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Episode 102: Influencer Marketing Strategy, with Gordon Glenister

Consumers and corporate buyers no longer put blind trust in our brands. Nor do they trust big institutions. Nor religion. Nor the government. Nor the media. We do however still trust people like us. That’s where influencers come in. 

Gordon Glenister is a UK-based adviser on the business of working with influencers and running membership associations. Gordon launched the association arm of the UK’s Branded Content Marketing Association, to support the influencer marketing industry. Additionally, he hosts “Influence”, the global podcast on influencer marketing.  In 2021 he published the book Influencer Marketing Strategy

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  • Example of an influencer scorecard:
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Episode 101: Age of Customer Equity, with Allison Hartsoe

Think of the data you have on your customers as having value. It does, by the fact that the more you know your clients, the better you can serve them. This “unlocked potential revenue” of all your current customers can be quantified as your whole customer’s lifetime value (CLV) added together. 

This number is known by finance people as Customer Equity, but it’s much more than a mathematical formula. The value that VCs and public markets have put on assets such as loyalty programs and subscription lists is often greater than the value of a company’s capital assets!

While it might sound like it has to do with finance, this is all highly related to marketing. This is because each tactical decision gets vetted by whether it will optimize CLV; it becomes your company’s North Star.  

Allison Hartsoe has strategize d the digital customer analytics for dozens of Fortune 500 customers throughout her career. She now leads an analytics consultancy in Portland OR, Ambition Data, and published the book, “The Age of Customer Equity”,  in 2021. She has been published in Forbes.com, MIT Technology Review, and Fast Company and somewhere in between all this writing, she found time to cycle across the USA. 

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Episode 100: Ultimate Marketing Engine, with John Jantsch

How would you feel if you picked up a book about work, and in the first few pages it tells you that one of the core principles your whole profession holds is flat-out wrong. In most cases, that would be grounds for slamming the book down and never going back to it. But when the book comes from the bestselling author of 10 books, you might read on and hear him out. 

That’s the effect John Jantsch‘s 2021 book had on me. 

He is a who is a keynote marketing speaker, husband, father of four grown children and is a native Missourian. As he consulted for small businesses, he became known for approaching marketing pragmatically, something that many midwesterners are known for. Though it originated as the name of his 2006 book, Duct Tape Marketing has come to embody his blog, his podcast and his whole philosophy. It just shows how well good brand names…stick.

You’ll hear John tell what most of us haven’t grasped as the goal of marketing, and the steps his book uses to help us get full value out of our marketing. I guarantee that you will get value from listening to him, whether you are a business owner who wears the marketing hat part-time or you are a veteran career marketer. 

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100th Episode Thanks:

These podcasters have had me as a guest on their shows. Listen to their content:

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Episode 99: Tying Revenue back to Traffic, with Steffen Hedenbrandt

Disclaimer: When I bring technology vendors on the show, you should know that they are not sponsors or affiliates. They’re simply here to give you a broader perspective.

If you have been to the eye doctor for near or far sightedness, the equipment that’s likely been used to assess you is a phoropter. The part that’s put in front of your eyes looks somewhat like a pair of glasses, but it branches out from that with an imposing array of lenses, dials and machinery. You are shown an eye chart and the doctor flicks through alternate lenses, asking you to say whether the image is clearer with lens 1 or lens 2. When tests on the phoropter & other equipment is done, you end up with lens prescriptions that are right for you. 

This process isn’t unlike what’s behind marketing’s use of attribution models. They serve to show what impact advertising channels have on a company’s revenue, with pre-set models, each one weighing the impact of digital touchpoints differently. By attributing revenue back to the channels and campaigns that helped acquire it, you get a clearer view of what you are getting for your marketing dollar. 

Of course, marketers don’t use phoropters, but doing attribution analysis does take specific tools, and that’s what this episode takes us through. 

My guest is Steffen Hedenbrandt, who’s growth-oriented, data-driven and loves all parts of scaling a business.  He worked at places like Upwork and Airtame before cofounding DreamData, where he serves as the Chief Marketing Officer.He has a bachelor’s degree from Aalborg University and a Masters from Copenhagen Business School. 

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Episode 98: Built to Change: How to Future-proof your Marketing Team, with Amanda Farley

Change is the constant in today’s Marketing. The firms that adapt to that reality will survive. Those marketing employers that hold to conventional practices like daily office commutes and spliffs like Starbucks gift cards won’t survive this environment for long. 

My guest Amanda Farley knows this very well. She has been a marketer, performance strategist, and business success leader for over a dozen years. She is VP of Growth at Aimclear, a marketing agency dominant in customer acquisition and winner of 17 US Search Awards including 5X most recent Best Integrated Agency.

Amanda speaks at conferences such as SMX, HeroConf, PRSA Detroit, FoundCon, and TogetherDigital. She has appeared in publications including SearchEngineLand and MarketingLand. Amanda judges the annual Global Content Awards and UK App Awards. She has also been a finalist for Landy’s Search Female Marketer of the Year.

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Episode 97: Reacting to a Reengineered Sales team, with Rick Endrulat

No corporate function in B2B was impacted by the events of 2020 as much as sales. Salesforces had to reengineer themselves just to survive. We in marketing had better understand how these new sales dynamics are affecting us. My guest will help us do just that. 

