AMPUP Your Digital Marketing

Texting is the preferred channel of communication for many people. Having said that, it’s still not used as often in business as it could be. In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, host Glenn Gaudet talks with Scott Heimes, Chief Marketing Officer at Zipwhip, a business texting software platform. They cover the advantages of texting leads and customers, why it works better than calling or emailing, and the stigma around texting.   You’ll learn:     Why business texting works. What marketers should keep in mind to run a text messaging campaign successfully. What guardrails marketers should look out for so they don’t mishandle business texting.     

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Jason McClelland, CMO at Domino Data Lab. They talk about the importance of product-led growth in the SaaS industry and how to execute it successfully.   Product-led growth is a huge trend in marketing these days, but traditionally it works best for products that are fairly straightforward, like Netflix and Spotify. Leveraging product-led growth for a highly technical audience can be tricky, but it can pay off immensely. Jason says it helps him generate interest amongst developers and data scientists, who typically don’t care about flashy marketing initiatives — they just want to try the product out. Once a user has opted into a free trial or freemium product, you have to nurture them through the process. It’s like a Ferrari, Jason explains. You can’t just throw someone into the driver’s seat and say, “Go.”    

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Kayt Leonard, the public relations manager at PSI CRO. They talk about what executing marketing campaigns looks like when working in a highly regulated, highly targeted, and highly misunderstood industry.   Clinical trials are an integral part of health care, but they’re often misunderstood. (Thanks, Hollywood.) At any given time, there are hundreds of thousands of clinical trials registered across the world. Each one needs a specific number of participants who meet a specific set of criteria. As the PR manager of PSI CRO, it’s Kayt Leonard’s job to find these participants. “There's no template we have,” Kayt says. “There's no ability to look through previous campaigns and see, ‘All right, this patient population worked; these advertisements and keywords worked.’ We really build out every single campaign and every single persona as if it's the first time we've ever done it.”    

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Rhoan Morgan, co-founder and CEO of DemandLab. They sit down to discuss the importance of turning customer experience into a company-wide effort.   Traditionally, the B2B customer experience has been a siloed practice, an effort focused on by one or two teams. But Rhoan Morgan, co-founder and CEO of DemandLab, is encouraging businesses to start using the marketing-led customer experience approach. “What you're doing is you're using technology, data, and content to really engage with a company's audience — but in a way that matters to the customer,” Rhoan says. Embracing the marketing-led customer experience approach requires cross-team collaboration and setting specific customer experience goals using relevant data.    

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Michelle Huff, CMO of UserTesting. They sit down to discuss the benefits of user testing and why it’s more important now than ever.   Building your buyer persona based on data and intuition is limiting because you’re missing the why behind your customers’ decisions. User testing helps you connect and empathize with your customer base. By getting feedback directly from members of your target audience, you can optimize the customer experience. COVID-19 has drastically changed the way people live, and it’s forcing brands to relearn their customers — their new behaviors, needs, and buying habits.    

You may have heard this before, but this year has been unlike any other, and it has forced marketers to boost their digital marketing efforts.  In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Winfried Schultz, VP of EMEA Marketing at Teradata, a provider of database and analytics software and services. They discuss the transition to stronger virtual and digital marketing efforts from in-person marketing.  What you’ll learn:    The challenges of transitioning to a strictly digital marketing strategy.    How to overcome your digital marketing challenges. What marketers can do to make their digital presence more engaging.

Building your personal brand on social media might seem like an impossible task.    What do you post? How do you get it to resonate? What do you offer? Should you use video or a different type of content.  In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Daniel Murray, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at ServiceTitan, a software platform for trades. They discuss how Daniel built up his personal brand on LinkedIn in less than 8 months to the point where his simple, short, text-based posts consistently garners him hundreds of comments in just a few hours.  What you’ll learn:  The keys to building a personal brand on LinkedIn. Why LinkedIn is different from other social media platforms.    What TikTok and LinkedIn have in common.     

