Funnel Reboot podcast

Episode 209 When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example:  The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who'd commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it's a posterchild for poor projects because it didn't open until 1973.    Another example: Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental  of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B.   A last example: In 1998 NASA's Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe.    These failures are so huge, it's bound to bring out our inner cynic. It's natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: “what were they thinking?”   I don't scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions. When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited. Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest. At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You'll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn't tell us what would happen if we didn't. All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due  an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I's hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van,  carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we'd come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset. Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher.  My guest also believes it's our fault that projects fail as they do, and she's got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we're all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success.  She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let's go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil.   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer 00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects 00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs 00:25:07 PSA 00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating 00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows 00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers  as a foreign language? 00:43:12 AI's potential role 00:47:55 About Nilufer, book Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 208 People resist change. They only stop resisting when they're convinced the change is needed. They're only convinced change is needed when they grasp the truth. The best way to present them the truth is with data.    You might think that what works on people is a dry statistical presentation of the data in all its Indisputable, inscrutable glory.  Nope. Those avoiding change give themselves offramps by arguing about your data. History shows that to persuade people to take an action, it takes taking them through data in a way that grabs them emotionally. Some examples include: Florence Nightingale, 1854 Al Gore, 2006 Princess Diana, 1997   Numbers prove, but a story compels. This has so much to do with marketing. Here's why. To do what we do, our bosses / clients must be convinced in how our work is yielding results. That is the core of every story that a marketing presentation tells.  Our guest is a Data Storyteller. After graduating from Massey University in 2002, she moved into data analytics. She earned a digital design degree in 2015, combining her design and analytics skills, which led her to specialize in data storytelling. In 2016, she founded Rogue Penguin, a company focused on bridging analytics and business operations.  She now leads workshops for professionals in data science, marketing, and design. And she's the author of “the data storytelling handbook” Let's go to New Zealand to speak with Kat Greenbrook   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00      Intro 00:05:48    Welcome Kat 00:07:45    when data storytelling is needed 00:09:00    two ways of communicating data 00:13:55    Data stories improve communication between groups 00:26:38    PSA 00:27:18    Canvas for making time stories 00:30:05    making visuals relevant to the business 00:33:19    How to present when you only have part of story 00:39:06    Conserving data-ink 00:43:00    More you show - the less you contrast 00:48:20    Getting the book or contacting Kat Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 207 Those of you who know me outside of this podcast, know that if I'm doing anything that involves advertising, whether it be in a classroom or a consulting setting, I think of ads as a complicated puzzle that is never fully solved. While it may not have a predictable outcome, there are a few key principles about it that are always true. I've picked up these lessons one at a time, either by studying competitors or through the brands that entrusted me to run their ads—sometimes through painful trial and error. The models and principles that emerge from this process become a valuable piece of baseline knowledge, allowing you to make case-by-case decisions. However, it's hard to pass these insights along to others. They're often too abstract, and the examples become stale and dated as campaigns retire. Does this mean anyone wanting to adopt this perspective on advertising must go through the same process I did? Not necessarily. Thanks to someone with a gift for brevity and illustration, these principles have been distilled into a book. As I leaf through its pages, I'm delighted to see many concepts I've known given clear shape and an easy-to-remember form. Our guest graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life.  He's one of the nicest authors I've had on, and he's back on this show for a third time. Let's go to England to speak with Dan White. Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00      Intro 00:02:27 Welcome Dan 00:04:40 Oldest known advertisement 00:09:18 Uber's clever transit ad 00:11:15 Positive and negative impacts of ads 00:22:47 using advertising to build brand asset 00:23:49 PSA 00:30:46 Many ways ads can tell a story 00:33:19 How brain perceives messages 00:37:43 Learning about ads through metaphor 00:45:45 Getting the book or contacting Dan   For links to the people, products or concepts mentioned in the show, head to episode 207's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot website.   

Episode 206 There's no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI's do  amazing things. Extrapolating how far they've come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We're impressed by how clever they sound, and we're tempted to believe that they'll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do.  But according to many AI experts, this isn't what's going to happen.   The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked.  The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they're word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it's usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences.  The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying:   “During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words.”  All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn't be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a “what if”, building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something,  and they would have chained this together with reasoning by  others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what's written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work. This doesn't mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there's more than one branch of AI - each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn't just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen  by building a model of something in the real world. That  distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it's what enables this type of AI to  recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI. My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.  He has written five  books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don't hear very much about, Causal AI. So let's go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson.   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:04:36 Welcome John 00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI 00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for 00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal 00:26:50 PSA 00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling 00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery 00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

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 and 10th both virtually and in his hometown of Portland, Maine.   Timestamps/Chapters 0:00:00 Intro 00:02:49 welcome Rich 00:08:56 using GPT to make text seo-friendly 00:17:32 blending generative text with your own content 00:22:47 expanding to image & video 00:27:11 PSA 00:27:45 managing projects and events with AI 00:38:36 when to use a human vs aGPT 00:47:52 info on Rich. his podcast & his conference   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 204 Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion - this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation. But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that's tuned for people's minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication.  That's a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she's helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their  presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action She's a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We're going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.”  Let's go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.   Chapter Timestamps: 0:00:00   Intro 00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica 00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to 00:18:04 Building meeting's name around message 00:32:14 PSA 00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas 00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides 00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs 01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 203:  How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”  Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.” Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode”.  JFK “the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said “The view we take is, there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Hilary Clinton 2008  when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said "we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time," but added proudly, "it's got about 18 million cracks in it," a tally of her primary votes. Having heard those, you'll agree that this is doable.  Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people  What's more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves.  Our guest is storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and  a 2024 Recipient Ottawa's top 40 under forty.   Timestamps/Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro 00:04:23 Welcome Shea Cole 00:11:27 Build deck & meeting around vision 00:18:04 Slide 1 00:29:20 PSA 00:30:00 Slides 2 through 6 00:36:25 Adding parts that turn strategy into dollars 00:46:06 Contacting Shea   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 202 One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that the belltower at the University would sound its bell to announce the start of Hegel's lectures People may have flocked to hear him, but that doesn't mean they understood Hegel. One student who went on to write a biography of him was Karl Rosenkranz, who said “His lectures were not clear and systematic presentations, but profound expositions of the inner movement of concepts, which often raised more questions than they answered”…..in another part, he said “The students often complained that Hegel was difficult to understand.” Many moons ago, I was a Political Science major, in which I had to take a philosophy course that covered Hegel - I had the toughest time understanding him and Hegel still confuses me  to this day. I read & re-read his words, but I don't get what he's saying.  Same with Superintelligent AI like ChatGPT - when we ask it questions, there always seems to be a randomness factor. Sometimes it gives you amazing results, while other times it leaves you scratching your head at its hallucinations…its stupidity.  If you have this problem, it might not be the AI—it might be your prompts! There are hacks to how you craft them - and this has given rise to a whole field - prompt engineering.  Our guest co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder. He has designed courses on LinkedIn Learning & Udemy that 350,000 people have taken. And he was a very early user of Large Language Models - the brains behind Generative AI.  In 2023 he came on Ep 168 of this show for the book “Marketing Memetics.” In 2024 he came out with an O'Reilly book titled: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Let's go to Liverpool, England to talk with Mike Taylor.   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:03:28 Welcome Mike 00:11:27 Expressing all that's needed for a GPT to produce good response 00:20:24 Using AI context window 00:34:48 PSA 00:35:26 Training GPT on proprietary data 00:41:19 Agentic use of GPT 00:47:52 Training GPT for writing   For links to all people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 202's shownotes page.  

Episode 201: While our guest wasn't the one who invented content marketing, by founding the  Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown  marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience.  These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He's showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He's urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur.  This business model's definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they've acquired and  The next criteria - content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time - be it in increments of hours or years.  Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It's possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content. This isn't exactly a  typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we're starting on a new bicentenary. Let's use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new.  So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi. Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00      Intro 00:04:41    Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea 00:11:21    Content mktg's more than a wrapper 00:20:27    Audience vs community 00:23:11    PSA 00:23:52    Thinking of offers for your audience 00:31:13    Having media calendars 00:36:11    Business model may incorporate web3 00:45:34    About CEX & Joe's book For links to all things mentioned, go to the show 201's shownotes page at the funnelreboot.com website. 

Episode 200 Podcasts are tiny time capsules, preserving moments of wisdom and insight. Every time I revisit past episodes, I am reminded of how insightful our guests have been. Certain themes consistently emerge, echoed by guests from the very beginning of the podcast to just yesterday. The cost of ignoring these insights is so high that they bear repeating. Tune in to our latest episode where I share six aspects of marketing that I didn't know when I first started this podcast. Please listen in on these valuable pieces of wisdom.   Links to all episodes that featured the people mentioned are in the Show Notes.  

Episode 199 Today's topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn't concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it'll shift things. Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some  average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we're now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what's likely to happen.  With AI holding such promise, why don't more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it's held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we've had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn't enough to do the job.  He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven't made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this.  My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook” Let's talk to Eric Siegel. Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.    

Episode 198 A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It's not that buyers aren't buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won't even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival's product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.     But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand.    Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren't we supposed to hate the competition?   We don't have to. A famous example of that was Apple's announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”   Zooming to today's reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep' problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer's stack.    Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits.    His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.   Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America's top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.   This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let's head there now to meet Bob Moore.   Timestamps / Chapters 0:00:00 Intro 00:03:46 Bob's thesis on how sales is broken 00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope 00:26:13 PSA 00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices 00:31:38 Pooling together data 00:55:06 Contacting Bob   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 198  

Episode 197 Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we've exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us. Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing. Today's guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site's traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites. As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you're the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them. There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone. Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges. Let's go to Montreal and hear from John Wright. Chapter Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro 00:03:35 Welcome John Wright 00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking 00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods 00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables 00:23:14 PSA 00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars 00:42:13 Contacting John   For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode's page on the Funnel Reboot site.     

Episode 196   There's something we take for granted these days, something that wasn't even possible a short while ago. Let's go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That's because at the time, the cellular networks could transmit at around a third of a Megabyte per second, which went up to 2Mb/second when 3G was fully available. Then LTE/4G started becoming available in North America, reaching 97 percent by 2013. With those data speeds, you could watch brief standard definition videos, and social networks like Instagram & Snapchat began letting you record and send short clips. By the late twenty teens, advanced 4G infrastructure was fast enough, from 12 to 80 MPS, for people to watch 4K videos on their devices, bringing platforms like TikTok along with it. Now with 5G out, lag-free high-def video is available almost everywhere. And if you are a marketer trying to reach consumers, it means that  video must be part of the mix.    There are still quirks to these platforms that we need to figure out. Some of their ad units include ecommerce options for selling products while the ad's in front of them. More broad that this, it's hard to know how these platforms will react to videos you post. They know so much about a user's privacy, it's raised issues of which country that data's shared with. Clearly, this calls for an expert's help.     Our guest graduated from San Francisco State University and FIDM with a business degree and started working in-house at consumer eCommerce brands, running their digital marketing programs. After helping brands in every category from skincare & cosmetics to Books to jewelry, she built her own agency team to do this, Pennock, which is named after the rural Minnesota town where her family are from.  Let's go to  Northern California where she lives with her husband Tyler and three kids, to talk to Nikki Lindgren.   Chapter Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:12 - Welcome Nikki 00:09:05 - Video on platforms like TikTok 00:23:37 - PSA 00:24:26 - Reporting to stakeholders 00:29:59 - Ad campaign optimization 00:35:05 - Contacting Nikki   Links to all the people, products and concepts mentioned in show is available on the Funnel Reboot site's show page.  

