Funnel Reboot

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. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• How the archetype of Mentor began with a story in Homer’s Odyssey
• Anu’s profile on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Anu’s #PPCChat Roundup Podcast

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.

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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

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

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Fantastic video on how the properties of content can be separated from the content itself using markup: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
• Google Search Console
• Using Structured Data in Paid Search through Google Ad Extensions, Google Ad customizers
• Google’s Guide on How Structured Data Works
• Industry-standard dictionary at Schema.org 
• Google’s guide on how to Add structured data to your web pages
• Websites with tutorials on JSON-LD and XML
• Google’s Search Gallery and Rich Results
• Martha van Berkelon LinkedIn
• SEO Yoast plugin for WordPress

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