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Episode 25: Conversational Marketing with Andres Tovar

Conversational Marketing with Andres Tovar

Are you speaking AT or speaking WITH your prospects? Companies are increasingly turning to messaging agents to chat with their prospects. This show focuses on how marketers can use this technology to have conversational interactions with their audience.

I’m speaking Andres Tovar, with a Southern-Ontario based marketer who has built chat-based campaigns for many organizations. He began offering his skills on a contract-basis while he was still in school, doing a business degree at the University of Ottawa. His work was noticed by a faculty member, who hired him for the business school’s own marketing. Since then, he has picked up industry certifications and set up his own consultancy called Noetic Marketer which serves mainly B2C clients.

Andres will talk about the two types of chat tools: ones that use someone’s social log-in and ones that are native to a website. He takes us through selecting the steps in the customer journey when chat interactions make sense. Tips are given on how to brand a chatbot and how to script a bot’s reactions so they flow nicely towards a human touch-point.

People/products/concepts mentioned in this episode:

Whatsapp messenger

WeChat

MobileMonkey

Drift

ManyChat

ChatFuel

Intercom

IBM Watson

Episode Reboot:

Put chat functionality on product pages or other places with a call-to-action.
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Episode 24: Social Media Marketing with Amanda Relyea-Voss

In this episode I talk with Amanda Relyea-Voss (who also likes to be called Mandi), owner of a social media marketing agency that serves B2C and B2B companies. Listen for the ways Mandi has used social media to interact with prospects and how this has propelled them to buy from her customers.  We talk about creating social posts from a single piece of content, what kind of text and images to use, applying hashtags and the KPI ratios you can use to measure your effectiveness. 

You can connect with Amanda on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as well as find out about Amanda’s agency, likeavosssm.com

People/products/concepts mentioned:

OttawaKiosk, local site within CanadianKiosk 

https://linktr.ee/

https://bit.ly

Social Media Rule of thirds

Social Media Marketing World

Episode Reboot:

Once you have built your organic audience, consider leveraging it by using the platform’s lookalike audience feature to put your content in front of a wider audience.

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Episode 23: Qualifying Prospects with Martin MacArthur

Remember as a kid at the amusement park – you must be this tall to go on this ride? This closely parallels a key part of all complex sales – Qualification. 

So when marketing gets a lead, capping off their piece of the process, sales is far from the end, it’s actually the beginning of their work with the lead. The main question that sales has to answer is “Is this buyer capable of buying from us?”  Are they tall enough to ride this ride? 

The process of answering that question requires a rep to do offline research as well as having one or several conversations. In larger sales where multiple internal people are needed, the lead may not progress to involve anyone else, because the rep spoke with them and determined they aren’t a sales-qualified lead. The process varies depending on the company, but in all cases, it takes a bit of human intuition. There’s a whole art to it.  

To get a salesperson’s perspective on how to do this, I spoke with Martin MacArthur, who is passionate about getting on the phone and helping companies fill their pipelines with qualified leads that  drive sales. Let’s get into that discussion.

Cover concepts including how we arrive at a qualified prospect. 

CRM

BANT

MQL

People and Products mentioned:

LinkedIn profile reviews

Retinitis pigmentosa (condition which affected Martin’s sight)

Martin MacArthur’s LinkedIn profile 

Reboot:

Look into these good books about conversation:

Crucial Conversations

How to Talk to Anyone

A More Beautiful Question

 

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Episode 22: Digital Marketing Through Uncertain Times

Today’s episode is a simple solocast of me talking to you. I’m recording in an extraordinary time when stress is being put on healthcare, public institutions, whole industries and even entire economies. All the uncertainty out there is invading our digital marketing world. What’s going to happen? Just thinking about current events can induce fears about budgets getting cut, teams getting shrunk and we feel an existential threat to our very career. 

To help, the first part of the episode goes through how uncertainty affects everyone’s mindset. I share what some authors like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Kurt Vonnegut have observed about these reactions change over time. By understanding them, we’ll hopefully cycle through these emotions more quickly. 

 

Peter Drucker said we shouldn’t scale back at times like this, but to make investments that “enable a business to make its future. That, in the last analysis, is what planning for uncertainty means.” So having dealt with how we respond to uncertainty as humans, I devote the rest of this episode to how we can respond as marketers.

I talk about investments we can make around planning, doing, analyzing and improving processes. I share resources that have helped me during crises so the way I market fits with new outside realities. Hopefully it helps propel you to act in a way that you can look back on with pride when it’s all over.

People/Products/Ideas Mentioned:

Mr. Micawber from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”

Pandora’s Box

Andrea Bassi, co-author of “Tackling Complexity”

Apollo 13

The Shawshank Redemption among other ‘Man in Hole’ movies

Craig Ferguson final “Late Late Show” monologue

SWOT analysis

Porter Five Forces Model

Business Model Canvas popularized by Alex Osterwalder and Ash Maurya

Anzoff Matrix

“An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth” by Chris Hadfield

Mark Schaefer’s Content Shock

Shell Oil’s There Is No Alternative (TINA) Scenario Planning

Dr Flint McGlaughlin, Founder MECLabs, on marketers using their art to help others in crisis. 

Reboot:

Go find another group who would benefit from clarity on their strengths and ways to express their value to their audience.

 

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Episode 21: Writing Persuasively for your site visitors, with Nik Paprocki

In this episode we talk about how to write persuasively for prospects. Our guest is Nik Paprocki, the founder of Websuitable,  an ROI driven digital agency serving small businesses all across Canada.

Like many in the agency space, he has seen enough bad copy to almost expect it, but when he was researching some product purchases, he found himself being drawn in by the copy they wrote. It wasn’t hard-hitting, buy-my-product Direct response writing that worked on him, rather it was copy focused on helping a buyer, giving answers to their problems.

He feels this use of copywriting is just as effective in terms of generating leads, because it speaks to everyone, not just those who are in-market to buy from you now. He felt so strongly about how it works that he swung his whole agency around to this writing approach.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to find insights on what problems buyers have, and tactics to write in a way that convinces buyers you can relate to them.

People and Products mentioned:

Reboot:

Nik’s preferred places for insights on what problems buyers have, so you know what to write copy about: