Category: Podcast

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Episode 40: Giving Search Engines what they want with Brock Murray

You’re looking at a screen that’s empty, aside from a little box that you type or talk onto. A zillionth of a second later, you see all that the internet has, relating to what you entered. 

We’re talking about search engine results pages and though they may seem to simply fetch information, there’s a whole lot that we marketers need to know in order to appear there. 

I want you to listen as he explains Snippets markup XML schema, Info boxes, web stories open Graph, Search console and other technical aspects of how search data is indexed. 

Brock Murray is a full-stack marketer who specializes most in SEO. He started coding websites for friends and family members. He started his agency around 2012 and I met him recently after that, hearing him on a panel and liking how transparent he was in giving advice. Later I ran an event and asked him to speak at it.

Zooming ahead to the present, the agency is now a 7-figure business that does ecommerce sites, local service businesses, you name it. What I like most of all is how Brock still practices what he preaches in SEO, sharing real time experimentation he’s doing in his work, and what we can all learn about web search from doing it.

Follow Brock on Twitter or find out about his agency, SEOPlus+

People, products and Concepts mentioned on the show:

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Brock created a tool that checks how well websites are optimized for search. To have your site checked, visit FreeSEOReport.ca

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Episode 39: Mistakes Marketers Shouldn’t Make (and some they Should) with Jordan Danger

Mistakes so ingrained in our present-day world, we even expect them in depictions set in the future. If you watch Star Trek you’ll know that anytime they beam down on an away mission, something’s going to go wrong and usually someone wearing a red shirt won’t last until the end of the episode. 

Beyond hearing Star Trek references in this show, you’ll hear the roles that automation, documentation, realistic deadlines and self-assessments all have in determining whether mistakes happen. You’ll also hear how they can be avoided, but also why bending ourselves into pretzels trying not to make them is wrong.

My guest Jordan Danger, founder of Danger Co., a 360° marketing consulting and coaching practice. Right off the bat, you need to know that Jordan isn’t afraid to make mistakes. In fact, when you hear her last name in a moment, you’ll see how aptly it describes her fearlessness. And how she makes her opinions about marketing known. 

Jordan went to school for youth & social work, but has always had a flair for communications. Ever a believer in the power of the internet to share stories, a personal life event gave her the chance to build an audience off her blog and social media accounts. The explosive success of that project gave her the spark to enter marketing, which led her to sell her expertise to companies she met through her personal project. 

That led to working for a City Councillor and then working as an independent marketing consultant to tech firms, ranging from startups to ones going through successive investment rounds.  In addition to her consultancy, she’s an artist, writer, an Advisor at a local business accelerator, an Ottawa Forty Under 40 Recipient, a part time professor at Algonquin College and someone who’s enthusiastic about youth wellness, animals and nature. 

Products, People and Concepts mentioned in this show:

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Jordan’s advice to marketers:

  • Study outside your field. 
  • Participate in teams outside of your department 
  • Focus on psychology, economics and consumer behavior. 
  • Listen – all the time listen.
  • Follow what your audiences follow like you are Star Trek’s Spock on an away Mission, without emotion.

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Episode 38: A Cooperative Approach to Content with Paul Schneider

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.

A simple marketing model goes something like this: We have a product that solves a problem; a buyer who has that problem finds us, decides it’s a fit and a sale happens. Right? Sounds great! But it puts some big expectations on a buyer:

  • that they can feel their unmet need, their problem 
  • That there’s a well-known product category for out there and that they can find the vendors 
  • That they can predict the success they’d get from buying our product 

It’s a stretch to imagine a buyer could independently do all these. That’s what content marketing is meant for, to educate the prospects, informing them of the solution’s value and elevating us, the content’s author, in the process. Relax marketers everywhere, Content is the answer to your prayers.  Content is all you need. What’s that you say? You don’t have enough Content?  Or You don’t know how to deploy it externally to its maximum effect? 

Well, our guest has good news for you, he feels content can be found internally in our companies. And, for those who sell technology products, he’s also full of ideas on how content draw in prospects, getting them to use and come onside with our products. 

 My guest is Paul Schneider, came to using content for marketing by using content for a different purpose: training & education. Content has posed the same challenges in their field as ours, as they tried to modernize training content, letting people take it in at their own pace, no matter how distant they were from a classroom.

He got into this field by studying in education and psychology, which led him to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for a PhD. Illinois is practically the American epicenter of large-scale computing, which onto the internet through tools like Telnet, Eudora, the Mosaic browser. Companies built by U of Illinois alumnus include Netscape, Siebel Systems, PayPal and YouTube.  

Being at this school while all this was going on, he witnessed efforts to take learning onto the internet, built on top of browsers. He got in on the ground-floor and a decade and a half later is SVP of business development at a company that makes eLearning authoring software Dominknow.

Paul spoke to me from Colorado; he shares how his company, Dominknow Learning Systems use content to market their SaaS-based software. 

Show Notes:

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Episode 37: Taking B2B beyond the Big Three: Running Paid Social on Smaller Networks with Andrea Cruz

A lot of attention is given to the largest ad platforms (Google/YouTube and Facebook proper, along with Instagram & WhatsApp) – eMarketer says this duopoly accounts for two-thirds of all digital advertising.

If you include Amazon, whose market share is somewhere in the teens and should be in the 20s soon, over 80% of all the money paid to reach buyers is spent on three platforms. Does it make sense to take our advertising beyond these big players to smaller networks, that account for only one out of every five? Our guest, Andrea Cruz, says yes. A Manager with Boston-based agency KoMarketing, she feels these lesser-known Social Networks pose a great opportunity for B2B advertisers. In this show, she will talk about three networks, and how it takes a different approach to campaign on them successfully. 

Persons, concepts and products mentioned:

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Don’t go too big, don’t go too small. Try to go for a medium-amount of data so you can learn.

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Episode 36: Adapting How Marketing is Taught in Higher Ed with Jonathan Simon

Are colleges and universities keeping up with the changes in marketing? To answer this question, Prof Scott Cowley of Western Michigan University surveyed 529 US University marketing programs. Here are the results: out of all higher education institutions that teach marketing, 27% do not offer a single digital marketing course. Of those that do have digital in their curriculum, half of them offer only one digital marketing course. It seems even when schools have a digital component that they’re uncommitted to it.  Students at 9 out of 10 of these schools can graduate with a degree without taking a digital marketing course.

Prof Cowley pointed out the mismatch between schools and the outside world.  “Traditional marketers are struggling to upskill, marketing graduates have studied a syllabus that doesn’t include digital techniques, and digital professionals have inconsistent abilities due to a lack of standardized skills training”

But there’s a growing number of Profs that are bringing Off-Campus experts and their ideas into the classroom to help the next generation of marketers meet today’s needs. One of them is our guest, Jonathan Simon, who, since becoming a professor at U of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Business, has influenced how their marketing programs are taught.  He not only uses his educational background (which includes a BA and an MBA) to teach   but he also draws from time in the private sector where he worked with media companies and in the mobile technology space.

People, concepts and products mentioned:

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“If you are out in industry, keep learning. These students are hungry and they are gunning for your job”