunity to put together previous professional knowledge with brand new one exploring multiple subjects, from Web and App Development to cloud computing, Database structure, and much more.
Transitioning to the workforce, Ricardo served as a Web Developer at FilmFX from December 2017 to December 2019, gaining two years of experience. In March 2018, Ricardo expanded his skills at Pondstone Digital Marketing, specializing in WordPress, Content Management, and other relevant areas until February 2019. At this point, he had already fallen in love with Analytics and Data Tracking. His expertise continued to evolve as he took on the role of Senior Data Analytics Implementation at Bounteous Canada from July 2021 to October 2022 He currently holds the position of Napkyn Senior Implementation Specialist Data Solutions, a role he has been dedicated to since 2022.
In his spare time, when not reading about Analytics and developing his knowledge (and earning a badge from Linkedin as Top Web Analytics Voice), Ricardo supports others' new adventures in this field on multiple social media platforms answering questions and providing guidance.
Originating from Brazil, Ricardo Cristofolini's professional trajectory reflects a dynamic and progressively challenging path within the realms of web development, digital marketing, and data analytics implementation.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:04:55 - Ricardo on GTM and Google Tag
00:27:40 - PSA
00:28:30 - All about Server-side Tagging
00:49:06 - Where to contact Ricardo
Links to all People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show #189 is available at the Funnel Reboot site.
Episode 188
Dana DiTomaso embarked on her digital marketing journey over 20 years ago, initially working in tech support for a CRM before founding a web design company in 2002. In 2000, clients sought her expertise in increasing website traffic, propelling her into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By 2012, Dana became an active participant in the SEO community, sharing insights on technical and local SEO topics.
Dana, having typed her first line of code in 1982, consistently demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit and started delivering talks and presentations since 1998. Recognizing the potential of digital-first marketing, she founded three businesses that educate entrepreneurs and organizations. As the founder and lead instructor of KP Playbook, Dana teaches the "Analytics for Agencies" course and manages a thriving learner community, emphasizing proven principles over quick tips. Notably, none of her clients have faced Google penalties to date.
Dana lives in an old growth forest near Victoria BC.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:01 - Welcome Dana
00:08:18 - The unvarnished view of data given by GA4
00:16:33 - Using custom reports and exploration tab
00:22:41 - Giving other users access to Reports
00:26:39 - PSA
00:27:25 - Reporting through Looker Studio
00:35:08 - Why knowing some UX helps
00:38:54 - Pulling other data sources together with GA data
00:44:01 - Looker studio tactics
00:53:18 - Where to contact Dana
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 188.
In numerous companies, the approach to content strategy appears to be nonexistent, marked by haphazard content creation and dissemination. A notable absence of a cohesive plan to align content with overarching marketing objectives is evident, leading to a disjointed and less effective approach. In light of these challenges, it becomes imperative for companies to recognize the critical significance of implementing a robust content strategy. The upcoming discussion will delve into a methodology that not only addresses these shortcomings but also promises to elevate content creation to a level where flawlessness becomes a tangible outcome. As we navigate through the intricacies of this approach, you will discover how a well-crafted content strategy can serve as the linchpin for achieving marketing goals and fostering a more impactful and cohesive online presence.
Purna Virji is a globally recognized content strategist. She grew up in India, when her family came to the US they settled in Philadelphia. She did her masters at Cardiff University, but returned to Philadelphia where she was a journalist and then a producer at the local TV affiliate for PBS. That experience is where She picked up expertise in creating content. She ported this communications flair into designing Pay Per Click ad campaigns for ecommerce companies and then when Microsoft’s own ads platform needed a trainer, she transitioned to working there, training both internal Microsoft teams and external groups on Microsoft ads. She went on to speak at conferences like MozCon and SMX Advanced and was ranked as the #1 Most Influential Expert in the world by PPC Hero.
She is currently the Principal Consultant for Content Solutions at LinkedIn. In 2023 she came out with the book “High Impact Content Marketing” which we’ll talk about today.
Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 - Intro
00:02:42 - Welcome Purna 00:10:32 - the AGES model 00:20:38 - PSA 00:21:46 - Practical tips for high Impact content 00:35:26 - Identifying what your audience's needs are 00:46:41 - Where to get book; contact Purna
For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 187's page on the Funnel Reboot site.
Increasingly, many Marketing teams have been forced to transform their own teams, or the Business as a whole has had to start transforming itself.
But no matter how technically sophisticated they are, no matter how many consultants they have or how many Project management meetings they hold, most companies struggle through these transformations. At best, when transformations succeed, they leave heart-ache and sore feelings
Most of them revert to the status quo they tried so hard to shake. Those leading the initiative end up demoralized, marginalized or downsized.
People who say they can make transformations successful are treated with skepticism. But when that someone has skills that are so multifaceted and has pulled off this feat in multiple industries, you ought to lean in & hear them out.
Susan Odle is someone whose life's journey and heritage spans three continents. Born to Guyanese parents moved first to London England, then to Toronto, Canada where she went to high school; it happened to be the same school where I went. Anyway, she moved to Ottawa to study music at University. The musician in her has been strong from then until now, evidenced by a solo project she released in 2017.
Our paths crossed again years later when I moved to Ottawa. In the interim Susan had been holding pivotal roles in high tech firms, leading channel & direct sales, professional services, and ops which helped several to successful exits. Susan was honored In 2020 as one of the top 50 women in SaaS by the Software Report. She’s also owned several businesses as well. Currently, Susan specializes in operationalizing change through her consultancy, 8020CS. She’s taken her understanding of navigating successful change and literally wrote the book on it. "Successful Change," was released in 2023.
Chapters & Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:47 - Welcome Susan
00:06:46 - The chaos that comes with transformation
00:11:50 - The 8020CS Blueprint
00:21:46 - Break change down into four dimensions
00:29:38 - PSA
00:30:32 - Moving through 'gates' toward successful change
00:48:59 - Overcoming resistance
00:53:45 - Susan’s coordinate and other resources
For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 186's page on the Funnel Reboot site.
One thing that professional services and solo subject matter experts struggle with is building an audience and influencing their purchases.
Creating a content marketing engine that achieves this can take agonizingly long - years even. But virtual events that are properly marketed seem able to shorten that timespan.
My guest, Michael Tucker, has refined a program that develops virtual events for clients, and over the past 3 years it has accelerated post-event prospect discussions and sales success.
Graduating from Campbellsville University in Kentucky, he now calls Florida home
Chapters/Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
0:01:14 Welcome Michael
0:03:44 Virtual events are good for leadgen
0:29:09 PSA
0:30:17 Running virtual event that embeds call-to-action
0:32:30 Seeding the CTA into event
0:54:50 Michael's coordinates
Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show is available on Episode 185’s page on the Funnel Reboot website.
You could say that the marketing field is going through exciting times right now. But you shouldn’t say that everything’s rosy. Here are examples of issues we’re grappling with:
The use of SaaS by Marketing may have freed us from being chained to the IT department, but after 25 years of binge buying all these point solutions, we’re saddled with loads of Technical debt, and the order to repatriate customer data from all these servers.
CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology out there, much of their time is used up by the C-Suite’s questions, leaving little time for them to manage marketing.
There’s the question of whether the agency-client relationship will survive with AI. Some say brands won’t need an agency as they will generate their own creative. Agencies like Publicis, who’ve poured huge sums into their media-platform CoreAI that monitors billions of consumer signals and can inform what ads should be made, when & where.
Because our field doesn't have standardized accreditation, our terminology isn’t uniform, and we make dialects for our company or industry. How’s that working for us? About as well as it did for those building the Tower of Babel.
My guest is Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. Since graduating from Northeasters 20 years ago, he’s been up and down the marketing industry block. He was a client-side marketer in the tech and financial services sectors, He founded and led an adtech company, Canned Banners, that was acquired. He worked as a VP at data consultancy MightyHive which became Media.Monks.
He is in a new role now at U of Digital, spearheading this education thought leadership to expand the company's educational offerings across different formats, learners, and markets
To me, he’s something of a modern-day David Ogilvy, who wrote his thoughts on his industry back in the day, in a book called “Confessions of an Ad Man”. Myles is just as outspoken on digital media and advertising topics, and the opinions he voices in trade publications and podcasts can come across as prophecies about this industry and sometimes pleas for how it could be better.
I caught up with him in Portland, OR, where he lives with his wife and three kids.
Timestamp/Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
0:03:25 Welcome Myles
0:04:55 Continuum of approaches to privacy
0:07:58 Our reliance on ad tech; its future
0:20:56 We can only go as fast as our people can
0:24:53 Tech debt we've brought on ourselves
0:31:50 PSA
0:32:37 Changes impacting platforms & ad agencies
0:42:44 Platforms exploiting advertisers in the name of Al
0:48:27 The good & bad of using their Cloud offerings
0:52:32 Best reaction is educating ourselves
1:00:00 How to reach out to Myles
Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show appear within the Funnel Reboot site on Ep 184's shownotes page.
Episode 183
As a Disclaimer, note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship with the vendor interviewed here. They're simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.
As trite as it sounds, the way that we look at the world affects our understanding of it. Let me tell you about a time I noticed this. When I was a kid, I would go to school, walk into my classroom, and see my teacher there. She was such a constant there, I imagined that she never left the classroom, she was a fixture of the room, part of the furniture. It’s like the teacher didn’t persist as a person who had a life outside of the classroom. So when I was out at the grocery store with my parents and I saw my teacher, not dressed in their teacher clothes, not ensconced in their teacher setting, my brain just melted.
While this might be laughable, those of us using marketing analytics tools could be guilty of falling into the same trap. Credit for making this concept clear in not 1 but 2 great books must go to Avinash Kaushik. Think about it. According to Classic web analytics, visitors who hit our website had started an imaginary timer that we called a web session. We imagined in this race against the clock, they were viewing a sequence of pages which ferried them to forms we used as gates. We told ourselves that the gate-crossers had completed a successful session, converting from visitors into leads or customers.
Stepping back, there are a few things wrong with this picture. Users don't only exist inside of a session, just like the teacher didn't only exist in the classroom—they roam about as they please.
Today’s users aren’t confined to marketing content. The experience they have straddles our marketing sites, to sites and apps where their identity persists through being logged-in, where the interactions even span multiple devices - as we see on Slack and Discord for messages we’ve already read.
The user’s state changes - sometimes they complete a purchase, or become a paid subscriber, but at other times they may opt for a free plan or abandon their cart.
We need analytics for all of these actions. We need to step back and view the entire experience that people have with us over time. This is something that classic web analytics just can't measure.
This is why the new generation of tools allows us to analyze complex trends and behavior of our users. They are collectively known as event-based analytics tools, and they excel in portraying the way that users experience a product. The foremost product-oriented analytics tool out there is called Amplitude, and today, we are speaking with its product evangelist.
Since 2021, Adam Greco has been Amplitude’s Product Evangelist, guiding clients in understanding their tool through workshops, blogs, and videos.
He got into this field in 2005 when he joined analytics platform Omniture where he was a customer advocate for four years until Adobe acquired them and rechristened them Adobe Analytics. He then worked at consultancies for 15 years, showing people how to get the most out of Adobe’s tool, authoring over 200 blog posts along the way.
Lately Adam’s speaking and advising on analytics has had him splitting his time between Chicago and Amsterdam (where he was when this was recorded). When he’s in the states and not working, he enjoys restoring and going for drives in his 62 convertible corvette.
Timestamps/Chapters
0:00 - Intro
5:00 - Meet Adam; why event-based method works better than session-based method
24:00 - PSA
24:45 - how to get value out of recent analytics tools, including warehouse-native apps
56:20 - Adam’s coordinates and free resources
Links to all people and products mentioned are available in Ep 183's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.
Today's episode looks at how pervasive voice technology is, and how marketers can make better use of it.
After spending over twenty years in marketing agencies, Susan Westwater became cofounder and CEO of Pragmatic Digital. Susan has talked and written on the role voice & conversational AI plays in marketing and business strategy.
Susan is coauthor of Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences. Recently, she co-authored the book “Voice Marketing”
Chapters & Timestamps
0:00 Intro
2:30 About Voice marketing
27:15 PSA
28:00 Susan’s process for enabling voice technology in your marketing
59:30 Where to find Susan and the book
All people, products and concepts are linked in episode 182's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.
When a person interacts with their device or goes online, who owns their data? Today’s guest says they do, and marketers should be paying them for the privilege. Right now, you might think this person wears hats made out of tinfoil. It may surprise you to learn they are the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.
John Thompson has written four books. I found out about him through his 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, which led to him being a guest on this show back in 2023. He recently released his book “Data for All” which spurred this repeat appearance - which has only happened with a handful of people.
Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00 - Intro 1:39 - How we came to giving our data for free 24:55 - Public Service Announcement 25:49 - Getting paid for our data 44:26 - Getting to John & his books
For links to all persons and concepts mentioned, go to Ep 181's notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.
If you go to Wikipedia and type Zero-sum game, it’ll describe it as “a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one's gain is equivalent to player two's loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero”
Many think that’s how privacy regulations are affecting marketing. Anytime client privacy is upheld it’s at our expense. We’re losing; they’re winning. Zero-sum game.
Siobhan Solberg disagrees. She says you can effectively market to your client in a way that does right by them and is privacy-compliant.
She calls herself a protector of privacy, while also being a marketing consultant, the founder of a marketing agency. She has over a decade in the measurement space, having created CXL’s course on personalization. She’s also been a speaker at conferences like Superweek and The Copywriter Club. She also writes on privacy and marketing on her blog and is host of a podcast whose name is spelled out in the shownotes but which I’ll call Marketing Unf*d.
She is currently enrolled in the Master of Laws program for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Management at Maastricht University.
When she’s not not pushing these boundaries, Siobhan loves to get outside and test her physical limits.
Chapters Timestamps
0:00 – Intro
0:46 – About Siobhan
2:11 – What marketers should know about Privacy
20:56 – PSA
21:53 – Privacy across the organization
39:59 – Siobhan’s contact details
For links to everything mentiones, visit the shownotes on the FunnelReboot site.
‘1 to 1 Marketing,’ sounds wonderful. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers wrote a series of books in the 1990s called this. We have thrown all kinds of technology, content, and persona construction at it over the last 25 years. But it still eludes us. Architecting communications that converses with each person, at their own point in a conversation with our brand is hard. Is it marketing’s job to actually have 1:1 conversations? And with what’s at stake if we screw up personalization, can we implement or maintain it without losing our jobs?
Today’s guest is here to help answer that.
Since getting his M.A. in Information Studies from Aarhus University, our guest has lived at the intersection of data and communications.
Since 2020 he has been the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic, an omnichannel marketing software, where he works primarily with large companies involved in omnichannel marketing, customer experience management, and customer lifecycle projects.
He’s on a mission to ensure that the end user gets consistent, timely and relevant communications across channels - be it web, email, app, text, social - or even in-store. He often presents keynotes on Omnichannel Personalization and sits on the jury for that at the Danish eCommerce Awards.
His first book, written together with Colin Shearer, was a bestseller on Omnichannel Marketing. We’re talking with him about his book “Hello $Firstname,” which came out in 2023. Joining me from Copenhagen, let’s welcome Rasmus Houlind.
Links for all people and products mentioned are in the episode's page on the Funnel Reboot site.
Chapters & Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
2:30 - Book's Main Theme
37:48 - Public Service Announcement
38:41 - Quantifying the value of Personalization
1:00:25 - Rasmus Contact details
Today’s talk is with a technology vendor, as a Disclaimer, please note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. They're simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.
Today we’re going to talk about leveling up beyond KPIs to data that visualizes our full-funnel.
Comedian George Carlin knew how complicated things get with marketing technology. Or, you can imagine that when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing technology evolve before our eyes. As our software tools grow, so does the complexity. We’re beyond the point of logging into each of them to see individual KPIs. They have just become too specialized, and now we need meta-tools, crafted solely to connect with the specialized marketing systems, to extract and roll up streamlined data that we can analyze or see on a dashboard.
It’s against this backdrop that I invited today’s guest.
Jacob Varghese hails from India, having graduated with a BA from University of Mumbai. Since moving to Canada in the 1990s, he’s focused on building marketing machines and crafting go-to-market strategies that yield repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue.
Following experiences as a senior executive at numerous B2B SaaS outfits, he’s now the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AgencyAnalytics. His passion for augmenting marketing and sales through data and automation comes through in the insights he shares on his blog.
Links to all things mentioned will be in the shownotes on Ep 177's page on the Funnel Reboot site.
If your job involves numbers, you likely spend time graphically plotting it. Whether it’s for analyzing or presenting, we usually toss our datasets into our visualization tool (mainly because it takes one button click) and start visualizing it. The problem here is that we’re making content before knowing our intent, we’re making the software master over us instead of being its master.
Today’s guest says the visualizations that come from this won’t be intelligible, won’t make them motivated to act and won’t yield good decisions. However, he does passionately believe that when people who know how to read numbers, see it presented the right way, it’ll motivate them to make the right decisions.
Lee Feinberg graduated from Cornell University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. In 2012 founded a consultancy to help data leaders create armies of trustworthy decision makers. He has worked in the analytics and data visualization fields for 20 years.
He is associated with Data Science programs at both NYU and the University of Chicago. When he’s not talking about visualization, Lee likes experiencing concerts - from the front row, and also hanging out with his wife and kids.
All links mentioned are in the show notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.
There were a lot of books covered on the podcast in 2023 - 44% of this year’s shows were with book authors. Combined with previous years’ book episodes, we have reached the 60-book mark on this podcast - you can sift through them all on our site by clicking on the “books” category on the right-hand menu.
But I’ve had the chance to read books outside of these, and found even more I’d like to feature. I’m not saying all all biz books that come out are good. To be honest - a decent portion of them aren’t good at all. But since I set out once per year to make a special show, I felt it time to review some of the business books that shouldn’t slip by unnoticed.
After you hear brief reviews of these 6 books, you’ll hopefully put one or two on your To-be-read pile.
Shownotes with links to these books is available on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 175.
There are websites and then there are websites.
Some give User Experience short shrift, slapping together generic templates that look pretty... generic. Others use experts to make interfaces that are optimized for mobile and PC environments, and anticipate what users want and present their content in engaging ways.
Some with so little security, they’re susceptible to cyber threats. Others invest heavily in cybersecurity - protecting not only themselves, but visitors as well.
Some sites have clung to technology that’s become atrophied and prone to crashing. Others are kept up to date, and are upgradable as the company’s needs change. Some have a backend that craters when traffic spikes,while others keep humming because of their scalable infrastructure.
Some expect visitors will come back on their own initiative, others use email smartly to coax visitors back.
Our guest is going to show us how to see the difference that well-developed websites can make. He knows how the value of our online presence can be unlocked to produce experiences that lead to revenue.
Josh Garellek is co-founder & CEO of a full-service web development agency that's spread across North America.
He grew up and started his studies in Montreal, then went on to study at New York’s Yeshiva University.
He did stints in the food service industry and e-commerce before starting a game development studio, until he and a business partner teamed up, switching it into a web dev company called Arctic Leaf. He’s gone beyond this and started other ventures too. The drive to do all this, he’ll tell you, is probably rooted in ADHD, or being a natural entrepreneur, or his chutzpah; probably all of these. But after knowing him for over a decade, for questions about what to do with your website, he is THE person to listen to.
Links to all items mentioned can be found in the Episode 174 shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.
Today, we’re talking about the future of data with Google Analytics 4.
It’s been about 6 months since we all had Universal Analytics. It’s good to talk to others who use GA4 to do their jobs, to compare notes. Although GA4 is here to stay, it still has gaps that need bridging.
That’s why I spoke with Jason Hackenberry, Head of Partnerships from web development agency Arctic Leaf. Prior to Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, along with roles in Merchandising.
What you’ll hear is from a virtual event he and I did in December 2023, on topics including
- How Google is migrating users of its free version differently from its 360 version
- How to capitalize on the information provided by GA4
- The data you actually need vs. what you THINK you need
- Tips on finding insights, reporting, conversion tracking and data retention
- New GA4 features that can help your lead generation or e-commerce website.
GA4 is now our de facto analytics tool. Regardless of how familiar we were with the previous tool, GA4 is here to stay so we may as well get good at using it.
I’ve got just the person to make the transition relatively painless for us.
Our guest’s love for analytics was a happy accident after she worked in a company where the sales director was making a move to take my budget and remove people from my department to fund new sales people. The work we were doing was having an impact, and she needed to prove it, show the evidence, and going into a board meeting with a warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy won’t cut it. You need to show our craft in all its creative beauty, but we also need to show the numbers to justify it and continue with our work.
As head consultant at The Colouring In Department, she has completed close to 230 audits now, and has trained thousands of people on GA.
Joining from London England - here is Jill Quick
Links to all things mentioned in episode 172 can be found on its shownotes page at the Funnel Reboot site.
AI won’t end up being one thing, it will be present in many little applications - hopefully that will help us in our marketing. But what kind of AIs do we want? Are we looking at the ingredients that go into them?
Those are the kinds of questions innovations our guest considers as he makes AI models for healthcare and the retail marketing sectors.
Yash Gad is a data scientist, education advocate, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Group. He earned his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Computational Biology, Neuroscience &, Biophysics and received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He joins me from Austin TX.
Links to all things mentioned can be found in Episode 171's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.
Whenever your marketing is being assessed by an analyst, they will use one of two approaches.
The first is called Multi-touch attribution, which takes a customer who’s made a purchase decision, then puts weights on the touchpoints they had on various channels (Google calls their model ‘Data-driven attribution”) on the way to that point, to say which touchpoints were most influential.
The other approach they may use is Media Mix Modeling. From what previous podcast guest Kevin Hartman told me about MMM, it’s a ‘tremendous undertaking.’ It involves collecting and analyzing historical data in different geographies at different times of the year: sales figures, both legacy and digital marketing channels, and external factors like economic indicators and even weather. It has its own jargon: Incrementality, ratios, betas, impact on objectives. Then there’s the math. It uses regression methods, both linear and non-linear, Frequentist vs Bayesian statistics.
I get so overwhelmed with these modeling solutions, it’s like the old Who’s On First skit. I needed someone who would sort this out for me.
Our guest has been a consultant in the marketing and digital analytics space for 15 years. I'm currently focusing on helping clients quantify the impact of their marketing efforts using Marketing Mix Models, experimentation, and various attribution methodologies.
He is so passionate, he started a newsletter called MMM Hub
He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a Masters degree in Information Technology, focused on Business Intelligence & Data Analytics.
Jim is great at showcasing other people in the analytics community -He truly believes that all of us are smarter than any one of us. He, along with Simon Poulton, co-host the MeasureUp podcast.
He talked with me from his home in Pittsburgh. Let’s meet Jim Gianoglio.
Links to everything talked about in the show is found on the show's page at https://funnelreboot.com
You did everything just the way you were told.
You took the tags the free tools gave you and installed them on your site, you configured platforms and poured over their reports, you connected the systems and even hired developers to hook everything up to a database. And yet, you have little value to show for all the work you’ve put into your company’s analytics
You feel the analytics platforms are backing away from their responsibility to streamline all this. Instead, the answer from the largest of the bunch, Google, is they’ll hold onto your data if you use their newest tool, BigQuery, and pay them money to store your data …or is it their data… on it.
The bad news is summed up in a 2023 book whose euphemistic name is “You’re data is flawed”- don’t want to get an explicit rating for using the actual name
It was written by someone who empathizes with our situation and who lays out in the book the steps needed to generate positive financial returns for our analytics investment.
Our guest Mark McKenzie started his career in London, but moved in 2014 to sunny New Zealand to work for a data-focused digital agency. That led to him founding and growing an analytics firm that served clients locally and in the UK, Australia, and the US. Following the sale of that firm in 2022, he moved with his family back to the not-so-sunny UK. where he’s consulting with on digital analytics
His focus on analytics can be seen through his volunteering at events such as ‘MeasureCamp’ and ‘Web Analytics Wednesdays.’ Let’s talk with Mark McKenzie.
Chapters & Timestamps:
2:26 Admitting our data is f_____ed
10:22 Prior to fixing data, must treat it as an asset
39:29 Fixing data we keep internally
54:47 The book and Mark's contact info
Links to all people and entities names are in show number 169's page on the Funnel Reboot site.
Memes act as our collective memory’s transportation system. The instant they are seen or heard, our minds hop to whatever emotion the meme conveys. The use of this brain-hack is as scary as it is impressive.
Memes rarely come to us via broadcast media. Instead, they spread organically online. Most of the original uses for these have faded, while the internet has collectively assigned them new meanings.
Our guest was so interested in memes that he came out with a book in 2023 called Marketing Memetics to explain all that marketers must consider when using them.
Mike Taylor shares content on wider marketing topics, such as AI & prompt engineering, which O'Reilly has commissioned him to write a book that’s due to come out in 2024. Experimentation is also a passion; he’s run over 8,000 CRO experiments, and he shares the insights he gets on his social channels, and in courses he has on LinkedIn Learning and udemy.
His love of learning & teaching can be traced back to his studies at Anglia Ruskin University and U of Nottingham, where he obtained his masters degree.
But in between his schooling and the present, he was working in the marketing trenches, at places like Candor, SumoMe, ShopStyle, Travelzoo and marketing agency Ladder.io, which has grown from its beginnings with Mike and his co-founders to a team of 50 people.
All people and entities mentioned are linked in the episode page on the Funnel Reboot site.
A trend that’s currently having its day in the sun is Product-Led Growth. According to our guest, it’s a fine model, but our companies need growth that’s based on a more foundational element - advocating for Customer-Led Growth.
