We’ve all been pitched by MLMs in consumer categories like weight-loss and cosmetics. You should know there are similar operators in the corporate marketing world, scamming even experienced business leaders.
Someone who’s seen this up close is agency owner Mike Pacitto. He’s angered by not only the real monetary damage scams cause; these bad actors also sour companies trusting the work of legitimate marketing agencies like his and mine.
In this episode, Mike raises issues like:
How the internet amplifies the moral hazards of scamming people, because the vendor can set up a website for a negligible cost and disconnect themselves from it in an instant.
What are the vendor’s responsibilities in screening the buyers with whom the odds of success will be highest
How Marketing scammers and gambling institutions sell a money-losing activity but that gambling advertisements come clean about this, while scammers claim that they can make people money.
Every part of marketing today runs thanks to technology, but few of us understand what actually goes on under the hood. This episode’s guest talks to us about what we really need to understand about our technology stack, and how we can use more automation in our marketing.
Our guest is Steve Foster, the founder of 628 Media, which helps businesses clarify their message and implement the tools and strategies they need to drive revenue and build their brand.
Steve was inquisitive at a young age, watching his father, a mining-company electrician, troubleshoot problems. Though he went through university for Mechanical Engineering, what really captivated him was human psychology. This carried through to choosing sales positions after school and, in 2013, starting a company devoted to helping other businesses sell and market themselves.
Are you speaking AT or speaking WITH your prospects? Companies are increasingly turning to messaging agents to chat with their prospects. This show focuses on how marketers can use this technology to have conversational interactions with their audience.
I’m speaking Andres Tovar, with a Southern-Ontario based marketer who has built chat-based campaigns for many organizations. He began offering his skills on a contract-basis while he was still in school, doing a business degree at the University of Ottawa. His work was noticed by a faculty member, who hired him for the business school’s own marketing. Since then, he has picked up industry certifications and set up his own consultancy called Noetic Marketer which serves mainly B2C clients.
Andres will talk about the two types of chat tools: ones that use someone’s social log-in and ones that are native to a website. He takes us through selecting the steps in the customer journey when chat interactions make sense. Tips are given on how to brand a chatbot and how to script a bot’s reactions so they flow nicely towards a human touch-point.
People/products/concepts mentioned in this episode:
This is part of a series on Elements of Every Funnel. Fifty years ago, Author and Ad Age writer Bob Stone gave a framework for direct marketing funnels: list, offer, creative. Today, we will focus on the ‘Offer,’ otherwise known as the call-to-action.
In this episode, we look at both sides of website interaction. We discuss how visitors progress through a website and how marketers make conversion offers for visitors to complete. Marketers make a critical choice when deciding the conversion actions they use, so we go through the most common call-to-action offers used on leading-edge websites. Listen in for answers to these topics:
Why do we have conversions?
How to optimize your conversion offers
How to choose what call-to-action to put on your webpage
How to effectively use chatbots, contact form, call buttons, questionnaires, etc
Enjoy this list of Conversions/Calls-to-Action from “You Should Test That” (reprinted with permission)
Lead-Generation Goals
If lead generation is your overall purpose, the goals might include any of the following specific user actions:
Request a quote
Create an online quote
Request an in-person demo
View an overview video
Request a phone call
Take a quiz or poll
Request a situation analysis
in a contest
Request market information
Fill out a needs-analysis
Book a meeting
questionnaire
Use a needs-analysis wizard
Ask a question
Use an interactive savings or RO
Complete a contact form inquiry
calculator
Download software
Click to call
Sign up for trial offer
Click to chat
Request a printed brochure
Make a phone call
Request a catalogue
Register for a webinar
Download an online brochure
Register for a conference
Download a whitepaper
Sign up for a newsletter
Download an ebook
Sign up for a blog subscription
Download a worksheet
Sign up for an RSS feed Subscription
Download a case study
E-Commerce Goals
For e-commerce, your goals might be based on any of these common metrics:
e-commerce purchase conversion rate
Average order value
Return on ad spend
Revenue per visitor
Or they might include any of the following user actions:
Sign up for an RSS feed
Request a catalog
Subscription
Ask a question
Add to cart
Click to cali
Save to a wish list
Click to chat
Sign up for auto-reordering
Sign up for a newsletter
Add accessories (up-sell)
Sign up for a blog subscription
Affiliate Marketing Goals
For affiliate marketing, your goals might include a specific revenue-per-visitor value, along with any of the following actions:
Click through to an affiliate site
Sign up for a newsletter
Sign up for a blog subscription
Fill out a needs-analysis questionnaire
Sign up for an RSS feed subscription
Use a needs-analysis wizard
Find a service provider
Use an interactive savings or ROI calculator
Find savings in your area
Create an online quote
Subscription Goals
Subscription goals might include any of the following actions and metrics:
Sign up for a free trial subscription
Upgrade subscription
Paid subscription signups
Average subscription signup value
There are many more goals you can track, depending on your business model. For each test, choose the one that drives the most revenue. Once you have identified the goals for your test, you’ll be ready to set up your conversion-optimization experiment and get testing.