Rick Endrulat’s passion for revenue generation began at Watcom, a spinoff from the University of Waterloo. He was there as it grew and was acquired by the sixth-largest software company in the world. He then co-founded Virtual Causeway, a consultancy that helps enterprises scale up their demand generation.

Rick is a Quantum Shift Fellow with the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. A past recipient of Waterloo Region’s “40 Under 40,” Rick has also received Wilfrid Laurier’s MBA Alumni Award in 2008 and 2013, and Communitech’s Tech Impact Award for outstanding leadership and involvement in the local technology community. He is a member of Laurier’s President’s Council of Advisors, and a two-time winner of the Laziridis School of Business — Entrepreneurship & Innovation award. He has an Honours Degree in Arts and a Masters of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Not one to stand still, Rick co-founded School of Rock Kitchener-Waterloo, which rapidly grew to become the largest music school in the community. He is also Co-Founder and Director of 100 Guitars for 100 kids, as well as a Founding Board Member for Sustainable Waterloo Region.

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Episode 96: Is the Marketing Services Model Broken? with Leona Hobbs

Is the Marketing Services Model Broken?

My guest is calling BS on the state of agency-brand relations. Considering her qualifications in this space, it’s worth hearing her out. Leona Hobbs joined global public relations agency Fleishman-Hillard right out of school. She worked on strategy across several sectors and rose to become a vice president there. 

The 1990s and early 2000s had her working with internet clients like Yahoo and Tucows as director of communications. Working in agencies and through her own Reset Digital brand, she consulted with leading automotive, industrial, financial services, cruise line, and consumer brands. She also had an extended account leadership role with a Fortune 50 semiconductor firm.

People, Companies and Concepts mentioned in this episode:

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Episode 95: New database technology paradigm, with Chris McLellan

Big Data has a problem. It’s not just its bigness; it’s the rigidity of the databases that hold and that force us to make data copies. Resulting problems, from privacy to fidelity loss, are so severe, we should revisit the first principles of how databases are built. Let’s be honest, if we could build our whole data infrastructure over again, would we do it differently? 

Today’s guest says we would have built data like a network. Thankfully, next-generation technology will allow us to store data in this new way while still making use of old-style databases.   

My guest is Chris McLellan. He splits his time between the nonprofit Data Collaboration Alliance, and Cinchy, the leader in enterprise data fabric technology. Coming out of Bishops University with a degree in Political Science, his career has included stints at VarageSale, and Lyft, as well as startups like Flexday and ChangeJar. He also created the go-to-market strategy for Hailo, the taxi network of 35,000 licensed drivers. 

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Episode 94: Winning People’s Buy-in by Telling Stories, with Amy Hebdon

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ve taken on a marketing initiative that is finally going somewhere, and it’s now time for management to see what you’ve done and approve more funds, or give you props for  all your hard work. But on presenting your data, you’re only met with blank stares or nit-picking centred around how you put your data together. 

What’s going wrong when this happens? It’s probably that your audience couldn’t boil it down into something that makes sense to them. The universal structure that all of us use to do this is stories.  

My guest uses stories to present the performance of her marketing programs. It’s her contention that using a story-like framework works to your advantage when presenting data. Amy Hebdon has managed Google Ads Since 2004, working her way through at least a half dozen agencies.  In 2017, she and her husband James co-founded Paid Search Magic, which provides coaching, consulting, audits, reporting, and courses for those who want to get better at search engine marketing. She has lived in a handful of states and two central American countries, and she joined us today from the new “Home-base” which is in Tennessee. 

Fun Fact: she once worked for a man (named Mr. Schneer) who was in charge of the company website and didn’t know how to use the internet (he asked which was the “dot” key in typing “dotcom”)

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P-A-S framework:

  1. Problem
  2. Agitate
  3. Solution

Episode Reboot. 

Frame your statistics in a way that illustrates the impact on what your audience cares about.

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Episode 93: Visualizing & Making Data Valuable, with Eric Boissonneault

In its raw form, data’s not worth much. If refined and put together with other data, it can be worth a lot. Here are well-known brands that built their value by creating a useful visual experience out of user-generated data:

  • Notable Examples:
    • Glassdoor
    • Nest
    • Zapier
    • Mint
    • Robinhood
    • Flipboard
    • Ancestry
    • GoodReads

This episode’s guest will help us see what is possible once you have data in your hands. Eric Boissonneault grew up loving numbers, but it wasn’t until he saw a Hollywood movie about card players at age 16, that he knew how he would apply his skill. He taught himself poker and methodically played this ‘game of chance’ so well that He became a professional player through his years at University du Quebec à Montreal and beyond. 

After cashing his poker chips in, he wanted to show the business world how they could look at the data they have on-hand as the basis for decisions. In 2020 he founded data consulting company Systematik to help businesses untangle, collect, visualize and understand their data.

Listen in this episode for Eric’s explanation of how you can put a unique transformation or twist on the data you already have, and even make an application that monetizes the data. 

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How fast will you hit Google Sheets 5-million cell limit? If you have a spreadsheet with 5 tabs and each tab fills columns A to CW, and there is 10000 rows of data in each tab. It happens faster than you think.