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.

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Episode Reboot:

Tools to help contentE.G. PersadoDRIFTDescriptMarketMuseWriting social posts, messages (Copy.ai, persado) Personalizing landing pagesAnalyzing what’s said on social about our brand
Tools to help mktg activitiesE.G. Rasa.ioSprinklrOptimizing ads on campaigns to get most leads for least cost-summarizing/visualizing our web visitors and prospectsUnderstand which prospects have intent to buy, are open to contactData cleanup or other repeated tasks, learning from watching you

Also check out our other AI-related episodes:

Episode 77: Stop arguing over leads; start scoring them, with Gary Amaral

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.

Two things are required to get a clear view of revenue growth. First, sales and marketing must come together to jointly-define the thresholds at each stage of a lead’s lifecycle. Second, they must apply points to a lead’s every action, either manually or by layering automation on this process. 

My guest believes that lead scoring systems not only bring pipeline visibility, they improve the collaboration between Sales & Marketing. In fact, he claims that by pooling their information on leads and letting AI find the patterns, they can tell when a lead is ready to buy, upsell, or churn. 

Gary Amaral held several positions at places like at BlackBerry & Hootsuite, always at the intersection of marketing and sales. Seeing how poor scoring led to frustration for all involved, he joined forces with two other serial startup entrepreneurs. 

In 2020 they co-founded Breadcrumbs, which is a revenue acceleration platform based on a co-dynamic lead scoring and routing engine. Listen for Gary’s advice on what you need to do to get scoring right. Just as good communication helps keep couples together, the Sales & marketing relationship needs good communication on the status of leads. Lead scoring could very well be the glue in this marriage. 

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You can also check out these episodes involving lead scoring:

Episode Reboot.

Download Breadcrumb.io’s lead scoring template

Episode 76: Paid Media Automation: It’s About Time, with Ameet Khabra 

There’s no shortage of things to do in paid media marketing.   

There are so many options available for automating what the platforms do. Those of us who have taken the plunge into automation all agree it makes sense, both the logical kind and even literal cents, the currency kind. Yet many still resist automation. Not really resist, but given all the things each ad platform does, and all the third-party tools out there, the problem some have is knowing where to begin. 

Our guest today can help us there. Ameet Khabra has spent the last decade figuring out why people do what they do online, what prompts them to take action, and how to use this insight to make marketing work better. She uses that experience in her agency, Hop Skip Media, to design campaign strategies for clients and teach future generations of PPC pros at the university level. Ameet loves her dogs Luke and Leia & the Dallas Cowboys, and Celine Dion songs.

Listen to her take on where this goes right, and in cases like Google Ads’ optimization-scored recommendations, where this can go wrong. 

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Episode Reboot. Be scientific in how you evaluate the use of automation

Episode 75: When Growth can’t be Hacked: New category marketing, with Ned Nadima

Ned Nadima

Today we’re going to talk about the limits to growth marketing, aka “growth hacking.”  In his book “Growth Hacker Marketing,” Ryan Holiday defines this person as: 

A growth hacker is someone who [works] with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users.

There’s nothing wrong with this practice per se. But there are stages in an industry’s life cycle where it’s the wrong approach. You can’t, for example, continuously improve a metric when there’s no data to base the metric on in the first place. There are other industries where privacy or perceptions require you to use a different approach. 

This is the world that Ned Nadima lives in. Growing up in Ottawa, he now spends much of his time in Newfoundland, studying and working as a marketer in the Biotech industry

His main passions are growing businesses that involve neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.  He avidly follows his crossfit routine and practices optimal living, experimenting with fasting, sleep hacking, diet and other ways to promote longevity. Like Ryan Holiday, he’s also into stoic philosophy.

Listen to Ned explain what you CAN do when you CAN’T growth hack.

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Episode 74: Marketing Manufactured Goods with Caine Ruckstuhl

When you hear the words “Manufacturing” or “Industrial,” it probably conjures up pictures of smoke-billowing factories somewhere in the American rust belt in the mid-20th century. Those hay days are long gone, that sector’s jobs, which used to account for half of all jobs in the 1950s, had slid to less than 10% by 2009. 

The last dozen years though, have brought something of a renewal to manufacturing. Thanks to the Internet of Things, specifically the Industrial IOT movement, many companies are now making ‘smart’  products that scoop up data about their own health and how they’re being used, a real  goldmine for the products’ makers. Thanks to Moore’s law, they are designing things faster and cheaper, 3D printing takes the minimum number you need to fabricate from huge lots down to single units. The outlook for manufacturing jobs in the 2020’s in places like the US is rosy, with 13 Million workers, producing a total of  $2.00 trillion in goods, or a fifth of the entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product).  It’s not only a good time for manufacturing production people, it’s good for the marketers that work there too.  

My guest today is someone who embodies this upbeat outlook. Caine Ruckstuhl is Head of Marketing, North America for CAREL. He has worked with clients in highly engineered products in Manufacturing businesses, much of it in the HVAC & Humidification space. He knows what it’s like to be in an environment dominated by engineers, who are  notoriously numbers driven, and who aren’t easily impressed by marketing. 

He also has experience marketing consumer products, as his wife perceived young women demanding better hygiene in public washrooms, He and his wife created a brand of  paper toilet seat covers in 2008, doing everything from designing, sourcing, distributing and of course marketing it. When Caine isn’t flying around North America, South America and Europe, he can be found at home with his wife and a lot of very small dogs.

Listen to some excellent insights about this tough, quirky environment of marketing manufactured products. Hear what has worked for him, so you’ll come away appreciating what it’s like to be an industrial marketer.  

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Glenn’s blog post on lessening importance of specs in marketing

Episode Reboot.

For another episode on marketing engineered products, check out Episode 55. 