Episode 195 We all want our organization's decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn't want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best.   But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn't mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It's hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this.  But there's no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven.  We're going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today's guest.  Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis' first Analytics Hire.  In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts. Let's talk with Luke Komiskey. Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:14 - Welcome Luke 00:17:38 - PSA 00:18:16 - Calculating value of having good data 00:49:29 - The MSP model 00:49:59 - Where to contact Luke   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 194 There's more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it's just different. - Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar - Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC - Programming can be done in various languages - Films can be made with a variety of filming equipment, anything from an iPhone up to an IMAX ALEXA 65mm This also applies to what we use as our analytics tool. And though Google Analytics gets a lot of attention, including in this podcast, to be fair, it is not the only game in town. The industry has a second tool,  Adobe Analytics and I wanted to talk with an expert, and to my mind, today's guest is the person to talk to about it.  She has 15+ years of experience helping enterprise organizations solve their analytics problems holistically, no matter where they are in their digital measurement evolution or what tool set they use.  Few can go as deep on pixel implementation, tag management, and data layers as she.  As a consultant at boutique agency 33 Sticks, she helps clients streamline the implementation process and get more value out of their tools, decreasing costs and headaches for developers, project managers, and analysts alike. On the side, she's used her background as a developer to create free industry tools like the Adobe Analytics Beacon Parser and the mobile app PocketSDR.  She loves helping and collaborating with others in the industry, and most days can be found in #measure slack or twitter doing just that. Let's go to the Atlanta-area to talk with Jenn Kunz    Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:21 - Welcome Jenn 00:03:37 - How Adobe's used by larger orgs 00:20:55 - PSA 00:21:32 - Navigating the Interface 00:41:48 - How to contact Jenn   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 193 Those of us in the digital economy think a lot about growing our business, but we don't think as much about the tech that enables customers to interact with our business. When our sites don't run smoothly or aren't available, our customers suffer and it stops working as our sales and marketing engine. Terms for these episodes: the site crashed or it croaked, give us a perception that sites are either alive and well or completely dead, when its health really resembles our own human health. Meaning, a website can give off  warning signs that can be diagnosed and treated before anything really bad happens. It doesn't take invasive tools to catch these; monitoring services that run without any special site access can detect issues.  These tools that take a site's pulse are also good to gauge the site's fitness - its ability to handle business growth.  Our guest has always called Ottawa Canada his home. He has also always had an entrepreneurial spirit, supporting the local startup scene since the 2000s, which is where I first met him. After earning his computer science degree, he began his career working at local web tech firms. A stint at a design agency stoked his enthusiasm for websites, and in 2010 he joined the parent company of Internet Service Provider and web host Rebel.com, and domain registrar Internic.ca.   He took on the role of CEO for both companies, where he saw first-hand how the internet fueled communication and value-creation. In 2013 he took on additional responsibility as a Director of the not-for-profit Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), where for the last decade more or less he has staunchly pushed for the internet to be used as a force for good in Canada. Workwise, after stepping away from Rebel and Internic, he returned to his technical and startup roots. Based on his observation that while websites were getting easier for non-experts to build, they could make mistakes hurting their user's experience of their site with equal ease. That led him to launch ONIK, a product that monitors website fitness.  Let's go talk with Rob Villeneuve   Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:06 - Welcome Rob 00:09:19 - Monitoring site health 00:29:09 - PSA 00:29:59 - How much access is needed to monitor a site 00:41:01 - Holding different patrs of site to different standards 00:42:12 - How alerts help 00:45:21 - Knowing when enough is being measured 00:49:50 - How large sites do monitoring 00:53:09 - About ONIK.IO, how to contact Rob Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

We've all heard of 1970's Apollo 13 mission that was supposed to send a 3-man crew to the moon, but once NASA became aware of an on-board explosion, it became all about rescuing the crew.  Ron Howard's 1995 movie gives a glimpse of how mission control staff in Houston reacted to information about the explosion.  When an alarm on the command module flashed, signaling a power drop, Flight Director Gene Kranz (portrayed by Ed Harris) turned to the mission controller in charge of emergencies and said "is this an instrumentation problem, or are we looking at real power loss here?" That officer, named Sy Liebergot and played by the director's brother Clive Howard said "It's, it's reading a quadruple failure - that can't happen! It's, it's got to be instrumentation." But by following their procedures, NASA confirmed it wasn't an instrumentation problem, the ship had actually suffered a devastating explosion, and at that point they swung into rescue mode.  NASA aren't the only ones who, on seeing data put in front of them, are so quick to dismiss it. Dashboards - and the work it takes to implement them - isn't trivial. Yet many of them fail…meaning that once they're built they never get looked at.  There are those who blame technical problems for this, but just like in Apollo 13, the main failures are due to people problems. The technology can be used to visualize  exactly the operational data that people literally  asked for…and present them with self-serve solutions, but they ignore the data, waving it away as some sort of instrumentation problem Our guest is going to tell us the right way to pull off dashboard projects.   He'll show how to engage the stakeholders to express what metrics they really need, ones that show how the organization is tracking towards reaching its vision. Nicholas Kelly, currently the principal consultant and trainer at G&K Consulting, holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from University College Cork. Formerly a Deloitte Analytics Senior Manager, he specializes in designing and developing dashboards for major global companies, including banks and Formula 1 teams. Nick is a frequent speaker at international conferences, having trained thousands of professionals in data visualization and analytics adoption. As a management consultant, educator, and author, his focus is on teamwork, inventive methods, and bridging technical gaps to increase data literacy. He is also the creator of business board games and the author of the book "Delivering Data Analytics." Let's go to Seattle where I caught up with Nick Kelly.    Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:57 - Welcome Nick 00:08:18 - Why dashboard projects fail 00:34:46 - PSA 00:35:35 - Building the dashboard 00:57:12 - Where to get book; contact Nick   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 190.  