CLG begins with creating organization-wide understanding around what experience is most appropriate for the company's best customers. Value to customers is then delivered — whenever, wherever, and however they need it — throughout their relationship with the company.
Our guest pioneered customer experience mapping while she was leading marketing for the Vancouver-based SaaS company Unbounce.
She has been a brand builder since 2000. In 2009, she embraced tech startups and SaaS, recognizing marketing's pivotal role in SaaS success. In 2023 she co-authored Forget the Funnel and with her co-founder Claire Suellentrop has a consultancy that goes by the same name.
Let’s talk to Georgiana Laudi.
All persons and topics mentioned are linked in the show's notes page on FunnelReboot.com
If you want to learn about sales and start Googling, you quickly run across self-professed gurus, who claim to know the secret to selling. If you faithfully follow this method (available today only for a low low price), you'll have sales success. Despite feeling a twinge of skepticism about their pitch, you're so deep into their slick, pressure-filled pitch at this point that you pay for their books and courses…which end up being disappointing.
Today's guest says these gurus have put you in the Vortex of crazy.
He doesn't try to apply the same advice to everyone - his response reminds me of what an ancient Buddhist guru said. Well, according to a novel written a century ago by Hermann Hesse.
There are a few men on a spiritual pilgrimage, and they reach a stage where the leader, Siddhartha, tells his followers that he must continue on alone. His right-hand man, Govinda asks him why, "Siddhartha…spoke quietly… “Always, oh Govinda, you’ve been my friend, you’ve always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won’t Govinda for once also take a step by himself, without me? Behold, now…[you] are choosing your path for yourself.”
Our guest says there's only one sales method that works - the one that comes naturally to you. That refreshing take ripples through his 2023 book Do It! Selling.
David Newman has been working since 1992 to help customers land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. From Fortune 500 corporations to sole-practitioners, his firm has helped over 1,800 clients with their marketing, sales, and professional services. David is also the host of the highly rated podcast, The Selling Show.
David is married to the #1 most amazing woman on the planet (his words, not mine), launched two great kids into the world disguised as small adults, and has enjoyed raising some of the world’s sweetest retrievers.
Links to every item mentioned appears in the show's page at https://funnelreboot.com
How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable.
In the 27 years since he graduated with his MBA, Darrell Amy has worked heavily in the tech sector, mainly in sales and marketing. Wanting to help a larger number of companies, in 2004 he started his own business, speaking and acting as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer. In 2020, Darrell authored Revenue Growth Engine book How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth.
He is a member of the Forbes Business Council and co-chair of the Kingdom Missions Fund. Based in Arkansas, with a family that now includes a couple of grand-children, let's go talk to Darrell Amy.
Links to everythings mentioned in the episode can be found at the https://funnelreboot.com shownotes page.
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"So, what does your company do?"
This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I'm asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps.
This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing's hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and intent-based campaigns aimed at key Accounts can all be for naught if sales doesn't have a game-plan for their conversation with the prospect.
It is at this point that companies seek the help of our guest
After getting his Ph.D. at Stanford Brent Keltner spent ten years as a social scientist at the RAND Corporation.
While he liked using his academic training, he looked for places his knowledge could be more practically applied. Jumping to enterprise and early stage companies, he found gaps in their revenue function. But also found he could get sales teams unstuck from specific challenges with a bit of theoretical modeling.
After more than a decade of experience as a revenue leader, he founded Winalytics LLC, a go-to-market and revenue consultancy whose clients include DealerRater, Lexmark, and Ascend Learning. He continued developing his list of situations and corresponding plays, which led to the publishing of his collection of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook which Brent came out with in 2022.
Links to everything mentioned in the show is on the Funnel Reboot site's episode page.
In this episode, I spoke with Danny Decker about the book he co-wrote with RJon Robins, "The Automatic Marketing Machine" which came out in 2022. The book combines direct marketing, nurturing emails and retention tactics to form a sustainable supply of ready-to-buy leads.
Danny Decker spent most of his childhood in West Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he was young, he saw people spending a large portion of their day getting water. In a similar way, businesses struggle to get a steady supply of prospects, even though leads are as important to business owners as water. In their frantic bid to fill their funnel, they commit random acts of marketing, looking to Danny just like the villagers that he once watched use up precious energy, spending much of their time on just subsisting.
He is based in Huntersville, NC with his wife, two kids, and a hyperactive German shepherd. Through the Automatic Marketing Agency, Danny now shows businesses how to secure their prospect-supply by building marketing systems that work to help businesses reach their full potential.
Links to everything mentioned appear in the shownotes at https://funnelreboot.com
Throughout our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today's guest didn't do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.
Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them. That turned out to be a great money-making opportunity.
That led to her owning her own physical store called Parlez Wireless, that operated as an authorized dealer for that carrier. She sold the franchise six years later and since then she has been providing consulting support to other businesses in Service and Retail sectors, as well as Speakers, Consultants and Authors.
After hearing the unconventional path she took, you can see why her philosophy on marketing isn't the same as everyone else. She believes using those old tired ways yields merely mediocre results, and she wants companies to do better than that. So she teamed up with Alan Weiss in 2022 to write her second book, "Masterful Marketing".
I first met her a dozen years ago at a Podcasters Across Borders conference and I'm so glad to have you join me to hear from Lisa Larter.
Shownotes include links to all people and products mentioned.
Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.
Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several european ecommerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms to turn raw data into usable marketing insights.
Working at an analytics firm that exposed him to BigQuery, he thought about sharing what he was learning. Seeing that the domain GA4BigQuery.com was available, he registered it and started posting there as a side gig. It got noticed by Simo Ahava, the founder of Simmer. That led Johan the release of the GA4 and BigQuery course on their training platform. As we fast forward to 2023, GA4BigQuery is now a well-known resource for marketers. And its creator is now consulting full-time on data analytics under his own brand, Select Star. Except for when he's having fun playing in a punk rock cover band.
See Shownotes for all people and links mentioned in the episode.
Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you're connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today's data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hybrid environments, and so many data pipelines the programs in charge of monitoring and logging the flows almost can't manage them. It becomes overwhelming to manually check and ensure the quality and integrity of the data. The more sophisticated the systems, the more errors creep into the data. If we rely on flawed data, the outcomes and insights we generate will be equally flawed. This is where data observability comes in.
In this episode you will hear about something called an observability platform. It identifies real-time data anomalies and pipeline errors in data warehouses. Now there's a twist here because we're in a cloud computing environment that charges by number of computing cycles. You don't want an observability tool that's another pipe accessing client data and running up the meter. The good news is there's an easier way to detect when data has gone awry, by comparing log files - basically metadata - they are just as effective at alerting you to problems.
If you'd like what this is doing described in a completely non-technical way, think of Hans Christian Andersen's Princess and the Pea. There is a girl who comes to a castle seeking shelter from the rain claiming to be a princess. The queen doubts whether she is truly of noble blood, and offers her a bed, but this bed has twenty mattresses and twenty down-filled comforters on it. A pea is placed underneath the bottom mattress to test if this girl detects anything. The next morning, the princess says that she endured a sleepless night; there must have been something hard in the bed. They realize then and there that she must be a princess, since no one but a real princess could be so delicate.
I spoke with Yuliia Tkachova, the co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data, a company which recently received $1.3M in a pre-seed round. Originally from Ukraine, Yuliia came to found Masthead after work that convinced her of the need for an observability solution. She had roles as a Product Manager roles at OWOX BI and Boosta, where their data solutions encountered problems. Prior to that, she did marketing for RAGT. She has Bachelors and Masters degrees from Suma State University, specializing in MIS & Statistics. She also serves as an Organizer at MeasureCamp, a volunteer community where analytics professionals come together to learn.
See Shownotes for links to all persons or products mentioned.
Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment's required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value.
Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you'll see from his backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it's him.
After completing a Bachelor of Science from The University of Manchester and studying at the University of Cambridge as a Doctoral Candidate, our guest worked in the UK analytics practice of a global Management Consultancy. Due for a change after 6 years of that, he moved to Ottawa Canada and founded his own consultancy so he could offer a more independent approach. A while later started the firm he's been leading for nearly 15 years, Bronson Analytics.
In 2018 he began a recurring event in Ottawa called Beer & Analytics, which draws hundreds from the field together for learning and socializing. In 2022, the event went outside of Ottawa for the first time, being held in Toronto.
It's fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot's 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that's becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I'm talking about marketing analytics.
This episode is compiled from experts in the world of analytics. It was recorded on location at the Marketing Analytics Summit that was held in Las Vegas. It's coming hot off the press from the June 2023 event.
Full speaker list in the shownotes.
When marketers from different companies get together and talk shop, it quickly becomes noticeable that each tackles their marketing problem differently. One by one, they throw into the conversation their own homebrew of channels, output tracking and the distinct expectations their stakeholders place on them. The more this study in contrast goes on, the more you hear them ask each other: "Why do you do it that way?"
The responses to this question all fall under one unsatisfactory theme. It's like Fiddler on the Roof, a broadway musical & movie set a century ago in part of the soviet union. A community of displaced Jews move into the slavic town of Anatevka. When townspeople ask them about their quirky customs, they give their famous one-word answer - Tradition. The main character defends his ancestors for starting the Tradition, even if nobody can remember why they made them in the first place.
Some of the marketing tasks we do are grounded in logic, which can be found by probing our institutional memory banks. But most of the time we don't probe, Instead relying on circular reasoning about the fact that we have them as justification for why we have them. Nothing changes; we cling to pointless traditions, which just ends up wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Our guest knows how to give marketing functions a checkup, teasing apart the traditional practices that boost productivity from those that have run their course. She's great at scrutinizing; at asking "Why do you do it that way?" She grew up in the republic of Georgia, shortly after the Communist system of the Soviets had collapsed. Would they transition to the new ways? Many were reluctant to, craving the familiarity of communism. This wavering delayed Georgia's emergence as a full-fledged western economy. Perhaps Khatia came by her bold way of questioning things from seeing the damage that's caused by clinging to the past.
Khatia Odzelashvili is the founder of a company called, not surprisingly, Bold Move Marketing. She is a public relations specialist with an entrepreneurial mindset who enjoys developing and implementing creative strategies. Since finishing her education at Algonquin College as well as the University of Göttingen, she has worked with and sometimes led a client's team as they build marketing programs.
If you want to communicate your message to others in this world, you only have four channels to choose from. Paid, Owned, Shared and Earned. If we expect to get some attention through shared and earned media, we should be prepared to face resistance, because we're competing with the biggest and most attention-grabbing stories out there.
My guest Phil Gaudreau is a former journalist, who has turned his talents to serving the communication needs of other businesses. He does this through Make it Matter Media, the agency which he runs jointly with his wife Catherine. From their base in Kingston Ontario, they work with a diverse range of clients, including small and medium businesses, politicians, and not for profit organizations.
Phil has also been actively engaged in the academic realm. He has worked with educational institutions such as Queens University, St. Lawrence College & Algonquin College, starting with communications roles and progressing to become a part-time professor of the subject.
An area where Phil loves to apply his writing and podcasting skills is generating awareness for businesses in less-populated regions. Ever since he teamed up with an Ottawa-based publisher in 2019, he has been the front-facing piece of several media properties focused on Eastern Ontario, which is as large as, and is as sparsely populated as the State of Maine. His profiles convey how these companies bet their future on the local labour force, and how much is at stake for the community where the company chooses to locate.
If your brand, or your client's brand, shares any commonality with the ones Phil works for, then you'll agree with me that it's really tough to get media coverage for organizations like yours. That's why we need to hear from Phil, because he employs the scrappy, entrepreneurial tactics that you will need in order to get your message out there.
Small-to-mid-sized businesses make up half of the economy. When surveys are done on why one company is chosen over another, buyers most-commonly cite the people as the main factor why they buy from them.
It's great that the founders or select team members are known by those buyers. But what about those who don't know them? How can they get a wider circle to know about their expertise and how excellent they are at what they do?
The vehicle that my guest believes does this better than anything else is public speaking.
Majeed Mogharreban is a professional speaker, world traveler, and founder of ExpertSpeaker.com. Speaking professionally for 10 years, Majeed has worked with the United Nations, Fairtrade, celebrities, politicians, Olympic medal winners, CEOs, and top entrepreneurs to give speeches and tell stories that change the world.
He is the author of the international best-seller "Expert Speaker: 5 Steps To Grow Your Business With Public Speaking"
He is the highest-rated trainer in the world at Learning Tree International. Majeed resides in Quebec, Canada.
The theme of these next few episodes are channels for getting our content out there.
The concept of marketing through a podcast is familiar to a high percentage of marketers (for those listening to my show, it's 100%), but it has some quirks that other channels don't.
A key issue for those thinking about podcasting is the volume of shows that already exist. There are arguably over a million active shows on Apple Podcasts. Why would marketing in such a crowded field be a good idea?
While this isn't a how-to on making a podcast, instead it aims to help you answer whether a podcast should be part of your marketing mix. We'll talk about:
- Who makes a good podcast host and what makes a good theme for a show.
- What podcasting has in common with PR
- How to get a podcast discovered by your audience.
- Promotional options, from sponsored ads inserted into shows…to shows which are entirely paid promotion.
I brought someone on who sees podcasts from multiple perspectives; from the standpoint of a marketer and as a podcast host herself.
Sherrilynne Starkie is an award-winning digital communications consultant with more than 20 years experience working with private and public sector clients in Canada, Britain and the USA. She has an international reputation as a social media innovator, is a prolific blogger and podcaster and is an active community volunteer.
Her new podcast 50 Women Over 50 is a passion project in which she is interviewing women past their 50th birthday to learn how they see the world, what lessons they’ve learned and what advice they have for us all.
What traits do humans have that distinguish us most from other species?
There are a few answers, but one I like is from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said it was our ability to form Society. In fact, he saw it as critical adaptation that ensures our survival: “...the only way in which [men] can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert.” We can apply this to society as a whole, and to smaller communities like: countries & ethnic groups, service clubs, businesses, User groups, Client forums. All are undeniably powerful.
Communities can defuse customer problems, encourage some to become brand ambassadors and provide a means of word-of-mouth marketing like no other channel can.
What does it take to grow and keep a community? Our guest will help us answer that.
Throughout his career, Paul Bradley has done the posting and moderating that you have to commit to if you are going to form an online community.
Paul has been building communities that connect and educate professionals across myriad industries for the last decade-plus. He has been part of Social Media Pulse (SMP) – a community of practice for social media industry professionals. He also launched and ran the community program at Agorapulse. Having moved to the education sector, he currently serves as Vice President for Kaplan Community.
Video is the most persuasive medium there is. That's why Many of us are building our marketing programs around it.
Inevitably, the wildcard that crops up when we have an idea for a video is what will it take to produce it? The answers to this are all over the map.
How much production value it takes is - as much as is needed for the video to produce your desired results.
The impact a video has isn't always reflective of the amount spent.
Our guest started MultiVision Digital, a video production agency in 2010 and has made over 1,200 videos produced for every business objective. We';ll hear from him answers on this and other questions to know about planning, producing, and distributing videos.
Join me as we talk to Robert Weiss.
As my eldest son has been in university, he's worked part-time at a sporting goods store. The section he works in is the category-leader in the store - as you can probably guess - it's shoes.
Need to admit that I'm not that into shoes.
I am fascinated by the conversations my son has with customers when it comes to shoes. They not only talk about the design features of a specific shoe. They also chat about the athletes who've worn it or collaborated with the brand to design it. They bring up details about how that athlete signed with the shoe company, the battling that went on between that brand and other companies to win the athlete's endorsement.
Clearly when people buy shoes for exercising or training for something, they aren't just going after ergonomics.
This back-story on the brand's struggles matters to them, as if they'll only wear a brand that works as hard as they do in staying fit or competing in sports.
This bond clearly applies to shoes, but it obviously reaches to many other types of brands too.
It's good for products to have a strong brand message and proof-points of their value, but the true winners are those that connect their story to the customers' internal values, or that give the customer a transformational experience.
Today I'm talking with someone who works with what he calls 'meaningful' brands, producing their media creative in a way that resonates with buyers. Fittingly, the name of his London-based boutique agency is 'Way'
My guest is a public speaker, an ultra marathon-runner, podcaster, skydiver and minimalist. In 2021, he released the book we're talking about today: "Not Another Pair of Shoes"
Let's talk with Alexander Novicov.
For several years running, noted marketing expert David Meerman Scott would access all the corporate press releases captured by major wire services. These covered product launches, major client signings and other moments when companies would talk about what distinguished them from their competitors. He posted his analysis of all this data and, without fail, almost all of them chose the same words to describe themselves. They made matters worse by, in David's words, by "using gobbledygook-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless"
We know we must try to embed our brand's personality into our writing - my last episode featured an expert talking about that. But that's not all we can do.
We've got to change the way we talk about ourselves, to cut through people's cynicism. If we're ever going to be believed by our prospective buyers, we've got to own what customers say in reviews of our products or services, and make claims about ourselves that duly represent what they could experience by buying from us.
Though noble, pulling this off sounds like a ton of work. But the premise of the book I'm covering today is that it's doable, if you make it part of your normal marketing workflow. The book which came out in 2022 is called, "Prove It."
It's the second book by Melanie Deziel, whose first book was "The Content Fuel Framework" She is an award-winning speaker and content creator. She has worked at various media companies, including The New York Times and Time Inc. In addition to her professional experience, Melanie has also taught courses on content marketing and digital marketing at universities such as Fairleigh Dickinson, Syracuse, and the City University of New York.
Our guest says that marketing has a problem: "I think there's an over-reliance on people's opinions at the expense of creating a vision and sticking with it." and he claims this hurts our ability to build brands that get strong traction. Already a published author, he devoted his second book to this argument. The book's title is his plea to marketers: "Stop Listening to the Customer: Try Hearing Your Brand Instead"
Adam Ferrier is the founder of Thinkerbell, an agency that creates ‘measured magic’, and was ranked 2021 number one Creative Agency in the world by industry publication BestAds - the first time awarded to an Australian agency. Leading Australian publication Mumbrella also lists Thinkerbell as Full Service, Creative, and PR 2021 Agency of the Year (the only time an agency has ever won all three titles in one year).
Adam is one of Australia’s leading consumer psychologists, a brand strategist and an authority on behavioural economics. He’s the author of The Advertising Effect: How to change behaviour (Oxford) and Stop Listening to the Customer: Try hearing your brand instead (Wiley). No stranger to the TV screen of Australia, Adam is a regular panelist on the Gruen Transfer, 7's Sunrise, and 10's The Project.
As the creator of the idea behind the WARC World Innovation prize (2013), and winner of the rare Cannes Gold Lion and Gold Effie double, Adam has won at all of the world's major advertising shows. He created the successful board game The Analyst (translated into four languages), space; an unconference where 'ideas meet influence’, and the social cause agency DOA (Decade of Action). Adam also co-hosts Black T-Shirts, a podcast that delivers XXL creativity for marketers.
An unstoppable force in the Australian advertising landscape, Adam's hands delegate the keys to embrace evidence-based creativity – whether to buy, perform or change - through cognitive behavioural psychology, hardcore creativity and a deep understanding of behavioural economics.
Regardless of when you're hearing this, it's safe to say that you're running into content generated by AI. There is a lot of good brought by chat tools, but there's one thing we want coming through in our content - that is to sound human. What engages people is content with personality, content that evokes a response. And that's what today's guest will break down for us.
When Alison Ver Halen found herself between jobs, her roommate's dad, who was an attorney, offered to give her things to do around his office until she got back on her feet. One of the things he needed was someone to write blog posts for his law firm. He knew she had a strong writing background, so he offered her the gig, and she was more than happy to get paid to write.
After six months, he told her she had brought in $75,000 worth of business for his law firm, just from the blog posts she was writing for him.
After a while, she started writing for an associate of his, and then for some friends of hers. She did get another day job, but she kept writing on the side, and her client list kept growing until she knew she couldn't do both any more, so she quit the day job to devote herself to writing full time, and she's never looked back.
She heads a Chicago-based agency called AV Writing services, in which she produces content for clients, with the help of her dog, Bobbi.
Today we'll talk about automated marketing data pipelines for reporting and even activation. If that last sentence didn't make total sense to you, don't worry, our guest is going to tell us why we need it and how we can set out implementing it.
The place where Noah Learner got his start was on the island of Nantucket. It's around 20km (15 mi) long, which is small enough that most visitors leave their cars on the mainland, come across on the ferry and rent a bike.
Noah's journey started with a job at one of the island's bike rental shops. Over the next decade as he rose to become the company's GM, he became convinced of the power of SEO for driving traffic.
He relocated to Colorado, at various points he worked in corporate SEO roles and worked out on his own. He even mashed up skills from his past to serve businesses in the pedal-powered rental market, calling it 'bike shop SEO.'
In the past 4-5 years he's built cutting edge SEO tools using cloud technology and has shared how to deploy them by speaking at MozCon, SearchLove and LocalU and in the agencyautomators.com community which he cofounded. he's just taken on a new role that has tool-building baked into his mandate, as Director of Innovation for Sterling Sky.
When not at work, he loves doing typical Colorado things like fly fishing and skiing, along with family-friendly activities like hiking and camping where their two dogs can tag along.
You have strategized and run a program with positive results, you would think that you simply show leadership your data and then you can sit back while they lavish you with praise.
Not quite.
If it isn't packaged right, it won't have that hoped-for impact. Remember Maya Angelou said 'people will forget what you said...what you did....but will never forget how you made them feel.' That feeling is conveyed through stories. To find and tell those stories, you need business intelligence and data visualization tools. I sought out a Googler who's an expert in their tool for doing this: Looker Studio.
Sireesha Pulipati is an experienced data analytics and data management professional. She has spent the last decade building and managing data platforms and solutions, and she is passionate about enabling users to leverage data to solve business problems.
Sireesha holds a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Her work history spans multiple industries – healthcare, media, travel, hospitality and high-tech
She is currently at Google as a technical lead, helping with the business intelligence and analytics strategy for internal teams.
She is the author of the newly-published book Data Storytelling with Looker Studio
John Thompson is the author of the 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, and a 35-year technology executive in the fields of data, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).
He is Global Head, Artificial Intelligence (AI) at EY. John was an Executive Partner at Gartner. He was the global advanced analytics and AI function at biopharmaceutical company CSL Behring, where he led an analytical applications team.
John has built start-up organizations from the ground up and he has reengineered business units of Fortune 500 firms to reach their potential. He has directly managed and run - sales, marketing, consulting, support and product development organizations.
He has been a technology leader with expertise and experience spanning all operational areas with a focus on strategy, product innovation, growth and efficient execution.
Thompson holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Ferris State University and a MBA in Marketing from DePaul University.
Disclaimer:When I bring technology vendors on the show, you should know that they are not sponsors or affiliates. They're simply here to give you a broader perspective.
Puneet Gangrade is a Customer Success Engineer, an active amateur soccer and badminton player and a resident of New York City who originally hails from Indore, India
He works at Habu, a data clean room software company, with the goal of creating reliable data and media strategies for all of his clients. He is responsible to work with Habu’s Engineering, Product teams, and clients on end-to-end workflows including clean room adoption, onboarding, planning, implementation, and growth. Habu works across distributed data platforms that allow agencies, publishers, advertisers, and their partners to truly unlock the potential of data and collaborate in a privacy-safe manner.
He has been a data clean room enthusiast since the beginning of 2018. Previously, he worked as a Digital Analytics Specialist at Time Inc till Oct 2017 and as a Data Science Team Lead at MightyHive, an adtech agency from early 2018 to mid-2022. He has a BS in Computer Science and earned his MS in Marketing Intelligence from Fordham University Gabelli School of Business, with a concentration in Marketing and Analytics.
Amid the rise of advanced measurement techniques in media and other industries, he likes to keep learning about various data clean room technologies and constantly think of use cases in media, finance, CPG, pharma, etc. where data clean rooms could be leveraged. He continues his passion for everything related to data clean rooms and data collaboration at Habu.
This is the third in our series on Revenue Operations, which also gets called Marketing Ops, or if you prefer, Mops.
Our guest grew up on the west coast and received his degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
Over the course of his 20 year professional career, Vito Mazzarino has been both a company owner and an employee brought in to help with Marketing and Business Development. While doing that, he grew to love using automation to streamline marketing & sales processes.
By the middle of the 2010s, he knew the automation tools well enough to implement them. He took this, along with a move to the other coast, specifically Montreal Quebec, as a signal that he should start his own agency.
Growth Geyser was born in 2018 to strategize and deploy automation that grows a company's customer base and hits their sales targets.
This is the second episode in our Revenue Ops series.
As Partner and Chief Strategy Officer of The Pedowitz Group, Dr. Debbie Qaqish has helped marketing teams drive revenue growth, foster customer centricity and lead digital transformation. With a focus on revenue operations, the customer experience and a personalized, omni-channel marketing mix, Dr. Debbie has established herself as a thought leader and digital pioneer, spearheading the overdue shift of traditional marketing strategies to what she coined as “revenue marketing” in 2011. Since then, marketing operations became her area of expertise, devising strategy-to-execution plans that earn marketing a seat at the table.
Dr. Debbie has published over one hundred articles, blogs, podcasts, webinars and white papers and in 2021 published "From Backroom to Boardroom"
Dr. Debbie earned her doctorate in 2019 from the University of Phoenix.
Sales has been around forever. But how long have we had marketing? In North America, it's the late 1800s and early 1900s.
You'd get an idea of what they were focused on by reading the journal of the US agricultural economics Bureau. In it, they chronicled the 1937 annual meeting the National Association of marketing officials (You may know it by its current name, the American Marketing Association). The proceedings were entirely about the marketing of… farm products. Producing and selling as many commodities as possible, to as many regions as possible.
Despite being in just one category, this assembly of academia and Industry was trying to formalize how this function would blend in with the other departments, like sales, within the average American business. Fast forward nearly a century, there seems to be a new framework on the horizon for how the marketing and sales functions should be organized - and it's called Revenue Operations. The purpose of this four part series is to go inside businesses where it's being used and listen to thought leaders who have written about it.
For this first episode of the series, we going into the trenches with someone possessing a diverse blend of experience spanning Revenue Operations, Marketing, Sales, and Product, Lawrence Quan brings a holistic view of revenue to startups of all stages.
He is Director, Growth Marketing with LTSE. He has also built growth teams at Rewind and led Growth Marketing at Clearco. On the side, Lawrence works with seed, Series A, and Series B SaaS companies to build and scale go-to-market engines.
Listen to the various places he's seen RevOps in organizations but wherever it sits, he stresses that it is a team sport. Hear how a revenue-focus gets infused into the Marketing Mix, and how the best marketing ideas don't always come from marketing.
Let me run a scenario by you: I want you to have something I'm not finished making, and I'm not going to let you buy it, but I will let you pay to use it. and you will continue to pay me over time to use this thing that I continue to work on. And while you use it, I will get to see what you're doing with my product. And I'll use that information to figure out how I can sell you new things.
It doesn't sound like a very good deal for you as a buyer, does it? But this is exactly how SAAS works, and most of the software in B2B and the world for that matter is now bought & sold this way, marketers don't skip a beat explaining this aspect of their product. But surprisingly, some things about SAAS products do trip them up. And today we're going to talk with someone who's seen almost everything that can go wrong in marketing saas.
Mark Evans has worked in & written about the SaaS space for his whole career. He began as a technology journalist for the Globe & Mail, National Post, and Bloomberg News. Moving on from there, he co-founded what ended up being a wildly unsuccessful startup. Some of the mistakes you'll hear are ones that he himself has made.
He now helps B2B SaaS companies accelerate growth with rock-solid marketing foundations underpinned by positioning, messaging, brand storytelling, and go-to-market plans.
Through his consultancy Marketing Spark he works with B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, brand strategist and coach.
he spends a lot of time focused on positioning, strategy, and systems that drive consistent and successful marketing,
We spoke to him in his hometown of Toronto, where in off-hours you can find him playing hockey and tennis.
This is the last episode we're covering in our series around product marketing books. The books in the three previous shows gave foundational advice that would benefit any product manager or product marketing manager in their career. But there's a single vertical that has idiosyncrasies setting it apart from other industries, and you should know about them if you're going to market these kind of products.
The industry that does things differently is High tech - and today's book not only explains how to market these products, it boils it down into simple steps that you can apply on the job.
Ted Marena has been in the tech sector for over 25 years, working his way from engineering to sales and onto marketing roles.
Marena came out with the book "High-Tech Marketing Simplified" in 2022. It builds upon his initial book "Marketing Simplified." He earned a BSEE from the University of Connecticut and a MBA from Bentley University. I caught up with him in the High Tech mecca of Silicon Valley where he lives with his wife & sons.
Product Marketing Managers go through trying times, but possibly the moments where these stresses are most concentrated are when their function is initially being formed, and of course when a new product is being launched. Key decisions are made at these times, and they are extra stressful when you have to make those decisions in a vacuum, without a formulated strategy to guide its development.
Our guest's book takes you through a dry run of this whole process. It gives you questions that begin at the genesis of a product, following through topics that you ought to readily answer at that particular stage. By testing how well you're able to answer those questions, you can catch any gaps before they turn into stress-inducing all-night work marathons.
Yasmeen Turayhi is an authority on product management. She's taught Bootcamps and workshops for Global companies and universities such as Harvard and MIT, and been a mentor at Founders Institute. In addition to her three books on this subject, she has also written dramatic screenplays, one of which was feted at International Film Festivals in Beirut and Hollywood. She is the host of "Gateways to Awakening" a podcast dealing with wellness, personal development, and higher consciousness.
Unicorn, Incubator, Angel, Seed round, Pitch deck, CAC & CLV. These are all buzzwords used by startups.
There is one word that's used in startup culture which, unlike the buzzwords, is grounded in reality. Its methodology nudges them to design products that fit the dire needs of the early adopters, and then ride a wave of growth as the wider mainstream market adopts it.
We call this methodology lean and from Eric Ries on down, there have been some great founders who have taken time out and written down how they have implemented lean. Today's guest is one of those people. He thought there ought to be a book explaining the differences in the lean approach when you're in B2B.
The resulting book, Lean B2B, guides those of us in these kinds of startup companies just as well as direct to consumer folks are helped by the best lean books out there that revolve around B2C. I know that B2B product Marketers, especially those trying to generate demand for new products, will be keen to hear the methods in this book.
Etienne Garbugli is a five-time entrepreneur and in three of those, he was a Founder. Feeling he should help other entrepreneurs and innovators build products for this market, he wrote "Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want" releasing the first edition in 2014 and the second edition in 2022. He is also the author of the books: Find Your Market, The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook, and Solving Product.
This episode is the first in a series on product marketing. In my opinion, this is one of the toughest roles someone can have in a company. As its two-word name suggests, it sits in no-mans land between other well entrenched corporate functions. Yet, to get external clients to fall in love with what you make, you've got to have good product marketing.
As squishy as the concept of Love is, it's what today's guest chose as the theme for her book on Product Marketing, which came out in 2022.
Martina Lauchengco is the product marketing partner at SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) and a partner at Costanoa Ventures, a boutique early-stage venture capital firm. Those positions combined have her advising Fortune 500 companies and early-stage startups on product marketing. Her writing has been featured in TechCrunch and VentureBeat. Prior to this Martina worked at Microsoft and Netscape after receiving her BA and MA from Stanford.
She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two kids, and lectures at nearby Berkeley in their engineering graduate program.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
Pocket vs Instapaper
Questions Product Marketing Managers should ask about users:
- What are they trying to do?
- Do they recognize and prioritize this problem?
- What is motivating them to solve the problem?
- What compels them to take action?
- What in this product delivers the most value?
- Who is most likely to value and buy this product?
- What starts the journey toward acquiring the product?
- How might a product get discovered and become more desired over the entire journey?
- How might we reduce friction in acquiring the product?
Malcolm Gladwell
HEART metrics:
- Happiness
- Engagement
- Acquisition
- Retention
- Task Success
The book's Amazon page: "Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products"
Martina on LinkedIn
Here is a look back at marketing trends, as seen by 19 of this past year's guests. What they feel is most important in marketing and where they think we're going next.
Five key themes of 2022 that will carry into 2023:
- Analytics is Everywhere
- Translating data into revenue dollars
- Recasted relationship with Sales
- Doing More with Knowing Less (privacy concerns)
- Things made possible by AI
My guest, after receiving a degree in psychology, worked as a barista at Starbucks and a local high-end hotel. In a conversation about career paths with the hotel's HR manager, she heard about the British Columbia Institute of Technology's two-year co-op and classroom-based marketing communications programme. She enrolled. Her first co-op internship was with a start-up automotive marketing company, where she was supposed to shadow their Pay-Per-Click campaign manager. After her first week, the supervisor resigned, and an executive asked her to take over, and right after getting her marcomm certificate she worked there full-time, growing out their PPC team. That led to working as a PPC expert at an agency, and within three and a half years she rose to a director-level position there.
In 2021 she went on her own, founding Good AF Consulting which focuses on helping find and fix issues within a brand's PPC and SEO efforts. Wanting to exercise her passion for sharing time and knowledge with new marketers, she has also gone back to BCIT but as an instructor in the very marketing programme she graduated from. In addition to teaching, she mentors new marketers, writes and works hard to leave the industry in a better state than the way she found it.
Please welcome someone who's been named to PPC Hero's list of the Top 25 people in PPC, Amalia Fowler.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Amalia on Twitter * Amalia on Linkedin
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Her series of LinkedIn articles on Audits: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6988649570272452608/ and https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amaliafowler_googleads-activity-6990785436600201217-kKsB
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Her newsletter for empathetic managers, The Wholehearted Manager
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-123-ppc-health-check-with-amalia-fowler/
Darryl Praill is the CMO at Agorapulse where he leads a global team of 40. Prior to that, he held executive roles with companies like SAP, IBM, Kinaxis, Airbus and VanillaSoft. He has consulted for AC Nielsen, Salesforce.com, UBM and Tweed. He is also a speaker at keynotes and on podcasts (which at last count runs into the hundreds).
You become convinced after hearing Darryl, he has a commanding grasp of how the social media game is played. He got onto social platforms earlier than anyone I know. He was posting audio & video content as soon as they'd let him, and his posts were from eyebrow-raising locales such as on top of parking garages, to the middle of a golf course fairway to the Arc de Triomph in Paris. The comments and engagement he generates must be seen to be believed. Where did he get this sixth sense on using social media? I think he learned to think strategically growing up in Chatham Ontario, where he played chess and became one of the highest-ranked high school students in his region.
Yet, to play the social media game in the 2020s takes not just posting strategies but also sophisticated listening, triaging and interacting with our audience. And in his day-job marketing a social media management tool, he has a birds-eye view of how tools have evolved to help us play this game.
He is one of the only people to have appeared twice on this podcast, and he joins me today from his home office in Ottawa. My friend, Darryl Praill.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Darryl's Inside Inside Sales podcast (which is one of two podcasts that he hosts) * Darryl's been on LinkedIn since 2004 * Darryl's been on Twitter since 2008 * Darryl works at the Social Media Management software company Agorapulse * Other S.M. Mgmt tools: Hootsuite, * Recent survey of social media campaigns, showing 1.8% of links contained UTM parameters.
Episode Reboot. * Go listen to the other talk I had with Darryl back in Episode 28: Thought-Leading Content on LinkedIn
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-122-evolving-social-tools-with-darryl-praill/
No about analytics is complete without talking about how to visualize data. A picture's worth a thousand words, right? In the past, when data was in a spreadsheet, it only took hitting that 'chart' button to render some numbers visually. But for many of us, this experience has moved to a browser where we build our own report, either in an interface like GA or in a standalone visualization tool.
I'm talking with someone who's really good at a visualization tool, but came by his power-user status in a roundabout way. My guest was born and raised in Hawaii. After he got his Marketing degree, he worked at an ad agency where he did everything from videography to FB and G-ads writing. That, and also building a few websites, stoked his curiosity for how the tagging and the analytics behind all these things worked. He didn't just want to get at raw data, he wanted actionable data. He felt that to optimize his marketing, if he only knew how to present visitor behaviour data visually, the answer would be apparent - even obvious.
He went down YouTube rabbit holes, asked around at conferences, and eventually landed on the beta of Google Data Studio, now called Looker Studio. And that's the Data Visualization tool we're talking about with JJ Reynolds, who joins us from Reno NV.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- JJ's agency, Mediauthentic
- JJ's LookerStudio.VIP
- JJ's cohort group, BetterThanData
- Google Looker Studio
- Criteo
- NextRoll (formerly AdRoll)
You may want to check out these related episodes:
- https://funnelreboot.com/episode-9-how-dashboards-make-the-whole-funnel-work/
- https://funnelreboot.com/episode-93-visualizing-making-data-valuable-with-eric-boissoneault/
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-121-looker-studio-101-with-jj-reynolds/
e had to see it coming. We marketers have been getting more and more data. From on-premise CRMs and site logs in the early days, then marketing SaaS products and API calls that pipe data in all directions, there's data everywhere. It goes without saying that we need help making sense of all this data. Most marketers wouldn't consider themselves natural statisticians. Enter the analyst, who knows how to wrangle, normalize and visualize those data points, and maybe even get it cleaned and dressed for dinner.
There are marketing teams who've got analysts onboard, but it isn't an industry-standard practice just yet. Some leaders in the analytics community make the case elegantly of how this role helps marketers. And I'd count my guest today as being a vocal advocate for why we need analysts.
In his day job, he is Senior Director of Analytics at Search Discovery. But that only scratches the surface of all that he does. He's also a perennial conference speaker and writer on many topics in analytics. To me, he typifies how one can be a digital analyst despite having a non-analytics background. In his case, he obtained an Architecture degree before entering the field.
Joining me from Columbus, Ohio, let's hear from a man who some call the quintessential analyst, Tim Wilson
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Tim on Twitter where you're bound to see some of his nature photography * Tim on LinkedIn * Tim's personal website * Monthly events he helps host in his hometown Web Analytics Wednesdays in Columbus * MeasureSlack * See his Superweek 2022 talk * Avinash Kaushik * Causal Inference * HAL9000 * Jim Cain * Simo Ahava * R programming language
Episode Reboot: Check out the podcast which Tim co-hosts, Analytics Power Hour
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-120-the-analysts-role-in-marketing-with-tim-wilson/
As Google’s Chief Analytics Evangelist, Kevin Hartman is responsible for leading the design, implementation, and evolution of programs and approaches that help businesses around the world realize the opportunities presented by data.
Kevin has a proven track record of building large, global, high-functioning analytics organizations from scratch and deep experience in leading large profit & loss centers and cross-functional teams, identifying business opportunities, and creating effective marketing programs. He has also written “Digital Marketing Analytics: In Theory And In Practice” which is now in its second edition.
Kevin’s decades of work in the digital analytics space, with most of that time spent leading large analytics teams at a major global advertising agency and Google. He has taught analytics for nearly 10 years at Universities near to his home, such as The University of Chicago, The University of Notre Dame, and The University of Illinois.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Kevin’s Book’s site * Information is Beautiful – David McCandless * Boston Consulting Group * Scott Berinato * Dona Wong * Tidy Data providers: trifacta.com and Openrefine.Org * Eric Peterson‘s Analytics Pyramid:
Episode Reboot: look into Kevin’s course on ELVTR For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-119-digital-marketing-analytics-with-kevin-hartman/
In digital marketing, we're all striving to do what works. Yet whether we're in-house or at an agency, we're basing our definition of what works on a small sample size. Honestly, none of us can zoom out far enough to the general traits of successful marketing. That is, unless you're someone who's tasked with measuring marketing data at the organization with the single-largest quantity of it on the planet.
My guest has gained a lot of insight on successful sellers in his role as Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist, where he has led over 2,500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers. He is a Senior Fellow at Wharton and holds degrees from Purdue University and UCLA. And in his book "Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts" the difference (I'm simplifying here) is that the best ones humanize their funnels for their buyers.
"Wait," you say, "we already know how to treat people nicely, we've known how to do that since humans have been around. You're right, yet it's surprising how we lose the human element is when we move commercial interactions online. My guest wants us to learn - or more correctly, relearn how to make our marketing more human.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Wharton Professor Peter Fader * Dunning Kruger Effect * A Few Good Men * Neil on Twitter * Neil on LinkedIn
Episode Reboot * convertedbook.com/toolkit
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-118-converted-with-neil-hoyne/
Paul Roetzer graduated with a journalism degree from the E.W. Scripps School at Ohio University and a few years afterwards he founded Ready North (formerly PR 20/20). In 2016 he founded the Marketing AI Institute. The idea for such an organization came from what Paul saw when AI began impacting his agency. He thought the only way marketers like him could work alongside AI would be by better understanding its capabilities.
Part of their vision of educating marketers is through an annual event, and in 2019 they held their inaugural Marketing AI Conference. MAICON was on pause during lockdowns, but it came back in 2022.
In 2022, He and co-author Mike Kaput published the book we're talking about, Marketing Artificial Intelligence. The book draws on years of research and dozens of interviews with AI marketers, executives, engineers, and entrepreneurs. He has also authored The Marketing Performance Blueprint (2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (2012). Through his podcast and as a conference speaker, Paul makes AI approachable and actionable for marketers.
He and his family live in Cleveland, Ohio.
People, Products and Concepts in the Show: * Paul's profile on LinkedIn and on Twitter * Marketing AI book's site * MAICON event held each summer in Cleveland * His Post: The Future of Business Is AI, or Obsolete * MarketMuse * Descript * AI's use of Large Language models * Kai-Fu Lee * LaMDA * GPT3 * Google's Multimodal Model (MUM) * DallE 2 * You may also be interested in this episode with Paul's colleague, Cathy McPhillips as well as with a MAICON speaker, Christopher S. Penn.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-117-marketing-artificial-intelligence-with-paul-roetzer/
In this episode I’m giving you the process that’s used in my agency’s work to get B2B companies onto Google’s full analytics stack. This episode is split into two parts.
Installing GA4 (from 1:30 to 10:45) – For the first third of this episode, I go through the steps that companies should follow to install GA4, including setting up streams, conversions and links to Google Ads accounts.
Installing Google and third party components for consolidated analysis and visualization of your marketing data (listen for melody at 10:45 to end) – the remaining time roams through the rest of the tools that give a complete picture of your B2B funnel.
In this episode I’m giving you the process that’s used in my agency’s work to get B2B companies onto Google’s full analytics stack. This episode is split into two parts.
Installing GA4 (from 1:30 to 10:45) – For the first third of this episode, I go through the steps that companies should follow to install GA4, including setting up streams, conversions and links to Google Ads accounts.
Installing Google and third party components for consolidated analysis and visualization of your marketing data (listen for melody at 10:45 to end) – the remaining time roams through the rest of the tools that give a complete picture of your B2B funnel.
The funnel is dead. Long live the Persuasion Experience. That’s the view of my guest today.
Alisha Conlin Hurd did something that’s rare for people in their 20s by turning a side hustle into an agency that she co-founded. Their firm, Persuasion Experience, works on marketing brands that require funnels for lead generation, SaaS, and consumer branding.
She shares experiences learned working for every kind of brand, from emergency plumbers and home builders, to Brazilian butt lifts and porn addiction counselors.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Alisha Conlin-Hurd – YouTube * Alisha’s Twitter profile * Eugene Schwartz * The podcast, Unapologetically Ambitious, which she co-hosts
You may also be interested in past Funnel Reboot episodes related to this topic:
- 16: Role of UX in a site’s marketing effectiveness, with Farhad Khan
- 65: The theory and Practice behind CRO, with Deborah O’Malley
- 77: Stop arguing over leads; start scoring them, with Gary Amaral
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-115-optimizing-experiences-that-convert-with-alisha-conlin-hurd/
We don't have the right to retain our visitors' information just because it's possible on the internet.
Complying with data privacy laws can be a confusing, stressful process. We help businesses embrace a new way of working with data, going beyond compliance to create a privacy-friendly strategy that builds trust with customers.
Jodi Daniels is a privacy consultant. She founded Red Clover Advisors in 2017, and through it, she assists companies to create privacy programs, build customer trust and achieve privacy law compliance. Jodi also serves as a Fractional Chief Privacy Officer to small and medium companies. Through frequent speaking appearances and her own podcast, she shares practical tips so companies can carrying on marketing, but in a way that's compliant and ethical.
She holds a BBA and an MBA from Emory University, and lives with her family in Atlanta.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * List of US States that have passed Privacy legislation or have proposed bills * Jodi's Red Clover Advisors consultancy and their Twitter profile * Jodi's LinkedIn Profile * Podcast: She said Privacy, he said Security * Video by John Oliver on data brokers * Jodi's book
Episode Reboot. Take the How Data Compliant is Your Business Quiz
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-114-why-privacy-is-good-for-marketing-with-jodi-daniels/
Designing Websites involves dealing with Domain Registrars, Hosting Providers, CMSs, Page templates and scripts that run forms. We haven’t even mentioned the things visitors see like text, images and audiovisual assets. It’s a lot.
My guest has set out to take the complexity out of all this. Knowing that we learn best when we’re absorbed in a story, he rolled all his principles into a book geared for anyone who’s been handed the keys to a website or work with a web designer.
Patrick Villemaire is the founder of Blue Eclipse Inc, a Canadian web agency. His passion is making the web a better place and he has been building websites for over 20 years.
Patrick is a graduate of McMaster University with a double major in Multimedia and Communications, and a minor in English. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, son and a barking dog. Outside of building websites, he likes to listen to music and play the occasional game of hockey.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Steve Krug * Webby awards * Patrick’s Web design firm: https://blueeclipse.ca * His DIY website builder: https://websitefuel.ca/ * The book’s website: https://websitesurvivalguide.com * Patrick’s Instagram Profile
For more information, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-113-website-survival-guide-with-patrick-villemaire/
People focus too much on posting content and not enough on asking what content they should post. We can easily get on a treadmill, writing about topic after topic. This results in treating everything as a fluff-piece, overlooking the power of content. And though this hyperactivity may look good on our status reports, and please the search engines, is that who really matters in this endeavour?
I'm reminded of the movie Jurassic Park, as financier John Hammond briefs mathematician Ian Malcolm on how the dinosaurs. Malcome scolds him for tinkering with the building blocks of life.
In the same way, we should think about the person consuming our content, pausing not only to ask if we can create a piece of content for them, but to ask if we should create it.
Judging what content gets made is a time-honoured skill. News media and the publishing industry have formalized it into the role of the editor. Today we'll talk with someone with an editorial background, to learn how they think, so we can judge our content just like they do.
My guest spent 16 years as senior-level journalist and editor at top Canadian newsrooms, such as The Globe and Mail, CBC.ca and the Ottawa Citizen. Melanie then directed the content for non-profits and organizations like Export Development Corporation.
She's happy to share what she's learned about Digital Communications on the stage at TEDx, or as a lecturer at Carleton University, where she originally received her journalism degree.
She has now moved into creating content under her own banner as Owner of Big Stride Media. She lives in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, with her husband and two sons.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Melanie's firm, Big Stride Media * Melanie on LinkedIn * Her newsletter, "Owning the Story" * Intel's impactful story-based adThe disastrous experience Subway had with their spokesperson Jared
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-112-owning-the-story-with-melanie-coulson/
There is a lot at stake when Companies develop some technological or physical product. But they face an equally high risk in getting the product positioning right. Weak positioning can mean the difference between success or failure.
When we don't have our positioning nailed, it's as if we're talking to someone who doesn't speak our language. And when they don't acknowledge us, we repeat the same message even louder, as if that will get our point across. For those who remember John Cusack 80s films, you might be familiar with the movie Better Off Dead's scene with a French foreign exchange student having dinner with her American host family.
Shouting doesn't work when you're using the wrong language, and it doesn't work with the wrong positioning either. Luckily, someone has come up with the process for finding the best positioning for our product, saving our market from being subjected to random jargon.
April Dunford was a startup executive, running sales, marketing and product at seven B2B technology startups over the course of 25 years. She is now a consultant who has had the privilege of bringing her positioning expertise to more than 100 companies. She codified her process in the 2019 book "Obviously Awesome," which makes these ideas about positioning accessible to any company
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Scene from Better off Dead (mentioned segment starts at 1:30) * Violinist Joshua Bell * Net Promoter Score * Wordle * Clayton Christiansen
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-111-obviously-awesome-with-april-dunford/
We humans are good at dealing with small numbers. So good, scientists have coined the word Subitizing to describe how we know small numbers as well as the back of our hand. The opposite is also true. We can’t differentiate big numbers. We know that 10 to the power of 10 is bigger than 10 to the power of 9, but how much bigger? Even on hearing that they differ by a factor of billions, we stumble to gauge that kind of scale. This puts those of us who present numbers in a pickle. Historical greats like Florence Nightingale had a terrible time presenting her data to government leaders. She broke with convention, framing everything in terms of soldiers not statistics, to argue how to prevent needless deaths in military hospitals. The book in today’s show explains methods used by her & others to convey numbers that the brain has a hard time grasping.
Knowing tactics that worked for Florence, should at the very least help us convince management to approve our marketing initiatives.
Since graduating with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from NYU, Karla has written columns for Medium and appeared on NPR and CBS Sunday Morning. She has also written for many magazines and won an award for the Best Science/Health story from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Her first book was Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others. We’re talking today about the second book Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, with Chip Heath
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Paul Slovik * Steven Pinker * Karla’s newsletter The Starr Report on Substack. * Karla’s website
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-110-making-numbers-count-with-karla-starr/
William of Ockham - 1287 – 1347 was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and catholic theologian, born in a small village in Surrey England. He had a way of reducing explanations down to their essential core, frequently and effectively showing that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon was usually the right one. Ockham used this so much, his name has become associated with this principle - which we know today as Occam's razor.
Dan White graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He is equally passionate about using imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. If people understand and remember an idea thanks to a clever framework or visual metaphor they will be able to use it in their day-to-day work. You can consider his book Smart Marketing to help you apply Occam's Razor to today's marketing problems.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Byron Sharp * George Box "all models are wrong; but some are useful" * Millward Brown and the MMA Growth Debates * The Professor and the Madman * Dan's LinkedIn profile Dan's Twitter profile
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-109-the-smart-marketing-book-with-dan-white/
In 1942 economist Joseph Schumpeter claimed at the core of our economic system was a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." He called it creative destruction
Half a century later, Harvard professor Clayton Christiansen wrote in "The Innovator's Dilemma" that "By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption…The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption."
Which of these two is telling the truth? They both are, it depends on companies and the individuals within them. It's up to them whether they will change with the times or be left behind.
My guest today is Engelina Jaspers, who has experienced revolving-door CEOs, business course-corrections and lots of reinventions during her 30-year corporate career. Across all her VP leadership roles — marketing, brand strategy, environmental sustainability, corporate communications — none escaped disruption. After being tapped to lead multiple company-wide transformations, Engelina became a student and teacher of business and career agility.
