Funnel Reboot

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...

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...

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. Th...

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...

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.co...

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 g...

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.  Tho...

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 ye...

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...