One thing that professional services and solo subject matter experts struggle with is building an audience and influencing their purchases.
Creating a content marketing engine that achieves this can take agonizingly long – years even. But virtual events that are properly marketed seem able to shorten that timespan.
My guest, Michael Tucker, has refined a program that develops virtual events for clients, and over the past 3 years it has accelerated post-event prospect discussions and sales success.
Graduating from Campbellsville University in Kentucky, he now calls Florida home
Chapters/Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
0:01:14 Welcome Michael
0:03:44 Virtual events are good for leadgen
0:29:09 PSA
0:30:17 Running virtual event that embeds call-to-action
You could say that the marketing field is going through exciting times right now. But you shouldn’t say that everything’s rosy. Here are examples of issues we’re grappling with:
The use of SaaS by Marketing may have freed us from being chained to the IT department, but after 25 years of binge buying all these point solutions, we’re saddled with loads of Technical debt, and the order to repatriate customer data from all these servers.
CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology out there, much of their time is used up by the C-Suite’s questions, leaving little time for them to manage marketing.
There’s the question of whether the agency-client relationship will survive with AI. Some say brands won’t need an agency as they will generate their own creative. Agencies like Publicis, who’ve poured huge sums into their media-platform CoreAI that monitors billions of consumer signals and can inform what ads should be made, when & where.
Because our field doesn’t have standardized accreditation, our terminology isn’t uniform, and we make dialects for our company or industry. How’s that working for us? About as well as it did for those building the Tower of Babel.
My guest is Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. Since graduating from Northeasters 20 years ago, he’s been up and down the marketing industry block. He was a client-side marketer in the tech and financial services sectors, He founded and led an adtech company, Canned Banners, that was acquired. He worked as a VP at data consultancy MightyHive which became Media.Monks.
He is in a new role now at U of Digital, spearheading this education thought leadership to expand the company’s educational offerings across different formats, learners, and markets
To me, he’s something of a modern-day David Ogilvy, who wrote his thoughts on his industry back in the day, in a book called “Confessions of an Ad Man”. Myles is just as outspoken on digital media and advertising topics, and the opinions he voices in trade publications and podcasts can come across as prophecies about this industry and sometimes pleas for how it could be better.
I caught up with him in Portland, OR, where he lives with his wife and three kids.
Timestamp/Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
0:03:25 Welcome Myles
0:04:55 Continuum of approaches to privacy
0:07:58 Our reliance on ad tech; its future
0:20:56 We can only go as fast as our people can
0:24:53 Tech debt we’ve brought on ourselves
0:31:50 PSA
0:32:37 Changes impacting platforms & ad agencies
0:42:44 Platforms exploiting advertisers in the name of Al
0:48:27 The good & bad of using their Cloud offerings
As a Disclaimer, note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship with the vendor interviewed here. They’re simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.
As trite as it sounds, the way that we look at the world affects our understanding of it. Let me tell you about a time I noticed this. When I was a kid, I would go to school, walk into my classroom, and see my teacher there. She was such a constant there, I imagined that she never left the classroom, she was a fixture of the room, part of the furniture. It’s like the teacher didn’t persist as a person who had a life outside of the classroom. So when I was out at the grocery store with my parents and I saw my teacher, not dressed in their teacher clothes, not ensconced in their teacher setting, my brain just melted.
While this might be laughable, those of us using marketing analytics tools could be guilty of falling into the same trap. Credit for making this concept clear in not 1 but 2 great books must go to Avinash Kaushik. Think about it. According to Classic web analytics, visitors who hit our website had started an imaginary timer that we called a web session. We imagined in this race against the clock, they were viewing a sequence of pages which ferried them to forms we used as gates. We told ourselves that the gate-crossers had completed a successful session, converting from visitors into leads or customers.
Stepping back, there are a few things wrong with this picture. Users don’t only exist inside of a session, just like the teacher didn’t only exist in the classroom—they roam about as they please.
Today’s users aren’t confined to marketing content. The experience they have straddles our marketing sites, to sites and apps where their identity persists through being logged-in, where the interactions even span multiple devices – as we see on Slack and Discord for messages we’ve already read.
The user’s state changes – sometimes they complete a purchase, or become a paid subscriber, but at other times they may opt for a free plan or abandon their cart.
We need analytics for all of these actions. We need to step back and view the entire experience that people have with us over time. This is something that classic web analytics just can’t measure.
This is why the new generation of tools allows us to analyze complex trends and behavior of our users. They are collectively known as event-based analytics tools, and they excel in portraying the way that users experience a product. The foremost product-oriented analytics tool out there is called Amplitude, and today, we are speaking with its product evangelist.
Since 2021, Adam Greco has been Amplitude’s Product Evangelist, guiding clients in understanding their tool through workshops, blogs, and videos.
He got into this field in 2005 when he joined analytics platform Omniture where he was a customer advocate for four years until Adobe acquired them and rechristened them Adobe Analytics. He then worked at consultancies for 15 years, showing people how to get the most out of Adobe’s tool, authoring over 200 blog posts along the way.
Lately Adam’s speaking and advising on analytics has had him splitting his time between Chicago and Amsterdam (where he was when this was recorded). When he’s in the states and not working, he enjoys restoring and going for drives in his 62 convertible corvette.
Timestamps/Chapters
0:00 – Intro
5:00 – Meet Adam; why event-based method works better than session-based method
24:00 – PSA
24:45 – how to get value out of recent analytics tools, including warehouse-native apps
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.
