Here is a look back at marketing trends, as seen by 19 of this past year’s guests. What they feel is most important in marketing and where they think we’re going next.
Five key themes of 2022 that will carry into 2023:
Analytics is Everywhere
Translating data into revenue dollars
Recasted relationship with Sales
Doing More with Knowing Less (privacy concerns)
Things made possible by AI
Here are the people you will hear on this episode:
My guest, after receiving a degree in psychology, worked as a barista at Starbucks and a local high-end hotel. In a conversation about career paths with the hotel’s HR manager, she heard about the British Columbia Institute of Technology‘s two-year co-op and classroom-based marketing communications programme. She enrolled. Her first co-op internship was with a start-up automotive marketing company, where she was supposed to shadow their Pay-Per-Click campaign manager. After her first week, the supervisor resigned, and an executive asked her to take over, and right after getting her marcomm certificate she worked there full-time, growing out their PPC team. That led to working as a PPC expert at an agency, and within three and a half years she rose to a director-level position there.
In 2021 she went on her own, founding Good AF Consulting which focuses on helping find and fix issues within a brand’s PPC and SEO efforts. Wanting to exercise her passion for sharing time and knowledge with new marketers, she has also gone back to BCIT but as an instructor in the very marketing programme she graduated from. In addition to teaching, she mentors new marketers, writes and works hard to leave the industry in a better state than the way she found it.
Please welcome someone who’s been named to PPC Hero’s list of the Top 25 people in PPC, Amalia Fowler.
Darryl Praill is the CMO at Agorapulse where he leads a global team of 40. Prior to that, he held executive roles with companies like SAP, IBM, Kinaxis, Airbus and VanillaSoft. He has consulted for AC Nielsen, Salesforce.com, UBM and Tweed. He is also a speaker at keynotes and on podcasts (which at last count runs into the hundreds).
You become convinced after hearing Darryl, he has a commanding grasp of how the social media game is played. He got onto social platforms earlier than anyone I know. He was posting audio & video content as soon as they’d let him, and his posts were from eyebrow-raising locales such as on top of parking garages, to the middle of a golf course fairway to the Arc de Triomph in Paris. The comments and engagement he generates must be seen to be believed. Where did he get this sixth sense on using social media? I think he learned to think strategically growing up in Chatham Ontario, where he played chess and became one of the highest-ranked high school students in his region.
Yet, to play the social media game in the 2020s takes not just posting strategies but also sophisticated listening, triaging and interacting with our audience. And in his day-job marketing a social media management tool, he has a birds-eye view of how tools have evolved to help us play this game.
He is one of the only people to have appeared twice on this podcast, and he joins me today from his home office in Ottawa. My friend, Darryl Praill.
No about analytics is complete without talking about how to visualize data. A picture’s worth a thousand words, right? In the past, when data was in a spreadsheet, it only took hitting that ‘chart’ button to render some numbers visually. But for many of us, this experience has moved to a browser where we build our own report, either in an interface like GA or in a standalone visualization tool.
I’m talking with someone who’s really good at a visualization tool, but came by his power-user status in a roundabout way. My guest was born and raised in Hawaii. After he got his Marketing degree, he worked at an ad agency where he did everything from videography to FB and G-ads writing. That, and also building a few websites, stoked his curiosity for how the tagging and the analytics behind all these things worked. He didn’t just want to get at raw data, he wanted actionable data. He felt that to optimize his marketing, if he only knew how to present visitor behaviour data visually, the answer would be apparent – even obvious.
He went down YouTube rabbit holes, asked around at conferences, and eventually landed on the beta of Google Data Studio, now called Looker Studio. And that’s the Data Visualization tool we’re talking about with JJ Reynolds, who joins us from Reno NV.
We had to see it coming. We marketers have been getting more and more data. From on-premise CRMs and site logs in the early days, then marketing SaaS products and API calls that pipe data in all directions, there’s data everywhere. It goes without saying that we need help making sense of all this data. Most marketers wouldn’t consider themselves natural statisticians. Enter the analyst, who knows how to wrangle, normalize and visualize those data points, and maybe even get it cleaned and dressed for dinner.
There are marketing teams who’ve got analysts onboard, but it isn’t an industry-standard practice just yet. Some leaders in the analytics community make the case elegantly of how this role helps marketers. And I’d count my guest today as being a vocal advocate for why we need analysts.
In his day job, he is Senior Director of Analytics at Search Discovery. But that only scratches the surface of all that he does. He’s also a perennial conference speaker and writer on many topics in analytics. To me, he typifies how one can be a digital analyst despite having a non-analytics background. In his case, he obtained an Architecture degree before entering the field.
Joining me from Columbus, Ohio, let’s hear from a man who some call the quintessential analyst, Tim Wilson
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
Tim on Twitter where you’re bound to see some of his nature photography
