Actionable Marketing Podcast

Nobody enjoys tedious, manual busywork. Precious work time is wasted, instead of spent on completing projects. Makeshift marketing isn’t fun. It’s unproductive and creates inefficiencies due to a disconnected marketing stack.

Today’s guest is Jared Rhue, head of business-to-business (B2B) marketing at rewardStyle. Jared describes his strategy of combining a core plan with agile methodologies to improve team collaboration and communication.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• rewardStyle: Influencer marketing pioneer started from passion for fashion
• rewardStyle’s revenue model drives more than $1.2 billion annually in retail sales
• Global Community: More than 250 team members; 50,000 top-tier influencers, and 5,000 retail partners
• Strategy, Plan, and Review: Jared’s average day at rewardStyle
• Strategy Steps to Success: Document marketing plan, strategy, and methods
• Marketers must be agile for ability to ask and listen to audience challenges
• Short Message Service (SMS): Relevant channel for B2B marketing in the future
• rewardStyle’s core plan consists of positioning, value proposition, and priorities 
• Secret to Team Success: Eliminate fire drills/urgent projects created by makeshift marketing chaos
• Questions to prioritize projects: 
• • Does it support quarterly/yearly Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals?
  • Does it drive annual revenue?
  • Are there dedicated deadlines?
  • What’s the scope of work, and which team members will it impact? 
  • Which projects will need to be deprioritized?
• Stay on Track with Tasks: Implement marketing organizational management platform and agile methodology  

Links: 

• rewardStyle
• Gartner
• CoSchedule Academy
• How to Get Started With Agile Marketing and Do Better Work

Inbound marketing is one component of content marketing that is often misunderstood. Relevant, compelling, and interesting blog posts, Webinars, and other content can attract and educate prospective and existing customers. What best practices should you use to align team of teams creating content marketing?

Today’s guest is Valaer Goldsworthy, director of content marketing at EZ Texting. Valaer describes how teams collaborate with business units outside of marketing to understand use cases of EZ Texting’s products and services. 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• EZ Texting: #1 mobile marketing platform for business that focuses on messaging and voice solutions
• Team of Teams: Identify, create, and review content needs
• Rapid Growth: Doubled in size, retained long-term staff, and hired new voices 
• Customer Base: EZ Texting is easy to use; doesn’t require tech-savvy marketers 
• Lifetime-value customers inspire content for prospects in various verticals
• Is text messaging safe? 90% of people believe so; EZ Texting tries to maintain that protection in all its content, collateral, voice, and point of view
• Everything to Everyone: Trust and consumer confidence are critically important
• Customer Success Team: Shares constant customer roadblocks creating churn
• Customer Marketing: EZ Texting segments content into “Hero,” “Hub,” and “Help” content to create awareness and ongoing education
• CoSchedule Transition: EZ Texting coordinates and collaborates content creation for campaigns to offer transparency and avoid silos 
• Change Management: Lessons learned via objectives and key results (OKRs) 

Links:

• EZ Texting
• CTIA

Some companies have multiple target industries, verticals, business regions/units, and personas. It’s impossible for marketers to do it all and quantify the results that they produce. Focusing on too much means focusing on nothing at all. Are you spreading yourself too thin to be effective?

Today’s guest is Tessa Barron. She is the senior director of marketing at ON24, which is on a mission to help marketers make intimate connections and engagements in the digital world via Webinars and other platforms. Tessa describes why cross-channel campaigns are more effective than multi-channel communication. 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• ON24: Create and deliver Webinar campaigns and curate bingeable content to drive demand and revenue
• What is marketing? Driving profitable customer action starting with engagement
• Backend Obsession: Lack of frontend technology for marketers to create products and experiences
• Find creative ways to connect with and engage your customers’ emotions 
• Orchestrated vs. Random Acts of Engagement: Don’t create something for the sake of creating it; identify purpose and insight that solves customers’ problems
• Future of Marketing: Integrated demand-gen, product, and customer marketing creates brand experience
• Marketing Strategy: Organization and planning are key tactics; document cross-channel roadmap so team members know what they’re doing is important
• Experience is Everywhere: ON24’s upcoming campaign tagline 
• Fragmented Digital World: Allow customers to make sense of brand message
• Build on, not Rebuild: ON24 evolves beyond Webinars, while retaining heritage 

Links: 

• ON24
• Content Marketing World
• Joe Pulizzi
• Seth Godin
• Adobe Creative Suite
• WordPress
• New CoSchedule Marketing Suite

Most of us look at our phones too much and too often. We’re distracted by the sounds and vibrations of notifications. We like to be distracted because it makes us feel important and wanted, but such interruptions can damage personal and professional relationships. 

Today’s guest is Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable. He offers several frameworks to understand and control internal urges to avoid being distracted. It’s easy to blame your phone for distractions, but it’s time to gain traction. What and who is more important and to blame? Your phone or your family?

