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Episode.63: Marketing Stack Do’s and Don’ts, with Dave Hicks

The element of marketing that occupies the largest chunk of our time and energy is the collection of software tools that we use. We usually termed it as our technology stack. Some people have seen enough things done with tech stacks, they can spot the do’s and don’ts that marketers should follow. I brought somebody on who I think is really good at this. 

Dave Hicks is a front end digital marketing strategist, photographer and designer whose tools of choice are Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.  He’s also a backend developer who knows JavaScript,  Jquery, Node.JS, Ruby and PHP. But what he’s especially good at is making sure that the tech stack a company uses conforms to the marketing objective that the strategy calls for. 

I met Dave through some of his community minded pursuits including his organization of live meet ups for social media and marketing folks in Ottawa. I also enjoy gawking at the creations he makes out of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi’s as a hobby. After doing a lot of moving around in his youth, he settled in Ottawa, where he lives and works on cool projects as a freelance marketer.

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Episode Reboot. You can’t automate everything.

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Episode 62: If marketers had a creed. How being a thoughtful person helps us in our profession, with Morgan Friedman

Our guest, Morgan Friedman, loved math as a kid, so it may not surprise you to know that his life as a marketing professional centred around pay-per-click, most recently as the CEO of a few digital agencies.  

That’s interesting in its own right, but when we step back to Morgan in his 20’s, he was already doing different things than what I did at that age: 

  • He Cofounded “Overheard in New York.com,”  dubbed one of the coolest blogs by Time Magazine, it still exists 17 years later, with bazillions of pageviews. 
  • He published my two Amazon bestseller humour books.
  • He ran an experiment to gauge human communication. He bet that good actors could convey story lines solely through body language, and he tested this by watching an entire season of the sitcom Friends without sound. 
  • He obtained a bachelor’s degree from UPenn, with studies in English & History. Not just history, but Classics in particular

This last activity brings us to why he’s here today. Classical philosophy influenced Morgan heavily, and he feels that philosophy can teach us much about marketing. As someone who’s overseen a lot of client relations, he believes practicing thoughtfulness is a key ingredient to good agency-client collaboration. 

As a mini pandemic project last year, Morgan put out some posts illustrating how various philosophers would adapt their approach to Pay-per-click marketing. Of course his posts were tongue-in-cheek, but they paved the way for today’s conversation. 

Listen to why philosophically inquiring about what we know helps us frame problems. Hear him tell how communicating with empathy impacts how well others understand us. I’m sure you’ll catch these and other deep ponderings that have very practical application in our day-to-day digital marketing jobs

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Philosophers: 

About Morgan:

Episode Reboot

Please don’t ever utter a sentence in conversation starting with “Obviously….”

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Episode 61: Tools for wrangling marketing data, with JD Prater

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.

What needs to be done with marketing data to make it usable?

Essentially, it must be taken from its original source, formatted cleanly, and put into your database to be analyzed. This is handled by a process called ETL, Extract, Transform & Load. This process was done manually in olden days, but AI is now facilitating this task to be almost entirely done by technology. 

Our guest can help us get familiar with how this works because he approaches it more from a marketer’s perspective than a technical one. JD Prater has a background in the world of paid media marketing, probably the niche that’s most famous for doing detailed analysis on large amounts of data. He has recently become Marketing Lead at Osmos, the maker of a tool that uses AI to help companies with ETL work. Besides that, JD has done marketing in-house at Amazon and Quora, and worked on brands while with a PPC agency. Besides that, he’s well known for speaking on digital marketing and being involved with several podcasts, and when he’s not on dad duty, you’ll catch him somewhere in his home state of Oklahoma, out cycling on an open stretch of road.

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Episode Reboot

Go take a product demo of some tool you might use.

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Episode 60: What makes a good Pay-Per-Click Marketer with Greg Finn

Do you know a marketer who is adept at using Google Ads or a similar platform to turn out a steady supply of leads? Like Liam Neeson in Taken, what these specialists “have are a very particular set of skills” Not only that, without a standard industry certification, the only way to see if someone possesses these rare skills is to divert some media budget and see what they do with real money. 

Those that do well at this sort of thing can be described as having Multipotentiality or Renaissance qualities. 

  • Part-numbercruncher
  • Part-editor
  • Part-scientist
  • part-librarian

Does such a person exist that can do all this? If there is, they may well be the Perfect PPC Professional. But even if there isn’t, it falls to some of us to hire a person to run our paid ads, or we ourselves may be that person, who’s figuring out which skills to develop. In either case, it’s important to identify the right traits needed for this role. 

Greg Finn has known how to run PPC marketing campaigns for more than a dozen years and now hires and develops people in this role. Many in digital marketing know him by the hundreds of articles in Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He founded the agency  Cypress North  with his partner Matthew Mombrea and is one of the hosts of the long-running podcast Marketing O’Clock. 

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Episode Reboot: Don’t stop at just reading about a topic, write about it so you get a really good understanding of it.

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Episode 59: Strong Social Strategies with Kyle Turk

I don’t know if you frequent the same social channels that I’m using for the podcast: IG, TW and my personal LinkedIn feed. I’ve put posts for the last 3 years on those platforms and the one thing I can tell you is that without paid promotion, it takes real work to reach a decent audience. 

I wanted to know how others play this game so I asked someone who started promoting things on Facebook 15 years ago. He’s not on all the social channels and doesn’t pretend to keep his Twitter account active, but for the company that’s his day-job and the clients he serves through his agency, he knows how to use content that gets noticed. 

Today’s guest, Kyle Turk, has headed the marketing teams at both public and private sector organizations. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration from St Francis Xavier University, and is a recipient of Ottawa’s Forty Under 40 award.

Listen for his explanation of how to conceive and create content.  He also does a great job of outlining how social selling should work to smoothly shift from public commenting with someone to  continuing the conversation through direct messaging. 

 Let’s learn how to up our social media game, with Kyle Turk!

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Episode Reboot

Observe what posts prompted you to engage. Deconstruct them and see what’s transferable to the content that you post.