Funnel Reboot

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...

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...