You may think of TikTok users as very young and outside of the target audience of B2B marketers, but you may want to advertise on TikTok.    In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Erica Weiss, Brand and Campaign Marketing Manager at SparkPost, an email intelligence software company. They discuss TikTok, how it’s used, who uses it, what the concerns are, and whether or not you should advertise on TikTok.    What you’ll learn:      What are the TikTok privacy concerns?  What is TikTok, and how does its algorithm work?  What does it look like to advertise on TikTok, how does its targeting work, and should you do it?     

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Stephen Spector, who’s spent more than 20 years doing digital marketing and social media in the IT space. Stephen discusses strategies he’s used to successfully implement employee advocacy programs. You’ll learn:   Employee advocacy platforms can reap a number of benefits, including an increase in brand engagement, product feedback, and sales leads. Getting buy-in from executives and employees isn’t always easy, but start with a “pilot program,” a small group of people who are already social media savvy. It’s essential to prove the value of an employee advocacy platform, especially to executives, by presenting them with backend reporting and metrics.    

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Karin Aviles, Head of Demand Generation and Field Marketing at Centrica Business Solutions, which offers sustainable energy alternatives for businesses. Karin discusses how her team’s lead generation strategies have shifted during COVID-19. You’ll learn:   Lead generation without face-to-face events forces companies to explore new ways to reach their target audience. With tighter budgets, marketing teams should look for ways to optimize their ROI through paid media channels.  People’s behaviors have drastically changed over the past few months, so it’s important to keep tabs on these trends and follow your customer.    

Your inbound marketing strategy likely took a hit this year thanks to the pandemic. In order to rebound from this, you need to adjust and be agile.  In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Jen Spencer, VP of Sales and Marketing at SmartBug Media, an intelligent inbound marketing agency. On the show, they discuss the impact of COVID-19 on inbound marketing, and what her advice is for organizations to adjust, what organizations should do as businesses reopen, and what her takeaways are from this time.   You’ll learn: The impact of COVID-19 on inbound marketing. How to keep your inbound marketing strategy agile. Why it’s important to consistently talk to your customers.

Millennial branding is more important today than ever before with the growing number of millennials in the workforce.   In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Douglas Spencer, President of Spencer Brenneman, LLC., a brand strategy consultancy based in Boston. On the show, they discuss the growing number of millennials in the workforce, and how organizations can approach millennial branding. This refers to brands being mindful of millennials in their target market and employee population. You’ll learn:   Why you need to keep millennials in mind more than ever. How you should adjust to millennials in your workplace and your target market. How millennials prefer to communicate and what that means for you.   Today, there are already more millennials in the workforce than any other generation, but they are about to take the majority of the whole workforce on their own. Millennials will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025, according to Deloitte. 

Many organizations had a go-to-market strategy in place heading into 2020, but the pandemic made them go back to the drawing board.  In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Diana Stanley, Sr. Director of Marketing at Osmosis, a healthcare education platform that focuses on medical students and caregivers. They discuss Osmosis’s go-to-market strategy, and how it had to adjust during COVID-19.  You’ll learn:   Why you must adjust your marketing strategy.   What to do if much of your traffic isn’t your target market.   How to build brand affinity.    

Even when you have a limited digital marketing budget, there’s a lot you can do, and a great collaborative environment helps.   In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Joshua Shulman, Digital Marketing Specialist at Bitmovin, a backend video SaaS company. They discuss how a startup can navigate its marketing campaigns on a short digital marketing budget. You’ll learn: What B2C and B2B marketing have in common.  How to make the most of your digital marketing budget and find your buyer persona.  How great internal communication and collaboration can make up for what you don’t have. 

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Greg Rosner, CEO and Founder of PitchKitchen, a company that helps to fix bad sales presentations and websites that do not make their product the hero. They discuss how to refine a sales pitch and place the prospect at the center of the discussion.  You’ll learn:   How to ask questions and create conversations that allow a prospect to own their decision rather than being told what their position should be.  How to present and position the before and the after to solidify the sale.  Why it’s important to audit your sales pitch. Not only can it help your salespeople learn what works and what doesn’t, but it can help marketing spot gaps in prospect perceptions.    Sales pitches - some area great, some are terrible, and you have likely had every conversation between both ends of the spectrum.  Greg Rosner, CEO and Founder of the PitchKitchen, says the mistake companies are having is that they’re focused too much on selling feature after feature and not practicing true empathy. “Too many salespeople love to talk and tell prospective customers what they should do,” he says. “But the best salespeople are the ones who ask the right questions, in the right way, at the right time, rather than spraying their messaging and hoping it sticks.”

