Author: Show Runner

Today we’re talking about how to think strategically about website content.  The primary reason we’re told to focus on content is SEO, but the true beneficiary of well-structured content isn’t the search engines. Another myth is that focusing on keywords will win the SEO contests when it’s actually more about “topical clusters.”

To improve how your content performs,  it all boils down to following the fundamentals of communication. My guest is Michel Fortin of Shelly Solutions, whose strategies get to the heart this. He is a 30-year marketing veteran, who has done copywriting and marketing as a coach, under his own consultancy, and within an agency. He’s active in industry associations spoken on stage at conferences, holds industry certifications, and has written hundreds of published articles.

As you hear our conversation, you’ll hear him refer to many sources: a half-dozen books that guided his thinking on sales & marketing, several tools, conceptual frameworks, and companies he’s worked with. Also listen to him tell, on a personal level, how as a young salesperson, an ADHD-related condition called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) led to him writing marketing content and becoming so good at it that he left sales to sell his copywriting services.

Concepts Mentioned:

Schemas

Neuro-linguistic Programming

BBS

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

How prepared is your audience to take an OATH:

Oblivious

Apathetic

Thinking

Hurting

The PESO Model of Media

SERP  – Search Engine Result Page

Google’s EAT acronym:

Expertise

Authority

Trustworthiness

Google’s BERT algorithm

Authors/Books/Tools:

Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising

Al Ries & Jack Trout’s The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

Brian Tracy’s Psychology of Selling

Dan Kennedy’s No BS Direct Marketing

Tom Hopkins How to Master the Art of Selling

Tony Alessandro’s DISC Assessment 

Tim Conley

Data Transformation client MB Foster

A/B Testing Tools

VWO

Optimizely

Google Optimize

Episode Reboot: 

Don’t try to please the Search Engines, try to please your site visitor.

In this episode I talk with Amanda Relyea-Voss (who also likes to be called Mandi), owner of a social media marketing agency that serves B2C and B2B companies. Listen for the ways Mandi has used social media to interact with prospects and how this has propelled them to buy from her customers.  We talk about creating social posts from a single piece of content, what kind of text and images to use, applying hashtags and the KPI ratios you can use to measure your effectiveness. 

You can connect with Amanda on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as well as find out about Amanda’s agency, likeavosssm.com

People/products/concepts mentioned:

OttawaKiosk, local site within CanadianKiosk 

https://linktr.ee/

https://bit.ly

Social Media Rule of thirds

Social Media Marketing World

Episode Reboot:

Once you have built your organic audience, consider leveraging it by using the platform’s lookalike audience feature to put your content in front of a wider audience.

Remember as a kid at the amusement park – you must be this tall to go on this ride? This closely parallels a key part of all complex sales – Qualification. 

So when marketing gets a lead, capping off their piece of the process, sales is far from the end, it’s actually the beginning of their work with the lead. The main question that sales has to answer is “Is this buyer capable of buying from us?”  Are they tall enough to ride this ride? 

The process of answering that question requires a rep to do offline research as well as having one or several conversations. In larger sales where multiple internal people are needed, the lead may not progress to involve anyone else, because the rep spoke with them and determined they aren’t a sales-qualified lead. The process varies depending on the company, but in all cases, it takes a bit of human intuition. There’s a whole art to it.  

To get a salesperson’s perspective on how to do this, I spoke with Martin MacArthur, who is passionate about getting on the phone and helping companies fill their pipelines with qualified leads that  drive sales. Let’s get into that discussion.

Cover concepts including how we arrive at a qualified prospect. 

CRM

BANT

MQL

People and Products mentioned:

LinkedIn profile reviews

Retinitis pigmentosa (condition which affected Martin’s sight)

Martin MacArthur’s LinkedIn profile 

Reboot:

Look into these good books about conversation:

Crucial Conversations

How to Talk to Anyone

A More Beautiful Question

 

In this episode we talk about how to write persuasively for prospects. Our guest is Nik Paprocki, the founder of Websuitable,  an ROI driven digital agency serving small businesses all across Canada.

Like many in the agency space, he has seen enough bad copy to almost expect it, but when he was researching some product purchases, he found himself being drawn in by the copy they wrote. It wasn’t hard-hitting, buy-my-product Direct response writing that worked on him, rather it was copy focused on helping a buyer, giving answers to their problems.

He feels this use of copywriting is just as effective in terms of generating leads, because it speaks to everyone, not just those who are in-market to buy from you now. He felt so strongly about how it works that he swung his whole agency around to this writing approach.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to find insights on what problems buyers have, and tactics to write in a way that convinces buyers you can relate to them.

People and Products mentioned:

• David Ogilvy
• Gary Halbert
• Dan Kennedy
• Robert Cialdini
• Neil Patel
• Russell Brunson
• Ryan Deiss

Reboot:

Nik’s preferred places for insights on what problems buyers have, so you know what to write copy about:

• Google
• Industry Forums
• Amazon Reviews – also available as searchable dataset
• Answer The Public (added by Nik after we stopped recording)

 

Today we’ll talk about the production of videos to use in your marketing, all the way from the planning stage to the appearance of the final product.

Casey Li is the CEO and Founder of BiteSite, a Custom Software and Video Production Firm based in Ottawa, Canada. He started the company in 2012 after years of passion for the two fields and today, BiteSite serves small to medium businesses in the Ottawa area helping them execute their vision.

Listen as Casey takes us through the steps that his production company follows for making any video. You don’t have to involve an outsourced firm to make your videos, but you can use the same principles at any scale so your final product ends up telling a story that will keep viewers engaged.

People and Products mentioned:

• Rewind.io
• App8
• One, Ten, One Hundred Videos (three 2-minute trailers that show the final results of the experiment)
• Good Will Hunting IMDB page
• Rocky IMDB page
• Indeed Commercial: The Promotion (30 sec)
• Explainer on Jump Cuts (2 min 31 sec)
• Wikipedia explanation of an MVP

 

In the fast pace of digital marketing, we sometimes brush up against legal issues. 

• We might sometimes take risks that have legal repercussions. 
• Other companies may harm our brand and we need to defend ourselves. 
• We may do things where legal frameworks haven’t caught up and it’s not clear what is legal. 

Today’s guest is here to help marketers make sense of these situations. Megan Cornell is the founder of Momentum – a new kind of business law firm dedicated to providing law solutions in a way that works for clients. She explains data privacy, trademarks, spam, intellectual property and other legal issues we all face, giving plain-English explanations (a first for lawyers, as far as I know) of ways we marketers can stay on the right side of the law. 

People and Products/Resources mentioned:

• Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)
• Canadian Competitive Regulations (Federal-level)
• Ontario Consumer Protection Regulations (Provincial-level)

Reboot:

See what aspects of Intellectual Property (IP) apply to you by referring to this Infographic:

Site containing more information on Canada’s approach to IP.

In any given year, there are a lot of changes in paid media. The pace of change in 2019 was every bit as brisk as in previous years. For the third year in a row, we assembling a panel to look back at a shortlist of the changes that are the most significant. Then we weigh their impact on B2B companies and what can be done either to minimize downside or capitalize on the upside. Our Panel this time features PPC professionals Olga Gladycheva as well as Pierre Levasseur and yours truly. 

The changes we discussed in the show include:

• LinkedIn adds Interest targeting options 
• Apple Rollout of ITP 2.x 
• Google Ads sunsets average position 
• Click share metric available in Search Campaigns 
• Google Ads Audit rules inside the desktop editor 
• Microsoft Ads rebrands, keeps pace with Google Ads and deepens features brought by their relationship with LinkedIn   
• Google rolls out Campaign-level conversions 
• Google softens Location settings to people REGULARLY in my target 
• Google puts same-meaning words in an auction on all types of Keyword matches 
• Google Ads Retiring Accelerated Delivery 
• Google lowers ‘15 conversions in 30-days’ as a minimum bar for Target CPA
• Google Analytics reports both dates of click and date of conversion

People/Products Mentioned:

• Google Ads Editor
• Microsoft Advertising
• LinkedIn Ads
• Google’s Danny Sullivan, John Mueller, Matt Cutts
• Microsoft’s John Lee
• Frederick Vallaeys

Reboot:

Stay to the end of the episode to hear our picks for the best and worst changes of the year.