Funnel Reboot

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 tailo...

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 any...

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? Wh...

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 wher...

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  m...

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...

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...

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...

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 know...

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 compan...

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...

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 Creato...

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...

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 mark...

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 collaboratio...

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 thir...

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...

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 manufactu...

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 me...

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 importa...

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. Bu...

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...

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...

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...

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 t...