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
When a person interacts with their device or goes online, who owns their data? Today’s guest says they do, and marketers should be paying them for the privilege. Right now, you might think this person wears hats made out of tinfoil. It may surprise you to learn they are the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.
John Thompson has written four books. I found out about him through his 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, which led to him being a guest on this show back in 2023. He recently released his book “Data for All” which spurred this repeat appearance – which has only happened with a handful of people.
For links to all persons and concepts mentioned, go to Ep 181’s notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.
‘1 to 1 Marketing,’ sounds wonderful. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers wrote a series of books in the 1990s called this. We have thrown all kinds of technology, content, and persona construction at it over the last 25 years. But it still eludes us. Architecting communications that converses with each person, at their own point in a conversation with our brand is hard. Is it marketing’s job to actually have 1:1 conversations? And with what’s at stake if we screw up personalization, can we implement or maintain it without losing our jobs?
Today’s guest is here to help answer that.
Since getting his M.A. in Information Studies from Aarhus University, our guest has lived at the intersection of data and communications.
Since 2020 he has been the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic, an omnichannel marketing software, where he works primarily with large companies involved in omnichannel marketing, customer experience management, and customer lifecycle projects.
He’s on a mission to ensure that the end user gets consistent, timely and relevant communications across channels – be it web, email, app, text, social – or even in-store. He often presents keynotes on Omnichannel Personalization and sits on the jury for that at the Danish eCommerce Awards.
His first book, written together with Colin Shearer, was a bestseller on Omnichannel Marketing. We’re talking with him about his book “Hello $Firstname,” which came out in 2023. Joining me from Copenhagen, let’s welcome Rasmus Houlind.
If you go to Wikipedia and type Zero-sum game, it’ll describe it as “a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero”
Many think that’s how privacy regulations are affecting marketing. Anytime client privacy is upheld it’s at our expense. We’re losing; they’re winning. Zero-sum game.
Siobhan Solberg disagrees. She says you can effectively market to your client in a way that does right by them and is privacy-compliant.
She calls herself a protector of privacy, while also being a marketing consultant, the founder of a marketing agency. She has over a decade in the measurement space, having created CXL’s course on personalization. She’s also been a speaker at conferences like Superweek and The Copywriter Club. She also writes on privacy and marketing on her blog and is host of a podcast whose name is spelled out in the shownotes but which I’ll call Marketing Unf*d.
She is currently enrolled in the Master of Laws program for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Management at Maastricht University.
When she’s not not pushing these boundaries, Siobhan loves to get outside and test her physical limits
Today’s talk is with a technology vendor, as a Disclaimer, please note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. They’re simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.
Today we’re going to talk about leveling up beyond KPIs to data that visualizes our full-funnel.
Comedian George Carlin knew how complicated things get with marketing technology. Or, you can imagine that when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing technology evolve before our eyes. As our software tools grow, so does the complexity. We’re beyond the point of logging into each of them to see individual KPIs. They have just become too specialized, and now we need meta-tools, crafted solely to connect with the specialized marketing systems, to extract and roll up streamlined data that we can analyze or see on a dashboard.
It’s against this backdrop that I invited today’s guest.
Jacob Varghese hails from India, having graduated with a BA from University of Mumbai. Since moving to Canada in the 1990s, he’s focused on building marketing machines and crafting go-to-market strategies that yield repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue.
Following experiences as a senior executive at numerous B2B SaaS outfits, he’s now the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AgencyAnalytics. His passion for augmenting marketing and sales through data and automation comes through in the insights he shares on his blog.
If your job involves numbers, you likely spend time graphically plotting it. Whether it’s for analyzing or presenting, we usually toss our datasets into our visualization tool (mainly because it takes one button click) and start visualizing it. The problem here is that we’re making content before knowing our intent, we’re making the software master over us instead of being its master.
Today’s guest says the visualizations that come from this won’t be intelligible, won’t make them motivated to act and won’t yield good decisions. However, he does passionately believe that when people who know how to read numbers, see it presented the right way, it’ll motivate them to make the right decisions.
Lee Feinberg graduated from Cornell University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. In 2012 founded a consultancy to help data leaders create armies of trustworthy decision makers. He has worked in the analytics and data visualization fields for 20 years.
He is associated with Data Science programs at both NYU and the University of Chicago. When he’s not talking about visualization, Lee likes experiencing concerts – from the front row, and also hanging out with his wife and kids.
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.
The last podcast episode was a recap from a 3-part web event I took part in, called OnTap (link in notes). It’s a regular event put on by a premier web design agency, who has helped me appreciate that There are websites and then there are websites.
Some give User Experience short shrift, slapping together generic templates that look
Pretty, generic. Others use experts to make interfaces that are optimized for mobile and PC environments, and anticipate what users want and present their content in engaging ways.
Some with so little security, they’re susceptible to cyber threats. Others invest heavily in cybersecurity – protecting not only themselves, but visitors as well.
Some sites have clung to technology that’s become atrophied and prone to crashing. Others are kept up to date, and are upgradable as the company’s needs change. Some have a backend that craters when traffic spikes,while others keep humming because of their scalable infrastructure.
Some expect visitors will come back on their own initiative, others use email smartly to coax visitors back
Our guest is going to show us how to see the difference that well-developed websites can make. He knows how the value of our online presence can be unlocked to produce experiences that lead to revenue.
Josh Garellek is co-founder & CEO of a full-service web development agency that’s spread across North America.
He grew up and started his studies in Montreal, then went on to study at New York’s Yeshiva University.
He did stints in the food service industry and e-commerce before starting a game development studio, until he and a business partner teamed up, switching it into a web dev company called Arctic Leaf. He’s gone beyond this and started other ventures too. The drive to do all this, he’ll tell you, is probably rooted in ADHD, or being a natural entrepreneur, or his chutzpah; probably all of these. But after knowing him for over a decade, for questions about what to do with your website, he is THE person to listen to.
Today, we’re talking about the future of data with Google Analytics 4.
It’s been about 6 months since we all had Universal Analytics. It’s good to talk to others who use GA4 to do their jobs, to compare notes. Although GA4 is here to stay, it still has gaps that need bridging.
That’s why I spoke with Jason Hackenberry, Head of Partnerships from web development agency Arctic Leaf. Prior to Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, along with roles in Merchandising.
What you’ll hear is from a virtual event he and I did in December 2023, on topics including
How Google is migrating users of its free version differently from its 360 version
How to capitalize on the information provided by GA4
The data you actually need vs. what you THINK you need
Tips on finding insights, reporting, conversion tracking and data retention
New GA4 features that can help your lead generation or e-commerce website.
GA4 is now our de facto analytics tool. Regardless of how familiar we were with the previous tool, GA4 is here to stay so we may as well get good at using it.
I’ve got just the person to make the transition relatively painless for us.
Our guest’s love for analytics was a happy accident after she worked in marketing at a company with a sales director. They told the executive team that marketing’s budget would be put to better use hiring new salespeople. But beyond having a warm fuzzy feeling in one’s tummy, it wasn’t clear marketing’s impact could be articulated in the way that executives talked.
Not willing to watch her department disappear, she dug in and found the data that showed marketing was having an impact. She took the evidence to the next board meeting and her department was able to continue with its work.
She chose to go out on her own so she could empower marketers to do as she’d done. She now heads up The Colouring In Department, a consultancy that has completed close to 230 GA audits now, and has trained thousands of people on how to get good at their analytics.