These experiences led her to develop the MARKETING FLEXOLOGY Management Framework™ — a mindset and a toolset for future-proofing your career, your team and your marketing platform. Engelina shares marketing agility know-how in her book, presentations and workshops so you, too, can anticipate and prosper from unplanned change.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * NRC's Downloadable (PDF) 5-point Agility Scale * Uniform Commercial Code * Engelina's LinkedIn Profile * Engelina's website and info on the book: marketingflexology.com
Please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-108-marketing-flexology-with-engelina-jaspers/ for more information
In 1942 economist Joseph Schumpeter claimed at the core of our economic system was a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." He called it creative destruction
Half a century later, Harvard professor Clayton Christiansen wrote in "The Innovator's Dilemma" that "By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption…The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption."
Which of these two is telling the truth? They both are, it depends on companies and the individuals within them. It's up to them whether they will change with the times or be left behind.
My guest today is Engelina Jaspers, who has experienced revolving-door CEOs, business course-corrections and lots of reinventions during her 30-year corporate career. Across all her VP leadership roles — marketing, brand strategy, environmental sustainability, corporate communications — none escaped disruption. After being tapped to lead multiple company-wide transformations, Engelina became a student and teacher of business and career agility.
These experiences led her to develop the MARKETING FLEXOLOGY Management Framework™ — a mindset and a toolset for future-proofing your career, your team and your marketing platform. Engelina shares marketing agility know-how in her book, presentations and workshops so you, too, can anticipate and prosper from unplanned change.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * NRC's Downloadable (PDF) 5-point Agility Scale * Uniform Commercial Code * Engelina's LinkedIn Profile * Engelina's website and info on the book: marketingflexology.com
Please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-108-marketing-flexology-with-engelina-jaspers/ for more information
Email is a powerful medium. At minimum, it serves a company's need for transacting with vendors & customers, etc. But some companies go much further, putting it at the centre of their business. The author of today's book, has done this in three distinct businesses. How did he get there? Just listen to his story.
In his primary school years, Matt Paulson played games like SimCity on his family's PC. Keen to share what he learned with other fans, he made a website and watched as visitors started coming by the hundreds. Learning that you could make money by putting banner ads on your site, he signed his little website up and small cheques started rolling in. But for the time being, it just served him as a way to make pocket money.
Like many University students, he found himself in the middle of his studies, needing money to cover tuition costs. The college newspaper had part-time job openings for writers. Between that and taking freelance gigs on ProBlogger, mainly about personal finance, he managed to get by.
Matt then fused his writing skills with selling banner ads like he'd done before. He launched a finance blog that generated about the same income as you'd make on a computer science graduate's salary. He made many websites along this theme, and because they were highly dependent on Google's algorithm for traffic, they rode some high highs and low lows. In the aftermath of one rankings smackdown, he resolved to never give a tech platform the power to damage his business like this.
The solution was to manage their own content distribution. That meant showing their brand on a variety of finance portals, but also networking directly with their audience, getting them used to seeing the site's brand in places like their email inbox. So they launched an email newsletter. That newsletter, called MarketBeat, now has three million email subscribers. Financial product companies pay top dollar to advertise in the newsletter, to get a piece of the one million monthly outbound clicks it receives. Along with premium subscription products, this business now employees thirteen people and grosses more than $25 million in top-line annual revenue.
You now know the story of a young guy who founded an email empire. And while he's proud of it, he's equally passionate about living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota with his wife and 3 young kids.
Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Matt's book "Email Marketing Demystified," (3rd edition release date: fall 2022) * CCPA * Email coregistration * Matt's personal website * Matt's LinkedIn Profile and Twitter Profile
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-107-email-marketing-demystified-with-matt-paulson/
Email is a powerful medium. At minimum, it serves a company's need for transacting with vendors & customers, etc. But some companies go much further, putting it at the centre of their business. The author of today's book, has done this in three distinct businesses. How did he get there? Just listen to his story.
In his primary school years, Matt Paulson played games like SimCity on his family's PC. Keen to share what he learned with other fans, he made a website and watched as visitors started coming by the hundreds. Learning that you could make money by putting banner ads on your site, he signed his little website up and small cheques started rolling in. But for the time being, it just served him as a way to make pocket money.
Like many University students, he found himself in the middle of his studies, needing money to cover tuition costs. The college newspaper had part-time job openings for writers. Between that and taking freelance gigs on ProBlogger, mainly about personal finance, he managed to get by.
Matt then fused his writing skills with selling banner ads like he'd done before. He launched a finance blog that generated about the same income as you'd make on a computer science graduate's salary. He made many websites along this theme, and because they were highly dependent on Google's algorithm for traffic, they rode some high highs and low lows. In the aftermath of one rankings smackdown, he resolved to never give a tech platform the power to damage his business like this.
The solution was to manage their own content distribution. That meant showing their brand on a variety of finance portals, but also networking directly with their audience, getting them used to seeing the site's brand in places like their email inbox. So they launched an email newsletter. That newsletter, called MarketBeat, now has three million email subscribers. Financial product companies pay top dollar to advertise in the newsletter, to get a piece of the one million monthly outbound clicks it receives. Along with premium subscription products, this business now employees thirteen people and grosses more than $25 million in top-line annual revenue.
You now know the story of a young guy who founded an email empire. And while he's proud of it, he's equally passionate about living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota with his wife and 3 young kids.
Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Matt's book "Email Marketing Demystified," (3rd edition release date: fall 2022) * CCPA * Email coregistration * Matt's personal website * Matt's LinkedIn Profile and Twitter Profile
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-107-email-marketing-demystified-with-matt-paulson/
Our guest came out of university not knowing what field he was going to go into. But he managed to get an internship at ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi. From there he went to work on a variety of accounts, dream clients like Penguin Books, Budweiser and Sony PlayStation. He then settled into the online entertainment space working with goalpoker.com and jackpotparty.com. And in between that and some unpublished novel writing, he found his real groove, giving advice on what young marketers could learn from things he had done. So after a career that’s done just about everything that you could do agency and client side in marketing he’s now sharing his advice.
NB: I apologize for technical issues we had with the recording – hope you’ll listen to what Harry has to say
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Ads by Car manufacturer Skoda * Two types of campaigns, parallel to film-making’s Above the Line / Below the Line functions * Harry’s LinkedIn Profile * The book’s website
EXCERPT: DON’T BE DERAILED BY REJECTION You’re going to get rejected. A lot. That’s just a given, and if you’re on A Grade student who’s sailed through school, university, and sporting success with the gilded sheen of a winner, this is going to sting a little.
Get used to it.
This isn’t a game of round pegs for round holes. Every hole has more edges than a jigsaw and there are always shit loads of more qualified people trying desperately to mould themselves to fit in. The bravery you need to defeat this early rejection will just be a leather jerkin when compared to the metaphorical suit of armour you’ll need later on, when whole campaigns or businesses you’ve poured your soul into are rejected without so much as a thank you email.
Please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-106-brands-bandwagons-bullshit-with-harry-lang/ for more information!
The best plan is not the most correct plan. It's not the one that requires barricading your door, working day and night for a week to write out. It's the one you stick to.
This logic can apply to diets, preparing a speech, training for competition, or keeping a New year's resolution. It can also be applied to one thing that is rarely fully implemented - a marketing plan. A great hack to overcome false-starts is to follow a program that's short enough, you see results in as little as 30 days. And that's the tactic used in today's book.
Written in 2019, "Action Tracking" is aimed at formulating a digital marketing strategy. Its author, Katrina German, came by her expertise here in a circuitous way. She's worked in different media, from books, to television to running a technology company. The common element was that they all centred around communicating stories, and reaching and marketing to the audiences hearing them. She's been helping companies for the last 6 years. Tying digital actions by sales and marketing to a coherent plan that's aligned with their strategy.
But this talk isn't just about scaffolding and building your online strategy. We talk about the drawbacks of current social channels. The issue of social media's impact on mental welfare was brought to the fore by the 2020 movie "The Social Dilemma." The platforms knew about their negative impact on audiences before we as marketers did, but now that we are aware, we can't ignore our impact. When we use sensational headlines so our messages spread further, it ups the ante for all posts to please the algorithm. This degrades everyone's experience and subjects our followers to mentally-corrosive content. This isn't the kind of Internet Katrina wanted to see, and so she did something about it. Her most recent reincarnation is as founder of Ethical Digital, a Canadian agency that respects the voices of women and Indigenous and other minority communities. Their belief is that more inclusion in the ranks of marketing practitioners will improve the digital experience for everyone. I can't argue with her here and I hope you stick around to hear this upbeat tone at the end of our talk.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Using Ads to test your Headlines, a tactic made famous by Tim Ferris * Google Analytics Chrome Extension * Google Keyword Planner * Google Trends * CMSs like Squarespace * Marketing Automation tools like ActiveCampaign and MailChimp * Documentary "The Social Dilemma" * Katrina's LinkedIn Profile and Twitter profile
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-105-action-tracking-with-katrina-german/
Back in the early 2000s Our guest was in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve. That occupation was rocked by the events of 9/11, bringing him into active duty service for four years, and eventually serving for a total of 20 years.
After doing a master’s in marketing from Southern Illinois University, he felt he should put these skills to work for academic institutions, he went to work at University College at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is now the Marketing Director.
Through this journey, he saw a transition happening with how digital content works. Since the early days of the internet, content marketing has been the battle cry of countless marketing experts promising free attention forever in return for creating quality content. However, the majority of the work of matching content with consumers is done by algorithms on the dominant search, social, and e-commerce platforms. This once in a century paradigm shift requires new strategies for marketers.
I bet you don't just want to survive this data revolution but you probably want to move past this old regime.
Our guest chronicled how to make this change in his recent book, The Death of Content as King
You'll want to hear what Jon Hinderliter has to say about his 2020 book.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Jon's concept of a 'data democracy' like the early days of the Internet * Jon's LinkedIn Profile and Twitter Profile * The book's website
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-105-death-of-content-as-king-with-jon-hinderliter/
If you've listened to this show, you know that I believe we can base all the marketing decisions we make on data.
Janet Driscoll-Miller brings over twenty years of search engine marketing experience to Marketing Mojo and is considered a leading expert in her field. Janet has spoken at search engine and marketing conferences including Digital Summit, SMX Advanced, MarketingProfs B2B and Pubcon. Janet is also a frequent guest lecturer at colleges and universities including the University of Virginia and James Madison University.
In 2020, she co-authored Data-First Marketing with Julia Lim
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Janet's Agency, Marketing Mojo * Janet Driscoll Miller's LinkedIn profile and Twitter profile * The book's site: Data-firstmarketing.com
Episode Reboot. * Go to the special Page on Marketing Mojo created for Funnel Reboot listeners.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-103-data-first-marketing-with-janet-driscoll-miller/
If you've listened to this show, you know that I believe we can base all the marketing decisions we make on data.
Janet Driscoll-Miller brings over twenty years of search engine marketing experience to Marketing Mojo and is considered a leading expert in her field. Janet has spoken at search engine and marketing conferences including Digital Summit, SMX Advanced, MarketingProfs B2B and Pubcon. Janet is also a frequent guest lecturer at colleges and universities including the University of Virginia and James Madison University.
In 2020, she co-authored Data-First Marketing with Julia Lim
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Janet's Agency, Marketing Mojo * Janet Driscoll Miller's LinkedIn profile and Twitter profile * The book's site: Data-firstmarketing.com
Episode Reboot. * Go to the special Page on Marketing Mojo created for Funnel Reboot listeners.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-103-data-first-marketing-with-janet-driscoll-miller/
Consumers and corporate buyers no longer put blind trust in our brands. Nor do they trust big institutions. Nor religion. Nor the government. Nor the media. We do however still trust people like us. That's where influencers come in.
Gordon Glenister is a UK-based adviser on the business of working with influencers and running membership associations. Gordon launched the association arm of the UK's Branded Content Marketing Association, to support the influencer marketing industry. Additionally, he hosts “Influence”, the global podcast on influencer marketing. In 2021 he published the book Influencer Marketing Strategy
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Example of an influencer scorecard:
- Influencer monetization platforms like Patreon
- Scale using Influencer followers: Nano (1-10K), Micro (10K-100K), Macro (100K+)
- Launchmetrics research studies on influencers
- Joe Pulizzi
- Influencer Becky Li
- Influencer Louisa Hatt
- Influencers used in B2B setting: IBM's Ryan Bares profiled in episode of Gordon's podcast
- Instagram Influencer Sponsored Post Money Calculator
- Gordon's LinkedIn profile
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-102-influencer-marketing-strategy-with-gordon-glenister/
Think of the data you have on your customers as having value. It does, by the fact that the more you know your clients, the better you can serve them. This “unlocked potential revenue” of all your current customers can be quantified as your whole customer’s lifetime value (CLV) added together.
This number is known by finance people as Customer Equity, but it's much more than a mathematical formula. The value that VCs and public markets have put on assets such as loyalty programs and subscription lists is often greater than the value of a company's capital assets!
While it might sound like it has to do with finance, this is all highly related to marketing. This is because each tactical decision gets vetted by whether it will optimize CLV; it becomes your company's North Star.
Allison Hartsoe has strategize d the digital customer analytics for dozens of Fortune 500 customers throughout her career. She now leads an analytics consultancy in Portland OR, Ambition Data, and published the book, "The Age of Customer Equity", in 2021. She has been published in Forbes.com, MIT Technology Review, and Fast Company and somewhere in between all this writing, she found time to cycle across the USA.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Your Company’s Data May Be Worth More Than Your Company (Forbes Article) * Poshmark case study * Naked Wines case study * UTM parameters * Net Promoter Score * Allison's Podcast -Customer Equity Accelerator * Allison's YouTube channel * Watch this CLV Marketing Example: https://youtu.be/mPzpZtPxdxU
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-101-age-of-customer-equity-with-allison-hartsoe/
How would you feel if you picked up a book about work, and in the first few pages it tells you that one of the core principles your whole profession holds is flat-out wrong. In most cases, that would be grounds for slamming the book down and never going back to it. But when the book comes from the bestselling author of 10 books, you might read on and hear him out.
That's what I did with a 2021 book written by John Jantsch who is also a keynote marketing speaker.
He is a husband and father of four grown children and is a native Missourian. As he consulted for small businesses, he became known for approaching marketing pragmatically, something that many midwesterners are known for. Though it originated as the name of his 2006 book, Duct Tape Marketing has come to embody his blog, his podcast and his whole philosophy. It just shows how well good brand names…stick.
You'll hear John tell what most of us haven't grasped as the goal of marketing, and the steps his book uses to help us get full value out of our marketing. I guarantee that you will get value from listening to him, whether you are a business owner who wears the marketing hat part-time or you are a veteran career marketer.
Let's go hear from John Jantsch.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Site about The Ultimate Marketing Engine book, containing templates * John is also the author of * Duct Tape Marketing * The Referral Engine * SEO for Growth * Duct Tape Selling * The Commitment Engine * The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur: 366 Daily Meditations to Feed Your Soul and Grow Your Business * John's LinkedIn profile
Special Thanks to other podcasts I've had the honour to be a guest on: * Wendy Covey's Content Marketing, Engineered * Andrew Monro's Drinking with Freelancers * Kevin Dieny's Close the Loop
For more details, visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-100-ultimate-marketing-engine-with-john-jantsch/
Disclaimer: When I bring technology vendors on the show, you should know that they are not sponsors or affiliates. They're simply here to give you a broader perspective.
If you have been to the eye doctor for near or far sightedness, the equipment that's likely been used to assess you is a phoropter. The part that's put in front of your eyes looks somewhat like a pair of glasses, but it branches out from that with an imposing array of lenses, dials and machinery. You are shown an eye chart and the doctor flicks through alternate lenses, asking you to say whether the image is clearer with lens 1 or lens 2. When tests on the phoropter & other equipment is done, you end up with lens prescriptions that are right for you.
This process isn't unlike what's behind marketing's use of attribution models. They serve to show what impact advertising channels have on a company's revenue, with pre-set models, each one weighing the impact of digital touchpoints differently. By attributing revenue back to the channels and campaigns that helped acquire it, you get a clearer view of what you are getting for your marketing dollar.
Of course, marketers don't use phoropters, but doing attribution analysis does take specific tools, and that's what this episode takes us through.
My guest is Steffen Hedenbrandt, who's growth-oriented, data-driven and loves all parts of scaling a business. He worked at places like Upwork and Airtame before cofounding DreamData, where he serves as the Chief Marketing Officer.He has a bachelor's degree from Aalborg University and a Masters from Copenhagen Business School.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * https://dreamdata.io/selling-dreamdata-internally * BigQuery * Snowflake * Amazon Redshift * Steffen's LinkedIn profile and Twitter profile
More details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-99-tying-revenue-back-to-traffic-with-steffen-hedenbrandt/
Change is the constant in today's Marketing. The firms that adapt to that reality will survive. Those marketing employers that hold to conventional practices like daily office commutes and spliffs like Starbucks gift cards won't survive this environment for long.
My guest Amanda Farley knows this very well. She is a marketer, performance strategist, and business success leader. She is VP of Growth at Aimclear, a marketing agency dominant in customer acquisition and winner of 17 US Search Awards including 5X most recent Best Integrated Agency. Aimclear's differentiator is the balance of holistic brand-builds, PR, data, and integrated performance marketing.
Amanda’s experience includes a dozen years *A rising star on the American conference circuit, Amanda has electrified numerous search and social marketing conferences including SMX (Advanced, West, Report, etc.), HeroConf, PRSA Detroit, FoundCon, and TogetherDigital. She published critically respected thought leadership articles in first tier industry publications including SearchEngineLand and MarketingLand. Amanda judges the annual Global Content Awards and UK App Awards. She has also been a finalist for Landy’s Search Female Marketer of the Year.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Compensation Scale Surveys & calculations * Amanda's LinkedIn Profile * Amanda's email
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-98-built-to-change-how-to-future-proof-your-marketing-team-with-amanda-farley/
No corporate function in B2B was impacted by the events of 2020 as much as sales. Salesforces had to reengineer themselves just to survive. We in marketing had better understand how these new sales dynamics are affecting us. My guest will help us do just that.
Rick Endrulat's passion for revenue generation began at Watcom, a spinoff from the University of Waterloo. He was there as it grew and was acquired by the sixth-largest software company in the world. He then co-founded Virtual Causeway, a consultancy that helps enterprises scale up their demand generation.
Rick is a Quantum Shift Fellow with the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. A past recipient of Waterloo Region’s “40 Under 40,” Rick has also received Wilfrid Laurier’s MBA Alumni Award in 2008 and 2013, and Communitech’s Tech Impact Award for outstanding leadership and involvement in the local technology community. He is a member of Laurier’s President’s Council of Advisors, and a two-time winner of the Laziridis School of Business — Entrepreneurship & Innovation award. He has an Honours Degree in Arts and a Masters of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University.
Not one to stand still, Rick co-founded School of Rock Kitchener-Waterloo, which rapidly grew to become the largest music school in the community. He is also Co-Founder and Director of 100 Guitars for 100 kids, as well as a Founding Board Member for Sustainable Waterloo Region.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Forrester creators of the renowned 'Wave' methodology * Funnel Reboot episode on Lead Scoring * Rick's company Virtual Causeway * Rick's personal site: https://rickendrulat.com/ * Weekly email 'What Do B2B Marketers Do Now?'
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-97-reacting-to-a-reengineered-sales-team-with-rick-endrulat/
Is the Marketing Services Model Broken?
My guest is calling BS on the state of agency-brand relations. Considering her qualifications in this space, it's worth hearing her out. Leona Hobbs joined global public relations agency Fleishman-Hillard right out of school. She worked on strategy across several sectors and rose to become a vice president there.
The 1990s and early 2000s had her working with internet clients like Yahoo and Tucows as director of communications. She also consulted, sometimes under her own Reset Digital brand, to Ford Motor Company, 3M, Thomson Reuters, Insurance Institute of Canada, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Upstate Niagara Dairy Cooperative, RBC Royal Bank, Sleep Number, and an extended role with Intel. She lives in Toronto with her husband John and Kip, the beloved rescue dog.
People, Companies and Concepts mentioned in this episode: * Deltek survey of nearly 200 agency professionals worldwide - https://info.deltek.com/Creative-Agencies-in-2022-PDF * Webware.io https://www.webware.io * Media.Monks https://media.monks.com/ * Art & Science Digital Experience Design https://artscience.ca/ * Hotspex Media: https://www.hotspexmedia.com/ * Mixtape: https://mxtp.ca/ * Leona's LinkedIn Profile * Leona Twitter profile
More details, please check https://funnelreboot.com/episode-96-is-the-marketing-services-model-broken-with-leona-hobbs/
Big Data has a problem. It's not just its bigness; it's the rigidity of the databases that hold and that force us to make data copies. Resulting problems, from privacy to fidelity loss, are so severe, we should revisit the first principles of how databases are built. Let's be honest, if we could build our whole data infrastructure over again, would we do it differently? Today's guest says we would have built data like a network. Thankfully, next-generation technology will allow us to store data in this new way while still making use of old-style databases.
My guest is Chris McLellan. He splits his time between the nonprofit Data Collaboration Alliance, and Cinchy, the leader in enterprise data fabric technology. Coming out of Bishops University with a degree in Political Science, his career has included stints at VarageSale, and Lyft, as well as startups like Flexday and ChangeJar. He also created the go-to-market strategy for Hailo, the taxi network of 35,000 licensed drivers.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Backgrounder on AI & Databases * Company Chris is part of: Cinchy * Non-profit Chris belongs to: Datacollaboration.org * Chris' Ask AI podcast * Chris on LinkedIn
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-95-new-database-technology-paradigm-with-chris-mclellan/
Stop me if you've heard this one before. You've taken on a marketing initiative that is finally going somewhere, and it's now time for management to see what you've done and approve more funds, or give you props for all your hard work. But on presenting your data, you're only met with blank stares or nit-picking centred around how you put your data together. What's going wrong when this happens? It's probably that your audience couldn't boil it down into something that makes sense to them. The universal structure that all of us use to do this is stories.
My guest uses stories to present the performance of her marketing programs. It's her contention that using a story-like framework works to your advantage when presenting data. Amy Hebdon has managed Google Ads Since 2004, working her way through at least a half dozen agencies. In 2017, she and her husband James co-founded Paid Search Magic, which provides coaching, consulting, audits, reporting, and courses for those who want to get better at search engine marketing. She has lived in a handful of states and two central American countries, and she joined us today from the new “Home-base” which is in Tennessee.
Fun Fact: worked for a man (named Mr. Schneer) who was in charge of the company website and didn’t know how to use the internet (he asked me which was the “dot” key in typing “dotcom”)
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * P-A-S framework: * Problem * Agitate * Solution * Rats in the Cellar, a concept popularized by CS Lewis * Video on Story Structures, given by Kurt Vonnegut * Curator * Amy's Twitter profile * Facebook group Google Ads for Savvy Digital Marketers
Episode Reboot. Frame your statistics in a way that illustrates the impact on what your audience cares about.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-94-winning-peoples-buy-in-by-telling-stories-with-amy-hebdon/
In its raw form, data's not worth much. If refined and put together with other data, it can be worth a lot. Here are well-known brands that built their value by creating a useful visual experience out of user-generated data: * Glassdoor * Nest * Zapier * Mint * Robinhood * Flipboard * Ancestry * GoodReads
This episode's guest will help us see what is possible once you have data in your hands. He grew up loving numbers, but it wasn't until he saw a Hollywood movie about card players at age 16, that he knew how he would apply his skill. He taught himself poker and methodically played this 'game of chance' so well that He became a professional player through his years at University du Quebec à Montreal and beyond.
After cashing his poker chips in, he wanted to show the business world how they could look at the data they have on-hand as the basis for decisions. In 2020 he founded data consulting company Systematik to help businesses untangle, collect, visualize and understand their data.
Listen in this episode for Eric's explanation of how you can put a unique transformation or twist on the data you already have, and even make an application that monetizes the data.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- Google Data Studio
- ETL
- SQL
- Google BigQuery
How you hit Sheets 5-million cell limit happens faster than you think
- Spreadsheet with 5 tabs
- Each tab has 100 columns, going out to CW
- Each tab has 10000 rows
For more details, visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-93-visualizing-making-data-valuable-with-eric-boissoneault/
Marketers help buyers make choices. Marketers must also make choices. No matter who we are, we inevitably must make choices. Join this special conversation about how tools can be incorporated into decision-making to help out the person who’s on the hot seat. Oz Gurtuna has a Bachelors from Boğaziçi University, a Masters from International Space University and a Ph.D. from Concordia University. He has worked in sectors as diverse as space, solar energy and web development. Coming to his current role as an agency owner who lives in Montreal Canada.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * MUM – Multi-task unified model * Video SRT caption files * Performance Max campaigns
###### Oz’s ventures:
- What next now
- Turquoise Technology Solutions
Episode Reboot. Try Plumfind’s tool to help you choose your marketing platform(s) – it’s ungated for unlimited use
For more details, visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-92-looking-at-choicefrom-all-sides-with-oz-gurtuna/
Disclaimer: Before going further, I want to make clear that technology vendors that come on the show are not sponsors or affiliates. They’re simply here to give you a broader perspective. There is still a good deal of information that prospects give you when visiting your site. If you use this information in the right way, instead of annoying them, you may actually provide an experience that tailors how they’re treated in such a way that may pleasantly surprise them.
We look in our analytics at all top-line numbers for activities , but not all that often do we drill down to the individual level. This is where we can learn about how our site is or isn’t working for a particular user.
Wart Fransen is a longtime web programmer and entrepreneur. Freelancing in his first few years after school, he found himself helping multinationals with their websites, including finding out what they could about who was on them. Seeing company after company wanting the same thing, he set out to build several analytics products to fill these needs. In 2014 he co-founded Leadboxer, a tool that examines a website’s visitors and aims to give insights about if they are ready-to-buy.
Beyond his fascination with technology, Wart’s a father of two and a strong proponent of causes like fighting the disinformation surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He spoke to me from his home-office near Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Wart on twitter * LeadBoxer * Time-To-Live (TTL) setting for cookies * ZoomInfo * Clearbit * 6sense * Demandbase * AWStats
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-91-what-first-party-data-can-tell-you-about-your-leads-with-wart-fransen/
No matter which side of the agency/brand fence you are on, I’m sure you think you know what it’s like to be on the other side. Regardless of our good intentions, reality is that we approach the work from different angles, blocking our ability to see it from the other’s perspective. One undertaking that all of us get the same view of is a website overhaul. It’s a project that feels grueling for anyone, agency side or client side. And yet, the learning we can all come away with can help us be more empathetic to co-workers and outside team members we work with. Darlene Moore is the CEO of Drive Traffic, a marketing and web design agency where she also provides fractional Chief Marketing Officer services, guiding companies’ digital marketing strategy. In addition to being a longtime independent marketer, she worked at Yellow Pages, building out their search engine marketing practice. She has degrees from both U of O and Carleton university and is an unapologetic dog-lover. Join now as we hear from Darlene Moore. People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Code Freeze * WordPress Divi and Elementor tools * Paul Boag * Darlene’s LinkedIn Profile
Episode Reboot. Think about what feeling you want visitors to have while on your website.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-90-rethinking-website-redesigns-with-darlene-moore/
What does it mean to be doing analytics right? It doesn’t mean only that a company’s analysts are being accurate, it has to do with how our company makes decisions. The data guiding those decisions doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere, there’s got to be a functional team analyzing it. What’s the composition of that team? What kind of process do they follow? Do outsourced partners get involved? What technology is used? Leaders that don’t put enough thought into this can burn through both people and budgets, and their organizations never become data-driven like they’d hoped. To borrow a term from environmentalists, their analytics function was unsustainable. Jason Thompson thought he’d grow up to be a geologist. By college though, he chose to go into Information Systems and came out of college to work at the once-mighty Novell. Over the course of several years, Novell shrank and then laid off his group. He switched to implementing Omniture web analytics for various companies; which showed him both the highs and lows of the consulting firm model. He then went to a brand with a popular web-based business, which caused him to question the value analytics really offered an organization. While there he met coworker Hila Dehan. They started imagining what analytics done right would look like and in March 2013 they started their own analytics shop 33 Sticks.
There’s more to the story of them working together, such as how they came up with their company’s name, but I’ll let him tell you that.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
| 5 Analytics sub-disciplines | | Architecture & Implementation | | Tag Management & Data Layer | | Reporting | | Analysis & Insights | | Optimization |
Jason’s LinkedIn profile and Twitter profile
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-89-sustainable-analytics-with-jason-thompson/
When you want to improve some part of your marketing. You quickly start thinking about how you're going to get your boss to agree to it. It's not the easiest thing, but it is possible. And I know this because our guest today has done it many times. In his own words, Kevin Dieny is a true marketing nerd who works in the marketing team at CallSource. I met him at a national marketing event where he gave a presentation about justifying the Money needed for Marketing Projects. This is one of his passions, along with Paid Search, Marketing Analytics and in particular, using data to show ROI.
He holds a Bachelor's degree from California State & an MBA from University of Redlands. When not working, Kevin likes wrestling with his four kids, loves cooking, and enjoys everything Batman. He is also the host of Close the Loop, which is a podcast designed specifically for small and medium businesses who are trying to improve their marketing.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Brian Halligan * Kevin's LinkedIn profile
Episode Reboot. For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-88-getting-marketing-projects-funded-with-kevin-dieny/
The pandemic changed much in our world, and though some routines will subside, one change that’s going to remain with us is work from home. It was even clear the year after COVID hit that people were reevaluating going into an office. Pundits like Adam Grant said many were questioning their jobs as a whole. As he put it in a WSJ article, “the taste of freedom left us hungry for more.” Meaning more than the flexibility to choose what K-Cup flavour of coffee on hand in the lunchroom. Grant goes much further, saying this “Flexibility is more than choosing the place where you work. It’s having freedom to decide your purpose, your people, and your priorities.” That’s all fine and good, but how does an employer make this work? How do those of us responsible give rank and file marketers this flexibility while still getting work done? My guest today has great insights into how marketing leaders can deal with all this. She’s witnessed first-hand the changes that Covid has brought to the marketing function. She has opinions on what will and what won’t work in the future. Kelly Rusk is a marketing consultant who supports mid-sized companies trying to grow their marketing and PR capabilities. The first few years of her career she worked for Ottawa-based technologies companies as a marketing and communications pro. Then she went to the agency side for a decade, finishing with the full-service firm Banfield as digital director and partner. Kelly is always contributing to her profession, holding board positions with IABC and Girl Geek Dinners and being an Instructor in the Digital Marketing Certificate Program at the University of Ottawa.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Roger Martin * Dorie Clark: * async communication * CERBLearn more on Kelly Rusk’s website or her LinkedIn profile or Twitter or Instagram
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-87-how-to-resource-marketing-amid-the-great-reset-with-kelly-rusk/
You can break down advertising by the medium of communication, and since we all started with text ads, we’re comfortable with that format. We’ve also become comfortable with image ads. But there’s one format that can throw a lot of us – video. Of course, the production cost put into videos can vary wildly, and ad platforms like youtube have a huge number of options and nuances to know, but the one thing all video has in common is it makes a human to human connection that other media formats cannot hold a candle to.
To demystify this field, we’re talking with the founder of Variable.media
One of the nicest people you’ll ever meet in the PPC industry
He has appeared on EDGE OF THE WEB, INBOUND SUCCESS PODCAST, HeroConference
- A4 Congress – Advanced Analytics & Advertising (Lima, Peru | Video | 5/21-5/23/19
- Hero Conference USA (Philadelphia, PA) | Video, TBD | 4/23-4/25/19
- Hero Conference (London, UK) | Video (YouTube) | 10/22-10/23/18
- SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA) | Video (YouTube, Facebook) | 6/11-6/13/18
- Hero Conference (Austin, TX) | Video (YouTube) | 4/15-4/17/18
- SMX West (San Jose, CA) | Unleashing The Power Of Online Video Ads | 3/12-3/15/18
- SMX West (San Jose, CA) | Workshop, Video (YouTube) | 3/12-3/15/18
- SMX East New York | Unleashing The Power Of Online Video Ads | 10/24-10/26/17
- SMX East New York | How to Maximize & Measure Performance on the GDN | 10/24-10/26/17
- SMX Advanced Seattle | A Year of Change in Online Ad Universe | 6/12-6/14/17
- SMX Advanced Seattle | Social Media Advertising Workshop | 6/12-6/14/17
- SLCSEM 2017 Utah | Hacking Facebook & YouTube | 1/18/17
- IIeX North America Atlanta | Altruism, Automation, & Effective Advertising | 6/13/16
and many regional digital marketing events…
He played basketball at California Lutheran while getting his degree.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * https://youtu.be/iTLVoj4iNr4 * 7 Types of videos suggested by Marcus Sheridan * Talking head video * Video placement options: channels, keywords, custom options * You may also want to check episode 54 on the Visual Sale and episode 20 on video creation * You can contact Cory via LinkedIn or Twitter.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-86-video-ads-with-cory-henke/
We know what our paid media marketing looks like within the walls of organizations of our size. We could be talking about monthly spends of $1000, $10,000 or maybe $50,000. But what does it look like when it grows to enterprise-size, with budgets of 6 and 7-figures? You start seeing media buys that act in concert. Known as omni-channel marketing, the consumer receives messages from all sides. This is only one of the hat techniques that can be used. I have the perfect guest to tell us what it’s like when you are working with scale.
So about my guest. Around 2014 I stumbled on something the Pay-Per-Click community did on Twitter every week. It was a lunchhour discussion called PPCChat and at that time I didn’t know anyone else who worked in PPC. That was when I met my guest in the Twitter chat, although she’d been airing her views there for 5 years before I came along. In my opinion, she is one of the OG digital marketers on Twitter.
But that’s not all she’s been up to since growing up in Canada’s Capital Region. She started working for marketing agencies, first in Montreal in la belle province of Quebec. Now she lives in BC with her jazz-playing husband and cat in tow.
Join me as we listen to Julia Vyse.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Bell Media * Rogers Media * Huffington Post Media * GA4 * Adobe Analytics * Spotify Ads * Microsoft Audience Network, Verizon * Reddit Ads * Julia’s agency, iProspect, a division of Dentsu
Episode Reboot. Each episode of this podcast aims to solve a common problem that businesses have with strategizing, implementing and measuring digital marketing problems.
For more details, visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-85-growing-paid-media-to-enterprise-size-with-julia-vyse/
Do you own a Crystal ball to predict the future? No? Well, I have good news for you. You don’t need one. When you feed lots of historicals into a machine, it doesn’t have to know what those numbers mean in business terms. Thanks to sophisticated data models, machines can determine the trends behind your numbers, including a pretty accurate prediction of what the next numbers in the series will be. That’s not all there is to data science though. Our guests believe it’s what takes our analytical abilities up the evolutionary ladder, from what happened, to how it happened, to how it might happen.
This episode talks about how cloud computing, which crunches these numbers, has changed data science, doing everything that high-end servers used to do, at a fraction of the cost. It also covers the skillsets of the people needed to help machines work. To learn about how you can start implementing data science in your marketing, I’m joined by two people who are well versed in the field.
Richard Fergie lives in the UK. He showed a penchant for math, which led him to Oxford University where he took his bachelors in mathematics. After spending time living in South America, he moved home and took a liking to the quant-heavy world of pay per click marketing. He has taken the 10 years of experience he got consulting on digital marketing and web analytics projects to found Forecast Forge, a quick and accurate forecasting tool that runs on Machine Learning.
Brett was an early SaaS pioneer and helped change the PR industry by creating one of the first companies to develop a real-time media monitoring and analysis platform that was able to successfully generate business intelligence from both traditional and social media.
Brett would lead the company as both the CEO and chief architect and developer of the platform as well as being awarded 2 patents.
Brett led his company through several significant transitions, including recognizing the need for big data and machine learning capabilities very early on as well as recognizing the importance of social media.
Brett also identified the need for both journalist and publication data from the aspect of creating new markets as well as leveraging the data to further improve the analytics.
Brett’s company, MediaMiser, would be acquired in 2014.
Brett would later go on to improve his own analytical capabilities by achieving certifications in both data science and AI from the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto.
Brett also has a bachelor’s degree from Western University and a diploma in PR and communications from Algonquin College.
Let’s go talk to Richard Fergie & Brett Serjeantson.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
| What you need to do | Tools that can do it | | Visualize large datasets | Google Colab/Jupyter, Matplotlib | | Find trends, use predictions to decide next action | Pomegranate | | Do regression analysis | Pandas (built on NumPy) | | unclassified | Prophet, PyTorch, TensorFlow |
- Python
- R
- Emma Franks Search Engine Land article on Forecasting with Excel
- Eric Siegel’s book: Predictive Analytics
- Richard’s Article on Optimizing the Timing of Paid Media Spend
Episode Reboot. Check out https://www.forecastforge.com/learning/
For more dedtails, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-84-data-science-wizardry-with-richard-fergie-brett-serjeantson/
The most common frustration I hear from people boils down to the phrase “I don’t know why it’s not working.” This isn’t verbatim what people say, but that’s the gist. They have painstakingly built a series of offers and paid for traffic to see them, but the conversion rates drop off somewhere between there and the point where sales close. Can their funnel be fixed? Absolutely, but not without knowing a critical piece of data. Getting that data that helps fix the suboptimal parts of the funnel is our focus today.
To go through this I’m joined by Keith Perhac, a digital marketing expert and software entrepreneur. After growing up in the states, he headed to Japan to become what’s known there as a salaryman. He moved back In 2010 to work with startups and digital marketers looking to grow quickly. He founded SegMetrics, a tool that lets you see revenue from the perspective of each touchpoint in your marketing funnel. Since then, he’s appeared on over 35 podcasts & in 2020 published the book we’re here to discuss, “Building Marketing Funnels that Convert, a 90 minute guide”
When he’s not working on SegMetrics, Keith draws and attempts (futilely) to spend more time outdoors. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * VWO * Urchin Tracking Module (utm) parameters, appended to URLs for Google Analytics to assign attribution. * Kaizen * Keith’s company, Segmetrics.io and a short demo of their tool * Keith on LinkedIn and Twitter * You may also want to check out Gary Amaral’s episode on measuring funnel touch points with enterprise B2B with a heavy human sales component
For more details, visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-83-quantifying-your-marketing-funnels-revenue-with-keith-perhac/
W. Chan Kim, author of Blue Ocean Strategy, said "The hardest battle is simply to make people aware of the need for a strategic shift"
I somehow feel that he was thinking of marketers with this phrase. We are changing the minds of our buyer so they'll choose our brand. To do that we are often changing our companies to produce the value our buyers expect. And changing the status quo in some companies means overcoming a lot of lethargy. This takes someone who's courageous, as today's author argues, it takes a renegade.
Drew Neisser is the founder of the marketing agency Renegade and Is the host of the podcast Renegade Thinkers Unite. Drew has been featured on network TV, many podcasts and writes a regular column for Ad Age. He talked to me from his Manhattan office about his 2nd book, Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands which came out in 2021.
Key takeaways for unleashing your own inner Renegade * Have the traits of cool marketing CATS: Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful, Scientific * Reverse your targeting – start with employees, then customers, then prospects * If your content isn’t of legitimate value to your customers, then don’t release it * Work with your CFO to radically simplify your metrics (8 KPIs or less). * Don’t overspend on martech, watch how much headcount it takes to manage the automation technology you take on * Leave 10-20% of your budget for experiments * Get your value proposition down to 8 words or less. * Sell through service:think of what your customers would consider valuable; give it without regard to charging them for it.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Jeff Perkins * Brent Adamson (wrote the foreward to Drew's book) author of the Challenger Customer * Drew's LinkedIn Profile and Twitter profile * Drew's first book, the CMO Periodic Table
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-82-renegade-marketing-with-drew-neisser/
It's been amazing, what we've achieved by connecting up computers world-wide, webbing them together. As its full name suggests, we gave ourselves an Inter-network that provides for our every information need, on command. But there is one change that the Internet made to us, it gave us more stimulus than our biology was made to handle. The demand for our attention suddenly exceeded the supply; and this economic shift is most noticeable in the world of advertising. The digital advertising marketplace has gotten more vast, more confusing, and it's far less clear what the rules are anymore.
Thankfully, there's been a lot of research at the intersection of advertising and human attention. Effective marketers who are aware of the trends can tune their advertising to make their brands heard and win the attention of their target audience.
To get the latest insights into this, we're talking to the author of the book, Paid Attention which just came out in 2022 with a revised edition.
Faris Yakob grew up in the UK and after graduating from Oxford University, led the digital innovation efforts at global ad agencies like McCann Erickson and MDC Partners. Following that, he and his wife Rosie co-founded Genius Steals, an innovation and strategy consultancy.
He also serves as a juror for marketing awards like the Clios and the London International Awards. He's also been a member of a non-profit consortium called the Attention Council that aims to better measure the influence of marketing on people's attention. Clearly someone who likes the written word, in addition to his books he puts out a monthly column in Admap and the Marketing Society.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Mathew Sweezey * Tim Wu * Mark Shaefer and his book Content Shock * Damian Hurst * Claude Levi Strauss * Robin Dunbar, significance of the number 150 * Nielsen Catalina Solutions * David Olgivy
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-81-paid-attention-with-faris-yakob/
When used properly, LinkedIn Company pages carry a ton of marketing value.
To help us learn how to leverage these assets, I asked Michelle Raymond to join me.
As a LinkedIn Pages Specialist, she helps businesses of all sizes use Company Pages to amplify personal brands, build up business credibility.
She is a Member of the SMB Advisory Council for LinkedIn Pages, a Top 1% LinkedIn Content Creator. She started using LinkedIn for social selling around six years ago for doing sales, using only the LinkedIn free tools. Closing deals convinced her of the power and she has branched out to using it for Digital Marketing.
In 2021 she and Co-author Lynnaire Johnston came out with a book called Business Gold: Build Awareness, Authority and Advantage with LinkedIn Company Pages.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * The LinkedIn Company Page subpage for Business Gold * Michelle's company Good Trading Co
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-80-business-gold-with-michelle-raymond/
Digital marketer isn’t one of those occupations that kids in school blurt out when they are asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Thankfully, a book came out in 2019 that lays out very plainly many of the things I wish I’d known when I joined this profession. Becoming a Digital Marketer has elements that are tactical but it also weighs in on existential questions like ‘what kind of lifestyle can I have being in this field?’ and ‘should I work client-side, agency-side, or be my own boss?” Though I’ve been at this for decades, I’ll admit that I learned a number of things in the book, both about marketing and about Kombucha, which was the product used throughout the book’s marketing tales. Once our guest, Gil Gildner, got out of school, he worked in media for NGOs, where he traveled to over 45 countries, wore hazmat suits in Ebola units, and rode Ugandan motorcycles. Realizing that he wanted to survive into his thirties, he started doing marketing for a company that sold around-the-world airfares. It’s in this company where he met his wife Anya, a paid search specialist. Listen to our conversation for more of the interesting story of how Gil and Anya wrote this book and founded an agency which they operate from wherever they are. Today he happens to be in his hometown of Fayetteville Arkansas, near Walmart world Headquarters
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Lambo guy * Sonia Simone’s blog post that says about Internet Marketers: ‘they spend 16 hours a day working so they can make money while they sleep.’ * Rand Fishkin * Peter Thiel book Zero to One * Gil & Anya’s agency, Discosloth * Gil & Anya’s book: Becoming a Digital Marketer
Episode Reboot. Check out Discosloth’s free resource The Beginner’s Guide to PPC
For details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-79-becoming-a-digital-marketer-with-gil-gildner/
Lots of experts have said that AI is transformational to business. Call me cynical, but when you look at how the average marketing team functions in 2022, it doesn't seem like much of our work has been transformed. My guest today, a mainstream marketer who hadn't been influenced by all the hype, will share her appraisal of AI's practical uses.
Cathy McPhillips is a longtime Cleveland-based marketer who has worked in corporate, agency-side, as well as owning a small business. She worked for years with the Content Marketing Institute which was led by Joe Pulizzi (who was on Episode 56 of the show). Nearly a year ago, she joined the Marketing AI institute as chief growth officer, but admittedly with very little hands-on experience with AI.
Brought on to grow the relatively new institute in a hurry, Cathy's gotten up to speed on how to use these tools. She'll tell us her story, including how the way we traditionally do things has to change in order to get the benefits of AI. Cathy lists many resources and tools, which have been compiled into a table that's in the show notes. I hope by listening to Cathy, you'll try some of them out, and come away as excited as she is about how AI can be a superpower for today's marketing.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- Spreadsheet Macros
- Cathy's profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter
- Marketing AI Institute's Introduction to AI
- Marketing AI Institute's Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput and the upcoming MAICON happening August 3-5, 2022
Episode Reboot:
| Tools to help content E.G. Persado DRIFT Descript MarketMuse | * Writing social posts, messages (Copy.ai, persado) * Personalizing landing pages * Analyzing what's said on social about our brand | | Tools to help mktg activities E.G. Rasa.io Sprinklr | * Optimizing ads on campaigns to get most leads for least cost * summarizing/visualizing our web visitors and prospects * Understand which prospects have intent to buy, are open to contact * Data cleanup or other repeated tasks, learning from watching you |
Also check out our other AI-related episodes
- Episode 57: How AI Levels the Marketing Playing Field
- Episode 51: The AI Marketing Canvas with Raj Venkatesan
- Episode 47: AI For Marketers by Chris Penn
For more edtails, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-78-how-ai-helps-marketers-with-cathy-mcphillips/
Two things are required to get a clear view of Revenue Growth. First, the two groups must come together to jointly-define the thresholds at each stage of a lead's lifecycle. Second, they must apply points to a lead's every action, either manually or by layering automation on this process. My guest believes that lead scoring systems not only bring pipeline visibility, they improve the collaboration between Sales & Marketing. In fact, he claims that by pooling their information on leads and letting AI find the patterns, they can tell when a lead is ready to buy, upsell, or churn. Gary Amaral held several positions at places like at BlackBerry & Hootsuite, always at the intersection of marketing and sales. Seeing how poor scoring led to frustration for all involved, he joined forces with two other serial startup entrepreneurs.
In 2020 they co-founded Breadcrumbs, which is a revenue acceleration platform based on a co-dynamic lead scoring and routing engine. Listen for Gary's advice on what you need to do to get scoring right. Just as good communication helps keep couples together, the Sales & marketing relationship needs good communication on the status of leads. Lead scoring could very well be the glue in this marriage.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * George Box's quote "All models are wrong. Some are useful" * Zero party data - optional information that the consumer chooses to willingly provide to a company * ABM - Account-based Marketing * Codynamic lead scoring, originally developed by Eloqua * Breadcrumbs.io's Revenue Cafe podcast and revenue acceleration manifesto * Gary's email & LinkedIn Profile * You can also check out these episodes involving lead scoring: * Ep 48 with Casey Cheshire, reviewing the book "Marketing Automation Unleashed" * Episode 14 with Lindsay Sykes
Episode Reboot. Download Breadcrumb.io's lead scoring template
For more detail, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-77-stop-arguing-over-leads-start-scoring-them-with-gary-amaral/
There's no shortage of things to do in paid media marketing. There are so many options available for automating what the platforms do. Those of us who have taken the plunge into automation all agree it makes sense, both the logical kind and even literal cents, the currency kind. Yet many still resist automation. Not really resist, but given all the things each ad platform does, and all the third-party tools out there, the problem some have is knowing where to begin.
Our guest today can help us there. Ameet Khabra has spent the last decade figuring out why people do what they do online, what prompts them to take action, and how to use this insight to make marketing work better. She uses that experience in her agency, Hop Skip Media, to design campaign strategies for clients and teach future generations of PPC pros at the university level. Ameet loves her dogs Luke and Leia & the Dallas Cowboys, and Celine Dion songs.
Listen to her take on where this goes right, and in cases like Google Ads' optimization-scored recommendations, where this can go wrong.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- Kasim Aslam
- Russell Savage
- Ginny Marvin
- Julie Bacchini
Reach out to Ameet on Twitter or Instagram
Episode Reboot. Be scientific in how you evaluate the use of automation
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-76-paid-media-automation-its-about-time-with-ameet-khabra/
Today we're going to talk about the limits to growth marketing, aka "growth hacking." In his book "Growth Hacker Marketing," Ryan Holiday defines this person as: "A growth hacker is someone who [works] with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users." There's nothing wrong with this practice per se. But there are stages in an industry's life cycle where it's the wrong approach. You can't, for example, continuously improve a metric when there's no data to base the metric on in the first place. There are other industries where privacy or perceptions require you to use a different approach.
This is the world that Ned Nadima lives in. Growing up in Ottawa, he now spends much of his time in Newfoundland, studying and working as a marketer in the Biotech industry
His main passions are growing businesses that involve neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He avidly follows his crossfit routine and practices optimal living, experimenting with fasting, sleep hacking, diet and other ways to promote longevity. Like Ryan Holiday, he's also into stoic philosophy.
Listen to Ned explain what you CAN do when you CAN'T growth hack.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Ash Maurya's books Running Lean and Scaling Lean * Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup * An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/ep-75-when-growth-cant-be-hacked-the-trade-offs-of-marketing-in-new-categories-with-ned-nadima/
When you hear the words “Manufacturing” or “Industrial,” it probably conjures up pictures of smoke-billowing factories somewhere in the American rust belt in the mid-20th century. Those hay days are long gone, that sector’s jobs, which used to account for half of all jobs in the 1950s, had slid to less than 10% by 2009. The last dozen years though, have brought something of a renewal to manufacturing. Thanks to the Internet of Things, specifically the Industrial IOT movement, many companies are now making ‘smart’ products that scoop up data about their own health and how they’re being used, a real goldmine for the products’ makers. Thanks to Moore’s law, they are designing things faster and cheaper, 3D printing takes the minimum number you need to fabricate from huge lots down to single units. The outlook for manufacturing jobs in the 2020’s in places like the US is rosy, with 13 Million workers, producing a total of $2.00 trillion in goods, or a fifth of the entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product). It’s not only a good time for manufacturing production people, it’s good for the marketers that work there too. My guest today is someone who embodies this upbeat outlook. Caine Ruckstuhl is Head of Marketing, North America for CAREL. He has worked with clients in highly engineered products in Manufacturing businesses, much of it in the HVAC & Humidification space. He knows what it’s like to be in an environment dominated by engineers, who are notoriously numbers driven, and who aren’t easily impressed by marketing.
He also has experience marketing consumer products, as his wife perceived young women demanding better hygiene in public washrooms, He and his wife created a brand of paper toilet seat covers in 2008, doing everything from designing, sourcing, distributing and of course marketing it. When Caine isn’t flying around North America, South America and Europe, he can be found at home with his wife and a lot of very small dogs.
Listen to some excellent insights about this tough, quirky environment of marketing manufactured products. Hear what has worked for him, so you’ll come away appreciating what it’s like to be an industrial marketer.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Glenn’s blog post on lessening importance of specs in marketing
Episode Reboot. For another episode on marketing engineered products, check out Episode 55.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-74-marketing-manufactured-goods-with-caine-ruckstuhl/
If you have been a marketer for a while, odds are you have been helped by a mentor. The use of the word Mentor to mean someone who shares knowledge with a less-experienced colleague is relatively new in English. But the concept of a mentor can be found in cultures all over the world, Going back millennia.