My sister-in-law Janice works at the forefront of Medical Sonography. You may know it by the name Ultrasound, where non-invasive sound waves are sent into the body, which bounce off tissue and get displayed on a monitor. It has the ability to evaluate anatomy in an increasingly wide range of structures such as abdominal organs, the heart, vasculature and muscles in patients of all ages as well as the most commonly known purpose of obstetrical ultrasound. In the past 35 years, ultrasound has changed from a tool that was used solely by Radiology and has now expanded into being used by almost every medical disciple: cardiology, emergency medicine, anesthesia, nursing, physical therapy and more. Training these non-traditional users had a huge boom, and now ultrasound is being taught in the first year of medical school as it is known that no matter what type of medicine one chooses, ultrasound will play a part. Janice and others have shared their love and knowledge of ultrasound to help and aid the expansion of ultrasound into new realms in all areas of healthcare. In a similar way, to be better marketers, developers, or website owners, there are aspects of web behaviour that we need surfaced: specific user conversions, page views, scrolls and many other interactions. These aren't visible to Analytics tools out-of-the-box. Our equipment must be configured to highlight them, and that's done with tags that fire and alert our analytics software of specific interactions, the same way that medical monitors show the echoes of specific sonar frequencies. We've evolved from coding tags right on our sites to operating them with tag management systems, the most common one being Google Tag Manager. Without these tagging tools, our visibility into site performance would be limited the same way that doctors before ultrasound couldn't see what was going on inside their patients. Another similarity these tools share is that they both come with ethical and safety considerations, and laws covering user privacy and data protection. Gathering insights, whether by ultrasound or tag technology, must respect the digital autonomy and privacy of users. We have a guest to take us through all facets of tag management and I hope that after hearing him, you won't think of tagging as just some machine that should be relegated to technicians, but a tool you can use on the front-lines, as something you yourself should get hands-on with. So let's talk about tag management with Ricardo Cristofolini. With a background in Tourism and Hospitality Management and International Trade, Ricardo Cristofolini's Analytics professional journey began when he arrived in Canada in 2015 to study at Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, where he earned an Ontario College Diploma in Computer Programming, Networked Environment, and Programming Languages from 2015 to 2017. There, he had the opportunity to put together previous professional knowledge with brand new one exploring multiple subjects, from Web and App Development to cloud computing, Database structure, and much more. Transitioning to the workforce, Ricardo served as a Web Developer at FilmFX from December 2017 to December 2019, gaining two years of experience. In March 2018, Ricardo expanded his skills at Pondstone Digital Marketing, specializing in WordPress, Content Management, and other relevant areas until February 2019. At this point, he had already fallen in love with Analytics and Data Tracking. His expertise continued to evolve as he took on the role of Senior Data Analytics Implementation at Bounteous Canada from July 2021 to October 2022 He currently holds the position of Napkyn Senior Implementation Specialist Data Solutions, a role he has been dedicated to since 2022. In his spare time, when not reading about Analytics and developing his knowledge (and earning a badge from Linkedin as Top Web Analytics Voice), Ricardo supports others' new adventures in this field on multiple social media platforms answering questions and providing guidance. Originating from Brazil, Ricardo Cristofolini's professional trajectory reflects a dynamic and progressively challenging path within the realms of web development, digital marketing, and data analytics implementation. Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:04:55 - Ricardo on GTM and Google Tag 00:27:40 - PSA 00:28:30 - All about Server-side Tagging 00:49:06 - Where to contact Ricardo Links to all People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show #189 is available at the Funnel Reboot site.

Episode 188 Dana DiTomaso embarked on her digital marketing journey over 20 years ago, initially working in tech support for a CRM before founding a web design company in 2002. In 2000, clients sought her expertise in increasing website traffic, propelling her into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By 2012, Dana became an active participant in the SEO community, sharing insights on technical and local SEO topics. Dana, having typed her first line of code in 1982, consistently demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit and started delivering talks and presentations since 1998. Recognizing the potential of digital-first marketing, she founded three businesses that educate entrepreneurs and organizations. As the founder and lead instructor of KP Playbook, Dana teaches the "Analytics for Agencies" course and manages a thriving learner community, emphasizing proven principles over quick tips. Notably, none of her clients have faced Google penalties to date. Dana lives in an old growth forest near Victoria BC.   Chapter Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:01 - Welcome Dana 00:08:18 - The unvarnished view of data given by GA4 00:16:33 - Using custom reports and exploration tab 00:22:41 - Giving other users access to Reports 00:26:39 - PSA 00:27:25 - Reporting through Looker Studio 00:35:08 - Why knowing some UX helps 00:38:54 - Pulling other data sources together with GA data 00:44:01 - Looker studio tactics 00:53:18 - Where to contact Dana   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 188.

In numerous companies, the approach to content strategy appears to be nonexistent, marked by haphazard content creation and dissemination. A notable absence of a cohesive plan to align content with overarching marketing objectives is evident, leading to a disjointed and less effective approach. In light of these challenges, it becomes imperative for companies to recognize the critical significance of implementing a robust content strategy. The upcoming discussion will delve into a methodology that not only addresses these shortcomings but also promises to elevate content creation to a level where flawlessness becomes a tangible outcome. As we navigate through the intricacies of this approach, you will discover how a well-crafted content strategy can serve as the linchpin for achieving marketing goals and fostering a more impactful and cohesive online presence. Purna Virji is a globally recognized content strategist. She grew up in India, when her family came to the US they settled in  Philadelphia. She did her masters at Cardiff University, but returned to Philadelphia where she was a journalist and then a producer at the local TV affiliate for PBS. That experience is where She picked up expertise in creating content. She ported this communications flair into designing Pay Per Click ad campaigns for ecommerce companies and then when Microsoft's own ads platform needed a trainer, she transitioned to working there, training both internal Microsoft teams and external groups on Microsoft ads. She went on to speak at conferences like MozCon and SMX Advanced and was ranked as the #1 Most Influential Expert in the world by PPC Hero.   She is currently the Principal Consultant for Content Solutions at LinkedIn. In 2023 she came out with the book “High Impact Content Marketing” which we'll talk about today.   Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00 - Intro 00:02:42 - Welcome Purna 00:10:32 - the AGES model 00:20:38 - PSA 00:21:46 - Practical tips for high Impact content 00:35:26 - Identifying what your audience's needs are 00:46:41 - Where to get book; contact Purna For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 187's page on the Funnel Reboot site. 