Whether you’re interested in starting an employee advocacy program or you already have one in place, you definitely want to make sure it reaches its potential.  In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Andrew Stewart, head of customer success at GaggleAMP. Stewart is running a virtual training session called AMPlify Virtual, where he trains marketers to run their employee advocacy programs the right way. In this discussion, he explains how organizations can make the most of their employee advocacy programs, what mistakes some marketers make, where they should focus instead, and more. You’ll learn: Why you should focus your program on organic engagement. How to get your employees active. What you’ll get out of AMPlify Virtual. Employee advocacy is a huge way to get your social media presence off the ground, increase your social media reach, drive engagement, traffic to your website, and boost your leads. The trouble is many organizations approach it the wrong way. They focus on sharing content, retweeting the same message, and years ago it was about having 200 employees share the same tweet.    That’s not how to approach your employee advocacy program, Stewart said.    “What works on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter this year will look much different next year,” he said. “The best employee advocacy programs are the ones adjusting with that.” 

During the time of the pandemic, the importance of the right brand messaging is magnified. It could be great, be a cookiecutter, or it could even be costly.    In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Douglas Spencer, President of Spencer Brenneman, LLC., a brand strategy consultancy based in Boston. They discuss how brands can go about brand messaging the right way, some good examples of brands doing a great job of this, some that did not go so well, and keys of brand messaging to abide by. You’ll learn: How to be empathetic in your messaging.  What being authentic looks like in brand messaging, and what it does not look like. The importance of sincerity, and why it’s an absolute must in your brand messaging.  Douglas is a branding expert who helps organizations, small and large, figure out who they are, refine their focus, and connect with the people most important to their success. He’s offered to help small businesses and nonprofits with their brand messaging free of charge during the time of the pandemic.    Right now, it’s even more important than ever to have the right brand message. The wrong message can be costly, however, having the right brand messaging can build brand affinity and loyalty, leading to people to keep your brand at top of mind when they want your products or services.    So how do you go about brand messaging? And how important is it? Doesn’t your bottom line take priority in these stressful times? The answer is, your brand is always important, especially during this pandemic. 

Establishing a strong company culture is important for any organization, but it can be difficult for a remote workforce to do this.    In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Michelle LeBlanc, a social media and content marketing consultant who works primarily in the transportation and logistics space. They discuss how companies with remote workers uphold company culture and values, what the benefits are, and the role user generated content (UGC) can play for your employees. You’ll learn: How an organization with a remote workforce can uphold its company culture and values. How UGC helps in a big way. The benefits of a strong company culture have on retention and recruiting.

For marketers, it’s difficult to plan with so much uncertainty, leaving them to wonder how they should go about their marketing strategy during this pandemic.   In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with George Jacob, Vice President at Marketri, a B2B strategic marketing consultant. They discuss the challenges organizations face during the coronavirus pandemic, and how they approach their marketing strategy. You’ll learn: How organizations should try to pivot. Why they should focus on what they do well. How to prioritize your plans during the pandemic. During the time of coronavirus, everyone needs to adjust, and that is a struggle for many organizations. For marketers, how do you adjust your marketing strategy, and what’s the right direction to go? Where do you start?  Jacob explains why you should focus on the basics of what you do well.

