Funnel Reboot

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...

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 teach...

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 V...

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 fr...

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....

 '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 actual...

Episode 179 This is the second of two shows on doing data-driven marketing, in a way that respects user privacy. No matter how much we crave, there will be fewer ways to capture it. At time of recording, Google says Chrome will stop supporting 3rd party cookies in 2024. Our choice should not be to switch to other forms of tracking, but whether we'll go into this privacy-centric era voluntarily, or...

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 wh...

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 gu...

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 featu...

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...

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 Arcti...

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 f...

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,...

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 a...

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 a...

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 mean...

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...

When it comes to branding, there are many facets to getting it right. But we don't have to know all about branding to know that only one mistake can cause deep, irreversible damage to a brand.  In 2009 the Tropicana juice company thought they'd be clever by taking their recognizable straw-in-an orange carton and simplify it down to an indistinct orangish object. Design critics howled and customers...

Did you know that how your message is received is mainly dependent on where people received it? This is a fact of life in an era that's framed by paid, earned, shared and owned channels, best known in its acronym form as the PESO framework. Focusing in on what we want our brand to be known for, we're soon hit with the reality that the same content plays differently when it's issued in a corporate...

If you take the United States economy as a bellwether, you can brea businesses down into three categories. There are Start-up companies that typically have annual revenue anywhere from a million up to $40 million. Mid-market or  Scale-up organizations generally have an average annual revenue of $300-400 million. Large enterprises, like those in the Fortune 500, had an average revenue in 2022 of $3...

Today we're talking about what analytics has to do with music (check out this music about analytics by songwriter Kai Feng ). We're looking at a musician's work style and seeing what analysts can adopt from it. According to today's guest, these two disciplines have much in common.   Fred Pike is a father, a grandfather and a string musician who both plays in and is president of the Milwaukee Mando...

This is the second episode in a series on having a thriving career. There is one specific subfield where this challenge is harder than usual - it's marketing within paid and organic search. There are always new tools and techniques coming along, and In our guest's opinion, to be a search marketing professional means upgrading yourself, to master them while the iron is still hot.  I'll be talking w...

There's a lot you need to deal with in a marketing career, such as:  What skills you should chase after when in an entry-level vs what's needed at higher levels How to manage both above and below your level What continuous learning actually looks like Knowing when a job isn't panning out and you need to cut  your losses Balancing whether to join a company based on the brand's cachet, the title, th...

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 boo...