This is part of a series on Elements of Every Funnel. Today’s focus is the infrastructure that needs to be in place to know everything about people’s interactions with your website.
This episode covers what needs to be in place to know everything about people’s interactions with your website.
Listen in for answers to these topics:
What are the main pieces of a funnel infrastructure
What are the skills you need to set up and maintain your infrastructure?
How to track what’s happening in your site through Google Analytics, everything from a video view to use of a chatbot
Which tools manage the tags behind these conversions
What you need to run A/B testing
You’ll also hear how Mother Hubbard, Gas Tanks and the game of Plinko all relate to tracking on your website.
This is the first of a series on Elements of Every Funnel. The graphic here shows how they all work together to generate a conversion.
Though it’s not an outwardly facing element, something that’s always part of the mix is the management metrics (top-right). Today’s episode focuses on how to make the dashboards that contain those metrics work for you.
Here is the 7-step process described for building a marketing dashboard:
This episode looks at 2018’s Top Changes in Paid Search Marketing. We have three PPC Professionals who reviewed the long list of features that PPC platforms made in 2018 and cut it down to a handful that are having the largest impact on B2B companies. Hear what we think are the best and worst changes made this past year, and what advertisers should to in reaction to them.
Special thanks to two people who know their way around all the major PPC platforms, Pierre Levasseur and Olga Gladycheva, for joining as guest panelists in this episode. The updates covered include:
Google Analytics Audience Report
Bing Native Intent Ads
Responsive Search Ads
Smart bidding Display campaigns
Click to Message Email Forwarding
Bing’s new LinkedIn targeting abilities through Microsoft Audiences
Google Ads Removal of some Budget Limits
Custom Intent Audiences for Display/Retargeting
New Script GTAG.JS in Response to Browsers dropping cookies
Google Ads Suggested Ad copy
Smart display campaigns
Increased targeting of mobile traffic on display campaigns
This episode covers the way we work in digital. As the pace of work has sped up, we’re using more agile methods to plan our resources. As automation and artificial intelligence enter, we’re deciding how it gets used in our marketing stack. We are also figuring out how our organizational culture fits with this, so everyone can focus on a funnel that efficiently converts visitors into buyers.
This episode is about how digital has changed how we measure marketing. We’ll cover the explosion of data brought by the Internet. We’ll look at how to clean and filter data so only the right kind is used for analysis. We’ll talk about tools for analyzing and reporting data, for sharing data with core areas of our business, and also for insights we ourselves get out of it. Finally, we’ll see how more leads can be generated by analyzing how buyers respond to our content.
I’m going to recommend that you review your own KPIs. You can even benchmark them against some external KPI libraries out there. First time I learned these things existed, I was fascinated. There’s kpilibrary.com, free-kpi.com, smartkpis.com and others. These are all great places to get inspiration for choosing the KPIs that matter to your own organization.