Different brands are using their email marketing strategy in different ways during this pandemic, but it’s important to contextualize your messaging and be empathetic. In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Tracy Sestili, Global Head of Marketing at Sparkpost, an email intelligence software company. They discuss the different ways organizations make use of their email marketing strategy during the coronavirus pandemic, and how you can optimize your email marketing strategy on both the back-and-frontend.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Conor Coughlan of financial data-management software company Fernogo. They discuss how to implement an “account-based experience” marketing and customer service strategy and why your company should embrace this approach. You’ll learn:   Account-based marketing (ABM) presents a major pitfall if your frontline customer service team isn’t following through on your marketing and sales strategies. A developing trend, account-based experience (ABX), extends the marketing and sales integration of ABM to also include customer experience and address that pitfall. As with any new strategy, implementing ABX at a company has to be careful and iterative to allow teams time to learn, adjust and come on board.    

The coronavirus forces almost all organizations to work remotely, but many are new to the game and struggle to manage a remote workforce. This is why Glenn Gaudet sat down with Clinton Bonner, VP of Marketing at Topcoder, an on-demand virtual talent platform, for this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing. Topcoder has been in business for about 20 years but has been a 100% remote workforce for over 8 years. Bonner shared his tips for leading a successful remote workforce and how he operates Topcoder’s marketing strategy. In this episode, you’ll learn:  Why it’s important to stay up to date on what productivity tools are out there.  Collaborative tool recommendations for remote workers.  The pros and cons of mixing tools rather than having one centralized platform.

It’s no secret that people are canceling conferences and other events left and right due to the coronavirus pandemic, so what can you do to host a virtual conference? In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Armen Najarian, CMO and Chief Identity Officer at Agari, an email security company. Armen recently had to make the tough decision of canceling his company’s annual customer conference, Trust 2020, and quickly organized a virtual conference to take its place. He walked us through the entire process, what he learned, and how he views the end result. You’ll learn: How to message this decision to your organization, your attendees, speakers, partners, and others. What the lasting effect of virtual conferences becoming so common in 2020 will be.  What the benefits are of a virtual conference over a physical event.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Scott MacKenzie of Industrial Talk. They discuss why podcasting is a vital element to the sales, marketing, and branding strategy for any business and how to get started. You’ll learn:   The greatest value to podcasting for industrial services companies is the opportunity to develop relationships with your guests. You can start a podcast about anything. To make it interesting, Scott says, you just have to find the “human element” of any subject. An engaging host is key to a podcast’s success. Find someone who can get guests talking about what they’re passionate about.     

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Demand Generation for VoIP phone service provider Nextiva. Gaetano discusses the shift from old-school lead generation into the kind of role he plays as a growth marketer and why this change is vital for brands. You’ll learn:   Traditional lead generation isn’t as useful as it once was. In its place, growth marketing helps you cultivate a trusted brand to bring prospects to you. Because of modern buyer behavior, owning your brand in search is the most important marketing investment you can make. Despite its trending popularity, account-based marketing isn’t right for every brand or product.    

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Shahnoor Khan of KCS Technologies. They discuss the growing prevalence of data-driven marketing and how companies are using artificial intelligence to streamline and optimize campaigns. You’ll learn:   AI marketing is simply a strategy that uses machine learning and data to automate, streamline and optimize your marketing efforts. “[AI is] being looked at as one of the fancy technologies, but we are all moving in that direction,” says Shahnoor Khan, VP Global Marketing for SaaS company KCS Technologies. Embracing simple tools that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to facilitate data-driven marketing can help you utilize the unprecedented amount of customer data your company has access to online.     

Implementing an employee advocacy program for any organization can come with challenges and hurdles. Couple that with implementing it in a regulated industry, like a bank, and the challenges are amplified, but far from being a deterrent. In fact, the financial industry can, and does, prove to be one of the best areas to implement an employee advocacy program because the end user needs to trust their financial institution, and their friends and colleagues are more trustworthy than a faceless brand.  In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Yvonne Boateng, the Employee Advocacy Director for Standard Chartered Bank, who championed her company's employee advocacy program. Recognizing early on that the company social media policy needed to match their desires for employees to share, alongside executive buy-in, led to a successful implementation, increasing engagements by 180X. Yvonne explains to listeners how and why the program was a success as well as hurdles she encountered early on that others should be aware of when implementing their program.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Dan Golden, president and co-founder of the digital marketing agency Be Found Online. They discuss the changing landscape of search marketing and what brands need to do now to keep up with coming changes. You’ll learn:   Google recently announced it will block third-party cookies in the Chrome browser by 2021, which will force advertising back into contextual targeting. Despite ongoing algorithm changes, best practices for optimizing for organic search haven’t changed much since the outset. Search marketing is becoming less about driving leads to your website and more about creating better customer experiences within search channels.    