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Deep Dive into Human Psychology: Hooked on building habit-forming products
• If you could have any superpower, which would you want to use for good?
• Proximal vs. Root Cause: Distractions and reasons to procrastinate 
• Motivated Reasoning: Place blame and pin responsibility on proximates  
• Definition of Distraction: Opposite of distraction is not focus, but traction
• Definition of Traction: Any action that pulls you toward what you want to do
• External and internal triggers motivate us toward traction or distraction
• How to channel discomfort into traction, not distraction:  
• • Step 1: Master internal triggers (re-imagine trigger, task, temperament)
  • Step 2: Make time for traction
  • Step 3: Hack back at external triggers
  • Step 4: Prevent distraction with pacts

Links:

• Nir and Far
• Indistractable
• Hooked
• How To Use The Psychology Of Habit Formation To Be A Better Marketer With Best-Selling Author Nir Eyal [AMP 085]
• Kahoot!
• Paga
• Fitbod
• Slack
• Carol Dweck
• How to Get Started With Agile Marketing and Do Better Work

Email marketing to the masses is quickly becoming an “old school” idea. Your audience of real people expect customization and personalization. Yet, your email list is one of your most valuable marketing assets. How can you engage your email subscribers to nurture them through your sales funnel and encourage them to convert?

Today’s guest is Val Geisler of Fix My Churn. A self-proclaimed email geek, Val shares some of what she knows about engagement, segmentation, and automation. She describes how email is a powerful communication tool and agent for change in battling churn problems. 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• If and when subscribers are ready to take the next step via engagement and interest in purchasing—do something
• Valid Metric: Val encourages and recommends engagement points and emails
• Engagement Equals Responses: Engage with email subscribers by asking them to reply to emails
• Common Complaints Create Content: What’s the biggest problem with email marketing?
• Cross-functional vs. Siloed Teams: Get more people involved in custom email replies to offer personalized solutions to problems
• Mass to Micro Email Marketing: Create a connection and build a bond because  it's easy to walk away from software, but harder to walk away from a person
• People-to-People vs. Automation: Different questions during specific email segments and sequences identify and offer solutions to subscribers’ pain points  
• Why include more form fields upon subscription? Reduce number of sign-ups with more quality sign-ups
• Clean Cold Contact Database: Every email service provider (ESP) defines a cold subscriber differently; re-engage them via brief email sequence requiring action 

Links: 

• Val Geisler on LinkedIn
• Fix My Churn
• Content Marketing World
• Email your suggestions for topics and guests for future AMP episodes.
• Try CoSchedule’s free Email Subject Line Tester.

Go to the homepage of your company’s Website, and read the copy aloud. How does it sound? Like a pushy salesperson? Cute and clever, but unclear? Why not sound like yourself? Avoid corporate speak copywriting that almost no one understands. 

Today’s guest is Nick Usborne, a conversational copywriting mastermind with 40 years of experience. Conversational copywriting is clear, concise, and converts customers.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What is conversational copywriting? Social and conversational copy that engages with an audience; write the way you talk 
• Conversational vs. Corporate Copywriting: Clear and compelling copy with a human voice matters
• Old School vs. Online Voice: Let go of marketing speak to create realistic, unique, and transparent voice and language 
• Conversational Copywriting Traits: Start with a couple short, simple sentences; remove the fluff
• Corporate copywriting is defensive, while conversational copy is disarming
• Mirror and Reflect Customers’ Words: Use their language, not yours as a clever copywriter; creativity can get in the way of copy  

Links:

• Nick Usborne
• Nick Usborne’s Conversational Copywriting Blog
• Nick Usborne's special offer for AMP listeners
• David Ogilvy
• Avengers: Endgame
• CoSchedule Transforms Modern Marketing
• Email your suggestions for topics and guests for future AMP episodes.

Content marketing isn’t only blogs, Webinars, guides, and podcasts. All content is meant to convert prospects and attract continued interest from existing customers. It costs more to convert new customers than to retain existing ones. While inbound marketing remains popular, how are you providing value to current customers?

Today’s guest is Leah DeKrey, customer marketing lead at CoSchedule. Customer marketing helps existing customers accomplish the dream they were sold by finding continuous value within products and services. Beyond knowing the features and functions, they can achieve outcomes. Provide value through content marketing for every customer experience—from beginning to end.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What is customer marketing? Helping existing customers quickly find the most value in your company’s products and services to be successful
• Sales Funnel: Traditional method neglects marketing process to retain current customers; multi-step process retains customers to turn them into advocates
• Where does customer marketing fit in the sales scheme? Difference between ‘support’ vs. ‘help’ documentation
• Funnel from Top-down: Customer marketing coincides with inbound marketing to bring in and nurture prospects via marketing automation to become customers
• Customer marketing content can include workbook guides and video tutorials/courses on how to be a successful CoSchedule user
• Delivering Customer Marketing: Email and marketing automation require creative and strategic options; Facebook ads produce mixed results
• Let Your Voices be Heard: Be the voice of the market for the marketing team and the voice of the customer to the marketing team

Links:

• CoSchedule’s Customer Marketing Examples
• This is How To Grow Your Blog From Zilch To 1 Million Monthly Views With Leah DeKrey From CoSchedule [AMP 144]
• Content Marketing Institute (CMI)

What if customers found your business every single time they Googled an industry buzzword? Can you imagine the incredible amount of traffic that would generate? Connect the dots between increased traffic and true business value to convert opportunities into leads.

Today’s guest is Liam Barnes, search engine optimization (SEO) specialist at Directive. He describes how “guides” are the future of SEO-driven content marketing. Discover what quality content looks like, why long-form interactive content works, and get tips on SEO keyword selection and tools. 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Where to start with SEO? Depends on several factors, including the client, industry, purpose of Website, and product 
• Different Dynamic Ways for SEO Website: 
• • Content: Based on keyword research, purpose, and topics targeted
  • Product: Keywords describe the product or focus on user experience
• Benefits of a Blog: Understand what, why, and how Google ranks content and utilize link building for search engine results pages (SERP)
• Short-tail, High Demand vs. Long-tail, Low Demand: Find keywords and make guides for different intents
• Guides that Rank: Long-form content pieces between 5,000 to 20,000 words where table of contents covers and breaks down every subtopic of a broad topic
• What’s good for the user, is good for SEO: When a piece gets big, it must be consumable to keep user’s interest and attention
• Single or Multiple Keyword Slugs: Which alternative offers a better user experience; what are you looking for?
• Directive’s Guide: What is CRO? Gather information for as many people as possible and then apply what works best for clients
• Go-to tools for SEO keyword selection include Google, Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Backlinko 
• Interactive Content and Tools: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and voice search based off of interactive content to create conversations with the search engine.
• SEO Takes Time: Go back to the basics to understand what the search engine considers—quality content, highly authoritative links, and good user experience

Links:

• Directive
• What is CRO? 
• Moz
• The Skyscraper Technique Explained By Brian Dean Of Backlinko
• Backlinko
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Uberflip
• Inc.
• Orbit Media Studios’ Blog
• Agile Marketing Guide 

Marketers who document their strategy are 313% more likely to report success. Yet, most marketer’s plans don’t change based on what works or not. Marketing is about generating results, not activity. Make a plan, and stick to it to be successful!

Today’s guest is Agnes Józwiak, brand and communication director at ClickMeeting. Agnes focuses on process to empower her team to make, review, and iterate strategic decisions to produce significant results. What features and what process do you need to put into action?

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• ClickMeeting: Browser-based Webinar platform for online events, courses, product demos, sales presentations, and meetings via video conferencing
• Platform full of features for Webinar process, from promotion through analyzing
• ClickMeeting: Customer feedback built and shaped tool to meet needs and goals
• Documenting Do’s and Don’ts: Processes should make people’s lives easier
• Blog Posts: Create in-depth content to repurpose and provide value to get results 
• All About Automation: Educate people on how to automate processes to make their businesses run smoothly
• Happy Marketing Team, Happy Customers: Make decisions together based on results and trust your experts

Links: 

• ClickMeeting
• Quora
• Taboola
• Reddit
• 10X Marketing Formula by Garrett Moon
• Agile Marketing Guide 
• The Marketing Management + Strategy Statistics You Need to Know in 2019
• How To Create A Marketing Strategy That Will Skyrocket Your Results By 9,360%
• CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
• Write a review on iTunes (wherever you listen), or let us know what you’re up to. Send it to receive some fun stuff from CoSchedule!

Do you spend more time coordinating or completing your work? Marketers need to create content that matters to their target audience. If the content is not valuable, then it’s worthless to waste their time and yours.

Today’s guest is Sean Gordon, marketing manager at Vanguard Charitable. Sean shares how a simple and agile “placemats” framework plans and delivers high-value projects. When clients expect more from Sean and his team, they expect more from themselves. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Search for Efficiencies and Maximize Resources: Unintentional but not uncommon to use makeshift marketing 
• Marketing and Planning Process: Vanguard Charitable sponsors and uses donor-advised funds (DAFs) to strategically think about charitable activities
• Operational Communications: Conduct grant research, communicate with nonprofits, and reach donors
• Placemats Framework: Set strategic vision of goals to achieve; execute, and adapt when necessary 
• Prioritize/Deprioritize: Get more done, or do most valuable work
• Value of Agile. Setbacks happen; accept, learn, and try something else next time
• Successful Solutions: Leverage CoSchedule and other tools to communicate with clients and donors

Links: 

• Vanguard Charitable
• Sean Gordon on LinkedIn
• American Red Cross
• Gartner
• Siteimprove
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• AgileSherpas
• Agile Marketing Guide 
• The Marketing Management + Strategy Statistics You Need to Know in 2019
• Write a review on iTunes (wherever you listen), take a screenshot, and send it to receive something fun!