Increasingly, many Marketing teams have been forced to transform their own teams, or the Business as a whole has had to start transforming itself.  But no matter how technically sophisticated they are, no matter how many consultants they have or how many Project management meetings they hold, most companies struggle through these transformations. At best, when transformations succeed, they leave heart-ache and sore feelings  Most of them revert to the status quo they tried so hard to shake. Those leading the initiative end up demoralized, marginalized or downsized. People who say they can make transformations successful are treated with skepticism. But when that someone has skills that are so multifaceted and has pulled off this feat in multiple industries, you ought to lean in & hear them out. Susan Odle is someone whose life's journey and heritage spans three continents. Born to Guyanese parents moved first to London England, then to Toronto, Canada where she went to high school; it happened to be the same school where I went. Anyway, she moved to Ottawa to study music at University. The musician in her has been strong from then until now, evidenced by a solo project she released in 2017. Our paths crossed again years later when I moved to Ottawa. In the interim Susan had been holding pivotal roles in high tech firms, leading channel & direct sales, professional services, and ops which helped several to successful exits. Susan was honored In 2020 as one of the top 50 women in SaaS by the Software Report. She's also owned several businesses as well. Currently, Susan specializes in operationalizing change through her consultancy, 8020CS. She's taken her understanding of navigating successful change and literally wrote the book on it. "Successful Change," was released in 2023. Chapters & Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:47 - Welcome Susan 00:06:46 - The chaos that comes with transformation 00:11:50 - The 8020CS Blueprint 00:21:46 - Break change down into four dimensions 00:29:38 - PSA 00:30:32 - Moving through 'gates' toward successful change 00:48:59 - Overcoming resistance 00:53:45 - Susan's coordinate and other resources For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 186's page on the Funnel Reboot site. 

One thing that professional services and solo subject matter experts struggle with is building an audience and influencing their purchases. Creating a content marketing engine that achieves this can take agonizingly long - years even. But virtual events that are properly marketed seem able to shorten that timespan.  My guest, Michael Tucker, has refined a program that develops virtual events for clients, and over the past 3 years it has accelerated post-event prospect discussions and sales success. Graduating from Campbellsville University in Kentucky, he now calls Florida home  Chapters/Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro 0:01:14 Welcome Michael 0:03:44 Virtual events are good for leadgen 0:29:09 PSA 0:30:17 Running virtual event that embeds call-to-action 0:32:30 Seeding the CTA into event 0:54:50 Michael's coordinates Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show is available on Episode 185's page on the Funnel Reboot website.  

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 customer data from all these servers.  CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology out there, much of their time is used up by the C-Suite's questions, leaving little time for them to manage marketing. There's the question of whether the agency-client relationship will survive with AI. Some say brands won't need an agency as they will generate their own creative. Agencies like Publicis, who've poured huge sums into their media-platform CoreAI that monitors billions of consumer signals and can inform what ads should be made, when & where.  Because our field doesn't have standardized accreditation, our terminology isn't  uniform, and we make dialects for our company or industry. How's that working for us? About as well as it did for those building the Tower of Babel. My guest is Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. Since graduating from Northeasters 20 years ago, he's been up and down the marketing industry block. He was a client-side marketer in the tech and financial services sectors, He founded and led an adtech company, Canned Banners, that was acquired. He worked as a VP at data consultancy  MightyHive which became Media.Monks.  He is in a new role now at U of Digital, spearheading this education thought leadership to expand the company's educational offerings across different formats, learners, and markets  To me, he's something of a modern-day David Ogilvy, who wrote his thoughts on his industry back in the day, in a book called “Confessions of an Ad Man”. Myles is just as outspoken on digital media and advertising topics, and the opinions he voices in trade publications and podcasts can come across as prophecies about this industry and sometimes pleas for how it could be better.  I caught up with him in Portland, OR, where he lives with his wife and three kids. Timestamp/Chapters 0:00:00 Intro 0:03:25 Welcome Myles 0:04:55 Continuum of approaches to privacy 0:07:58 Our reliance on ad tech; its future 0:20:56 We can only go as fast as our people can 0:24:53 Tech debt we've brought on ourselves 0:31:50 PSA 0:32:37 Changes impacting platforms & ad agencies 0:42:44 Platforms exploiting advertisers in the name of Al 0:48:27 The good & bad of using their Cloud offerings 0:52:32 Best reaction is educating ourselves 1:00:00 How to reach out to Myles   Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show appear within the Funnel Reboot site on Ep 184's shownotes page.  

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 teacher there. She was such a constant there, I imagined that she never left the classroom, she was a fixture of the room, part of the furniture. It's like the teacher didn't persist as a person who had a life outside of the classroom. So when I was out at the grocery store with my parents and I saw my teacher, not dressed in their teacher clothes, not ensconced in their teacher setting, my brain just melted.  While this might be laughable, those of us using marketing analytics tools could be guilty of falling into the same trap. Credit for making this concept clear in not 1 but 2 great books must go to Avinash Kaushik. Think about it. According to Classic web analytics, visitors who hit our website had started  an imaginary timer that we called a web session. We imagined in this race against the clock, they were viewing a sequence of pages which ferried them to forms we used as gates. We told ourselves that the gate-crossers had completed a successful session, converting from visitors into leads or customers. Stepping back, there are a few things wrong with this picture. Users don't only exist inside of a session, just like the teacher didn't only exist in the classroom—they roam about as they please.  Today's users aren't confined to marketing content. The experience they have straddles our marketing sites, to sites  and apps where their identity persists through being logged-in, where the interactions even span multiple devices - as we see on Slack and Discord for messages we've already read. The user's state changes - sometimes they complete a purchase, or become a paid subscriber, but at other times they may opt for a free plan or abandon their cart.  We need analytics for all of these actions. We need to step back and view the entire experience that people have with us over time. This is something that classic web analytics just can't measure. This is why the new generation of tools allows us to analyze complex trends and behavior of our users. They are collectively known as event-based analytics tools, and they excel in portraying the way that users experience a product. The foremost product-oriented analytics tool out there is called Amplitude, and today, we are speaking with its product evangelist. Since 2021, Adam Greco has been Amplitude's  Product Evangelist, guiding clients in understanding their tool through workshops, blogs, and videos.  He got into this field in 2005 when he joined analytics platform Omniture where he was a customer advocate for four years until Adobe acquired them and rechristened them Adobe Analytics. He then worked at consultancies for 15 years, showing people how to get the most out of Adobe's tool,  authoring over 200 blog posts along the way.  Lately Adam's speaking and advising on analytics has had him splitting his time between Chicago and Amsterdam (where he was when this was recorded). When he's in the states and not working, he enjoys restoring and going for drives in his 62 convertible corvette.  Timestamps/Chapters 0:00 - Intro 5:00 - Meet Adam; why event-based method works better than session-based method 24:00 - PSA 24:45 - how to get value out of recent analytics tools, including warehouse-native apps 56:20 - Adam's coordinates and free resources Links to all people and products mentioned are available in Ep 183's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.   

