Category: Books

A seasonal series that profiles recent books in the field.

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Episode 55: Content Marketing Engineered with Wendy Covey

No matter where you look around in today’s world, you use things that were conceived and built by engineers.  There were engineering-minded thinkers in ancient times like Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci. industrial age thinkers like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built on their ideas, to manufacture many things that improved the quality of our daily lives. Since then, engineers like Alan Turing, Thomas Watson and David Packard ushered in an electronic revolution that gave us the technology that makes possible the communication we’re having right now. 

Engineers are great. But, they are also a breed apart. They have a stereotype of being way too exacting for most people’s liking. They put a new spin on the proverbial glass half-full or half empty debate. While the Pessimist says “The glass is half empty” and the Optimist says “The glass is half full,” The Engineer does some measuring and pronounces “The glass is exactly twice the size that it needs to be.”

They also have a reputation for being notoriously tough to market to. Today’s guest knows how to reach engineers, and in her 2020 book Content Marketing, Engineered, she gives us a formula so we can reach them as well. 

Wendy Covey is a co-founder of TREW Marketing, an Austin, TX-based agency that serves technical industries such as engineering design and hardware manufacturing. Prior to starting the agency in 2008 Wendy produced global marketing and services programs at National Instruments. Another side of Wendy you should know about is how she loves outdoor recreations – in fact she is the current holder of a Texas fishing record.  

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm

SWOT Analysis: 

  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats

Episode Reboot

Figure from Wendy’s book (used with permission) showing channels where engineers prefer to get their content. Note how high YouTube and LinkedIn are on the list.

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Episode 54: The Visual Sale with Tyler Lessard – Summer Books

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

The newest book in our #SummerMarketingBooks series talks about how to take sales & marketing beyond the printed or spoken word.

Our guest Tyler Lessard has worked at high-flying tech companies like BlackBerry and lives in the Waterloo Ontario high-tech hub with his wife and four kids. Whenever he speaks on stage or is a guest on a show, he talks about how to modernize the way sales and marketing people communicate. I consider him to be a marketer’s marketer. What I mean by that is he’s dialed in to marketing tech, so seeing him come out with a book in 2020 called, The Visual Sale, I knew I needed to pay more attention to video. 

Listen in the show for the reasons why he thinks today’s buyers expect us to show up visually, not just in text they read or orally over the phone. He walks us through how to make videos seen when prospects are researching a purchase, when they are ready to decide and even after the sale. Most importantly, take it from a guy who describes himself as a hacky video creator, how little you need to get started shooting video.   

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

4 E’s of Video:

  • Educational
  • Engaging
  • Emotional
  • Empathetic

Marshall McLuhan assertion that “The Medium is the Message”

How Walt Disney appeared on video (we’ve moved past this kind of talking head video)

Episode Reboot

Great quote from his book: “If you don’t think that video can do a better job than text on a webpage or text in an email, think again!”

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Episode 53: Digital Marketing in an AI World with Fred Vallaeys – Summer Books

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov was famously beaten in 1997 by a supercomputer built by dozens of IBM technologists. A Slate article looking at how Deep Blue changed chess said “The change here wasn’t just that a computer could win, but that a computer could help human players win if incorporated into their training regimes effectively.”

The same thing is happening with PPC Platforms. Since 2011, Google has been integrating AI into many of their products, and every campaign feature Google Ads rolls out seems to take away control from us humans and give it to their machines. So if we’re going to follow Kasparov’ lead and get better at this game with the AI, the question becomes, what’s the process for training an ad platform’s AI, when it’s writing programming that only it knows, and even the technologists running it don’t know?

Some answers are contained in the book Digital Marketing in an AI World. Fred Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as Google’s AdWords Evangelist. Today he serves as Co-Founding CEO of Optmyzr, a PPC management software system. Fred is a fixture on the marketing conference circuit and blazed new trails with online industry learning through Optmyz’s PPC Town Halls. 

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Episode Reboot: 

Remember, computers have a different kind of smarts than us.

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Episode 52: Unfair Marketing with David Rodnitzky – Summer Books

Has this ever happened in your career?

  • Sales told you that a deal was lost even though you have a superior product
  • You’ve seen the positioning statements listed in your website or in your ads twisted by your competitors, to exploit some weakness
  • You saw an industry award or splashy press go to a competitor rather than to you
  • You faced a rival brand undercutting your pricing to grab your market share 

It’s maddening when this happens, but the truth is, marketers don’t get participation ribbons. Each of these things may be unfair, but they are also situations where you could have grabbed the upper hand and reaped the benefit over your competitor.  

That’s the premise of the book Unfair Marketing which came out in 2021, written by David Rodnitsky He is the founder of 3Q Digital, an agency that has over 350 digital marketers devoted to advertising, analytics, decision science, strategic consulting, creative, and conversion rate optimization. Many of 3Q’s clients are in silicon valley,  which is where they are based. You would no doubt know the names of the companies they serve.

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David’s Five levers:

  1. Unfair Data
  2. Unfair Knowledge
  3. Unfair Brand
  4. Unfair Access
  5. Unfair Money

Episode Reboot. 

Get a free copy of the book at www.3qdigital.com/unfair-marketing

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Episode 51: The AI Marketing Canvas with Raj Venkatesan – Summer Books

Are you looking at how your marketing can use AI? That’s good if you are, but it’s not enough to know how it works. Whether you are embedded in marketing operations or you’re an executive who oversees it, you must also figure out how to get your organization to buy into AI. You’ll need stakeholders who own precious data, you’ll need knowledge experts to train your models, you’ll possibly need operations folks to change what they deliver…as AI informs what you offer. Lastly, you’ll need money – getting that money will take you proving that investing in AI yields a positive ROI. So by now, you’re probably wondering how you can implement AI. Well, if you are, you will definitely be interested in the framework called the “The AI Marketing Canvas”

It’s all detailed in a book by the same name, co-authored by Raj Venkatesan, along with Jim Lecinski.

Professor Venkatesan is a professor at the Darden School of Business at U of Virginia. He is also a co-author of the book Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics. Before coming to Darden, Venkatesan taught graduate students at the University of Connecticut. There, he was the recipient of the MBA Teacher of the Year Award. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Houston and his B.E. in computer engineering from the University of Madras. He has consulted with firms in the technology, retailing, media, industrial goods and pharmaceutical industries. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Framework’s 5 stages, reproduced with permission: