Episode 30: A nontechnical look at your tech stack with Steve Foster

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.

People, products and concepts mentioned

Tracking pixels

Green Geeks eco-friendly hosting

Google G-Suite

Microsoft Office 365

Many more tools are listed in a page prepared by Steve

Steve and 628 Media can be found on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter

Reboot: When deciding if you will outsource technical work or DIY, compare the cost with a simple calculation of what an hour of your time is worth. For higher accuracy that takes more factors into account, you can use this interactive questionnaire.

June 8, 2020December 8, 2021

Episode 25: Conversational Marketing with Andres Tovar

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:

Episode Reboot:

Put chat functionality on product pages or other places with a call-to-action.
download

June 19, 2019October 20, 2022

Episode 11: How A Call-to-Action Makes the Whole Funnel Work

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

Ideas and Products mentioned in the episode:

Chat tools

People mentioned in the episode:

Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson, author “Making Websites Win”

Chris Goward, author “You Should Test That”

Brad Geddes, author “Advanced Google AdWords”

Tim Ash, author “Landing Page Optimization”

Sangram Vajre, Flip the Funnel

Reboot:

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.

April 9, 2019October 20, 2022

Episode 10: How a Tracking Infrastructure Makes the Whole Funnel Work

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.

Ideas and Products mentioned in episode:

Installing the Google Sheet add-on

Google Analytics

Search Console

Google’s Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics Suite

People mentioned in episode:

Sayf Sharif

Sangram Vajre

Reboot:

Please go see the Google Marketing Platform by going into https://analytics.google.com and clicking the 2 by 2 grid icon shown below.

February 3, 2019October 20, 2022

Episode 9: How Dashboards Make the Whole Funnel Work

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:

Interview stakeholders
Review Technology
Select KPIs
Group requirements
Select Charts
Prototyping/Wireframing
Launch

Ideas and Products mentioned in episode:

Entity relationship Model (ERM)

Database Schema

Extract Transform Load (ETL)

People mentioned in episode:

Special thanks to Doug McCaffrey who collaborated on this dashboarding initiative with me.

Reboot:

Look at Nicholas Kelly’s site, Nicksight.com for ideas and products related to dashboard-making

December 6, 2018December 18, 2018

Episode 8: Top Paid Search Updates of 2018

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

December 5, 2018February 13, 2022

Episode 7: Integrating CRM and Marketing Automation into your Funnel, with Ed Goffin

Ed Goffin of Pleaora Technologies talks about CRM and Marketing Automation

In this episode, we hear from a company that’s successfully using two enterprise applications to run sophisticated digital marketing programs.

Shownotes:

Ed Goffin works at Pleora Technologies and can be reached at ed.goffin@pleora.com

They use Salesforce as their CRM and Pardot for Marketing Automation.

May 8, 2018February 13, 2022

Episode 5: Dealing with how work’s changed with digital

Shownotes:

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’s Links:

Scott Brinker’s Book, “Hacking Marketing”

Jim Sterne http://twitter.com/jimsterne

Christopher P. Berry http://twitter.com/cjpberry

This Episode’s Reboot:

Read the Agile Manifesto at
http://agilemanifesto.org/

Photo: Thomas Edison and ‘the muckers’ in front of the Menlo Park laboratory

May 7, 2018February 13, 2022

Episode 4: Dealing with how digital is measured

Shownotes:

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.

Links mentioned:

Urchin Software (acquired/rebranded as Google Analytics)

Robert Rose

Difference between Stock and Flow numbers

Renaissance Men

Eric Peterson’s Big Book of Key Performance Indicators (author’s full-text release)

This Episode’s Reboot:

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.

June 21, 2017February 13, 2022

Episode 1: Dealing with Digital, starting with You

This is the first in a 5-part series on how digital marketing’s different. This episode examines how to do digital marketing well, we likely need to change our mindset and our skills.

Shownotes:

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.” These words belong to journalist Edward R. Murrow. Though he was describing television, it might as well apply to the primary medium of our digital age. The Marketing discipline in the Internet-era is wildly different than that of the TV-era. This episode asks how those of us in marketing have had to shift our thinking in this new era. What mindset and skills do we need to deal with digital?

Links to People/Things Mentioned:

Seth Godin

Terry O’Reilly

“The Hard Thing about Hard Things”, by Silicon Valley VC Ben Horowitz

Andrew Chen’s Law of Clickthroughs

Paul Roetzer author of the “Performance Marketing Blueprint”

This Episode’s Reboot:

Check out the skills inventory list from The Marketing Performance Blueprint (reprinted with permission). It gives a breakdown of the 15 skill areas that you can use to Assess your own abilities.