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 Voice Experiences. Recently, she co-authored the book “Voice Marketing”  Chapters & Timestamps 0:00 Intro 2:30 About Voice marketing 27:15 PSA 28:00 Susan's process for enabling voice technology in your marketing  59:30 Where to find Susan and the book All people, products and concepts are linked in episode 182's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.     

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 from DePaul with an MBA.  John Thompson has written four books. I found out about him through his 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, which led to him being a guest on this show back in 2023. He recently released his book “Data for All” which spurred this repeat appearance - which has only happened with a handful of people.  Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:39 - How we came to giving our data for free 24:55 - Public Service Announcement 25:49 - Getting paid for our data 44:26 - Getting to John & his books For links to all persons and concepts mentioned, go to Ep 181's notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.    

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. Anytime client privacy is upheld it's at our expense. We're losing; they're winning. Zero-sum game. Siobhan Solberg disagrees.  She says you can effectively market to your client in a way that does right by them and is privacy-compliant.  She calls herself a protector of privacy, while also being a marketing consultant, the founder of a marketing agency. She has over a decade in the measurement space, having created CXL's course on personalization. She's also been a speaker at conferences like Superweek and The Copywriter Club. She also writes on privacy and marketing on her blog and is host of a podcast whose name is spelled out in the shownotes but which I'll call Marketing Unf*d. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Laws program for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Management at Maastricht University.  When she's not not pushing these boundaries, Siobhan loves to get outside and test her physical limits.  Chapters Timestamps 0:00 – Intro 0:46 – About Siobhan  2:11 – What marketers should know about Privacy 20:56 – PSA 21:53 – Privacy across the organization 39:59 – Siobhan's contact details For links to everything mentiones, visit the shownotes on the FunnelReboot site.

 ‘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 actually have 1:1 conversations? And with  what's at stake if we  screw up personalization, can we implement or maintain it without losing our jobs?   Today's guest is here to help answer that.  Since getting his M.A. in Information Studies from Aarhus University, our guest has lived at the intersection of data and communications. Since 2020 he has been the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic, an omnichannel marketing software, where he works primarily with large companies involved in omnichannel marketing, customer experience management, and customer lifecycle projects.  He's on a mission to ensure that the end user gets consistent, timely and relevant communications across channels - be it web, email, app, text, social - or even in-store. He often presents keynotes on Omnichannel Personalization and sits on the jury for that at the Danish eCommerce Awards. His first book, written  together with Colin Shearer, was a bestseller on Omnichannel Marketing. We're talking with him about his book “Hello $Firstname,” which came out in 2023. Joining me from Copenhagen, let's welcome Rasmus Houlind. Links for all people and products mentioned are in the episode's page on the Funnel Reboot site.    Chapters & Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 2:30 - Book's Main Theme  37:48 - Public Service Announcement 38:41 - Quantifying the value of Personalization 1:00:25 - Rasmus Contact details  

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 out of necessity. Having less data on our customers may sound like it's bad for business, but a recent book argues that it's actually necessary to maximize your long-term ROI. The book, "Becoming a Privacy-Centric Marketing Organization," was a co-written by a group who work together at InfoTrust. One of those co-authors is today's guest. Lucas holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of South Carolina and is currently at the forefront of delivering tag architecture solutions for major corporations. Specializing in sales and business development, he leads the implementation of tag governance processes through his role in managing InfoTrust's Tag Inspector product. His expertise spans sales and marketing strategy, web analytics, and tag management. With a focus on educating clients about the critical aspects of proper tagging and user behavior analysis, Lucas collaborates with some of the largest agencies and enterprises globally.   Timestamp/Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 2:26 - The Privacy Imperative 22:40 - Public Service Announcement 23:11 - How Privacy is Implemented 50:13 - Coordinates for Lucas/InfoTrust For links to people, products and concepts mentioned, visit the show's website for Ep 179.

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 when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing technology evolve before our eyes. As our  software tools grow, so does the complexity. We're beyond the point of logging into each of them to see individual KPIs. They have just become too specialized, and now we need meta-tools, crafted solely to connect with the specialized marketing systems, to extract and roll up streamlined data that we can analyze or see on a dashboard. It's against this backdrop that I invited today's guest.  Jacob Varghese hails from India, having graduated with a BA from University of Mumbai. Since moving to Canada in the 1990s, he's focused on building marketing machines and crafting go-to-market strategies that yield repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue.  Following experiences as a senior executive at numerous  B2B SaaS outfits, he's now the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AgencyAnalytics.  His passion for augmenting marketing and sales through data and automation comes through in the insights he shares on his blog. Links to all things mentioned will be in the shownotes on Ep 177's page on the Funnel Reboot site. 

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 guest says the visualizations that come from this won't be intelligible, won't make them motivated to act and won't yield good decisions. However, he does passionately believe that when people who know how to read numbers, see it presented the right way, it'll motivate them to make the right decisions.  Lee Feinberg graduated from Cornell University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. In 2012 founded a consultancy to help data leaders create armies of trustworthy decision makers.  He has worked in the analytics and data visualization fields for 20 years. He is associated with Data Science programs at both NYU and the University of Chicago. When he's not talking about visualization, Lee likes experiencing concerts - from the front row,  and also hanging out with his wife and kids. All links mentioned are in the show notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

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 feature. I'm not saying all all biz books that come out are good.  To be honest - a decent portion of them aren't good at all. But since I set out once per year to make a special show, I felt it time to review some of the business books that shouldn't slip by unnoticed.  After you hear brief reviews of these 6 books, you'll hopefully put one or two on your To-be-read pile.  Shownotes with links to these books is available on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 175. 

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 heavily in cybersecurity - protecting not only themselves, but visitors as well.  Some sites have clung to technology that's become atrophied and prone to crashing. Others are kept up to date, and are upgradable as the company's needs change. Some have a backend that craters when traffic spikes,while others keep humming because of their scalable infrastructure. Some expect visitors will come back on their own initiative, others use email smartly to coax visitors back. Our guest is going to show us how to see the difference that well-developed websites can make. He knows how the value of our online presence can be unlocked to  produce experiences that lead to revenue. Josh Garellek is co-founder & CEO of a full-service web development agency that's spread across North America. He grew up and started his studies in Montreal, then went on to study at New York's Yeshiva University. He did stints in the food service industry and e-commerce before starting  a game development studio, until he and a business partner teamed up, switching it into a web dev company called Arctic Leaf. He's gone beyond this and started other ventures too. The drive to do all this, he'll tell you, is probably  rooted in ADHD, or being a natural entrepreneur, or his chutzpah; probably all of these. But after knowing him for over a decade, for questions about what to do with your website, he is THE person to listen to. Links to all items mentioned can be found in the Episode 174 shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site. 

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 Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, along with roles in Merchandising.  What you'll hear is from a virtual event he and I did in December 2023, on topics including How Google is migrating users of its free version differently from its 360 version  How to capitalize on the information provided by GA4 The data  you actually need vs. what you THINK you need Tips on finding insights, reporting, conversion tracking and data retention New GA4 features that can help your lead generation or e-commerce website.  

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 from my department to fund new sales people. The work we were doing was having an impact, and she needed to prove it, show the evidence, and going into a board meeting with a warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy won't cut it. You need to show our craft in all its creative beauty, but we also need to show the numbers to justify it and continue with our work. As head consultant at The Colouring In Department, she has completed close to 230 audits now, and has trained thousands of people on GA.  Joining from London England - here is Jill Quick Links to all things mentioned in episode 172 can be found on its shownotes page at the Funnel Reboot site. 

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, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Group. He earned his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Computational Biology, Neuroscience &, Biophysics and received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He joins me from Austin TX.  Links to all things mentioned can be found in Episode 171's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

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 approach they may use is Media Mix Modeling. From what previous podcast guest Kevin Hartman told me about MMM, it's a ‘tremendous undertaking.'  It involves collecting and analyzing historical data in different geographies at different times of the year: sales figures, both legacy and digital marketing channels, and external factors like economic indicators and even weather. It has its own jargon: Incrementality, ratios, betas, impact on objectives. Then there's the math. It uses regression methods, both linear and non-linear, Frequentist vs Bayesian statistics.  I get so overwhelmed with these modeling solutions, it's like the old Who's On First skit. I needed someone who would sort this out for me.  Our guest has been a consultant in the marketing and digital analytics space for 15 years. I'm currently focusing on helping clients quantify the impact of their marketing efforts using Marketing Mix Models, experimentation, and various attribution methodologies. He is so passionate, he started a newsletter called MMM Hub He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a Masters degree in Information Technology, focused on Business Intelligence & Data Analytics. Jim is great at showcasing other people in the analytics community -He truly believes that all of us are smarter than any one of us. He, along with Simon Poulton, co-host the MeasureUp podcast.  He talked with me from his home in Pittsburgh. Let's meet Jim Gianoglio. Links to everything talked about in the show is found on the show's page at https://funnelreboot.com

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 are backing away from their responsibility to streamline all this. Instead, the answer from the largest of the bunch, Google, is they'll hold onto your data if you use their newest tool, BigQuery, and pay them money to store your data …or is it their data… on it.  The bad news is summed up in a 2023 book whose euphemistic name is “You're data is flawed”- don't want to get an explicit rating for using the actual name  It was written by someone who empathizes with our situation and who lays out in the book the steps needed to generate positive financial returns for our analytics investment.     Our guest Mark McKenzie started his career in London, but moved in 2014 to sunny New Zealand to work for a data-focused digital agency. That led to him founding and growing an analytics firm that served clients locally and in the UK, Australia, and the US. Following the sale of that firm in 2022, he moved with his family back to the not-so-sunny UK.  where he's consulting with  on digital analytics His focus on analytics can be seen through his volunteering at events such as ‘MeasureCamp' and ‘Web Analytics Wednesdays.' Let's talk with Mark McKenzie. Chapters & Timestamps: 2:26 Admitting our data is f_____ed 10:22 Prior to fixing data, must treat it as an asset 39:29 Fixing data we keep internally 54:47 The book and Mark's contact info Links to all people and entities names are in show number 169's page on the Funnel Reboot site.   

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 meanings.  Our guest was so interested in memes that he came out with a book in 2023 called Marketing Memetics  to explain all that marketers must consider when using them.  Mike Taylor shares content on wider marketing topics, such as AI & prompt engineering, which O'Reilly has commissioned him to write a book that's due to come out in 2024. Experimentation is also a passion; he's run over 8,000 CRO experiments, and he shares the insights he gets on his social channels, and  in courses he has on LinkedIn Learning and udemy.  His love of learning & teaching can be traced back to his studies at Anglia Ruskin University and U of Nottingham, where he obtained his masters degree. But in between his schooling and the present, he was working in the marketing trenches, at places like Candor, SumoMe, ShopStyle, Travelzoo and marketing agency Ladder.io, which has grown from its beginnings with Mike and his co-founders to a team of 50 people. All people and entities mentioned are linked in the episode page on the Funnel Reboot site.   