If you have been helped by a mentor, a good question to ask yourself is, "should I start mentoring others?"
There are great benefits to doing this, provided you're well-matched with the person you're mentoring. One person who's been at both ends of the mentoring spectrum is Anu Adegbola, Director of Paid Search at Marin Software. Originally from Nigeria, Anu moved to the UK and got a bachelor's of computer science, with a master's in marketing. She is also one of PPC Hero's 25 Top Influencers for 2021.
Listen to her as she describes what internal traits to look for in a mentee you're considering working with, how senior marketers should balance advice on technical expertise with general professional advice, how to balance managing others and getting your job done, and how much you should open up about your own personal struggles to your mentee.
Enjoy the episode.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * How the archetype of Mentor began with a story in Homer's Odyssey * Anu's profile on Twitter and LinkedIn * Anu's #PPCChat Roundup Podcast
Episode Reboot. When you're asked to mentor someone, know that what you are saying yes to is primarily asking them questions. That's the best way you can help them.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-73-marketing-mentors-with-anu-adegbola/
There's a counter-intuitive saying that goes: good fences make good neighbours. Nobody does marketing today completely by themselves. Whether we are in-house or are on the vendor-side, we always have partners in the mix, and most of us approach them in a neighbourly way. But there's one task in the relationship-forming process that makes most of us squirm - contracting
They contain what's important to both sides, so instead of springing them on the other party at the last minute, their contents should be shared early on, to help everyone get a feel for what they are getting into.
Our guest, Julie Bacchini, is a professional speaker, has been in the PPC space for over a decade and has been helping businesses grow online in one way shape or form for two decades, through her own consultancy, Neptune Moon.
Julie has been named on “top influencer” lists, including PPC Hero's Top 25 list perennially, making the list again this year, 2021.
She is also the Managing Director of PPC Chat, where paid search professionals gather weekly on Twitter to talk shop. She's known for her practical, rubber-meets-the-road outlook so who better to talk to about
contracts. She says contracts lay the foundation for good Vendor-Client relationships and argues that we shouldn't shy away from talking about them.
So let's go hear how to make contracts that are a win-win, with Julie Bacchini.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
According to Kirk Williams "contracts define and preserve the intent of the relationship.
Agreement subtopics covered:
- Service levels and days/times for communications responses, including timezones
- Upfront work such as discovery, setup of marketing creative/content/campaigns
- Expectations of both the vendor and the client
- Price structure, extra charges, frequency of invoicing and payment terms
- Legal protections for Intellectual property and force majeure interruptions.
- Termination and dispute resolution clauses
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-72-contracts-the-foundation-of-great-relationships-with-julie-bacchini/
As cliche as it sounds, Content is king. Digital marketing demands that we write, record, edit, and layout content. This precious material is used in prospect research or in client interactions, and it's up to us to anticipate their every content need. We rack our brains to imagine what questions they might have, and most of us have done everything we can think of to make the answers available. But there's one thing most marketers haven't done - that is structuring their site's content using Schemas.
These pieces of code matter enough to marketers that, even if we're not too technical, we should understand the basics of what they do. So I've brought someone who's so confident in the positive ROI schemas can bring companies, she and her cofounder built a business around it.
Martha van Berkel is the CoFounder and CEO of Schema App, an application that looks at your site and helps tag your content so search engine bots can crawl and read it.
Before starting this company, she earned a degree in Applied Math and Engineering, a certificate for Innovation and Strategy at MIT and managed technical services on a global scale at Cisco Systems. Whenever she gets the chance to speak or write, Martha takes the chance to encourage site owners to use proper, connected schema markup. Martha does all this, plus being a Mom and a rower, from her home in Guelph Ontario.
Get ready for an interview that will energize you to markup your site's content in order to stand out in search
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Fantastic video on how the properties of content can be separated from the content itself using markup: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us * Google Search Console * Using Structured Data in Paid Search through Google Ad Extensions, Google Ad customizers * Google's Guide on How Structured Data Works * Industry-standard dictionary at Schema.org * Google's guide on how to Add structured data to your web pages * Websites with tutorials on JSON-LD and XML * Google's Search Gallery and Rich Results * Martha van Berkelon LinkedIn * SEO Yoast plugin for WordPress
Episode Reboot. Check out the resources Martha's company provides on using and getting ROI out of this: https://www.schemaapp.com/ For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-71-structured-data-stand-out-in-search-with-martha-van-berke/
Those of us who work in a marketing role or are marketing our own company can debate how this tactic is better than that tactic. Depending on which conference you attend or article you read, you’ll get a different opinion. But there are a few elements that a company must have to make all of this possible – their web and social properties. These foundational assets are what everything else sits on top of, and though I may be preaching to the choir here, these basics must be properly managed, or it’s all for nought.
My guest, Avery Swartz, has had her own business for 15 years. She’s seen nearly every problem that can happen, through her experience as a web consultant. 10 years ago, she established CampTech, a company which holds workshops showing the right way to use marketing and website applications. So she knows whereof she speaks.
Her clear explanations of web technologies earned Avery spots on nationally-airing Canadian TV shows and on the radio. She also writes a tech column in one of Canada’s national newspapers that reaches 6 million people a week. She’s here today because in 2020 she authored a book covering the fundamentals of managing these pieces.
Listen as we cover everything from domain registration and maintenance, accessibility, privacy laws, PPC channels like Google Ads, marketing metrics and more.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * WCAG Accessibility * PIPEDA * Template for a Data Processing Agreement * CASL * GDPR guidelines * Google’s former Webmaster Liaison Matt Cutts * Avery’s personal website and her latest LinkedIn Learning course “How to plan your website” * Avery’s book, See You on the Internet: Building Your Small Business with Digital Marketing * Avery’s profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram
Episode Reboot. Check out the new LinkedIn Learning course by Avery For more details, please visit our page at https://funnelreboot.com/episode-70-see-you-on-the-internet-with-avery-swartz/
The act of rotating yourself with one foot anchored is called a pivot. This mechanism our bodies use to face a new direction provides the perfect analogy for how people should think as they move fully into digital marketing.
Our guest, Eric Schwartzman, is a digital marketing consultant, with over 20-years of experience serving clients such as Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, the United States Marine Corps, and hundreds of SMBs. In 2021 he published "The Digital Pivot: Secrets of Online Marketing" and he joins me on this episode to talk about digital pivots.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- The Grammy's
- John J Wall
- How to reach out to Eric on Twitter & LinkedIn
- Eric's podcasts, respectively: The Earned Media podcast and The B2B Lead Gen Podcast
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-69-digital-pivot-with-eric-schwartzman/
Has this ever happened to you? You're working as a Marketer, either in-house or as the agency serving another business. You work earnestly to do what leadership asks. You might even be part of the leadership team, directing the marketing efforts. But inside, you're bugged by a question. While you architect campaigns, answer emails and sit in meetings, the question is there in the back of your head. You wish it had an answer, but that magic bullet keeps eluding you. It's "How are we going to grow?"
My guest says that growth can happen, but it's part of a larger challenge, and not just one that marketing has to tackle. For growth to happen, both marketing (who's got a pivotal role here) and the whole company have to retool themselves into an entity that can scale.
Felix Velarde began as an entrepreneur, starting a web design agency in 1994, when websites were just starting to be a thing. He then became a journeyman CEO for a string of digital agencies, eventually moving onto a role where he chaired those businesses. He has also been an adjunct professor at Hult International Business School and UK lead at Vint Cerf’s People-Centered Internet coalition.
In 2014 Felix broadened the advisory role to other companies like tech startups, at which point he boiled the growth principles he'd learned down to a system that any businesses could use. In 2021 he published the playbook of his two-year program that he claims will triple a company's size, called "Scale at Speed"
Listen to how instrumental Felix considers the role that marketing plays in building the firm's proposition. Also watch who he says should be in charge of growth; it's probably not the roles you'd expect to be most effective at it.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Jim Collins' book "Good to Great" * Edwin Locke * Schumpeter's Creative Destruction * Mai Lin Fung and Vint Cerf's People-Centered Internet coalition * Yahoo's Jerry Yang * Vistage International * The book's website * Felix can be contacted on LinkedIn * 2Y3X's Program's website: https://2y3x.com/ implemented by over a dozen consultants worldwide.
Episode Reboot. https://scaleatspeed.com/ assessment (20 questions, under 5 minutes)
For details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-68-scale-at-speed-with-felix-velarde/
Our talk doesn't start out sounding the way most sales & marketing talks do. That's because of the alarm being raised by our guest on the forces around us that are polluting our digital environment. Why does this matter? Because this sludge messes with our innate ability as humans to relate to each other, and without that personal connection, the ability for a buyer to gain enough trust to put their faith in your business is out of the question.
The book in question is Human-Centered Communication. It was co-authored by Stephen Pacinelli as well as our guest, Ethan Beute. He is VP of Marketing at BombBomb, a software company in Colorado Springs, CO that helps people create simple video messages. Prior to that: he ran marketing for local television stations on-air and online.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Shep Hyken * Morgan Ingram * Lauren Bailey * Adam Contos * Julie Hansen * Mathew Sweezey * Dan Hill * Gary Vaynerchuk * Wall-E, a Disney/Pixar production
Episode Reboot. For another take on communicating with video, check out Ep 54 with Tyler Lessard
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-67-human-centered-communication-ethan-beute/
We all want to know how to improve the number of conversions we get on our websites. A lot of the time, we try to do that by rearranging the layout or switch up page elements. Then we go to our dashboards, see if the number went up or down. You’ve probably spotted the flaw in this. This is circular reasoning, a change in customer behavior can’t be proven by “looking back at data, trying to decide whether or not it was some sort of change that we made” As conversion expert, Matt Gershoff puts it. What’s the right way to do this? It’s simple, reverse the order of events and start off with your hunch about what you should change, run an experiment on your customers, proving or disproving if the thing you believe causes their behaviour actually has that effect.
This discipline is called CRO, which stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. There’s someone who’s superbly qualified to talk about this and I’m lucky to have known her for the past few years.
Deborah unknowingly ran her first optimization study in school at the age of 8, when she put her classmates through a science experiment where they looked at pieces of construction paper tacked on a bristol board. Little Deborah grew up to earn a master’s of science degree, specializing in eye tracking technology. Today, Deborah applies her specialized skillset to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). She founded a well known resource website where she has published hundreds of client A/B test case studies. She also has a certificate in graphic design, giving her the blend of left and right-brain thinking that’s just right for working in CRO.
Some things to listen for:
- Marketers who run paid search & paid social will want to listen to what she has to say about mixing traffic from various channels together.
- She explains what minimum traffic constraints we’re under for A/B tests, and why with small volumes we’re better to put 2-pages into a test where only 1 thing has changed, versus testing multiple pages or multiple variables at the same time
- She has some tips on how we can maintain objectivity as we run our tests and as we present the results to our leadership.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Deborah’s Five Step Process:
-
Practice Know Your Audience (KYA) and research the performance of pages via site analytics and heatmaps like CrazyEgg and HotJar.
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Form a SMART experiment hypothesis. Here is a single-sentence version: “Because I observed and received feedback on [what is causing users to convert at X rate], I believe that [the change to be tested] For [targeted segment or all users] will result in [specific lift in conversion rate].”
Ensure you have sufficient traffic / time for the experiment, using one of these calculators:
- Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools
- CXL
-
Shinyapps
-
Pick a Tool to run the experiment. Here are some common ones:
-
Google Optimize
- VWO
- Optimizely
-
Adobe Target
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Run the experiment. Here’s a screenshot from one run using Google’s free tool
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Implement the winning page and monitor for expected results.
How A/B pages are commonly named: “A” is your Control (original version) and “B’ is your Variant (includes change you’re testing). Here is a more in-depth Conversion Rate Optimization glossary
Note the different frameworks that tools use: Frequentist vs Bayesian frameworks. Depending on the statistical framework used, the timeframe needed to give results will change.
Connect with Deborah on LinkedIn and Twitter
Deborah’s websites include GuessTheTest.com and Convert Experts
Episode Reboot Run an A/A Test, here is Deborah’s article on why you should and what to consider.
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-65-conversion-rate-optimization-with-deborah-omalley/
One of the basic principles taught in marketing is to suss out why someone buys a product. That seems a simple enough thing to do, but is it? What makes this complex is the fact that different jobs demand different products.
Let’s say you’re sending a physical object to someone who’s on another continent. You aren’t going to take it there yourself, so your likely option is to mail it. To you, the mail service fits the mold of the product you should buy in this case. But let’s pretend this object is a birthday present and their birthday is tomorrow. Now, what you require is a ‘it-absolutely-positively-has-to-get-from-here-to-there-overnight’ product and for that, only a global courier like FedEx fits the mold. Not every product in a category suits the job the customer has in mind, so those of us selling products must know the job our product is bought to do. And these jobs can loosely be divided by whether they:
- help us improve something we may not feel an urgent need for – Vitamins
- immediately solve something we absolutely positively need – Painkillers
That’s how someone I know describes these two job types. She’s joining us to explain how knowing which type we have impacts positioning, customer service, product roadmapping and more.
Dipalli Bhatt is the head of marketing at Incognito Software Systems. She has 15 years of product and corporate marketing experience and has worked with organizations like Disney and TD Canada Trust which listed her as one of ’30 under 30′ marketing professionals to watch. Honoured by Adobe as ‘Fearless 50 Marketer 2019-2020’ across the world.
She is a member of Forbes Communications Council and is involved in mentoring tech-startups and women in leadership. Dipalli also volunteers at Tie Ottawa Chapter and Invest Ottawa.
She has a Master of Business Administration from University of Ottawa
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Clayton Christiansen originator of the jobs-to-be-done framework * Asana * Trello * Contact Dipalli on her LinkedIn and Twitter profiles
For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-66-vitamins-vs-painkillers-with-dipalli-bhatt/
Before 2020, most interactions between sellers and buyers were done in-person, at industry conferences. To attract and retain customers, companies held their own seminars or user group events. Of course, none of us have been driving or jetting around for the past year and a half (I'm recording in late 2021) and as of now here in Canada and elsewhere, we have filled the void with virtual events.
These are more than just webinars, If you have attended one, it's likely been a paid affair, though cheaper than it's IRL counterpart. These virtual events enable you to interact with others, you can either take part in breakout sessions, ask speakers questions & take their polls, or sit at virtual tables to chat and network.
So while it's unclear whether we will keep using virtual events as much once face-to-face meetings return, there's no denying their powerful advantages.
I'm speaking to someone who knows more about virtual events than almost anyone. Jarrod Goldsmith has tons of experience running physical events and hosting exciting virtual events for others. He is better described as a Canadian small business community builder and is the embodiment of the small business spirit. He founded Sax Appeal (Canada's Premier Saxophone Ensemble), Jarrod also shares his passion for entrepreneurship through the eSAX Podcast series and the Pivoted Success Podcast which he co-hosts. You can also follow Jarrod on social media; he's easy to spot, he'll be wearing his ever-present Fedora.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
Show Flow Diagram sample:
Horizon Workrooms: Facebook's Metaverse Starts With Virtual Reality Meetings
Event registration tools:
- Events.com
- Eventbrite
Event recording tools for hosts:
- Loom
- Zencastr
- Brett Wilson
About Jarrod:
- Jarrod's site & email details
- Jarrod's Twitter profile @eSAXnetworking and instagram profile, @esaxnetworking.
- Jarrod's Youtube Channel
- Jarrod on Linkedin
Episode Reboot. When attending an event, add your social links to your main profile, it gives people chances to connect with you down the road, whether or not they engage with you during the event.
The element of marketing that occupies the largest chunk of our time and energy is the collection of software tools that we use. We usually termed it as our technology stack. Some people have seen enough things done with tech stacks, they can spot the do's and don'ts that marketers should follow. I brought somebody on who I think is really good at this.
Dave Hicks is a front end digital marketing strategist, photographer and designer whose tools of choice are Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. He's also a backend developer who knows JavaScript, Jquery, Node.JS, Ruby and PHP. But what he's especially good at is making sure that the tech stack a company uses conforms to the marketing objective that the strategy calls for.
I met Dave through some of his community minded pursuits including his organization of live meet ups for social media and marketing folks in Ottawa. I also enjoy gawking at the creations he makes out of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's as a hobby. After doing a lot of moving around in his youth, he settled in Ottawa, where he lives and works on cool projects as a freelance marketer.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Single point of failure * COTS vs Custom-coded software: Here's one view and here's another. * Development vs Staging vs Production sites * Corel * K.I.S.S. Principle * Dave's twitter account, which has over 200K tweets * Dave can be reached via email
Episode Reboot. You can't automate everything. For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-63-marketing-stack-dos-and-donts-with-dave-hicks/
Our guest, Morgan Friedman, loved math as a kid, so it may not surprise you to know that his life as a marketing professional centred around pay-per-click, most recently as the CEO of a few digital agencies.
That's interesting in its own right, but when we step back to Morgan in his 20's, he was already doing different things than what I did at that age:
-
He Cofounded "Overheard in New York.com," dubbed one of the coolest blogs by Time Magazine, it still exists 17 years later, with bazillions of pageviews.
-
He published my two Amazon bestseller humor books.
-
He ran an experiment to gauge human communication. He bet that good actors could convey story lines solely through body language, and he tested this by watching an entire season of the sitcom Friends without sound.
-
He obtained a bachelor's degree from UPenn, with studies in English & History. Not just history, but Classics in particular
This last activity brings us to why he's here today. Classical philosophy influenced Morgan heavily, and he feels that philosophy can teach us much about marketing. As someone who's overseen a lot of client relations, he believes practicing thoughtfulness is a key ingredient to good agency-client collaboration.
As a mini pandemic project last year, Morgan put out some posts illustrating how various philosophers would adapt their approach to Pay-per-click marketing. Of course his posts were tongue-in-cheek, but they paved the way for today's conversation.
Listen to why philosophically inquiring about what we know helps us frame problems. Hear him tell how communicating with empathy impacts how well others understand us. I'm sure you'll catch these and other deep ponderings that have very practical application in our day-to-day digital marketing jobs
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
Philosophers:
- Nietzsche
- Heraclitus
- Hegel
- Plato/Socrates
- Aristotle
- Seneca, Epictetus & the Stoics
- Popper
About Morgan:
- Morgan's personal website , also Display Ads blog site, PPC Certification site and The Marketing Scientist site
- Morgan's book focused on the topic of Empathy.
- Morgan's book "Beloved by Clients" and companion online resources.
- Morgan's podcast, Client Horror Stories
You can connect with Morgan on Linkedin, marketers who work on PPC can request access to his slack group, PPC Club83
Episode Reboot. Please don't ever utter a sentence in conversation starting with "Obviously…."
What needs to be done with marketing data to make it usable?.
Essentially, it must be taken from its original source, formatted cleanly, and put into your database to be analyzed. This is handled by a process called ETL, Extract, Transform & Load. This process was done manually in olden days, but AI is now facilitating this task to be almost entirely done by technology.
Our guest can help us get familiar with how this works because he approaches it more from a marketer's perspective than a technical one. JD Prater has a background in the world of paid media marketing, probably the niche that's most famous for doing detailed analysis on large amounts of data. He has recently become Marketing Lead at Osmos, the maker of a tool that uses AI to help companies with ETL work. Besides that, JD has done marketing in-house at Amazon and Quora, and worked on brands while with a PPC agency. Besides that, he's well known for speaking on digital marketing and being involved with several podcasts, and when he's not on dad duty, you'll catch him somewhere in his home state of Oklahoma, out cycling on an open stretch of road.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- Program Synthesis
- Funnel.io
- Supermetrics
- Spreadsheet pivot tables
- Marc Benioff: Every company is a software company
- GDPR and CCPA regulations
- Google Data Studio
- Google BigQuery
- Amazon S3
- Snowflake
- ThoughtSpot: Search & AI-Driven Analytics
- Reverse ETL - A Primer
- Connect with JD on LinkedIn or on Twitter
- JD's article Ultimate Glossary of 101 Data Terms You Should Know and company where he works, Osmos
Episode Reboot
Go take a product demo of some tool you might use.
For more information, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-61-tools-for-wrangling-marketing-data-with-jd-prater/
Do you know a marketer who is adept at using Google Ads or a similar platform to turn out a steady supply of leads? Like Liam Neeson in Taken, what these specialists "have are a very particular set of skills" Not only that, without a standard industry certification, the only way to see if someone possesses these rare skills is to divert some media budget and see what they do with real money.
Those that do well at this sort of thing can be described as having Multipotentiality or Renaissance qualities.
- Part-numbercruncher
- Part-editor
- Part-scientist
- part-librarian
Does such a person exist that can do all this? If there is, they may well be the Perfect PPC Professional. But even if there isn't, it falls to some of us to hire a person to run our paid ads, or we ourselves may be that person, who's figuring out which skills to develop. In either case, it's important to identify the right traits needed for this role.
Greg Finn has known how to run PPC marketing campaigns for more than a dozen years and now hires and develops people in this role. Many in digital marketing know him by the hundreds of articles in Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He founded the agency Cypress North with his partner Matthew Mombrea and is one of the hosts of the long-running podcast Marketing O'Clock.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- Atomic Habits book
-
PPCChat
- Amalia Fowler
- Andrew Foxwell
- AJ Wilcox
- Andrea Cruz
- Sarah Burke
- Greg's LinkedIn and Twitter profiles
Episode Reboot: Don't stop at just reading about a topic, write about it so you get a really good understanding of it.
I don’t know if you frequent the same social channels that I’m using for the podcast: IG, TW and my personal LinkedIn feed. I’ve put posts for the last 3 years on those platforms and the one thing I can tell you is that without paid promotion, it takes real work to reach a decent audience.
I wanted to know how others play this game so I asked someone who started promoting things on Facebook 15 years ago. He’s not on all the social channels and doesn’t pretend to keep his Twitter account active, but for the company that’s his day-job and the clients he serves through his agency, he knows how to use content that gets noticed.
Today’s guest, Kyle Turk, has headed the marketing teams at both public and private sector organizations. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration from St Francis Xavier University, and is a recipient of Ottawa’s Forty Under 40 award.
Listen for his explanation of how to conceive and create content. He also does a great job of outlining how social selling should work to smoothly shift from public commenting with someone to continuing the conversation through direct messaging.
Let’s learn how to up our social media game, with Kyle Turk!
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Faces Magazine * Using influencers. If in larger company, bring employees to advocate for you on their social feeds * Being professionally formal vs casual * Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation‘s “Fighting for a Cure” event which featured Kyle boxing for charity * Twitter Revue * LinkedIn newsletters * Kyle works at Keynote GroupKyle’s boutique agency, Meerkat
Episode Reboot Each episode of this podcast aims to solve a common problem that businesses have with strategizing, implementing and measuring digital marketing problems.
For more detail, please check https://funnelreboot.com/episode-59-strong-social-strategies-with-kyle-turk/
Voice technology is so prevalent, I'm giving a disclaimer on this episode that we'll refer to some voice assistants by name, so smart-speakers or digital assistants within earshot will, you know, notice.
Many of us may be users of voice recognition, but few of us know how to use it for marketing our companies. Coming up with applications is hard, with a platform whose interface is invisible. Few of us are exposed to the artificial intelligence behind it, so we can't picture what we'd do with it. As the Steve Jobs quote goes, "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
To help us with this, we'll talk with a company that launched a voice AI tool, and is happy to peel back the curtain on how this all works. Our guests are both from UCLab, a software development firm in Ottawa, where Debra is a Partner and Justin is CEO.
Listen for how this technology began with simple single-word commands, to where it can now process whole paragraphs containing advanced grammar structures. You'll learn how it goes beyond turning itself on or off, to interacting with calendars and documents. They will share how AI monitors which points someone brings up on a call and whether it was said in a positive or negative way, so before you talk again, you're ready for that objection. Also hear how detecting different human voices lets it assist with meetings by pulling out of the discussion, email them to people action items.
Bound to be some good ideas here for how to use this in your marketing or your work life.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show VOICE TECHNOLOGY, A BRIEF TIMELINE
- 1950s: computer program Audrey created, it understood numbers 1-10
- 1985: stuffed animals that take voice command, like Teddy Ruxby, enter marketplace
- 1990: Dragon Dictate launched
- 2011: Apple releases Siri
- 2011: IBM Watson won on Jeopardy
- 2013: Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant enter the marketplace
- 2013: Movie HER released
Nielsen ratings
Xbox Kinect
IVR - Interactive Voice Response
GPT3
Company Debra and Justin are part of, UCLabs
Debra Workman on LinkedIn
Justin Hacker on LinkedIn
Episode Reboot: check out UCLabs' meeting assistant, BlueCap
For
If every part of your customer acquisition can be measured, you'll figure out how to do it profitably. That premise has driven why digital marketing, and especially Pay-per-click (PPC) is managed by experienced humans. These professionals scour through data for the relationship between a company's ads and the buyers actions; once found, budgets get shifted to achieve that optimal effect.
A wrench has been thrown into our acquisition dreams by the ad platform titans: Google, Facebook and Microsoft (who own LinkedIn). Thanks to major AI investments they have made in the last five years, they've been able to automate much of the work that marketing professionals have done. In tandem with implementing their 'smart' software that runs autonomously, they have been restricting a marketer's ability to manually control campaigns.
The platforms believe their AI is smart enough to run marketing, so we can either be passive, letting them spend our money as they see fit, or we can choose to give them navigational assistance while they drive. The point is, you should have a game plan that works with the platforms' AI. One that, over time, will generate the leads you need at the best possible acquisition cost.