Marketers. Love them or hate them, they serve a purpose and often are the backbone of growth within your organization. They have an innate ability to get down and dirty in understanding how and why people purchase products and services. By asking the right questions at the right time and providing the right tone and candor, they can take a relational conversational to transactional with ease. Marketers are creative problem solvers but often have a big problem - they struggle with communicating their value add and the impact on the pipeline.    In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Ken Pratt, a former educator turned Vice President of Marketing for Frontline Education. He takes us through how he and his team learned how to deliver their value, while generating a marketing pipeline that actually aided in the closing of about 38% of their closed/won business. As an organization he got really comfortable with knowing what the company needed and the problems they were solving. This lead to their three solid elements that helped his department communicate overall value.

Where do I spend the money? Is this campaign bringing prospects to the finish line? Is my talent pool established and who do I need to hire to hit this big, hairy, audacious goal in three years? All valid questions, and all questions your marketing leaders are likely asking themselves. If there was a SaaS tool out there that could perfectly predict a multi-touch attribution model, and tell you when to hire and fire, and where to invest your budget, it would be a unicorn overnight. Guaranteed.    In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Shane Murphy-Reuter, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Intercom, a customer messaging platform. Through depth and breadth of experience, and making some mistakes along the way, Murphy-Reuter gives us insight into the ‘three buckets’ he follows for marketing budgets, delegation, and learning attribution models. His actionable tips will help you answer questions such as: How Do Marketers Spend Their Budget Wisely? When Do Marketers Validate Their Hiring Decisions? How Do You Delegate the Marketing Tasks? How Does a Marketer Learn Their Attribution Model with Imperfect or Incomplete Data? How Do Analysts Affect the Non-Directly Attributable and Not Direct Response Efforts?

One of the greatest challenges marketers face is creating campaigns that can both scale and are unique to the person viewing the content. Its where the premise of ABM originated; it's how marketers get the most bang-for-their-buck. Enter AI into this mix and it combines the best of both worlds - AI in marketing at scale while allowing for micro-targeting of verticals, groups of people, or those with very specific attributes.  In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Dr. Ian Howells, Vice President and Head of Marketing at Sage Intacct, an accounting software. He speaks to tailoring their marketing approach to allow for scale while creating an unparalleled level of micro-targeting to their target markets. In this discussion, he challenges the way marketers think about verticalization and grouping together industries just because they share a common thread, and how to leverage AI to influence them better.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Kira Mondrus, SVP of Global Marketing at Tricentis. They sit down to discuss the benefits of perpetual demand generation marketing and how it can help grow your business. You’ll learn:     Traditional campaign-based marketing is stymied by its need to find customers at just the right time. Perpetual demand generation, instead, engages prospects with ongoing messaging that allows them to find you when they need your product.   Perpetual demand generation requires a heavy lift at first in the way of audience research, content creation, and brand advocacy, but the ongoing load is much lighter than with campaign-based marketing.

Insurtech, or the emergence of new technologies that are transforming the insurance industry, is redefining the common role of insurance as we know it. Leading this shift is generational needs and wants alongside the need for better technologies in the insurance space, to not only lead the insurtech space, but to redefine it. In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Denise Garth, the Senior Vice President for Strategic Marketing, Industry Relations, and Innovation at Majesco. She'll discuss the trends and factors, from customers and technologies to market boundaries that are reshaping and redefining the insurance space and the role of platforms in the next generation.

Outbound calling; social media outreach and scheduling; PPC; SEO; trade shows, email campaigns - kinda sounds like the beginnings of a job listing for every marketers responsibility, doesn’t it?    While that may be true, it's also the foundation of understanding the relationship between these actions in generating demand for your product and building you brand. These channels all require strategy and optimization to work in harmony with one another. But when there are so many channels that can make or break your marketing efforts, where does one even start?   In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Vivian Gomes, Head of Global Marketing and Sales for CSS Corp, a technology services firm. His insight tackles why creativity is the genesis of marketing, and why it’s so important to start at the top to satisfy some kind of curiosity of the targeted end user.

Chatbots - love them or hate them they are a game changer for marketers. Sometimes people just want to explore your website without pressure. But what happens when they have a question? They’re forced to either fill out the marketing form of doom, resulting in endless emails and unsolicited sales calls, or to leave the site with unanswered questions. Both sound dreadful right? This is where chatbots marry the two worlds together. In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Lindsay Kelley, Vice President of Digital and Content Marketing at Telit, an IoT enablement global leader. She speaks directly to the challenges that arise in creating some 40+ playbooks globally, powering her chatbot program, including the need for translation into multiple languages. In this discussion you’ll also learn some of her key discoveries, like more questions aren’t always better.

Peanut butter and jelly; Bert and Ernie; Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen; Marketing and sales. Some of the greatest duos have the greatest results when working together. But what happens when these duos don’t work together?    Sometimes they do just fine (I mean, peanut butter and banana is pretty awesome) but other times, they realize they are better off working together (Michael Jordan’s post-retirement three-peat). That’s kinda how D. Fish sees the world of marketing and sales. A marketer can be a better marketer by walking in the shoes of sales, and sales can be a better salesperson understanding the data marketers need to bring successful leads to the sales team.    In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet D. Fish, author of the book Hyper-Connected Selling, who discusses how marketers needs sales and vice versa, and how we can do our jobs better with each other.

Marketers love it when all the pieces connect nicely, kinda like a well-built lego project. But like our tech stack, marketers are realistic and realize it's never really as simple as the directions make it out to be. Take ABM; it causes you to really take a look at how data has been adopted and creates a great deal of perspective around how it is all handled. But it can power multiple teams, which means that it better be right.   When it is, it makes powering the launch of a new product or initiative that much easier. The data all aligns, as does the messaging, thereby clearing the way for internal advocates to amplify event promotions.   In this episode, Glenn Gaudet speaks to Matt Stone, Senior Director of Marketing at Gainsight, about this premise of internal promotion and brand building. Leveraging their internal advocacy solution, Matt speaks to how that helps Gainsight grow brand awareness in new industries and verticals through their employees with strong, well-curated content.

Social media has changed the way we communicate, not only with friends and family, but in our business relationships as well. With our hectic day-to-day, we can now perform a quick scroll and catch up on the lives of those around us, all before crawling out of bed or uttering a word. This, of course, changes how we interact with media and it’s only natural the media around us changes, too. Enter the concept of employee advocacy - enabling businesses to use the power of people, and their influential capacity, to expose others to news, information, and brand messaging as it relates to their company or purpose.    In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Andrew Hutchinson, Content and Social Media Manager at Social Media Today, to discuss the findings on a GaggleAMP commissioned employee advocacy report. In this discussion, we’ll cover why there has been such a rising interest in employee advocacy and what the data in the report told us about marketers perceptions.    You can download Building the Case for an Employee Advocacy Program discussed on this episode at any time. 

The truth is - SEO is really just really good marketing and  understanding your audience. It's creating content that frankly resonates with your audience but also has demand, which is where keyword research comes in. The idea of manipulating Google and trying to do SEO to rank is where people kind of go astray.    But, if you look at SEO as just another kind of marketing practice that's based on understanding your audience and positioning, your website and your brand will be discovered. Your ideal customer will find you when they search for the parts or services you offer. If you can wrap your head around that basic understanding of SEO, then it becomes incredibly powerful. In this episode, Glenn Gaudet speaks to Garrett Mehrguth, CEO of Directive Consulting, about this premise of SEO and how it impacts your overall marketing strategy. By simply thinking about how your customers search for information about your business, you’ll make a world of difference in your SEO strategy long term.

