Category: Books

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. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Site about The Ultimate Marketing Engine book, containing templates 
• John is also the author of 
• Duct Tape Marketing
• The Referral Engine
• SEO for Growth
• Duct Tape Selling
• The Commitment Engine
• The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur: 366 Daily Meditations to Feed Your Soul and Grow Your Business
• John’s LinkedIn profile

100th Episode Thanks:

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

• Wendy Covey’s Content Marketing, Engineered
• Andrew Monro’s Drinking with Freelancers
• Kevin Dieny’s Close the Loop

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

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Jeff Perkins
• Brent Adamson (wrote the foreward to Drew’s book) author of the Challenger Customer
• Drew’s LinkedIn Profile and Twitter profile
• Drew’s first book, the CMO Periodic Table 

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Mathew Sweezey
• Tim Wu
• Mark Shaefer and his book Content Shock
• Damian Hurst
• Claude Levi Strauss
• Robin Dunbar, significance of the number 150 
• Nielsen Catalina Solutions
• David Ogilvy

When used properly, LinkedIn Company pages carry a ton of marketing value. 

To help us learn how to leverage these assets, I asked Michelle Raymond to join me. 

As a LinkedIn Pages Specialist, she helps businesses of all sizes use Company Pages to amplify personal brands, build up business credibility.

She is a Member of the SMB Advisory Council for LinkedIn Pages, a Top 1% LinkedIn Content Creator. She started using LinkedIn for social selling around six years ago for doing sales, using only the LinkedIn free tools. Closing deals convinced her of the power and she has branched out to using it for Digital Marketing.

In 2021 she and Co-author Lynnaire Johnston came out with a book called  Business Gold: Build Awareness, Authority and Advantage with LinkedIn Company Pages.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• The LinkedIn Company Page subpage for Business Gold
• Michelle’s company Good Trading Co

Digital marketer isn’t one of those occupations that kids in school blurt out when they are asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” 

Thankfully, a book came out in 2019 that lays out very plainly many of the things I wish I’d known when I joined this profession.  Becoming a Digital Marketer has elements that are tactical but it also weighs in on existential questions like ‘what kind of lifestyle can I have being in this field?’ and ‘should I work client-side, agency-side, or be my own boss?” Though I’ve been at this for decades, I’ll admit that I learned a number of things in the book, both about marketing and about  Kombucha, which was the product used throughout the book’s marketing tales.

Once our guest, Gil Gildner, got out of school, he worked in media for NGOs, where he traveled to over 45 countries, wore hazmat suits in Ebola units, and rode Ugandan motorcycles. Realizing that he wanted to survive into his thirties, he started doing marketing for a company that sold around-the-world airfares. It’s in this company where he met his wife Anya, a paid search specialist. Listen to our conversation for more of the interesting story of how Gil and Anya wrote this book and founded an agency which they operate from wherever they are. Today he happens to be in his hometown of Fayetteville Arkansas, near Walmart world Headquarters 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Lambo guy
• Sonia Simone’s blog post that says about Internet Marketers:  ‘they spend 16 hours a day working so they can make money while they sleep.’
• Rand Fishkin
• Peter Thiel book Zero to One
• Gil & Anya’s agency, Discosloth
• Gil & Anya’s book: Becoming a Digital Marketer

Episode Reboot.

Check out Discosloth’s free resource The Beginner’s Guide to PPC

Those of us who work in a marketing role or are marketing our own company can debate how this tactic is better than that tactic. Depending on which conference you attend or article you read, you’ll get a different opinion. But there are a few elements that a company must have to make all of this possible – their web and social properties. These foundational assets are what everything else sits on top of, and though I may be preaching to the choir here, these basics must be properly managed, or it’s all for nought. 

My guest, Avery Swartz, has had her own business for 15 years. She’s seen nearly every problem that can happen, through her experience as a web consultant. 10 years ago, she established CampTech, a company which holds workshops showing the right way to use marketing and website applications. So she knows whereof she speaks. 

Her clear explanations of web technologies earned Avery spots on nationally-airing Canadian TV shows and on the radio. She also writes a tech column in one of Canada’s national newspapers that reaches 6 million people a week.  She’s here today because in 2020 she authored a book covering the fundamentals of managing these pieces. 

Listen as we cover everything from domain registration and maintenance, accessibility, privacy laws, PPC channels like Google Ads, marketing metrics and more.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• WCAG Accessibility 
• PIPEDA
• Template for a Data Processing Agreement
• CASL
• GDPR guidelines
• Google’s former Webmaster Liaison Matt Cutts
• Avery’s personal website and her latest LinkedIn Learning course “How to plan your website”
• Avery’s book, See You on the Internet: Building Your Small Business with Digital Marketing
• Avery’s profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram

Episode Reboot.

Check out the new LinkedIn Learning course by Avery