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 — whenever, wherever, and however they need it — throughout their relationship with the company.  Our guest pioneered customer experience mapping while she was leading marketing for the Vancouver-based SaaS company Unbounce. She has been a brand builder since 2000. In 2009, she embraced tech startups and SaaS, recognizing marketing's pivotal role in SaaS success. In 2023 she co-authored Forget the Funnel and with her co-founder Claire Suellentrop has a consultancy that goes by the same name.  Let's talk to Georgiana Laudi. All persons and topics mentioned are linked in the show's notes page on FunnelReboot.com

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 release versus an influencer's social post versus a customer's review versus a direct message that's sent from someone we know.  We have limited control in many of these settings, and because of the sway gigantic Silicon Valley companies have, even the media channels that let us publish content  aren't giving us enough control for us to say we really own those properties.  So how do we  tune our content for these channels, so each one has the greatest impact on our audience?  Our guest says that only after we accept the degrees of control afforded to us by different channels, can we align our content with what each of them does best. This concept is called Owned Asset Optimization RJ Licata began working at  Tarakeet, a central-NY Mktg agency in 2014. He is now the director of marketing there. Prior to that, RJ worked in New Media and Web Strategy with the fabled Syracuse University football program, running their social media and official team site.  RJ has a bachelor's degree from SUNY Cortland and received his master's degree in instructional design, development and evaluation from Syracuse University. RJ is also a fiction and non-fiction author and together with his wife, tries corralling their three children. Links for all people and entities mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.  

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 Mandolin orchestra.  He is also a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager expert, having been a founding member of the web development agency Northwoods which just celebrated twenty five years in business. He has also shared his knowledge through various courses and at CXL which is better known as Conversion XL and sessions he has presented at Superweek.  He approaches marketing analytics in much the same way as he approaches a musical performance. So let's listen to how he does that, in my chat with Fred Pike.  For links to all things mentioned, go to episode 163's show notes page at www.funnelreboot.com.     

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 with someone who has dealt with more than her fair share of change - but who feels she is better as a result. Originally from Peru, Giannina Fumigalli has lived in Montreal Canada for the last 18 years and who has been working in digital marketing that whole time, including both agency and client-side roles. She is currently the Growth Marketer at Vircom, a pioneer in B2B Email Security. All people and things mentioned can be found via episode 162's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site. 

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, the salary and what you will get out of the experience Advice when interviewing for marketing roles - what she looks food when hiring How to cultivate your profile within your organization When to stay a generalist, or when to gain a specific skill by joining a special project  This episode's guest is eminently qualified to cover these topics. Marissa Homere is the VP of Marketing at Irwin, an investor relations and capital markets software company. She is a demand generation leader and for the last decade, she has built and scaled marketing teams in a wide range of industries. She also teaches in an online marketing program.  In this episode, Marissa shares her thoughts on the marketing industry as a whole, how young professionals can be best prepared for today's rapidly changing environment, and what it takes to succeed in a fast-paced marketing role. Most importantly, she talks about how, as a wife and mother, how societal issues have muscled in on her life as a marketer. Like being a working parent, handling old oppressive tendencies in the workplace, struggling to balance career ladder-climbing with family responsibilities.  Links to all people and items mentioned are available on the Funnel Reboot shownotes page. 

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 books and courses…which end up being disappointing.  Today's guest says these gurus have put you in the Vortex of crazy.  He doesn't try to apply the same advice to everyone - his response reminds me of what an ancient Buddhist guru said. Well, according to a novel written a century ago by Hermann Hesse.  There are a few men on a spiritual pilgrimage, and they reach a stage where the leader, Siddhartha, tells his followers that he must  continue on alone. His right-hand man, Govinda asks him why, "Siddhartha…spoke quietly… “Always, oh Govinda, you've been my friend, you've always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won't Govinda for once also take a step by himself, without me? Behold, now…[you] are choosing your path for yourself.” Our guest says there's only one sales method that works  -  the one that comes naturally to you. That refreshing take ripples through his 2023 book Do It! Selling. David Newman has been working since 1992 to help customers land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. From Fortune 500 corporations to sole-practitioners, his firm has helped over 1,800 clients with their marketing, sales, and professional services. David is also the host of the highly rated podcast, The Selling Show. David is married to the #1 most amazing woman on the planet (his words, not mine), launched two great kids into the world disguised as small adults, and has enjoyed raising some of the world's sweetest retrievers. Links to every item mentioned appears in the show's page at https://funnelreboot.com

How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable. In the 27 years since he graduated with his MBA, Darrell Amy has worked  heavily in the tech sector, mainly in sales and marketing. Wanting to help a larger number of companies, in 2004 he started his own business, speaking and acting as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer. In 2020, Darrell authored Revenue Growth Engine book  How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth. He is a member of the Forbes Business Council and co-chair of the Kingdom Missions Fund. Based in Arkansas, with a family that now includes a couple of grand-children, let's go talk to Darrell Amy. Links to everythings mentioned in the episode can be found at the https://funnelreboot.com shownotes page.  

The relationship between those who generate creative work and the rest of us in revenue-related roles can be …strained. From those I've talked to in graphics or visual arts, being left to their lonesome makes it hard producing creative that's exactly what the marketers and other stakeholders wanted.  That's one reason why I hope you listen to today's talk with a graphic designer who wrote a guide for other graphic designers.  To help your interactions with your creative counterparts.  The other reason is this author's healthy outlook…on everything. I was first exposed to how zen-like he was when I met him at an event in 2017. Reading LinkedIn updates over the next few years I marveled how he did everything at his design agency, his training business and his college lecturing. When we met again (virtually) in 2020 , he talked about everything he had going on, but in that same calm tone.  So by the time he came out with his second book this last year - "Stop Looking for Zebras", I seized the chance to let you hear his unique viewpoint for yourself.  Let's go hear from our guest Robert Smith who will explain the book's title, and much much more. All people and items mentioned are linked in the episode's show page.  

"So, what does your company do?" This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I'm asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps.  This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing's hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and  intent-based campaigns aimed at key Accounts can all be for naught if sales doesn't have a game-plan for their conversation with the prospect. It is at this point that companies seek the help of our guest  After getting his Ph.D. at Stanford Brent Keltner spent ten years as a social scientist at the RAND Corporation.  While he liked using his academic training, he looked for places his knowledge could be more practically applied.  Jumping to enterprise and early stage companies, he found gaps in their revenue function. But also found he could get sales teams unstuck from specific challenges with a bit of theoretical modeling.  After more than a decade of experience as a revenue leader, he founded Winalytics LLC, a go-to-market and revenue consultancy whose clients include DealerRater, Lexmark, and Ascend Learning. He continued developing his list of situations and corresponding plays, which led to the publishing of his collection of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook which Brent came out with in 2022.  Links to everything mentioned in the show is on the Funnel Reboot site's episode page.