Funnel Reboot

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...

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 wrenc...

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 o...

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 ,...

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...

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,...

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 sha...

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 oper...

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 investin...

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 ev...

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 Ch...

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,...

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 an...

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...

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, Insta...

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 a...

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...

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 h...

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 sens...

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 exp...

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 hearin...

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 pred...

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...

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 b...

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 b...