Category: Books

Episode 191

Do you wish there was a blueprint for architecting all your company’s content? You’ve come to the right place because a super-well researched book has just come out, from someone whose name is synonymous with Content marketing. 

Our guest is a marketing leader who helps companies combine technology and digital media to produce great content marketing. Many Fortune 500 brands have sought him out for his strategic guidance. 

He himself says this was an improbable outcome, as a guy who moved from Texas to LA to start a career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. But LA had its own plans for him, specifically in senior marketing roles with SaaS companies, including a content management solution firm where he was CMO.  

In 2010 he joined  Joe Pulizzi, previous show guest who had just founded The Content Marketing Institute as its Chief Strategy Advisor. He played a pivotal role in making it the premier content marketing education organization through its acquisition by UBM in 2016 and right up to the present. He and Joe still put out This Old Marketing, a podcast which is downloaded more than a half-a-million times every year in 150 countries.

He also provides training programs and certification courses through The Content Advisory. 

Beyond all the enterprise work he does, he still rolls up his sleeves to support various startups , serving supporting roles  at DivvyHQ and BrandLens. He is the best-selling author with four best-selling books on marketing and today we’re talking about his 2023 book: Content Marketing Strategy. 

We’re headed now to talk with Robert Rose. 

 

Timestamps/Chapters

00:00:00 – Intro

00:02:50 – Welcome Robert

00:04:48 – How having a strategy produces better content

00:28:31 – PSA

00:29:08 – 3 pillars of the Content marketing model

00:34:43 – Org structures at odds with Content Strategy

00:37:22 – Content dept shouldn’t be treated as vending machine

00:39:44 – Content’s container vs content itself

00:45:02 – Infusing content with storylike progression

00:48:23 – Points of view for creating content

00:49:49 – Measuring content’s value

01:00:37 – Getting the book/contacting Robert

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Episode 187

In numerous companies, the approach to content strategy appears to be nonexistent, marked by haphazard content creation and dissemination. A notable absence of a cohesive plan to align content with overarching marketing objectives is evident, leading to a disjointed and less effective approach. In light of these challenges, it becomes imperative for companies to recognize the critical significance of implementing a robust content strategy. The upcoming discussion will delve into a methodology that not only addresses these shortcomings but also promises to elevate content creation to a level where flawlessness becomes a tangible outcome. As we navigate through the intricacies of this approach, you will discover how a well-crafted content strategy can serve as the linchpin for achieving marketing goals and fostering a more impactful and cohesive online presence.

Purna Virji is a globally recognized content strategist. She grew up in India, when her family came to the US they settled in  Philadelphia. She did her masters at Cardiff University, but returned to Philadelphia where she was a journalist and then a producer at the local TV affiliate for PBS. That experience is where She picked up expertise in creating content. She ported this communications flair into designing Pay Per Click ad campaigns for ecommerce companies and then when Microsoft’s own ads platform needed a trainer, she transitioned to working there, training both internal Microsoft teams and external groups on Microsoft ads. She went on to speak at conferences like MozCon and SMX Advanced and was ranked as the #1 Most Influential Expert in the world by PPC Hero.  

She is currently the Principal Consultant for Content Solutions at LinkedIn. In 2023 she came out with the book “High Impact Content Marketing” which we’ll talk about today.  

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00 – Intro

00:02:42 – Welcome Purna

00:10:32 – the AGES model

00:20:38 – PSA

00:21:46 – Practical tips for high Impact content

00:35:26 – Identifying what your audience’s needs are

00:46:41 – Where to get book; contact Purna

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Episode 186

Increasingly, many Marketing teams have been forced to transform their own teams, or the Business as a whole has had to start transforming itself. 

But no matter how technically sophisticated they are, no matter how many consultants they have or how many Project management meetings they hold, most companies struggle through these transformations. At best, when transformations succeed, they leave heart-ache and sore feelings 

Most of them revert to the status quo they tried so hard to shake. Those leading the initiative end up demoralized, marginalized or downsized.

People who say they can make transformations successful are treated with skepticism. But when that someone has skills that are so multifaceted and has pulled off this feat in multiple industries, you ought to lean in & hear them out.

Susan Odle is someone whose life’s journey and heritage spans three continents. Born to Guyanese parents moved first to London England, then to Toronto, Canada where she went to high school; it happened to be the same school where I went. Anyway, she moved to Ottawa to study music at University. The musician in her has been strong from then until now, evidenced by a solo project she released in 2017.

Our paths crossed again years later when I moved to Ottawa. In the interim Susan had been holding pivotal roles in high tech firms, leading channel & direct sales, professional services, and ops which helped several to successful exits. Susan was honored In 2020 as one of the top 50 women in SaaS by the Software Report. She’s also owned several businesses as well. Currently, Susan specializes in operationalizing change through her consultancy, 8020CS. She’s taken her understanding of navigating successful change and literally wrote the book on it. “Successful Change,” was released in 2023.

Chapters & Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:02:47 – Welcome Susan

00:06:46 – The chaos that comes with transformation

00:11:50 – The 8020CS Blueprint

00:21:46 – Break change down into four dimensions

00:29:38 – PSA

00:30:32 – Moving through ‘gates’ toward successful change

00:48:59 – Overcoming resistance

00:53:45 – Susan’s coordinate and other resources

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Today’s episode looks at how pervasive voice technology is, and how marketers can make better use of it. 

After spending over twenty years in marketing agencies, Susan Westwater became cofounder and CEO of Pragmatic Digital. Susan has talked and written on the role voice & conversational AI plays in marketing and business strategy. 

Susan is coauthor of Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences. Recently, she co-authored the book “Voice Marketing” 

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 Intro

2:30 About Voice marketing

27:15 PSA

28:00 Susan’s process for enabling voice technology in your marketing 

59:30 Where to find Susan and the book

 

 

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People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Susan contributes to the industry site: https://voicebot.ai/

Susan’s company is Pragmatic.digital

Book can be found at VoiceMarketingbook.ai

Susan is on X and on LinkedIn

Morgan Freeman

UTM Parameter Builder

Intro was made with the help of https://ttsmaker.com/

Episode 175

There were a lot of books  covered on the podcast in 2023 – 44% of this year’s shows were with book authors. Combined with previous years’ book episodes, we have reached the 60-book mark on this podcast – you can sift through them all on our site by clicking on the “books” category on the right-hand menu. 

But I’ve had the chance to read books outside of these, and found even more I’d like to feature. I’m not saying all all biz books that come out are good.  To be honest – a decent portion of them are aren’t good at all. But since I set out once per year to make a special show, I felt it time to review some of the business books that shouldn’t slip by unnoticed. 

After you hear brief reviews of these 6 books, you’ll hopefully put one or two on your To-be-read pile.

Shownotes:

Friction, by Soon Yu 

“Sell The Way You Buy” by David Priemer

Impromptu :: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

The Attention Merchants, by Tim Wu

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur by John Jantsch 

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

Chapters:

0:00 – Intro

02:08 – Friction, Soon Yu

08:40 – Sell the Way you Buy, David Priemer

17:12 – Impromptu, Reid Hoffman

24:52 – The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu

30:40 – The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, John Jantsch

35:30 – The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman

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

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

Mike’s company

Mike on Twitter

Skeumorphism

Christopher S Penn

Rory Sutherland TED Talk

Joshua Bell Violin Busking experiment

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”

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.

If you want to learn about sales and start Googling, you quickly run across self-professed gurus, who claim to know the secret to selling. If you faithfully follow this method (available today only for a low low price), you’ll have sales success. Despite feeling a twinge of skepticism about their pitch, you’re so deep into their slick, pressure-filled pitch at this point that you pay for their books and courses…which end up being disappointing. 

Today’s guest says these gurus have put you in the Vortex of crazy. 

He doesn’t try to apply the same advice to everyone – his response reminds me of what an ancient Buddhist guru said. Well, according to a novel written a century ago by Hermann Hesse. 

There are a few men on a spiritual pilgrimage, and they reach a stage where the leader, Siddhartha, tells his followers that he must  continue on alone. His right-hand man, Govinda asks him why, “Siddhartha…spoke quietly… “Always, oh Govinda, you’ve been my friend, you’ve always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won’t Govinda for once also take a step by himself, without me? Behold, now…[you] are choosing your path for yourself.”

Our guest says there’s only one sales method that works  –  the one that comes naturally to you. That refreshing take ripples through his 2023 book Do It! Selling.

David Newman has been working since 1992 to help customers land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. From Fortune 500 corporations to sole-practitioners, his firm has helped over 1,800 clients with their marketing, sales, and professional services. David is also the host of the highly rated podcast, The Selling Show.

David is married to the #1 most amazing woman on the planet (his words, not mine), launched two great kids into the world disguised as small adults, and has enjoyed raising some of the world’s sweetest retrievers.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

David’s site Do It Marketing

David’s free webclass about consultancy growth 

David’s Do It MBA

1992 Movie A Few Good Mew

Brent Adamson’s The Challenger Sale

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse