Glenn Schmelzle – Page 2

November 16, 2023March 2, 2024

Your data is f*%#ed, with Mark McKenzie

Episode 169

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Mark’s MckTui consultancy

Avinash Kaushik

Cambridge Analytica

The Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno

With Federated IDs, a company personalizes an experience for someone using digital data that was sourced (but not shared with the company) from multiple external systems.

The DIKW Pyramid of Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom

https://www.cardinalpath.com/blog/digita-analytics-immaturity

Tom Triscari

Chapters & Timestamps

146.879456 146.879456 Admitting our data is f*%#ed
622.046944 622.046944 prior to fixing data, must treat it as an asset
2369.560249 2369.560249 Fixing data we keep internally
3287.677599 3287.677599 Book and Mark’s contact info

November 10, 2023March 2, 2024

Marketing Memetics, with Mike Taylor

Episode 168

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Rory Sutherland TED Talk

Joshua Bell Violin Busking experiment

October 25, 2023March 2, 2024

Smart Branding, with Dan White

Episode 166

When it comes to branding, there are many facets to getting it right. But we don’t have to know all about branding to know that only one mistake can cause deep, irreversible damage to a brand.

In 2009 the Tropicana juice company thought they’d be clever by taking their recognizable straw-in-an orange carton and simplify it down to an indistinct orangish object. Design critics howled and customers shied away from the sight of it at store shelves. In response to this 20% decline, Tropicana rapidly went back to the old packaging

Gerald Ratner, CEO of the UK Jewelry chain that bears his name, responded to a question about some of his products by saying they were ‘total crap.’ The company eventually closed over 300 of its stores, admitting that this comment caused a decisive blow to their reputation.

Subway named a game after long-time spokesman Jared Fogle’s famous weight loss pants and called it ‘JARED’S PANTS DANCE’, just at the time that Fogle pleaded guilty to sexual interference charges.

Google changed the logos of its suite of work-applications with geometric shapes in their corporate colours – confusing users (including me) who can no longer tell whether they’re opening Docs, Sheets and Slides.

To learn how branding is done right, today we are speaking with Dan White.

He graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He is equally passionate about using imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. If people understand and remember an idea thanks to a clever framework or visual metaphor they will be able to use it in their day-to-day work.

Three people have been repeat guests on this show; Dan White is now the fourth.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Dan White on LinkedIn

Dan’s earlier episode on The Smart Marketing Book

Professor Byron Sharp

Scrabble

Tony Hayward ‘I would like my life back’

Bertolli rebrandTry to make your brand like Ronseal, who’s slogan is: “It does exactly what it says on the tin”

Gerald Ratner holds paper that quoted damaging remark he himself made about his brand.

October 18, 2023March 2, 2024

One message, many media: the varied impact of your content across channels, with RJ Licata

Episode 165

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 Terakeet, a central-NY Mktg company in 2014. He is now the senior 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, mostly unsuccessfully.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Planter’s death and rebirth of the Mr. Peanut brand.

Concept of Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

Ford Motor Company

Sharecropping

October 11, 2023March 2, 2024

How priorities shift as you grow, with Shannon Clement

Episode 164

If you take the United States economy as a bellwether, you can brea businesses down into three categories. There are Start-up companies that typically have annual revenue anywhere from a million up to $40 million.

Mid-market or Scale-up organizations generally have an average annual revenue of $300-400 million.

Large enterprises, like those in the Fortune 500, had an average revenue in 2022 of $36 Billion. They represent the vast majority of all business revenues.

The point is, these companies are such different sizes from each other, that you must tailor the marketing you do according to where they are on this continuum. Ideally, you’ll take on the difficult task of reinventing the marketing function at each stage of their Start-up to Scale-up to enterprise journey.

Our guest draws on 20 + years of experience in creating digital marketing and product development strategies that have resulted in highly converting online assets and campaigns. As a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer & owner of an Agency called Engagement Marketing, she has supported organizations and businesses in the growth stage looking for positioning help & support gaining further market traction. She also serves as a marketing consultant to Start-up Founders through various Accelerator and Incubator programs.

Let’s join this talk with Shannon Clement.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Shannon on LinkedIn

MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue

October 4, 2023October 31, 2023

Episode 167: Forget the Funnel, with Georgiana Laudi

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Georgiana on Twitter/X

ACV = Average Customer Value

Clayton Christiansen’s jtbd framework

Dave McClure’s Pirate metrics

You may also like the previous episode on customer interviews with Ryan Gibson

Episode Reboot. Get the free workbook and other free resources on the FTF site.

Book’s phases and customer journey milestones combined (used with permission)

October 4, 2023September 10, 2023

Episode 163: What we can learn from artists, with Fred Pike

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Northwoods, the agency which Fred co-founded

Fred on LinkedIn

Fred on X/Twitter

Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra

Great video by Kai Feng singing about data: https://youtu.be/D_upBpY1U2I?si=DxFHdl-PO7CqLGXH&t=147

September 27, 2023September 27, 2023

Episode 162: In search marketing, change = opportunity. With Giannina Fumagalli

In search marketing, change = opportunity. with Giannina Fumigalli

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 Fumagalli 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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Giannina works at Vircom.com

Parisian vs Quebecois French

RSA = Responsive Search Ad

Episode Reboot. “Not all clicks are created equal”

September 20, 2023September 10, 2023

Episode 161: Charting your course as a young marketer, with Marissa Homere

Ep 161 Charting your course as a young marketer

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Marissa works at Irwin

Dave Hale

uOttawa Marketing program

Modern Marketing Certificate

Episode Reboot. Marissa’s 3 questions: Are you growing? Are you learning? Are you fairly compensated?

August 31, 2020January 3, 2024

Episode 31: Dissecting Marketing Scams with Micheal Pacitto

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.
How not to become a victim.

For complete Show Notes, go to: https://www.funnelreboot.com/episode-31-dissecting-marketing-scams-with-micheal-pacitto