Category: Posts

Podcast episodes plus excerpts and standalone reviews

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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

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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Episode 80: Business Gold with Michelle Raymond

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

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Episode 79: Becoming a Digital Marketer with Gil Gildner

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

Episode Reboot.

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

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Episode 78: How AI Helps Marketers, with Cathy McPhillips

Lots of experts have said that AI is transformational to business. Call me cynical, but when you look at how the average marketing team functions in 2022, it doesn’t seem like much of our work has been transformed. My guest today, a mainstream marketer who hadn’t been influenced by  all the hype, will share her appraisal of AI’s practical uses.

Cathy McPhillips is a longtime Cleveland-based marketer who has worked in corporate, agency-side, as well as owning a small business. She worked for years with the Content Marketing Institute which was led by Joe Pulizzi (who was on Episode 56 of the show). Nearly a year ago, she joined the Marketing AI institute as chief growth officer, but admittedly with very little hands-on experience with AI. 

Brought on to grow the relatively new institute in a hurry, Cathy’s gotten up to speed on how to use these tools. She’ll tell us her story, including how the way we traditionally do things has to change in order to get the benefits of AI. Cathy lists many resources and tools, which have been compiled into a table that’s in the show notes.   I hope by listening to Cathy, you’ll try some of them out, and come away as excited as she is about how AI can be a superpower for today’s marketing.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot:

Tools to help content E.G. Persado, DRIFT, Descript, MarketMuseWriting social posts, messages (Copy.ai, persado) Personalizing landing pages, Analyzing what’s said on social about our brand
Tools to help mktg activities E.G. Rasa.io, SprinklrOptimizing ads on campaigns to get most leads for least cost-summarizing/visualizing our web visitors and prospects, Understand which prospects have intent to buy, are open to contact, Data cleanup or other repeated tasks, learning from watching you

Also check out our other AI-related episodes:

Cathy in her role as Chief Growth Officer with the Marketing AI Institute