Imagine this - you have a market of potential clients in which your product or service can substantially streamline their day-to-day and make their jobs easier. I bet we’d all like to be a BRD selling these clients - they’re a slam dunk. But what if I told you these potential clients have a fiduciary responsibility to serve their business and client base, and not themselves, and certainly not by adding costs from a vendor. That changes your perspective on this market, doesn’t it? In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Andrew Botero, the Chief Marketing Officer at Blackline where he discusses building brand awareness and knowledge of his products. He’ll explain how working in concert with sales to achieve their goal of demand generation has helped accountants and those with fiduciary responsibility to a third-party see the value in Blackline’s products. This groundswell approach has allowed the team at Blackline to have a crystal clear and consistent message throughout the buyer's journey, allowing them to tap into this difficult to sell client base.

Does your impression of AI bring flashbacks of the robot takeover in the Spielberg classic A.I. Artificial Intelligence? Our understanding of AI and machine learning has come a long way since the SciFi hit, and has had a substantial impact on marketing and how to market your business. Through a stronger understanding of data-driven insights, AI and machine learning help improve the customer journey through your website and lead to getting more from your existing funnel versus refilling it often.   In this episode, Glenn Gaudet speaks to Steve Zakur about how AI and machine learning can be more insightful than a human with the customer journey on your website. Deployed at scale, it's not just a marketer or content marketer making sure the most important pages of your site are relevant, but a machine delivering the most important relevant message to that user at the right place, at the right time.

Shift happens, literally. For marketers, this shift comes in the form of how we connect messaging with potential clients. We've shifted from propaganda driven, one directional marketing, into an age of smart customers. We’re making the most of new technologies to do our jobs smarter while having a mindset to challenge the status quo, even when you're successful. In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Jussi Wacklin, Vice President of Marketing at Amadeus, a travel technology company. He discusses why he believes company culture is not just an internal activity and why it’s important that we recognize our culture as a reflection to the outside world, especially when making a shift. This is where branding and linking company culture to marketing becomes so important in both client perception of your company, but also throughout the hiring process.

Facebook advertising is an incredibly powerful tool that can help you grow your business and draw attention back to an intended purchase, videos you might like, or even make you aware of products and services that may resolve an issue for you. For those not in the digital marketing space, it may feel a bit ‘big brother’ to see advertising for a website you had recently visited, but it works.   In this episode, Glenn Gaudet speaks to Amanda Bond, owner of The Ad Strategis. Here you’ll  learn how to leverage the Facebook ad pixel to gain a better understanding of your audience and how to expand to look alike audiences of people that have yet to discover you. She’ll uncover the powerful strategy around how pixel placement can serve different offers to different audiences, and why this all matters. This all comes together with a solid map of the buyer's journey so that you can fully understand how your buyers discover, interact with, and use your products or services. 

One of the biggest questions that a CMO has to ask themselves when they look across the different marketing channels is how much money to put into each of those channels. Of course, there are the tried-and-true avenues that support your business, but marketing changes fast. Deciding what channels to explore and which ones to negate is a big part of making the most of your marketing budget.   But what about employer branding - is that important? Isn’t that an HR function? Not exactly, not in the new marketing landscape. In fact, it's a term that you don't often hear in product companies, but employer branding is something that services CMOs know a lot about. Why? Your offering a face-to-face connection and when the growth of your company hinges on talent acquisition and having the ability to service more clients, the CMO gets very close and comfortable with employer branding.  In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Arya Barirani, CMO of GlobalLogic, an engineering services company, and Executive Director at Method, a wholly-owned design agency supporting GlobalLogic. His insight will help executives think about how digital strategy is measured across an entire organization, and not solely reserved as a marketing activity.

