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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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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!

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot

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

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Episode 58: I know what you’re saying, with Debra Workman and Justin Hacker

Voice technology is so prevalent, I’m giving a disclaimer on this episode that we’ll refer to some voice assistants by name, so smart-speakers or digital assistants within earshot will, you know, notice.  

Many of us may be users of voice recognition, but few of us know how to use it for marketing our companies. Coming up with applications is hard, with a platform whose interface is invisible. Few of us are exposed to the artificial intelligence behind it, so we can’t picture what we’d do with it. As the Steve Jobs quote goes, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

To help us with this, we’ll talk with a company that launched a voice AI tool, and is happy to peel back the curtain on how this all works. Our guests are both from UCLab, a  software development firm in Ottawa, where Debra is a Partner and Justin is CEO. 

Listen for how this technology began with simple single-word commands, to where it can now process whole paragraphs containing advanced grammar structures. You’ll learn how it goes beyond turning itself on or off, to interacting with calendars and documents. They will share  how AI monitors which points someone brings up on a call and whether it was said in a positive or negative way, so before you talk again, you’re ready for that objection. Also hear how detecting different human voices lets it assist with meetings by pulling out of the discussion, email them to people action items.

Bound to be some good ideas here for how to use this in your marketing or your work life. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

VOICE TECHNOLOGY, A BRIEF TIMELINE

  • 1950s: computer program Audrey created, it understood numbers 1-10
  • 1985: stuffed animals that take voice command, like Teddy Ruxby, enter marketplace  
  • 1990: Dragon Dictate launched
  • 2011: Apple releases Siri 
  • 2011: IBM Watson won on Jeopardy 
  • 2013: Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant enter the marketplace
  • 2013: Movie HER released

Nielsen ratings

Xbox Kinect

IVR – Interactive Voice Response

GPT3

Company Debra and Justin are part of, UCLabs

Debra Workman on LinkedIn

Justin Hacker on LinkedIn

Episode Reboot: check out UCLabs’ meeting assistant, BlueCap

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Episode 57: How AI Levels the Marketing Playing Field

If every part of your customer acquisition can be measured, you’ll figure out how to do it profitably. That premise has driven why digital marketing, and especially Pay-per-click (PPC) is managed by experienced humans. These professionals scour through data for the relationship between a company’s ads and the buyers actions; once found, budgets get shifted to achieve that optimal effect.  

A wrench has been thrown into our acquisition dreams by the ad platform titans: Google, Facebook and Microsoft (who own LinkedIn). Thanks to major AI investments they have made in the last five years, they’ve been able to automate much of the work that marketing professionals have done. In tandem with implementing their ‘smart’ software that runs autonomously, they have been restricting a marketer’s ability to manually control campaigns. 

The platforms believe their AI is smart enough to run marketing, so we can either be passive, letting them spend our money as they see fit, or we can choose to give them navigational assistance while they drive. The point is, you should have a game plan that works with the platforms’ AI. One that, over time, will generate the leads you need at the best possible acquisition cost.

I believe listening to this episode will give you that plan. It covers:

  • How marketing has become more computationally complex than humans can handle
  • What was in it for the platforms to automate PPC marketing
  • Stages of maturity for dealing with data, ending with predictive analytics
  • Why you shouldn’t fight ad platform automation, but instead use your business data to train algorithms how to market you more effectively
  • How you should integrate your in-house systems and apply data science to uncover insights

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Paper estimating how much data optimized advertising requires, authored by Randall A. Lewis of Google; Justin M. Rao of Microsoft: “A calibrated statistical argument shows that the required sample size for an experiment to generate informative confidence intervals is typically in excess of ten million person-weeks”

Quote by Chuck Heamann & Ken Burbary in “Digital Marketing Analytics”:  “If you think about all the tools we have talked about…you see that there is one common denominator: You do not own any of the data. Herein lies what we think is the biggest revolution coming to digital analytics..companies will be building internal repositories for this data.”

Episode Reboot 

Go talk to a coworker who uses statistical measurement, to understand how the efficiency it achieves in other fields can be applied to marketing.