Category: Books

A series profiling recent books in the field.

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Episode 101: Age of Customer Equity, with Allison Hartsoe

Think of the data you have on your customers as having value. It does, by the fact that the more you know your clients, the better you can serve them. This “unlocked potential revenue” of all your current customers can be quantified as your whole customer’s lifetime value (CLV) added together. 

This number is known by finance people as Customer Equity, but it’s much more than a mathematical formula. The value that VCs and public markets have put on assets such as loyalty programs and subscription lists is often greater than the value of a company’s capital assets!

While it might sound like it has to do with finance, this is all highly related to marketing. This is because each tactical decision gets vetted by whether it will optimize CLV; it becomes your company’s North Star.  

Allison Hartsoe has strategize d the digital customer analytics for dozens of Fortune 500 customers throughout her career. She now leads an analytics consultancy in Portland OR, Ambition Data, and published the book, “The Age of Customer Equity”,  in 2021. She has been published in Forbes.com, MIT Technology Review, and Fast Company and somewhere in between all this writing, she found time to cycle across the USA. 

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Episode 100: Ultimate Marketing Engine, with John Jantsch

How would you feel if you picked up a book about work, and in the first few pages it tells you that one of the core principles your whole profession holds is flat-out wrong. In most cases, that would be grounds for slamming the book down and never going back to it. But when the book comes from the bestselling author of 10 books, you might read on and hear him out. 

That’s the effect John Jantsch‘s 2021 book had on me. 

He is a who is a keynote marketing speaker, husband, father of four grown children and is a native Missourian. As he consulted for small businesses, he became known for approaching marketing pragmatically, something that many midwesterners are known for. Though it originated as the name of his 2006 book, Duct Tape Marketing has come to embody his blog, his podcast and his whole philosophy. It just shows how well good brand names…stick.

You’ll hear John tell what most of us haven’t grasped as the goal of marketing, and the steps his book uses to help us get full value out of our marketing. I guarantee that you will get value from listening to him, whether you are a business owner who wears the marketing hat part-time or you are a veteran career marketer. 

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100th Episode Thanks:

These podcasters have had me as a guest on their shows. Listen to their content:

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Episode 83: Building Marketing Funnels that Convert, with Keith Perhac

Quantifying Your Marketing Funnel’s Revenue

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.

“It’s not working.” That’s the gist of every complaint made about marketing funnels. Marketers painstakingly build a series of offers and pay for traffic to see them, but the conversion rates drop off somewhere between there and the point where sales close.

Can funnels be fixed? Absolutely, but not without knowing a critical piece of data. Getting that data that helps fix the suboptimal parts of the funnel is our focus today. 

To go through this I’m joined by Keith Perhac, a digital marketing expert and software entrepreneur. After growing up in the states, he headed to Japan to become what’s known there as a salaryman. He moved back In 2010 to work with startups and digital marketers looking to grow quickly. He founded SegMetrics, a tool that lets you see revenue from the perspective of each touchpoint in your marketing funnel. Since then, he’s appeared on over 35 podcasts & in 2020 published the book we’re here to discuss, “Building Marketing Funnels that Convert, a 90 minute guide”

When he’s not working on SegMetrics, Keith draws and attempts (futilely) to spend more time outdoors. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.

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Episode 82: Renegade Marketing with Drew Neisser

W. Chan Kim, author of Blue Ocean Strategy, said “The hardest battle is simply to make people aware of the need for a strategic shift”.

I somehow feel that he was thinking of marketers with this phrase. We are changing the minds of our buyer so they’ll choose our brand. To do that we are often changing our companies to produce the value our buyers expect. And changing the status quo in some companies means overcoming a lot of lethargy. This takes someone who’s courageous, as today’s author argues, it takes a renegade.

Drew Neisser is the founder of the marketing agency Renegade and Is the host of the podcast Renegade Thinkers Unite. Drew has been featured on network TV, many podcasts and writes a regular column for Ad Age. He talked to me from his Manhattan office about his 2nd book, Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands which came out in 2021.

Key takeaways for unleashing your own inner Renegade

  • Have the traits of cool marketing CATS: Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful, Scientific
  • Reverse your targeting – start with employees, then customers, then prospects
  • If your content isn’t of legitimate value to your customers, then don’t release it
  • Work with your CFO to radically simplify your metrics (8 KPIs or less)
  • Don’t overspend on martech, watch how much headcount it takes to manage the automation technology you take on
  • Leave 10-20% of your budget for experiments
  • Get your value proposition down to 8 words or less
  • Sell through service:think of what your customers would consider valuable; give it without regard to charging them for it

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Episode 81: Paid Attention with Faris Yakob

It’s been amazing, what we’ve achieved by connecting up computers world-wide, webbing them together. As its full name suggests, we gave ourselves an Inter-network that provides for our every information need, on command. But there is one change that the Internet made to us, it gave us more stimulus than our biology was made to handle. The demand for our attention suddenly exceeded the supply; and this economic shift is most noticeable in the world of advertising. The digital advertising marketplace has gotten more vast, more confusing, and it’s far less clear what the rules are anymore. 

Thankfully, there’s been a lot of research at the intersection of advertising and human attention. Effective marketers who are aware of the trends can tune their advertising to make their brands heard and win the attention of their target audience.

To get the latest insights into this, we’re talking to the author of the book, Paid Attention which just came out  in 2022 with a revised edition. 

Faris Yakob grew up in the UK and after graduating from Oxford University, led the digital innovation efforts at global ad agencies like McCann Erickson and MDC Partners. Following that, he and his wife Rosie co-founded Genius Steals, an innovation and strategy consultancy. 

He also serves as a juror for marketing awards like the Clios and the London International Awards. He’s also been a member of a non-profit consortium called  the Attention Council that aims to better measure the influence of marketing on people’s  attention. Clearly someone who likes the written word, in addition to his books he puts out a monthly column in Admap and the Marketing Society.

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