Intended Consequences

Listen in to Part 2 of Brian Massey's conversation with Tara Hunt, CEO of Truly., as they continue to discuss the Cluetrain Manifesto. You can check out Part 1 by dialing back one episode in this feed or visit intendedconsequencespodcast.com for a full list. You can also hear Brian's reading of the full Cluetrain Manifesto on this feed.  In this episode, you'll also hear Tara's thoughts on 'Jobs t...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Contrarians are very important during times of change. They're often one step ahead of the herd.  Are you a marketing contrarian? Here's a quick test. Listen in as Intended Consequences host Brian Massey reads the Cluetrain Manifesto and make note of how you feel.  Are you feeling excited or just meh?...

Contrarians. They're trouble. At least they're trouble in structured organizations. They are the "But maybes" in your "Of courses!" They come up with the exceptions to your rules. It's hard for businesses to find a place for contrarians. But, when they do find their place, the results can be incredible. Think Steve Jobs: He was kicked out of the company he founded before returning to it at a despe...

" The best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else."  In this episode of Intended Consequences, we're talking to BJ Fogg, PhD, author and founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. His new book, "Tiny Habits," has turned business management lessons into a program for individual behavioral change. Anyone involved in marketing is involved in what BJ calls "behavi...

After almost four decades, I believe the best choice for another shot at a conversion is still that quaint old communication medium: email. Email still can't be beat for rich content, for conversations that feel one-to-one, and for getting another shot at a future customer. It's the original social media platform.  Liz Willits is a self-professed email marketing nerd, and the Senior Content Market...

"CMOs are abdicating their strategic position in their businesses." Just when I was marveling at how much CMOs really must do for their brands, Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing, said the above statement that stopped me in my tracks. Laura has been focused on performance marketing and the proper use of data since before it was "cool," and if anybody knows what's going on with CMOs...

"Marketing needs to generate more leads," says sales.  "Sales needs to follow up on the leads we're sending them," says marketing.   Sales and marketing: two functions that are critical to a business's success. And from the first time something was sold, sales and marketing have worked independently.  This gulf, this canyon, this gaping sinkhole between sales and marketing has been around for a lo...

People like funnels because they provide us with some sense of progress in our marketing efforts, but the marketing funnel is under attack, especially in the B2B lead generation space. Carman Pirie ( @pirie ) is the co-founder of Kula Partners , an agency built to help leading manufacturers digitally transform marketing and sales to deliver more leads, close more prospects, and grow their competit...

Having a true understanding of your target customer is the first step in building an effective marketing plan.  How are they spending their time? Are they able to use the time they have to focus on their area of expertise? And do they have an interest in doing even better work? Come to think of it, we could ask these same questions of ourselves. It's a full-circle approach that leads to better cla...

There is a ceiling on your conversion rate. It's not your price. It's not your copy. It's not your form. It's eating your website from the inside out. It's causing your SEO to atrophy. It's causing your paid search placement to drop. It's causing your visitors to bounce, and it's only getting worse as mobile traffic grows.  What is the ceiling on your conversion rate? It may be....your page load t...

Mobile best practices don't really exist. Every audience is different, and Intended Consequences host Brian Massey has the tests to prove it. What works for one business doesn't always work for others. In this episode, you'll hear design ideas for your website's mobile call-to-action buttons, so you can test them and discover what works. How can mobile call-to-action buttons increase conversions?...

We're told terrifying things: that people have the attention span of a goldfish, that Millennials don't read, that we only have 8 seconds to make our point. No wonder we're confused about how to communicate through copy. However, the words we use to establish our value and persuade visitors to take action can be tested. Data to the rescue! Olivia Ross ( @ortdesign ) is the Director of Conversion R...

As a customer, do you really want to create an account for every single website you interact with? Absolutely not.  On the other hand, you want online retailers to know who you are. Having a guest checkout is one way to keep people from leaving your ecommerce site before they buy. This is also why a website without a guest checkout is regarded as a "conversion killer." In this episode, Intended Co...