Employee activism is on the rise and these employees are passionate about transparency, holding true to values, and doing the right thing. They are the employees you want - articulate, passionate, and they do it because they care about the company. And they are also the ones that every marketer, communications professional, senior leader, and CEO need to keep their eyes on as they can be your biggest cheerleader, and your greatest heartache.   In this episode, Glenn Gaudet speaks to Sharon McIntosh about how culture and values shape an organization, harnesses positive employee activism, and some missteps to avoid in your organization. She’ll help us understand how to take the pressure out of the balloon when your values say X and you did Y. And, after the shoe has dropped with an employee activism event, how you can go back and retroactively implement changes and learn for future use.

What is the intent behind retargeting? Of course, we want folks to come back to our website and make a purchase, but is it always that easy? Nope, not at all - if it was, you wouldn’t have much of a need for other means of marketing, right? See, there are often a variety of reasons a person doesn’t purchase after visiting your site, but it’s up to you to understand where they are in their journey and how to speak directly to them.   In this episode, Glenn Gaudet speaks to Daniel Daines-Hutt about the importance of researching your buyers journey in the process of retargeting your audience. He brings to light our trigger-happiness in making A/B testing decisions too early, learning when to hold and when to fold, and how to speak to audiences in a one-to-one conversation at scale.

Back before the days of radio and TV, people gossiped (heck, people still gossip). Word of mouth is how you knew about the latest events, when the corner store had a new product, and even when your town got new neighbors. Overtime, things changed with broadcast marketing and, what was an easy way to get a message to the masses, eventually became another marketing tool we got really good at tuning out.    In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, host Glenn Gaudet dives into the reemergence of word of mouth marketing with Ted Wright, CEO of the word of mouth agency, Fizz. He’ll dive into how word of mouth marketing can support digital marketing efforts, resulting in far greater impact and more personal conversations than one method over another.

Can an engaged employee workforce make a difference in your company's social media efforts? Employee generated content is on the rise, and a healthy culture that asks for employees to contribute content not only helps the marketing team with content creation but also helps employees feel more connected to their company. It truly fosters an environment of “people-first” and it shows when employees create MAGIC on the companies branded social channels.   In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, host Glenn Gaudet speaks to Michael Waterman, Vice President of Communications and Creative Services at CHG Healthcare, a healthcare staffing company. As the 10-time “Best Companies to Work For” winner, he’ll dive into creating a culture of sharing on social media to amp up their personal culture story. Through their MAGIC engagement model, he arms the staff and physician network with the knowledge of the brand and sets them free to create stories of the past and present.

Keyword stuffing is all you need to amass awesome content right? Wrong! Content creation is more aggressive than ever and to get the attention of the coveted first page, your content needs to not only be helpful and resonate with your audience, but also must address the right search intent to ensure traffic back to your site.  In this episode, Erin Balsa, Content Marketing Manager at The Predictive Index, delves into addressing the keyword research to create powerful content and how she harnesses her coworkers to help in content creation. She debunks the myth that not everyone is a content creator and tells us how she gets buy-in company-wide, all while helping to build the personal brands of her coworkers and the exposure of her company.

On this episode Glenn Gaudet is joined by Nick Pavlidis, Founder of Attorney Marketing Institute. Nick is a former lawyer who now helps lawyers with social media, networking and marketing.  In this podcast you will learn about: Networking by being genuinely helpful  Using the right language without needing a legal disclaimer  Splitting up long blog posts into multiple bite sized pieces  Utilizing Twitter to connect with media and influencers Outsourcing social media to get started  Having a plan before embarking on social media marketing  Make social media content about them, not you  Connect with Nick via his website at attorneymarketinginstitute.com

On this episode Glenn Gaudet is joined by Shane Barker, a Digital Marketing Consultant who has worked in the digital realm for over 20 years. Shane talks about how he got into the influencer marketing space through his experience with SEO, social media and digital content. Along with his work helping the digital reputation of celebrities, Shane is an instructor at UCLA and active member of the Sacramento area startup culture.  In this podcast you will learn about: What is an influencer?  How the influencer space has developed  Maintaining transparency and authenticity  Why you should treat an influencer like hiring an employee  Research potential influencers that align with your message  Don’t forget about key performance indicators  Connect with Shane at shanebarker.com or via email at shane[at]shanebarker.com