I believe listening to this episode will give you that plan. It covers:
- How marketing has become more computationally complex than humans can handle
- What was in it for the platforms to automate PPC marketing
- Stages of maturity for dealing with data, ending with predictive analytics
- Why you shouldn't fight ad platform automation, but instead use your business data to train algorithms how to market you more effectively
- How you should integrate your in-house systems and apply data science to uncover insights
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Paper estimating how much data optimized advertising requires, authored by Randall A. Lewis of Google; Justin M. Rao of Microsoft: "A calibrated statistical argument shows that the required sample size for an experiment to generate informative confidence intervals is typically in excess of ten million person-weeks"
- Episode 51: The AI Marketing Canvas with Raj Venkatesan
- Episode 50: Join or Die, Digital Advertising in the age of Automation by Patrick Gilbert
- Episode 41: How Google Analytics 4 Impacts Marketers with Jim Cain
- Marcus Hearne, former VP of IBM Watson Marketing Analytics
Quote by Chuck Heamann & Ken Burbary in "Digital Marketing Analytics": “If you think about all the tools we have talked about...you see that there is one common denominator: You do not own any of the data. Herein lies what we think is the biggest revolution coming to digital analytics..companies will be building internal repositories for this data.”
- Episode 47: AI For Marketers by Chris Penn
- Episode 52: Unfair Marketing with David Rodnitzky
- Episode 53: Digital Marketing in an AI World with Fred Vallaeys
Episode Reboot Go talk to a coworker who uses statistical measurement, to understand how the efficiency it achieves in other fields can be applied to marketing.
Go here for full Shownotes
The book we talk about in this show is #15 on the Amazon Best Seller list for Internet Marketing. Not to take anything away from past guests, but if you only listen to one of the 50 interviews we have done, I hope that you choose this one.
I think most marketers have heard of the Content Marketing Institute. The public figure at the centre of CMI, Joe Pulizzi, started it all with a blog post on April 26, 2007 "Why Content Marketing" His hypothesis in 2007 was that companies who put content on the internet would build relationships that blossom into future customers. He then went about literally putting out content that taught others how to do this. Once they came to the CMI site and got this free content, he would sell them everything from newsletters, to magazines, to training, and an annual Content Marketing World event.
For me personally, the story picks up in 2014 when I started listening to Joe's podcast with Robert Rose on the podcast series, This Old Marketing. I found this giving-away-expertise tactic to be quite unorthodox, as I was accustomed to thinking that companies should mainly communicate with their audience through advertising. Listening to them influenced how I've come to see content marketing's value.
While CMI was evangelizing how to grow a business on content, Joe didn't keep any secret about how well he was doing with growing his business. Already a bestselling author of several books, he came out in 2015 with Content Inc, that gave out the blueprint he was using. A year after it came out, he sold CMI in 2016 to the International Events company UBI.
He may have finished with CMI, but over the next few years, he stayed close to both corporate and entrepreneurial content creators. His keen focus on them led him to pitch his publisher on a second edition of the book, which rounds out the model by sharing the rest of his own journey of monetizing a Content-based business. the second edition that came out this year. I was amazed as I read it; so many new examples, all the updates on marketing channels, it's a total overhaul from the first edition.
This is one high-energy conversation. I was already pumped to talk to Joe, I'm not going to lie, and it seems we both got pretty keyed up as we spoke.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Shift away from the Glengarry Glenross revenue-generation model
The Sweet Spot
- The book Killing Marketing, co-authored with Robert Rose.
- Joe's LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.
- Site for the book, Content Inc and Joe's new venture, TheTilt.com
Episode Reboot To get another perspective on audience-building, see Kevin Kelly's post on 1000 true fans
No matter where you look around in today's world, you use things that were conceived and built by engineers. There were engineering-minded thinkers in ancient times like Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci. industrial age thinkers like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built on their ideas, to manufacture many things that improved the quality of our daily lives. Since then, engineers like Alan Turing, Thomas Watson and David Packard ushered in an electronic revolution that gave us the technology that makes possible the communication we're having right now.
Engineers are great. But, they are also a breed apart. They have a stereotype of being way too exacting for most people's liking. They put a new spin on the proverbial glass half-full or half empty debate. While the Pessimist says "The glass is half empty" and the Optimist says "The glass is half full," The Engineer does some measuring and pronounces "The glass is exactly twice the size that it needs to be."
They also have a reputation for being notoriously tough to market to. Today's guest knows how to reach engineers, and in her 2020 book Content Marketing, Engineered, she gives us a formula so we can reach them as well.
Wendy Covey is a co-founder of TREW Marketing, an Austin, TX-based agency that serves technical industries such as engineering design and hardware manufacturing. Prior to starting the agency in 2008 Wendy produced global marketing and services programs at National Instruments. Another side of Wendy you should know about is how she loves outdoor recreations - in fact she is the current holder of a Texas fishing record.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm
SWOT Analysis:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
-
Threats
-
Influencers like Walt Mossberg, Leo Laporte and Robert Scoble
- Foreword to the book written by former HubSpot COO JD Sherman
- Wendy's profile on LinkedIn and resources like the State of Marketing to Engineers Research Report, available on the TREW Marketing agency's site.
- Wendy's podcast Content Marketing, Engineered
Episode Reboot Figure from Wendy's book (used with permission) showing channels where engineers prefer to get their content. Note how high YouTube and LinkedIn are on the list.
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-55-content-marketing-engineered-with-wendy-covey-summer-books/
The newest book in our #SummerMarketingBooks series talks about how to take sales & marketing beyond the printed or spoken word.
Our guest Tyler Lessard has worked at high-flying tech companies like BlackBerry and lives in the Waterloo Ontario high-tech hub with his wife and four kids. Whenever he speaks on stage or is a guest on a show, he talks about how to modernize the way sales and marketing people communicate. I consider him to be a marketer's marketer. What I mean by that is he's dialed in to marketing tech, so seeing him come out with a book in 2020 called, The Visual Sale, I knew I needed to pay more attention to video.
Listen in the show for the reasons why he thinks today's buyers expect us to show up visually, not just in text they read or orally over the phone. He walks us through how to make videos seen when prospects are researching a purchase, when they are ready to decide and even after the sale. Most importantly, take it from a guy who describes himself as a hacky video creator, how little you need to get started shooting video.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show 4 E's of Video:
- Educational
- Engaging
- Emotional
- Empathetic
Marshall McLuhan assertion that "The Medium is the Message"
How Walt Disney appeared on video (we've moved past this kind of talking head video)
- Retrofoam of Michigan weekly video series "Foam U"
- Marketo
- Co-Author Marcus Sheridan's book: They Ask, You Answer
- The book's companion site TheVisualSale.com.
- Tyler's profiles: Personal site, LinkedIn and Twitter
- Past episodes of the Creating Connections show on YouTube and Apple podcasts
- Tyler is VP Marketing at Vidyard, a video tool used by B2B companies for marketing and selling.
Episode Reboot Great quote from his book: "If you don't think that video can do a better job than text on a webpage or text in an email, think again!"
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-54-the-visual-sale-with-tyler-lessard-summer-books/.
Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov was famously beaten in 1997 by a supercomputer built by dozens of IBM technologists. A Slate article looking at how Deep Blue changed chess said "The change here wasn’t just that a computer could win, but that a computer could help human players win if incorporated into their training regimes effectively."
The same thing is happening with PPC Platforms. Since 2011, Google has been integrating AI into many of their products, and every campaign feature Google Ads rolls out seems to take away control from us humans and give it to their machines. So if we're going to follow Kasparov' lead and get better at this game with the AI, the question becomes, what's the process for training an ad platform's AI, when it's writing programming that only it knows, and even the technologists running it don't know?
Some answers are contained in the book Digital Marketing in an AI World. Fred Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as Google's AdWords Evangelist. Today he serves as Co-Founding CEO of Optmyzr, a PPC management software system. Fred is a fixture on the marketing conference circuit and blazed new trails with online industry learning through Optmyz’s PPC Town Halls.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Google Ads Scripts: One compilation by Fred's company and another by RankHammer * Tools like Google Ads Seasonality Adjustment and GA4 Data filters, that train Google to omit anomalous periods by imputing data they should not factor into their machine learning models. * Vickrey Auction system used by PPC platforms * Google Ad Customizers * SKAGs: Single Keyword Ad Groups * Follow Fred on his Twitter or LinkedIn profiles for info on his upcoming book, "Unlevel the Playing Field" * Company co-founded by Fred, Optmyzr
Episode Reboot:
Remember, computers have a different kind of smarts than us.
Has this ever happened in your career?
- Sales told you that a deal was lost even though you have a superior product
- You've seen the positioning statements listed in your website or in your ads twisted by your competitors, to exploit some weakness
- You saw an industry award or splashy press go to a competitor rather than to you
- You faced a rival brand undercutting your pricing to grab your market share
It's maddening when this happens, but the truth is, marketers don't get participation ribbons. Each of these things may be unfair, but they are also situations where you could have grabbed the upper hand and reaped the benefit over your competitor.
That's the premise of the book Unfair Marketing which came out in 2021, written by David Rodnitsky He is the founder of 3Q Digital, an agency that has over 350 digital marketers devoted to advertising, analytics, decision science, strategic consulting, creative, and conversion rate optimization. Many of 3Q's clients are in silicon valley, which is where they are based. You would no doubt know the names of the companies they serve.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show David's Five levers:
- Unfair Data
- Unfair Knowledge
- Unfair Brand
- Unfair Access
-
Unfair Money
-
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
- David's profiles on: Twitter, LinkedIn
- David's Agency, 3Q Digital
- The Song that inspired the phrase "Mo data, Mo problems"
- Marketers should use data the way the Oakland A's did in Moneyball
Episode Reboot. Get a free copy of the book at www.3qdigital.com/unfair-marketing
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-52-unfair-marketing-with-david-rodnitzky-summer-books/
Are you looking at how your marketing can use AI? That's good if you are, but it's not enough to know how it works. Whether you are embedded in marketing operations or you're an executive who oversees it, you must also figure out how to get your organization to buy into AI. You'll need stakeholders who own precious data, you'll need knowledge experts to train your models, you'll possibly need operations folks to change what they deliver...as AI informs what you offer. Lastly, you'll need money - getting that money will take you proving that investing in AI yields a positive ROI. So by now, you're probably wondering how you can implement AI. Well, if you are, you will definitely be interested in the framework called the "The AI Marketing Canvas"
It's all detailed in a book by the same name, co-authored by Raj Venkatesan, along with Jim Lecinski.
Professor Venkatesan is a professor at the Darden School of Business at U of Virginia. He is also a co-author of the book Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics. Before coming to Darden, Venkatesan taught graduate students at the University of Connecticut. There, he was the recipient of the MBA Teacher of the Year Award. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Houston and his B.E. in computer engineering from the University of Madras. He has consulted with firms in the technology, retailing, media, industrial goods and pharmaceutical industries.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Framework's 5 stages, reproduced with permission:
- AI Marketing Moments: acquisition, retention, growth, advocacy
- Google's Zero Moment of Truth, co-authored by Jim Lecinski
- Clayton Christensen and the Innovator's Dilemma
- CapEx vs OpEx
- Washington Post's spinoff Zeus Technology
- Jim Lecinski's LinkedIn Profile
- Rajkumar Venkatesan's LinkedIn Profile
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-51-the-ai-marketing-canvas-with-raj-ventakesan-summer-books/
This is the fifth book of our "Summer Books" series and we're even going social with the hashtag, #SummerMarketingBooks on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. This book focuses on Pay-Per-Click marketing, and whether you do any PPC yourself or outsource, you should be aware of how much of a ground-shaking shift artificial intelligence is making here. Remember that Google & Facebook have been investing enormous sums of money on AI. Their ad empires pretty much run on AI now, and it's vaulted them to become two of the world's top 10 companies.
While acknowledging that this sounds ominous for advertisers, our author believes that by joining with them on campaign automation, we can actually thrive. Our author's seen this shift happen first-hand, as part of the NY-based agency Adventure Media, where he serves as COO. his book, Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the age of Automation, came out in 2020.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Think-with-Google's Messy Middle paper * Single Keyword AdGroup (SKAG) strategy * Eric Seufert * Survivorship bias * Jason Kalakanis' Google Wins Everything post * Fred Vallaeys PPC Town Hall * PPCProtect.com * Clickcease.com * Cheq.ai * Agency where Patrick works is AdVenture Media * Patrick can be contacted on LinkedIn and Twitter
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-50-join-or-die-digital-advertising-in-the-age-of-automation-by-patrick-gilbert-summer-books/
This is the fourth episode in our Summer Books series.
Anyone who's joined a Twitter chat or attended a conference session about it knows that discussing PPC stirs up strong opinions. The criticisms around Google, with its near-monopoly, grow louder and louder. Whether it's making their auction more competitive, their campaigns more automated, or their data reporting more opaque, it seems that everyday there's something Google does to tick off its users.
It is against this backdrop that Kirk published "Ponderings of a PPC Professional" in 2020. For the last decade, Kirk's agency, ZATO marketing, has specialized in Google Shopping Ads. His moral compass clearly points towards what's best for the advertisers that are his clients. Kirk is not afraid to tackle these things head-on. In some areas, the book offers a philosophical slant, keeping it fresh for whatever a PPC marketer in the future might be grappling with.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show * Fred Vallaeys * Patrick Gilbert * Schrödinger's cat * Mary Poppins * Google Marketing Livestream 2021 * Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin * Kirk can be contacted on LinkedIn, Twitter and on Instagram
For complete Show Notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-49-ponderings-of-a-ppc-professional-by-kirk-williams-summer-books/.
Our book is "Marketing Automation Unleashed" by Casey Cheshire. From 2011 to 2021, Casey was the Founder of Cheshire Impact a From Nashua, New Hampshire-based consultancy focused on Pardot. He is the host of the Hard Corps Marketing Show which has just blown past its 250th episode. You'll also find him sharing his views on marketing automation at industry events including Dreamforce.
Prior to Cheshire impact, Casey served in the U.S. Marine Corps and he maintains that physical stamina as a skydiver, mountaineer, triathlete.
He released the book in 2019 and I have not only read it but gifted it to others.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Four Functions of any marketing automation tool, rolls up to acronym CNAR:
- Capture
- Nurture
- Automate
- Report
Cheshire Success Index (CSI) - a 10 point marketing automation assessment
Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek
Office Space TPS report
Communication principle of What's In It For Me (WIIFM)
Lisa Earle McLeod book "Selling with Noble Purpose"
Contact info and Social Profiles: Casey's website
Hard Corps Marketing Podcast
His Profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Goodreads
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-48-marketing-automation-unleashed-by-casey-cheshire-summer-books
Marketers know that Artificial Intelligence is being integrated into our work, but many are unsure how they can apply it to their daily work. Our guest is Christopher S. Penn, the author of AI for Marketers: A Primer and Introduction, just out in its 3rd edition.
Our guest is an authority on analytics, digital marketing, and marketing technology. A recognized thought leader, best-selling author, and keynote speaker. He has been named by IBM as a Champion in IBM Analytics.
Chris is a cofounder and Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights, a Boston -based digital analytics firm. He is co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. He has also run the marketing for a series of startups in the financial services, SaaS software, and public relations industries.
People, products and concepts mentioned in the episode: Seven steps of AI Maturity:
- Data Foundation
- Measurement & analytics
- Insights & Research
- Process Automation
- Data Science
- Machine learning
- AI-Powered
- Microsoft's Tay Bot
- Jay Baer's book Youtility
- 'When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen' commercial
- American Airlines SABRE system
- Common Biases in AI
- Ann Handley
- Google's MUM algorithm and short video explainer
- GPT J6B algorithm (for a publicly accessible chat-enabled AI, see Replika)
- Dunkin donuts
- Brookings Institution Research on Jobs under threat from AI
Chris' Social Profiles * YouTube * Instagram * LinkedIn * Twitter * Facebook
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-47-ai-for-marketers-by-chris-penn-summer-books/
This is the first show of our "Summer Books" series, our featured book is called The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing by Rich Brooks.
Businesses know that for their marketing to have a significant impact on revenue, they have to put some effort into it. Many are confused by where effort is most needed and how to measure it all. Rich Brooks gets this and his hope in writing the Lead Machine was to break this whole marketing puzzle down into its constituent pieces.
Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine. He founded The Agents of Change a weekly podcast that is about to cross the 400-episode mark. He is a nationally recognized speaker on using digital channels like search, social media and mobile for marketing to your audience. Rich also hosts the Agents of Change conference which takes place in Portland, Maine.
This episode begins with websites, which Rich sees as the cornerstone of your marketing assets. We then skip through the chapters he devotes to SEO, paid traffic, Social Media, Email, Podcasts and Video. We also explore how to contextualize this investment, so we have a yardstick to judge whether we aren't spending enough or we are spending too much on marketing.
People, products, concepts mentioned in this episode: Rich's BARE marketing framework:
- Build
- Attract
- Retain
- Evaluate
John Lee Dumas
Google Data Studio
Rich Brooks' contact info: Agents of Change Podcast/Conference
Flyte New Media
Fast Forward Maine podcast
Rich on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-46-the-lead-machine-by-rich-brooks-summer-books/
A Marketing generalist is known for having abilities in diverse fields, but what exact combination of abilities does it take? And when should a marketer try to go deep in one skill area instead of going broad.
One problem is that you can’t judge whether your skills are commonplace or exceptional, it always depends on who’s around you and how many of them can do what you do. After all, everyone is an expert to someone else
I’m lucky enough to have known Robert Decher for the better part of a decade. Listen to the show where he explains how:
- Good Careers don’t always go in straight lines, but broad abilities acquired along the way are augmented by one skill that goes deep, together forming the shape of a T. Hence the name T-shaped career.
- There's no substitute for experience.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in the Episode * Paul Roetzer’s book, The Marketing Performance Blueprint * Algonquin College’s Media and Design Program * Video Cover Story for LinkedIn Profiles * Low-code and no-code development applications * Spark Advocacy * Pink Robot * Canva * The shelf-life of skills and how to avoid obsolescence * Inspiration for parts of episode came from the Humans of Martech podcast * How to contact Robert: * Robert Decher's LinkedIn profile * Robert Decher’s Twitter account
Episode Reboots * It takes trust to do work that’s at the fringes of someone’s skills, by both the person paying for the work and the person doing it. * A good generalist is able to think out and talk about how something should work, even if they aren’t the one building all of it.
For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-45-how-general-should-a-marketing-generalist-be-with-robert-decher/
In this episode I talk with Amanda Relyea-Voss (who also likes to be called Mandi), owner of a 5 person social media marketing agency, Like a Voss, that serves B2C and B2B companies. Listen for the ways Mandi has used social media to interact with prospects and how this has propelled them to buy from her customers.
Last time Amanda was on the podcast, we covered LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Since then, there have been many changes to these platforms - Stories; a way for users to watch a short, possibly edited, video of anything they wish to upload. We have also seen new platforms which have become popular in just a short amount of time such as TikTok and Clubhouse. In this podcast, we talk about these platforms and see if they can add value to companies who need help with their social media marketing.
People/Places/Concepts * The Social Dilemma IMDb * Article: How UGC is Redefining Marketing in 2020 * TikTok homepage * Clubhouse homepage * Twitter Spaces
Episode Reboot “Show up as yourself”
How to Contact Amanda * Like a Voss: blog * Amanda's LinkedIn * Amanda's Twitter * Amanda's Instagram * Amanda's Facebook
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-44-social-networks-for-the-2020s-with-mandi-relyea-voss/
A lot of changes have happened with Data Privacy lately, as people have grown more aware of information that companies have on them. Cookies were introduced to allow sites to improve the visitor experience. But their usage has mushroomed so much, we now need pop-ups on sites just to say how many cookies are being used.
With privacy regulations passed and more looming, big tech players like Apple and Google are pre-emptively changing data tracking. Google’s taking away the individual targeting on which they have sold ads for the last 20 years.
There will be more episodes on this topic, because it is changing and we won't know how it fully impacts marketers for another year or two. But for now, let’s explore all that’s happened and look at tactical alternatives we as site owners and marketers can take to react to this.
People/Places/Concepts * GDPR - EU General Data Protection Regulation * CCPA - California Consumer Privacy Act * VCDPA - Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act * Canada Modernizing its Privacy Act * First-party and third-party cookies * Cambridge Analytica scandal * RDP - Restricted Data Processing (Google) * LDU - Limited Data Use (Facebook) * ETP - Enhanced Tracking Protection (Mozilla)
Apple Technologies: * ATT - App Tracking Transparency * ITP - Intelligent Tracking Protocol * IDFA - Identifier for Advertisers
Google Technologies: * FLoCs - Federated Learning of Cohorts * FLEDGE - First "Locally-Executed Decision over Groups" Experiment * Turtledove - “Two Uncorrelated Requests, Then Locally-Executed Decision On Victory”
Lawsuits brought by Governments in US against Google
Surveillance Capitalism (term coined by author Shoshana Zuboff)
Porter Model: Resources: Google Ads Announcement on Privacy Sandbox and FLoCs
Page that Julie Bacchini and the #ppcchat community are curating: Privacy & Cookieless Resources
Eric Seufert’s podcast on this topic
Episode Reboot: Ensure your site complies with opt-in provisions and limited data collection policies.
Collect first-party data on your leads/buyers, including which advertisements they saw. Form inferences on which ads your entire potential-buyer population should see, based on this statistical sample.
Encourage visitors to provide their email early, so you can track them as they go from visitor to lead to customer. You will be better prepared when Google Ads switches to selling cohorts of users based on interest.
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-43-marketing-within-the-limits-of-data-privacy/
Until recently, contacting prospects and customers was difficult and came with enterprise-sized price tags. Only 25 years ago, the CRM landscape was dominated by PeopleSoft, Oracle and Siebel. To send out mass emails, products like Yesmail, UnityMail, ExactTarget and FloNetwork used to be the only games in town. But around the year 2000 the cloud-based CRM Salesforce entered as well as entry-level email tools like MailChimp. Then followed by a newer breed of tools that sent emails and bolted onto a website, letting you trace when email recipients revisited your site. This marked the start of Marketing Automation platforms, which has the power of old enterprise systems at a much lower price point, and they talk to CRMs. Around 2010, Steve Shock got so intrigued with Marketing Automation's potential, he decided to act as a consultant to show companies how to take advantage of the tools.
Steve specializes in revenue generation engines for SMB's in B2B. As head of Shock & Co, he works independently or part of a larger team. He also works with the non-profit organization, Invest Ottawa, as an advisor to companies who are trying to scale.
Listen in the episode where Steve talks about how to set up marketing automation campaign’s so they will keep in touch with buyers throughout their journey. I love that he avoids jargon when describing the technical parts of this, and he has actionable tips for both prospect and customer communication.
Steve can be contacted on LinkedIn or at shockandco@gmail.com
People, products, concepts mentioned: * Forrester’s research showing it takes a minimum of four, and typically seven+ touches of a prospect to get them to engage. * How CRM and Marketing Automation should be considered as a single database * Try to send 'marketing emails' from a person's email address, such as head of marketing or the CEO
Types of Drip campaigns: * Sequence sent to raw leads to turn them into qualified prospects (demo or free SaaS user) * Sequence sent to qualified prospects to turn them into paid users or closed customer * Sequence sent once they have become a customer
Reboot: For inspiration on how to write copy to use in automated emails, look at emails you/your sales team have already sent to prospects.
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-42-structuring-marketing-automation-for-success-with-steve-shock
In fall 2020, Google released version 4 of their Google Analytics tool (here is the official announcement of GA4). Despite its description as a new version, this is actually a brand new product. In fact, it’s part of Google’s switch to a whole new technology stack, and the ripples of their move extend to the remotest corners of a marketer’s world.
What do you need to know about GA4? For one, it has a different interface from the existing “Universal” version of GA. It doesn’t have some features and functions that you assume are in GA. At the same time, there are things that GA4 has that you haven’t been able to get before without paying for GA Premium.
My guide for this tour of GA4 is Jim Cain, who founded the analytics consultancy Napkyn in 2009, one of only a few Premier Google Marketing Platform Solution Partners. If you want to know what to do about GA4, Jim will tell you how Napkyn is dealing with it in their client work.
People, products and Concepts mentioned on the show: * How Google Analytics 4 is part of Google Cloud, a platform for integrating GA data with a companies’ internal systems. * Google Tag Manager * Google Data Studio * How those on Google Analytics 360 (premium version of the tool) can Connect to BigQuery to have continuity of data as they migrate to GA4. * Analytics Expert Kelly Kubrick (someone both Jim and I look up to) * Jim’s Consulting firm, Napkyn Analytics
Episode Reboot Set up a GA4 Property onto your existing GA account as soon as possible, to run it in parallel with GA3.
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-41-how-google-analytics-4-impacts-marketers-with-jim-cain
You're looking at a screen that's empty, aside from a little box that you type or talk onto. A zillionth of a second later, you see all that the internet has, relating to what you entered.
We're talking about search engine results pages and though they may seem to simply fetch information, there's a whole lot that we marketers need to know in order to appear there.
I want you to listen as he explains Snippets markup XML schema, Info boxes, web stories open Graph, Search console and other technical aspects of how search data is indexed.
Brock Murray is a full-stack marketer who specializes most in SEO. He started coding websites for friends and family members. He started his agency around 2012 and I met him recently after that, hearing him on a panel and liking how transparent he was in giving advice. Later I ran an event and asked him to speak at it.
Zooming ahead to the present, the agency is now a 7-figure business that does ecommerce sites, local service businesses, you name it. What I like most of all is how Brock still practices what he preaches in SEO, sharing real time experimentation he’s doing in his work, and what we can all learn about web search from doing it.
Follow Brock on Twitter or find out about his agency, SEOPlus+
People, products and Concepts mentioned on the show: * XML sitemap * Schema.org * Local Search Listings (also known as Map Pack or Local 3-Pack) * Google’s Knowledge Panels (Info boxes that appear in search results) * web stories * Open Graph protocol * Search Console * Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP project) * Google Analytics 4 * BERT algorithm * Google My Business * Rand Fishkin * Glenn Gabe
Episode Reboot Brock created a tool that checks how well websites are optimized for search. To have your site checked, visit FreeSEOReport.ca
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-40-giving-search-engines-what-they-want-with-brock-murray
We’re going to talk about mistakes today. I mean, today we’re going to talk about mistakes. They’re so ingrained in our present-day world, we even expect them in depictions set in the future. If you watch Star Trek you’ll know that anytime they beam down on an away mission, something’s going to go wrong and usually someone wearing a red shirt won’t last until the end of the episode.
Beyond hearing Star Trek references in this show, you’ll hear the roles that automation, documentation, realistic deadlines and self-assessments all have in determining whether mistakes happen. You’ll also hear how they can be avoided, but also why bending ourselves into pretzels trying not to make them is wrong.
My guest Jordan Danger, founder of Danger Co., a 360° marketing consulting and coaching practice. Right off the bat, you need to know that Jordan isn’t afraid to make mistakes. In fact, when you hear her last name in a moment, you’ll see how aptly it describes her fearlessness. And how she makes her opinions about marketing known.
Jordan went to school for youth & social work, but has always had a flair for communications. Ever a believer in the power of the internet to share stories, a personal life event gave her the chance to build an audience off her blog and social media accounts. The explosive success of that project gave her the spark to enter marketing, which led her to sell her expertise to companies she met through her personal project.
That led to working for a City Councillor and then working as an independent marketing consultant to tech firms, ranging from startups to ones going through successive investment rounds. In addition to her consultancy, she’s an artist, writer, an Advisor at a local business accelerator, an Ottawa Forty Under 40 Recipient, a part time professor at Algonquin College and someone who’s enthusiastic about youth wellness, animals and nature.
Products, People and Concepts mentioned in this show:
- Jordan’s DangerCo Agency
- Jordan't Wedding Project Priceless/NEST
- Girl, crafted blog
- Art site: Danger Creative
Episode Reboot:
Jordan’s advice to marketers:
- Study outside your field.
- Participate in teams outside of your department
- Focus on psychology, economics and consumer behavior.
- Listen - all the time listen.
- Follow what your audiences follow like you are Star Trek’s Spock on an away Mission, without emotion.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
https://funnelreboot.com/episode-39-mistakes-marketers-shouldnt-make-and-some-they-should-with-jordan-danger
A simple marketing model goes something like this: We have a product that solves a problem; a buyer who has that problem finds us, decides it’s a fit and a sale happens. Right? Sounds great! But it puts some big expectations on a buyer:
- that they can feel their unmet need, their problem
- That there’s a well-known product category for out there and that they can find the vendors
- That they can predict the success they’d get from buying our product
It’s a stretch to imagine a buyer could independently do all these. That’s what content marketing is meant for, to educate the prospects, informing them of the solution’s value and elevating us, the content’s author, in the process. Relax marketers everywhere, Content is the answer to your prayers. Content is all you need. What’s that you say? You don’t have enough Content? Or You don’t know how to deploy it externally to its maximum effect?
Well, our guest has good news for you, he feels content can be found internally in our companies. And, for those who sell technology products, he’s also full of ideas on how content draw in prospects, getting them to use and come onside with our products.
My guest is Paul Schneider, came to using content for marketing by using content for a different purpose: training & education. Content has posed the same challenges in their field as ours, as they tried to modernize training content, letting people take it in at their own pace, no matter how distant they were from a classroom.
He got into this field by studying in education and psychology, which led him to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for a PhD. Illinois is practically the American epicenter of large-scale computing, which onto the internet through tools like Telnet, Eudora, the Mosaic browser. Companies built by U of Illinois alumnus include Netscape, Siebel Systems, PayPal and YouTube.
Being at this school while all this was going on, he witnessed efforts to take learning onto the internet, built on top of browsers. He got in on the ground-floor and a decade and a half later is SVP of business development at a company that makes eLearning authoring software Dominknow.
Paul spoke to me from Colorado; he shares how his company, Dominknow Learning Systems use content to market their SaaS-based software.
Show Notes: * Instructional Designer * IDIODC podcast * Adobe Authorware * Toolbook eLearning software * Subject Matter Expert (SMEs) * xAPI protocol to evaluate eLearning experiences * LMS * LCMS
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-38-a-cooperative-approach-to-content-with-paul-schneider/
A lot of attention is given to the largest ad platforms (Google/YouTube and Facebook proper, along with Instagram & WhatsApp) - eMarketer says this duopoly accounts for two-thirds of all digital advertising.
If you include Amazon, whose market share is somewhere in the teens and should be in the 20s soon, over 80% of all the money paid to reach buyers is spent on three platforms. Does it make sense to take our advertising beyond these big players to smaller networks, that account for only one out of every five? Our guest, Andrea Cruz, says yes. A Manager with Boston-based agency KoMarketing, she feels these lesser-known Social Networks pose a great opportunity for B2B advertisers. In this show, she will talk about three networks, and how it takes a different approach to campaign on them successfully.
Persons, concepts and products mentioned: * Jeremy Krantz * eMarketer numbers on Facebook-Google Duopoly * Quora Ads * Reddit Ads * Pinterest Ads * Funnel Reboot episode on LinkedIn and Microsoft Advertising
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-37-taking-b2b-beyond-the-big-three-running-paid-social-on-smaller-networks-with-andrea-cruz/
Are colleges and universities keeping up with the changes in marketing? To answer this question, Prof Scott Cowley of Western Michigan University surveyed 529 US University marketing programs. Here are the results: out of all higher education institutions that teach marketing, 27% do not offer a single digital marketing course. Of those that do have digital in their curriculum, half of them offer only one digital marketing course. It seems even when schools have a digital component that they're uncommitted to it. Students at 9 out of 10 of these schools can graduate with a degree without taking a digital marketing course.
Prof Cowley pointed out the mismatch between schools and the outside world. “Traditional marketers are struggling to upskill, marketing graduates have studied a syllabus that doesn’t include digital techniques, and digital professionals have inconsistent abilities due to a lack of standardized skills training”
But there’s a growing number of Profs that are bringing Off-Campus experts and their ideas into the classroom to help the next generation of marketers meet today’s needs. One of them is our guest, Jonathan Simon, who, since becoming a professor at U of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Business, has influenced how their marketing programs are taught. He not only uses his educational background (which includes a BA and an MBA) to teach but he also draws from time in the private sector where he worked with media companies and in the mobile technology space.
People, concepts and products mentioned: * NYU’s Scott Galloway * PageCloud * Telfer’s Digital Marketing Certificate
For complete Show Notes, go to: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-35-adapting-how-marketing-is-taught-in-higher-ed-with-jonathan-simon/
This is part of a series on how to structure a growth team, in particular the marketing resources that generate sales leads. Every resourcing model along the in-house to outsourced spectrum was covered in the four-part series, with each guest giving their take from their respective position as an internal or external resource. Their views are here in these episodes as well as in a webinar hosted by the agency behind this podcast, Marketing What’s New. To hear the full panel’s answers on which in-house or outsourced model is right for your company, go watch the recording on the Marketing What’s New site - it’s ungated.
This episode talks with Ryan Paul Gibson, the head of RPG Marketing in Ottawa, Canada. He’s also a producer of short films and documentaries, and previously worked as a reporter for CBC Ottawa.
Ryan’s key points:
- How much a fractional marketer can be accountable for meeting objectives and target numbers, as long as they are involved in setting the inputs behind the programs that make those outcomes happen.
- How technologies like SaaS tools have evolved the marketing function to being more receptive to outsourced marketers.
- The fact that connecting/disconnecting with a consultant is relatively easy, compared to in-house staff
- The analogy he uses to capture both parties, likening your company to a large ship and h’s the little tugboat that ensure the large ship stays on the right trajectory.
- The stages of growth when it makes sense for a company to bring on fractional resources. Also how the CMO-level consultant can draw up the playbook, execute on some of it AND train junior staff to continue executing on it after they’re done.
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-35-a-fractional-cmos-perspective-with-ryan-paul-gibson-talent-tradeoffs/
This is part of a series on how to structure a growth team, in particular the marketing resources that generate sales leads. Every resourcing model along the in-house to outsourced spectrum was covered in the four-part series, with each guest giving their take from their respective position as an internal or external resource. Their views are here in these episodes as well as in a webinar hosted by the agency behind this podcast, Marketing What’s New. To hear the full panel’s answers on which in-house or outsourced model is right for your company, go watch the recording on the Marketing What’s New site - it’s ungated.
She has a self-proclaimed passion for livestock management (animal husbandry) especially cows. This led her to get a (Ph.D.) in Education from Cornell University and a career as a Government researcher. She took a hard turn in a different direction when she bought her first home - a condo and joined the condo board. Being a volunteer board director is a tough job, so she built a software solution that would make it easier. This caused her to found a company in 2014 that serves boards. Boardspace is a sub-10 employee company that makes SaaS software to help boards manage their work.
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-34-a-founders-foray-into-marketing-with-pat-crosscombe-talent-tradeoffs/
This is part of a series on how to structure a growth team, in particular the marketing resources that generate sales leads. Every resourcing model along the in-house to outsourced spectrum was covered in the four-part series, with each guest giving their take from their respective position as an internal or external resource. Their views are here in these episodes as well as in a webinar hosted by the agency behind this podcast, Marketing What’s New. To hear the full panel’s answers on which in-house or outsourced model is right for your company, go watch the recording on the Marketing What’s New site - it’s ungated.
This episode’s perspective is with Nathan Pabich, a director with Chicago-based SEO and PPC marketing. agency Digital Third Coast
This episode covers:
- How the outsourced staff who work at an agency are specialists, as opposed to marketing generalists that work in-house. Also hear the economic advantage of paying for agency specialists on an as-needed basis
- The talent-hiring challenge that are faced by agencies and employers on the brand-side, and how the type of client projects an agency brings on helps them retain their staff.
- The kind of leaders within a client’s organization that agencies hope to work with and how an honest dialogue about what is or isn’t working makes for a great agency-client relationship.
- Limits on how much an agency can learn about your industry environment and mirror your culture
- How far agencies are willing to go with being tied to your revenue-related metrics
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-33-an-agency-leads-perspective-with-nathan-pabich-talent-tradeoffs
This is part of a series on how to structure a growth team, in particular the marketing resources that generate sales leads. Every resourcing model along the in-house to outsourced spectrum was covered in the four-part series, with each guest giving their take from their respective position as an internal or external resource. Their views are here in these episodes as well as in a webinar hosted by the agency behind this podcast, Marketing What’s New. To hear the full panel’s answers on which in-house or outsourced model is right for your company, go watch the recording on the Marketing What’s New site - it’s ungated.
Jamie Walker has been a B2B digital marketer for the past years. She is currently the marketing manager at APX Data whose technology gives first responders crucial information about the buildings they enter when responding to a call.
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-32-a-client-side-marketers-perspective-with-jamie-walker-talent-tradeoffs/
We’ve all been pitched by MLMs in consumer categories like weight-loss and cosmetics. You should know there are similar operators in the corporate marketing world, scamming even experienced business leaders.
Someone who’s seen this up close is agency owner Mike Pacitto. He’s angered by not only the real monetary damage scams cause; these bad actors also sour companies trusting the work of legitimate marketing agencies like his and mine.
In this episode, Mike raises issues like:
- How the internet amplifies the moral hazards of scamming people, because the vendor can set up a website for a negligible cost and disconnect themselves from it in an instant.
- What are the vendor’s responsibilities in screening the buyers with whom the odds of success will be highest
- How Marketing scammers and gambling institutions sell a money-losing activity but that gambling advertisements come clean about this, while scammers claim that they can make people money.
- How not to become a victim.
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-31-dissecting-marketing-scams-with-micheal-pacitto
Every part of marketing today runs thanks to technology, but few of us understand what actually goes on under the hood. This episode’s guest talks to us about what we really need to understand about our technology stack, and how we can use more automation in our marketing.
Our guest is Steve Foster, the founder of 628 Media, which helps businesses clarify their message and implement the tools and strategies they need to drive revenue and build their brand.
Steve was inquisitive at a young age, watching his father, a mining-company electrician, troubleshoot problems. Though he went through university for Mechanical Engineering, what really captivated him was human psychology. This carried through to choosing sales positions after school and, in 2013, starting a company devoted to helping other businesses sell and market themselves.
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-30-a-nontechnical-look-at-your-tech-stack-with-steve-foster/
This talk with Anastasia Valentine is about scale, something that’s clearly baked into everything she does. Anastasia heads up Marketing at Rhonda.ai which is owned by IMI, but she has also been a CMO at startups and mid-sized companies, a seasoned speaker, and a strong proponent of developing future leaders. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-29-whats-needed-to-scale-up-marketing-with-anastasia-valentine
This episode I talk with Darryl Praill who has used LinkedIn as a platform for promoting branded content. In his three years with VanillaSoft, maker of SaaS-based sales software, he has brought them visibility in the form of a podcast, virtual events, and conference keynotes. This exposure and the resulting growth in pipeline revenue has resulted in Darryl being promoted to Chief Revenue Officer for the company. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-28-thought-leading-content-on-linkedin-with-darryl-praill
This is part of a pair of episodes about a social network devoted to business professionals, LinkedIn. To hear how to use thought-leading content on it, go to this show with Darryl Praill.
In this episode, you'll hear AJ Wilcox, founder of a LinkedIn-only advertising agency, explain why you should advertise on LinkedIn. AJ was an early adopter of LinkedIn (you’ll see what I mean by looking at his LinkedIn profile) and he goes in to deep description of many aspects of running paid campaigns on LinkedIn, including:
- Which part of the BANT model which LinkedIn’s targeting provides.
- How objective-based campaigns work.
- The four main types of ads you can create.
- How to differentiate explicit, implicit and behavioural targeting methods the platform uses so you can choose the best one for your campaign audience.
- Why the cost-per-click of LinkedIn ads is higher than other platforms, and how it can still be economically justified.
- How the age and past performance of your campaigns is factored into what Linkedin charges you for a click.
- Some of the newer platform releases, like integration of Microsoft Bing search behaviour and new features coming to the platform.
People/products/concepts mentioned in this episode:
Bombora - Intent data for B2B marketing and sales
CPC vs CPM bidding
Rand Fishkin
AJ’s LinkedIn Ads Show podcast
Connect directly with AJ
Episode Reboot:
Add the LinkedIn pixel to your site even if you aren’t planning on a campaign. Get insights on what LinkedIn knows about your site visitors.
My guest is Michel Fortin of Shelly Solutions, whose strategies get to the heart this. He is a 30 year marketing veteran, who has done copywriting and marketing as a coach, under his own consultancy, and within an agency. He’s active in industry associations spoken on stage at conferences, holds industry certifications and has written hundreds of published articles.
As you hear our conversation, you’ll hear him refer to many sources: a half-dozen books that guided his thinking on sales & marketing, several tools, conceptual frameworks and companies he’s worked with. Also listen to him tell, on a personal level, how as a young salesperson, an ADHD-related condition called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) led to him writing marketing content and becoming so good at it that he left sales to sell his copywriting services.
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-26-wrangling-performance-out-of-site-content-with-michel-fortin/
I’m speaking Andres Tovar, with a Southern-Ontario based marketer who has built chat-based campaigns for many organizations. Andres will talk about the two types of chat tools: ones that use someone’s social log-in and ones that are native to a website. He takes us through selecting the steps in the customer journey when chat interactions make sense. Tips are given on how to brand a chatbot and how to script a bot’s reactions so they flow nicely towards a human touch-point. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-25-conversational-marketing-with-andres-tovar
In this episode I talk with Amanda Relyea-Voss (who also likes to be called Mandi), owner of a social media marketing agency that serves B2C and B2B companies. Listen for the ways Mandi has used social media to interact with prospects and how this has propelled them to buy from her customers. We talk about creating social posts from a single piece of content, what kind of text and images to use, applying hashtags and the KPI ratios you can use to measure your effectiveness.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/social-media-marketing-with-amanda-relyea-voss/
Remember as a kid at the amusement park - you must be this tall to go on this ride? This closely parallels a key part of all complex sales - Qualification.
So when marketing gets a lead, capping off their piece of the process, sales is far from the end, it’s actually the beginning of their work with the lead. The main question that sales has to answer is “Is this buyer capable of buying from us?” Are they tall enough to ride this ride?
The process of answering that question requires a rep to do offline research as well as having one or several conversations. In larger sales where multiple internal people are needed, the lead may not progress to involve anyone else, because the rep spoke with them and determined they aren’t a sales-qualified lead. The process varies depending on the company, but in all cases, it takes a bit of human intuition. There’s a whole art to it.
To get a salesperson’s perspective on how to do this, I spoke with Martin MacArthur,who is passionate about getting on the phone and helping companies fill their pipelines with qualified leads that drive sales. Let’s get into that discussion.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/qualifying-prospects-with-martin-macarthur/
Today’s episode is a simple solocast of me talking to you. I’m recording in an extraordinary time when stress is being put on healthcare, public institutions, whole industries and even entire economies. All the uncertainty out there is invading our digital marketing world. What’s going to happen? Just thinking about current events can induce fears about budgets getting cut, teams getting shrunk and we feel an existential threat to our very career.
I talk about investments we can make around planning, doing, analyzing and improving processes. I share resources that have helped me during crises so the way I market fits with new outside realities. Hopefully it helps propel you to act in a way that you can look back on with pride when it’s all over.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-22-digital-marketing-through-uncertain-times/
In this episode we talk about how to write persuasively for prospects. Our guest is Nik Paprocki, the founder of Websuitable, an ROI driven digital agency serving small businesses all across Canada. He feels this use of copywriting is just as effective in terms of generating leads, because it speaks to everyone, not just those who are in-market to buy from you now. He felt so strongly about how it works that he swung his whole agency around to this writing approach.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-21-writing-persuasively-for-your-site-visitors/
Today we’ll talk about the production of videos to use in your marketing, all the way from the planning stage to the appearance of the final product.
Listen as Casey takes us through the steps that his production company follows for making any video. You don’t have to involve an outsourced firm to make your videos, but you can use the same principles at any scale so your final product ends up telling a story that will keep viewers engaged
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-20-using-video-to-make-content-more-engaging/
In the fast pace of digital marketing, we sometimes brush up against legal issues. Today’s guest is here to help marketers make sense of these situations. Megan Cornell is the founder of Momentum – a new kind of business law firm dedicated to providing law solutions in a way that works for clients. She explains data privacy, trademarks, spam, intellectual property and other legal issues we all face, giving plain-English explanations (a first for lawyers, as far as I know) of ways we marketers can stay on the right side of the law.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-19-legal-and-not-so-legal-aspects-of-digital-marketing/
In any given year, there are a lot of changes in paid media. The pace of change in 2019 was every bit as brisk as in previous years. For the third year in a row, we assembling a panel to look back at a shortlist of the changes that are the most significant. Then we weigh their impact on B2B companies and what can be done either to minimize downside or capitalize on the upside. Our Panel this time features PPC professionals Olga Gladycheva as well as Pierre Levasseur and yours truly.
For complete Show Notes, go to http://leadgeneering.com/episode-18-top-paid-media-changes-in-2019/
Whether you look at traditional or digital media, there’s a growing expectation that brands be more human. Those that use technology as a spamming tool or a way to hide from their buyers are being ignored or worse, heckled by their audience on social media. You may not be experiencing this problem right now, but just because you aren’t, doesn’t mean you don’t have this problem.
Buyers may be at a breaking point where they’ll stop tolerating company messaging in their media feed. We have saturated our audiences with so much sterilized corporate-speak, they don’t even hear us anymore. This is a sure-fire way to lose, and the only way we can win is to be more human. Listen to my conversation with Eric Collard who knows a lot about how to communicate in a human way.
For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-17-staying-human-in-todays-media-landscape
In this episode, I talked with Farhad Khan, an Ottawa-based expert on UX. He started out working as a software engineer for high tech companies and then formed a Web development agency called Grype Solutions in 2009. Listen for his description of how design impacts a site’s marketing effectiveness, what jobs your website has, using your analytics tool to see how visitors flow through your site, making each page on your site interesting, and where sites are going when it comes to personalization.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-16-role-of-ux-in-a-sites-marketing-effectiveness/
This episode looks at the impact of fraudulent traffic on digital marketing. We’ll talk about how big a problem it is for publishers, ad platforms and advertisers. We will step through what advertisers can do to make their campaigns less vulnerable to attacks by fraudsters, and give thoughts on how to give your non-marketing colleagues reasons why it’s still good business to advertise, in spite of problems with ad fraud.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-15-ad-fraud-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/
This episode takes us through the case of a company that seized the chance to market their product using content, tailored to each buyer’s vertical and funnel stage.
Hear how they:
- Implemented the email communications and marketing content into their Marketing Automation tool.
- What kind of marketing resources they needed to build and maintain the platform
- How to customize content for different audiences, without making too much work for yourself
- How to present dashboard data such that management understands how you use the budget to create content and what business-related numbers that influence.
For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-14-the-role-of-content-throughout-the-funnel/
This is the fifth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. An experience is created with the content you write; but content alone does not an experience make. You can’t just throw together a collection of words and expect it to do anything. Here I talk with a web copy expert on how to craft content that provides a positive experience for the user. In my interview with James Taylor of Samurai Marketing, you’ll hear the 12 steps he follows for creating content that measurably improves the number of users who engage and become leads.
Show Notes: People/Things mentioned in the show.
- James Taylor, Samurai Marketing
- War & Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
- Ernest Hemingway
- WordPress SEO All-in-One Plugin
- Pixabay
- Apple Notes (similar to: Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep)
Episode Reboot:
Here is James’ 12-step checklist for Creating WebPage and Blog Post content
This is the fourth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. In this episode, we talk about traffic; not the automotive type but the web visitor type. This solocast talks about all the ways web analytics tools classify traffic to your site. Then I focus on four of those channels that you can affect for getting more traffic to your site. For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-12-how-traffic-make-the-whole-funnel-work/
In this episode, we look at both sides of a website interaction. We discuss how visitors progress through a website and how marketers make conversion offers for the visitors to complete. Marketers make a critical choice when deciding the conversion actions they use, so we go through the most common actions used on leading-edge websites. Listen in for answers to these topics:
- Why do we have conversions?
- How to optimize your conversions
- How to choose what call-to-action to put on your webpage
- How to effectively use chatbots, contact form, call buttons, questionnaires, etc
For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-11-how-conversions-make-the-whole-funnel-work
This episode covers what needs to be in place to know everything about people's interactions with your website. We talk about how to track conversions in your analytics, how to add Tags, run A/B testing and more.
For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-10-how-a-tracking-infrastructure-makes-the-whole-funnel-work
This episode walks through a 7-step process for building a marketing dashboard:
- Interview stakeholders
- Review Technology
- Select KPIs
- Group requirements
- Select Charts
- Prototyping/Wireframing
- Launch
For the People, Ideas and Products mentioned in this episode, visit the shownotes at http://FunnelReboot.com
In this episode, three PPC Professionals reviewed the long list of features that PPC platforms made in 2018 and cut it down to a handful that are having the largest impact on B2B companies. Hear what we think are the best and worst changes made this past year, and what advertisers should to in reaction to them.
Check out the shownotes or signup to receive them by email at funnelreboot.com
To get future episodes, please subscribe at Apple podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @funnelreboot
Does your company use technology like Marketing Automation and CRM? Is your marketing program supported by applications by the likes of Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce? More and more Marketing departments are integrating them into their technology stack.
Listen to this interview with a Marketer named Ed Goffin at Pleora Technologies to hear a real company’s experience with this automation.
For all the links mentioned in this episode, go to: funnelreboot.com
Panelists: Doug McCaffrey, Olga Gladycheva, Pierre Levasseur, being moderated by Glenn Schmelzle
Updates made by Paid Search platforms that we cover:
- Custom Intent Audiences
- AI Attribution models
- Review & Promotion extensions
- Ad variations
- Modeling conversions via GCLID
- IF function in Ads
- Account Health score
- AdWords Experience UI
- Cross-device remarketing
- Nearly Exact Exact Match
- Youtube ad restrictions
- GSP stops reading emails
- AdWords + Google Optimize
For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/top-paid-search-updates-year
This episode covers the way we work in digital. As the pace of work has sped up, we're using more agile methods to plan our resources. As automation and artificial intelligence enter, we're deciding how it gets used in our marketing stack. We are also figuring out how our organizational culture fits with this, so everyone can focus on a funnel that efficiently converts visitors into buyers.
For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/dealing-with-how-work-changed-with-digital/
This episode is about how digital has changed how we measure marketing. We'll cover the explosion of data brought by the Internet. We’ll look at how to clean and filter data so only the right kind is used for analysis. We'll talk about tools for analyzing and reporting data, for sharing data with core areas of our business, and also for insights we ourselves get out of it. Finally, we'll see how more leads can be generated by analyzing how buyers respond to our content.
One of the ways that digital has changed marketing is in how buyers converse with sellers. The experiences we deliver actually facilitate a conversation where they buyer talks him or herself into either buying or engaging with sales.