Episode 27: Leveraging LinkedIn Ads with AJ Wilcox
Episode 26: Wrangling Performance out of Site Content with Michel Fortin
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:
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
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
Data Transformation client MB Foster
A/B Testing Tools
Episode Reboot:
Don’t try to please the Search Engines, try to please your site visitor.
Episode 24: Social Media Marketing with Amanda Relyea-Voss
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
Social Media Rule of thirds
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.
Episode 23: Qualifying Prospects with Martin MacArthur
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.
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:
Episode 22: Digital Marketing Through Uncertain Times
Today’s episode is a simple solocast of me talking to you. I’m recording in an extraordinary time when stress is being put on healthcare, public institutions, whole industries and even entire economies. All the uncertainty out there is invading our digital marketing world. What’s going to happen? Just thinking about current events can induce fears about budgets getting cut, teams getting shrunk and we feel an existential threat to our very career.
To help, the first part of the episode goes through how uncertainty affects everyone’s mindset. I share what some authors like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Kurt Vonnegut have observed about these reactions change over time. By understanding them, we’ll hopefully cycle through these emotions more quickly.
Peter Drucker said we shouldn’t scale back at times like this, but to make investments that “enable a business to make its future. That, in the last analysis, is what planning for uncertainty means.” So having dealt with how we respond to uncertainty as humans, I devote the rest of this episode to how we can respond as marketers.
I talk about investments we can make around planning, doing, analyzing and improving processes. I share resources that have helped me during crises so the way I market fits with new outside realities. Hopefully it helps propel you to act in a way that you can look back on with pride when it’s all over.
People/Products/Ideas Mentioned:
Mr. Micawber from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”
Andrea Bassi, co-author of “Tackling Complexity”
The Shawshank Redemption among other ‘Man in Hole’ movies
Craig Ferguson final “Late Late Show” monologue
Business Model Canvas popularized by Alex Osterwalder and Ash Maurya
“An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth” by Chris Hadfield
Shell Oil’s There Is No Alternative (TINA) Scenario Planning
Dr Flint McGlaughlin, Founder MECLabs, on marketers using their art to help others in crisis.
Reboot:
Go find another group who would benefit from clarity on their strengths and ways to express their value to their audience.