Episode 73: Marketing Mentors with Anu Adegbola

If you have been a marketer for a while, odds are you have been helped by a mentor.  The use of the word Mentor to mean someone who shares knowledge with a less-experienced colleague is relatively new in English. But the concept of a mentor can be found in cultures all over the world, Going back millennia. 

If you have been helped by a mentor, a good question to ask yourself is, “should I start mentoring others?” 

There are great benefits to doing this, provided you’re well-matched with the person you’re mentoring. One person who’s been at both ends of the mentoring spectrum is Anu Adegbola, Director of Paid Search at Marin Software. Originally from Nigeria, Anu moved to the UK and got a bachelor’s of computer science, with a master’s in marketing. She is also one of PPC Hero’s 25 Top Influencers for 2021. 

Listen to her as she describes what internal traits to look for in a mentee you’re considering working with, how senior marketers should balance advice on technical expertise with general professional advice, how to balance managing others and getting your job done, and how much you should open up about your own personal struggles to your mentee. 

Enjoy the episode. 

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Episode Reboot. 

When you’re asked to mentor someone, know that what you are saying yes to is primarily asking them questions. That’s the best way you can help them.

Episode 72 Contracts: the foundation of great relationships, with Julie Bacchini

There’s a counter-intuitive saying that goes: good fences make good neighbours. Nobody does marketing today completely by themselves. Whether we are in-house or are on the vendor-side,  we always have partners in the mix, and most of us approach them in a neighbourly way. But there’s one task in the relationship-forming process that makes most of us squirm – contracting

They contain what’s important to both sides, so instead of springing them on the other party at the last minute, their contents should be shared early on, to help everyone get a feel for what they are getting into.

Our guest,  Julie Bacchini, is a professional speaker and has been in the PPC space for over a decade and has been helping businesses grow online in one way shape or form for two decades, through her own consultancy, Neptune Moon

Julie has been named on “top influencer” lists, including PPC Hero’s Top 25 list perennially, making the list again this year, 2021. 

She is also the Managing Director of PPC Chat, where paid search professionals gather weekly on Twitter to talk shop. She’s known for her practical, rubber-meets-the-road outlook so who better to talk to about contracts. She says contracts lay the foundation for good Vendor-Client relationships and argues that we shouldn’t shy away from talking about them. 

Learn how to make contracts that are a win-win, with Julie Bacchini.

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According to Kirk Williams “contracts define and preserve the intent of the relationship.”

Agreement subtopics covered:

  • Service levels and days/times for communications responses, including timezones
  • Upfront work such as discovery, setup of marketing creative/content/campaigns
  • Expectations of both the vendor and the client
  • Price structure, extra charges, frequency of invoicing and payment terms
  • Legal protections for Intellectual property and force majeure interruptions.
  • Termination and dispute resolution clauses

Episode 71: Structured Data: Stand out In Search, with Martha van Berkel

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.

As cliche as it sounds, Content is king. Digital marketing demands that we write, record, edit, and layout content. This precious material is used in prospect research or in client interactions, and it’s up to us to anticipate their every content need. We rack our brains to imagine what questions they might have, and most of us have done everything we can think of to make the answers available. But there’s one thing most marketers haven’t done – that is structuring their site’s content using Schemas. 

These pieces of code matter enough to marketers that, even if we’re not too technical, we should understand the basics of what they do. So I’ve brought someone who’s so confident in the positive ROI schemas can bring companies, she and her cofounder built a business around it.  

Martha van Berkel is the CoFounder and CEO of Schema App, an application that looks at your site and helps tag your content so search engine bots can crawl and read it

Before starting this company, she earned a degree in Applied Math and Engineering, a certificate for Innovation and Strategy at MIT and managed technical services on a global scale at Cisco Systems. Whenever she gets the chance to speak or write, Martha takes the chance to encourage site owners to use proper, connected schema markup. Martha does all this, plus being a Mom and a rower, from her home in Guelph Ontario. 

Get ready for an interview that will energize you to markup your site’s content in order to stand out in search

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Episode Reboot. Check out the resources Martha’s company provides on using and getting ROI out of this: https://www.schemaapp.com/

Episode 70: See you on the Internet with Avery Swartz

Those of us who work in a marketing role or are marketing our own company can debate how this tactic is better than that tactic. Depending on which conference you attend or article you read, you’ll get a different opinion. But there are a few elements that a company must have to make all of this possible – their web and social properties. These foundational assets are what everything else sits on top of, and though I may be preaching to the choir here, these basics must be properly managed, or it’s all for nought. 

My guest, Avery Swartz, has had her own business for 15 years. She’s seen nearly every problem that can happen, through her experience as a web consultant. 10 years ago, she established CampTech, a company which holds workshops showing the right way to use marketing and website applications. So she knows whereof she speaks. 

Her clear explanations of web technologies earned Avery spots on nationally-airing Canadian TV shows and on the radio. She also writes a tech column in one of Canada’s national newspapers that reaches 6 million people a week.  She’s here today because in 2020 she authored a book covering the fundamentals of managing these pieces. 

Listen as we cover everything from domain registration and maintenance, accessibility, privacy laws, PPC channels like Google Ads, marketing metrics and more.

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Episode Reboot.

Check out the new LinkedIn Learning course by Avery

Episode 69: Digital Pivot with Eric Schwartzman

The act of rotating yourself with one foot anchored is called a pivot. This mechanism our bodies use to face a new direction provides the perfect analogy for how people should think as they move fully into digital marketing. 

Our guest, Eric Schwartzman, is a digital marketing consultant, with over 20-years of experience serving clients such as Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, the United States Marine Corps, and hundreds of SMBs. In 2021 he published “The Digital Pivot: Secrets of Online Marketing” and he joins me on this episode to talk about digital pivots.

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