Category: Podcast

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Episode 87: How to resource marketing amid the Great Reset, with Kelly Rusk

The pandemic changed much in our world, and though some routines will subside, one change that’s going to remain with us is work from home. It was even clear the year after COVID hit that people were reevaluating going into an office. Pundits like Adam Grant said many were questioning their jobs as a whole. As he put it in a WSJ article, “the taste of freedom left us hungry for more.” Meaning  more than the flexibility to choose what K-Cup flavour of coffee on hand in the lunchroom. Grant goes much further, saying this “Flexibility is more than choosing the place where you work. It’s having freedom to decide your purpose, your people, and your priorities.”

That’s all fine and good, but how does an employer make this work? How do those of us responsible give rank and file marketers this flexibility while still getting work done?

My guest today has great insights into how marketing leaders can deal with all this. She’s witnessed first-hand the changes that Covid has brought to the marketing function. She has opinions on what will and what won’t work in the future.

Kelly Rusk is a marketing consultant who supports mid-sized companies trying to grow their marketing and PR capabilities. The first few years of her career she worked for Ottawa-based technologies companies as a marketing and communications pro. Then she went to the agency side for a decade, finishing with the full-service firm Banfield as digital director and partner. Kelly is always contributing to her profession, holding board positions with IABC and Girl Geek Dinners and being an Instructor in the Digital Marketing Certificate Program at the University of Ottawa. 

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Episode 86: Video Ads with Cory Henke

You can break down advertising by the medium of communication, and since we all started with text ads, we’re comfortable with that format. We’ve also become comfortable with image ads. But there’s one format that can throw a lot of us – video. Of course, the production cost put into videos can vary wildly, and ad platforms like youtube have a huge number of options and nuances to know, but the one thing all video has in common is it makes a human to human connection that other media formats cannot hold a candle to.

To demystify this field, we’re talking with the founder of Variable.media

One of the nicest people you’ll ever meet in the PPC industry

He has appeared on Edge of the Web and the Inbound Success podcasts. He has also spoken at HeroConf, A4, SMX, IIeX and many regional digital marketing events on three different continents.

He got his degree from California Lutheran, where he also distinguished himself as a walk-on for the basketball squad.

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Episode 85: Growing Paid Media to Enterprise-size, with Julia Vyse

We know what our paid media marketing looks like within the walls of organizations of our size. We could be talking about monthly spends of $1,000, $10,000 or maybe $50,000. But what does it look like when it grows to enterprise-size, with budgets of $100,000 or even millions per month? You start seeing media buys that act in concert. Known as omni-channel marketing, the consumer receives messages from all sides. This is only one of the hat techniques that can be used. I have the perfect guest to tell us what it’s like  when you are working with scale.

So about my guest. Around 2014 I stumbled on something the Pay-Per-Click community did on twitter every week. It was a lunchhour discussion called PPCChat and at that time I didn’t know anyone else who worked in PPC. That was when I met Julia Vyse in the Twitter chat, although she’d been airing her views there for 5 years before I came along. In my opinion, she is one of the OG digital marketers on Twitter. 

But that’s not all she’s been up to since growing up in Canada’s Capital Region. She started working for marketing agencies, first in Montreal in la belle province of Quebec. Now she lives in BC with her jazz-playing husband and cat in tow. 

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Episode Reboot.

Try making up a rubric for the different objectives you aim to hit with your campaigns.

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Episode 84: Data Science Wizardry with Richard Fergie & Brett Serjeantson

Do you own a crystal ball to predict the future? No? Well, I have good news for you. You don’t need one. 

When you feed lots of historicals into a machine, it doesn’t have to know what those numbers mean in business terms. Thanks to sophisticated data models, machines can determine the trends behind your numbers, including a pretty accurate prediction of what the next numbers in the series will be. 

That’s not all there is to data science though. Our guests believe it’s what takes our analytical abilities up the evolutionary ladder, from what happened, to how it happened, to how it might happen.

This episode talks about how cloud computing, which  crunches these numbers, has changed data science, doing everything that high-end servers used to do, at a fraction of the cost. It also covers the skillsets of the people needed to help machines work. To learn about how you can start implementing data science in your marketing, I’m joined by two people who are well versed in the field.  

Richard Fergie lives in the UK. He showed a penchant for math, which led him to Oxford University where he took his bachelors in mathematics. After spending time living in South America, he moved home and took a liking to the quant-heavy world of pay per click marketing. He has taken the 10 years of experience he got consulting on digital marketing and web analytics projects to found Forecast Forge, a quick and accurate forecasting tool that runs on Machine Learning.

Brett was an early SaaS pioneer and helped change the PR industry by creating one of the first companies to develop a real-time media monitoring and analysis platform that was able to successfully generate business intelligence from both traditional and social media.

Brett would lead the company as both the CEO and chief architect and developer of the platform as well as being awarded 2 patents.

Brett led his company through several significant transitions, including recognizing the need for big data and machine learning capabilities very early on as well as recognizing the importance of social media. 

Brett also identified the need for both journalist and publication data from the aspect of creating new markets as well as leveraging the data to further improve the analytics.

Brett’s company, MediaMiser, would be acquired in 2014.

Brett would later go on to improve his own analytical capabilities by achieving certifications in both data science and AI from the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto.

Brett also has a bachelor’s degree from Western University and a diploma in PR and communications from Algonquin College.

Let’s go talk to Richard Fergie & Brett Serjeantson.

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What you need to doTools that can do it
Visualize large datasetsGoogle Colab/Jupyter, Matplotlib 
Find trends, use predictions to decide next actionPomegranate
Do regression analysisPandas (built on NumPy)
unclassifiedProphet, PyTorch, TensorFlow

Episode Reboot. 

Check out https://www.forecastforge.com/learning/

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Episode 83: Quantifying Your Marketing Funnel’s Revenue with Keith Perhac

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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