Lance Loveday ( @loveday ) is the founder and CEO of Closed Loop , a digital advertising agency that specializes in paid media management.  As an optimizer by nature, digital marketing comes naturally to Lance. He's analytical but also creative - he uses his left brain and his right brain.  In this episode of Intended Consequences, we discuss the tough questions to ask when bringing on external re...

Erin Collis , Marketing and Communications Manager at Corradi USA , has a lot on her plate (as we suspect you probably do as well).  Most marketers are holding dozens of ideas in their minds, many of which are in opposition, and then these poor souls are expected to be creative and thoughtful amidst all of this. It's a barrier to a culture of experimentation in marketing, product development, and...

Barbara Cavness is the CEO of (un)Common Logic , a digital marketing agency that enables talented people to do great things. Her team investigates digital marketing data to find surprising facts that can solve their clients' toughest problems. Barbara is very purposeful in her approach to building teams, even though she encounters all of the same obstacles that Conversion Sciences does.  In this e...

Chris Mercer ( @merecertweets ) aka 'Mercer' is not only good at analytics, but he's also good at teaching analytics. That's what he spends his days doing as the Co-Founder of Measurement Marketing.io .  Chris and his team help people like you discover how to grow your business using tools like Google Analytics , Google Tag Manager , Google Data Studio and more. Essentially, Chris helps people get...

What if you could see the analytics of any of your competitors' websites? Mike Roberts ( @mrspy ) is the Founder and CEO of SpyFu and Nacho Analytics . He's also one of the most interesting people in online marketing. A digital marketing pirate, if you will. Mike founded Nacho Analytics because he's passionate about the bootstrapper entrepreneurs of the world. You know - the people grinding away d...

Dr. Diane Hamilton is an expert in emotional intelligence and behavioral science. She is an author, radio host of "Take the Lead Radio," and creator of the Curiosity Code Index - which we will dive into on this episode. Curiosity is a topic that is at the core of everything marketers do. We're all about experimenting,  discovering data, and getting answers when it comes to website redesigns, launc...

Tim Ash ( @Tim_Ash ) started his career in the 'interwebs' back in 1995, focusing on data-driven websites. On top of leading his CRO company SiteTuners , Tim is a digital marketing keynote speaker, founder of the Digital Growth Unleashed conference events, and author of the book Landing Page Optimization . To begin to understand how our visitors think, Tim suggests we stop looking inside our compa...

Chris Nolan [not the Batman movie director] is the Senior Growth Strategy Manager at BigCommerce - and a former Conversions Sciences employee. Although Brian Massey and the team misses Chris, they have enjoyed seeing how a conversion scientist takes on a big organization like BigCommerce, a company that builds e-commerce software for businesses. Chris jumped out of his lab coat and into the fire a...

Imagine your website is a doll. You choose the clothes, hats, and shoes for it. Some you buy, some you make yourself. Your website is similar. You rent server space from a host and drop a content management system on it. It's a generic, website-shaped form that you can begin dressing. On this episode of Intended Consequences, we're talking with David Vogelpohl ( @wpdavidv ), VP of Web Strategy at...

On this episode of Intended Consequences, host Brian Massey ( @bmassey ) is pulling in Joel Harvey ( @JoelJHarvey ) - Chief Operating Officer at Conversion Sciences - and they're talking website redesigns.   In this episode, the duo is going to tell you something that may surprise you. Website redesigns don't have to be all or nothing. You don't have to push all your budget in and wait 3, or 6 or...

Trying to understand what a company thinks they need to accomplish compared to what they actually need to accomplish is not an easy task. That's where Dan McGaw ( @danielmcgaw ), CEO of Effin Amazing , comes in. On this episode of Intended Consequences, we're talking about ICE Framework - what it means and how marketers can apply it as they experiment. Dan and his team identified that a missing co...

In this episode of Intended Consequences, we're digging into agency management - how to leverage the relationship and how to think about the relationship. You'll hear from Garrett Mehrguth ( @gmehrguth ), CEO of Directive Consulting , on why regardless of the research done, the pitch meeting is a tough time for the agency. That initial agency pitch meeting brings out bias. It becomes about pleasin...