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Episode 122: Evolving Social Tools, with Darryl Praill

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

  • Darryl’s Inside Inside Sales podcast (which is one of two podcasts that he hosts)
  • Darryl’s been on LinkedIn since 2004
  • Darryl’s been on Twitter since 2008
  • Darryl works at the Social Media Management software company Agorapulse
  • Other S.M. Mgmt tools: Hootsuite, 
  • Recent survey of social media campaigns, showing 1.8% of links contained UTM parameters.

Episode Reboot. 

Go listen to the other talk I had with Darryl back in Episode 28: Thought-Leading Content on LinkedIn

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Episode 121: Looker Studio 101, with JJ Reynolds

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.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

You may want to check out these related episodes:

Episode 9: How Dashboards Make the Whole Funnel Work
Episode 93: Visualizing & Making Data Valuable, with Eric Boissonneault
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Episode 120: The Analyst’s Role in Marketing, with Tim Wilson

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

Episode Reboot:

Check out the podcast which Tim co-hosts, Analytics Power Hour

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Episode 119: Digital Marketing Analytics, with Kevin Hartman

As Google’s Chief Analytics Evangelist, Kevin Hartman is responsible for leading the design, implementation, and evolution of programs and approaches that help businesses around the world realize the opportunities presented by data. 

Kevin has a proven track record of building large, global, high-functioning analytics organizations from scratch and deep experience in leading large profit & loss centers and cross-functional teams, identifying business opportunities, and creating effective marketing programs. He has also written “Digital Marketing Analytics: In Theory And In Practice” which is now in its second edition.

Kevin’s decades of work in the digital analytics space, with most of that time spent leading large analytics teams at a major global advertising agency and Google. He has taught analytics for nearly 10 years at Universities near to his home, such as The University of Chicago, The University of Notre Dame, and The University of Illinois.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot:

look into Kevin’s course on ELVTR

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Episode 118: Converted, with Neil Hoyne

Converted, Neil Hoyne

In digital marketing, we’re all striving to do what works. Yet whether we’re in-house or at an agency, we’re basing our definition of what works on a small sample size. Honestly, none of us can zoom out far enough to the general traits of successful marketing. That is, unless you’re someone who’s tasked with measuring marketing data at the organization with the single-largest quantity of it on the planet. 

My guest has gained a lot of insight on successful sellers in his role as Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist, where he has led over 2,500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers. He is a Senior Fellow at Wharton and holds degrees from Purdue University and UCLA. And in his book “Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts” the difference (I’m simplifying here) is that the  best ones humanize their funnels for their buyers. 

“Wait,” you say, “we already know  how to treat people nicely, we’ve known how to do that since humans have been around. You’re right, yet it’s surprising how we lose the human element is when we move commercial interactions online. My guest wants us to learn – or more correctly, relearn how to make our marketing more human. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot

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Episode 117: Marketing Artificial Intelligence, with Paul Roetzer

Marketing Artificial Intelligence

Paul Roetzer graduated with a journalism degree from the E.W. Scripps School at Ohio University and a few years afterwards he founded Ready North (formerly PR 20/20). In 2016 he founded the Marketing AI Institute. The idea for such an organization came from what Paul saw when AI began impacting his agency. He thought the only way marketers like him could work alongside AI would be by better understanding its capabilities. 

Part of their vision of educating marketers is through an annual event, and in 2019 they held their inaugural Marketing AI Conference. MAICON was on pause during lockdowns, but it came back in 2022.

In 2022, He and co-author Mike Kaput published the book we’re talking about, Marketing Artificial Intelligence. The book draws on years of research and dozens of interviews with AI marketers, executives, engineers, and entrepreneurs. He has also authored The Marketing Performance Blueprint (2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (2012). Through his podcast and as a conference speaker, Paul makes AI approachable and actionable for marketers. 

He and his family live in Cleveland, Ohio. 

People, Products and Concepts in the Show:

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Episode 116: Merging GA4 with all your Marketing Data

Merging GA4 with all your marketing data

In this episode I’m giving you the process that’s used in my agency’s work to get B2B companies onto Google’s full analytics stack. This episode is split into two parts.

Installing GA4 (from 1:30 to 10:45) – For the first third of this episode, I go through the steps that companies should follow to install GA4, including setting up streams, conversions and links to Google Ads accounts.

Installing Google and third party components for consolidated analysis and visualization of your marketing data (listen for melody at 10:45 to end) – the remaining time roams through the rest of the tools that give a complete picture of your B2B funnel.

People, products & concepts mentioned in episode:

Scott Kelley

Jim Sterne

Jim Cain

David Krevitt

You may also be interested in this other reporting-related solocast:

How Dashboards Make the Whole Funnel Work, from podcast episode 9

Episode Reboot:

Another path for completing this process is to implement them together with peers in a workshop environment.  By the end of the session, you leave ready to make reports leveraging all your company’s marketing data. I am leading several two-day workshops in several Eastern states and provinces. To find out more, visit https://gafast4ward.com

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Episode 115: Optimizing experiences that convert, with Alisha Conlin-Hurd

The funnel is dead. Long live the Persuasion Experience. That’s the view of my guest today. 

Alisha Conlin Hurd did something that’s rare for people  in their 20s by turning a side hustle into an agency that she co-founded. Their firm,  Persuasion Experience, works on marketing brands that require funnels  for lead generation, SaaS, and consumer branding.

She shares experiences learned working for every kind of brand, from emergency plumbers and home builders, to Brazilian butt lifts and porn addiction counselors.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

You may also be interested in past Funnel Reboot episodes related to this topic:

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Episode 114: Why Privacy Is Good For Marketing, with Jodi Daniels

We don’t have the right to retain our visitors’ information just because it’s possible on the internet. 

Complying with data privacy laws can be a confusing, stressful process. We help businesses embrace a new way of working with data, going beyond compliance to create a privacy-friendly strategy that builds trust with customers.

Jodi Daniels is a privacy consultant. She founded Red Clover Advisors in 2017, and through it, she assists companies to create privacy programs, build customer trust and achieve privacy law compliance. Jodi also serves as a Fractional Chief Privacy Officer to small and medium companies. Through frequent speaking appearances and her own podcast, she shares practical tips so companies can carrying on marketing, but in a way that’s compliant and ethical.

She holds a BBA and an MBA from Emory University, and lives with her family in Atlanta.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot.

Take the How Data Compliant is Your Business Quiz

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Episode 113: Website Survival, with Patrick Villemaire 

Designing Websites involves dealing with Domain Registrars, Hosting Providers, CMSs, Page templates and scripts that run forms. We haven’t even mentioned the things visitors see like text, images and audiovisual assets. It’s a lot. 

My guest has set out to take the complexity out of all this. Knowing that we learn best when we’re absorbed in a story, he rolled all his principles into a book geared for anyone who’s been handed the keys to a website or work with a web designer.  

Patrick Villemaire is the founder of Blue Eclipse Inc, a Canadian web agency. His passion is making the web a better place and he has been building websites for over 20 years.

Patrick is a graduate of McMaster University with a double major in Multimedia and Communications, and a minor in English. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, son and a barking dog. Outside of building websites, he likes to listen to music and play the occasional game of hockey.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot

Download this sample of the book, used with permission.

Website Survival Guide-promoDownload