Actionable Marketing Podcast

Are you dependent on technology? Rely on it to get you through the day? Suffer from shiny object syndrome? What would marketers do without technology? The hope is that technology helps marketers connect with customers in a more personable way. In reality, it’s killing marketing productivity.

Today, my guest is Mark Schaefer, author of Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins. Mark shares how marketing should create amazing experiences at specific moments to help customers authentically connect with brands.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Ready for a wake-up call? Traditional marketing strategies don’t meet customer expectations today
• Customers Takeover Control: Marketers are losing control of a brand’s story, voice, and customer journey
• Where the action is: Shift focus from relying on technology and automation to actually talking to customers
• Human-centered Marketing Approach: Resonate with consumers and remove barriers by remembering what it’s like to be a customer
• Purpose of Marketing: Build emotional connections by bringing people together
• Experiential Marketing: Create encounter worthy of consumers giving brands their attention and sharing their story
• Testimonial Stats: Content about a brand created by a consumer gets 600% more engagement than content created by a brand
• Taking Social out of Social Media: Easy button for automation and technology is the opposite of what customers want; marketers have a way of ruining every medium
• Hurdles to Overcome: Organizational, cultural, leadership, and measurement
• Meaning is the New Marketing: Consumers want brands that represent values
• Levels of Loyalty:
• • Shared Values: Take a stand to connect in a way that pushes loyalty
  • Show up and Represent: Unifying and uplifting to display beliefs
  • Dangerous Territory: Not every company needs to take a stand/political view
• Words of Wisdom:
• • Remember what it's like to be a customer
  • Be more human in everything you do

Links:

• Mark Schaefer
• Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins
• Marketing Companion Podcast
• The new battleground for marketing-led growth
• Talk Triggers by Jay Baer
• Tesla
• An Emotional Connection Matters More than Customer Satisfaction
• Earth Day
• Habitat for Humanity
• Nike Nearly Dropped Colin Kaepernick Before Embracing Him
• Write a review on iTunes and send a screenshot of it to receive cool CoSchedule swag!

Who’s on your short list of marketing influencers for thought leadership and mentorship? Which company brands do you gravitate toward because of their unique value propositions and authentic connection with customers?

Today, my guest is Ken Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Ad Zombies. Ken shares insights on brand creation and challenges marketers to bring entertainment, humor, and storytelling into their content.

 Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Passion for Production: From creating commercials as a child and dreaming of being the best disc jockey to turning into a zombie
• Conversions and Reconstruction: Ad Zombies came to life by accident after discovering need to rewrite ad copy to connect with specific customers
• Origin and Evolution: Ad Zombies’ brand positioning of world’s best flat-fee ad copywriting service changes to writing words that sell anything
• More than 103,000 Ad Zombies followers on Facebook attributed to mix of wordsmithing skills and engaging audience to evoke emotional responses
• Missing mark to make memorable ads: Stories and visual noise connect and convert consumers through brand awareness
• Where to start: Consistent messaging peppered through channels; view consumer’s perspective, and take the plunge to try something new

Links:

• Ad Zombies
• Ad Zombies on Facebook
• Howard Stern
• Bob Ross
• The Lion King
• Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men
• The Walking Dead
• Game of Thrones

The success of your company depends on the marketing you do, how you choose to present the benefits of a product or service, and which audience to target. How you position a product or service can make or break your company. Stop right there. Forget everything you thought you knew about product positioning. Connecting your product or service with buyers is not a matter of following trends, selling harder, or trying to attract the widest customer base.

Today, my guest is April Dunford, who has launched more than a dozen products and shares some of the biggest mistakes that startups, marketers, and entrepreneurs make with product positioning. Also, she’s the author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. April’s book describes her point of view on positioning and offers a step-by-step process to perfectly position your product or service.

 Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Career Change: Fake it till you figure it out. How hard can it be?
• Do it right, and the company grows quickly, gets acquired; you get bored and do another startup
• Definition of Positioning: How to win at doing something that a well-defined market cares about
• Perfect marketing execution won’t save you from weak positioning; marketing execution and results are only as good as positioning that feeds into them
• Who should decide the positioning for your product? Everybody
• Siebel Story: Too small to buy out beyond a billion dollars
• Positioning Pitfalls: People don’t do positioning deliberately; and when they try to fix it, they don’t follow a process but wing it or write a “Positioning Statement”
• Positioning Statement Components:
• • Who’s your competitive alternatives?
  • What are the unique capabilities or features that your product has?
  • What’s the value that those features can enable for customers?
  • Who’s my target customer?
  • Is this a market that I’m going to win?
• Signs of weak positioning include:
• • How a customer reacts to your product/service
  • They compare you to a non-competitor; not in the right market
  • Customer knows what you do, but not the value or why they should care

Links:

• April Dunford
• Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

What does “strategic ambiguity” mean? Marketers, politicians, and others use it all the time. It’s the art of making a claim using language that avoids specifics. So, you can be purposefully vague to derive personal organizational benefit. On the other hand, it creates an environment at companies where employees try to avoid blame.

Today, my guest is Karen Martin, president of TKMG and author of Clarity First. She describes how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and leadership on marketing teams.  

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Definition of Clarity: State of something being easily and accurately understood; similar to transparency, but different from certainty
• Conveying and receiving information can cause ambiguity or clarity for employees and customers
• Primary reasons for lack of clarity all come down to fear
• Ramifications of lack of clarity: Takes time, builds frustration, and creates inefficiencies
• Five Ps for clarity:
• • Purpose
  • Priorities
  • Process
  • Performance
  • Problem-solving
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Visual of the marketing team’s health
• Profit is not your purpose; profit is the outcome of delivering high value to customers, and purpose is to solve a customer’s problem
• Are you a clarity avoider, pursuer, or blind? Take Karen’s Clarity First Quiz
• Where to start to focus on clarity: What do you do? What do you really do? Why does that product, and not something else, to solve a problem?
• Fearless Workplace: Multiple perspectives, but not a single understanding; feel comfortable having difficult conversations

Links:

• TKMG
• Clarity First by Karen Martin
• Clarity First Quiz
• Clarity Webinars presented by Karen Martin
• The Outstanding Organization
• Write a review on iTunes and send a screenshot of it to receive cool CoSchedule swag!

Marketers try to map and meticulously outline their customer’s journey to convert a lead into a paying customer. Instead, maybe they should focus on behavioral data to deliver the right message on the right channel at the right time.  

Today, my guest is Judd Marcello, executive vice president of global marketing at Cheetah Digital. He believes the customer journey doesn’t exist. Instead, figure out why data is important and how to leverage it between brands and customers.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Judd’s Career Journey: B2C to B2B martech firms; it’s all about your contacts and who you know
• As the number of channels increase, buyers jump around brands on their journey
• Fallacy of falling into trap of using phrases that become commonplace
• Consumers, not marketers now predict the path they take from researching to buying a product
• Marketers can still be proactive by using data to drive smart insights and technology from an AI perspective to provide a great customer experience
• Customers are going to do whatever they want to do; marketers should:
• 1. Create unique, compelling, and consistent brand experience
  2. Deliver the right messaging
  3. Hyper personalize efforts  
  4. Create connection between your brand and customer
• Deliver personal and custom experience through data management
• Cheetah Digital’s Website revised to reflect how prospects look for information
• Indicators of Success: Team members, content, client summit; digital evolution
• What’s working and what’s not; prioritize performance to identify gaps

Links:

• Judd Marcello on LinkedIn
• Judd Marcello’s Email
• Cheetah Digital
• ExactTarget
• Experian
• Friction by Roger Dooley
• Write a review on iTunes and send a screenshot of it to receive cool CoSchedule swag!

What kind of experience does your brand create for customers? Is it simple and seamless enough to keep them coming back for more? Or, do they find their experience with your brand frustrating, cumbersome, and time-consuming?  

Today, my guest is Roger Dooley, author of Friction, which describes things that prevent customers from having a great experience with companies and their brands. Each year, about $4.6 trillion of merchandise is left abandoned in eCommerce shopping carts. Also, internal friction (i.e., organizational drag) is responsible for $3 trillion in lost productivity.  

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Most important element in behavior change process: Friction
• How to eliminate, minimize, or use friction to your advantage
• Reasons why people leave things in their shopping carts
• All routers are the same; awful experience for “normal” people
• Reviews and Rankings: In a market dominated by giants, address pain point that other companies aren’t to be successful
• Worst advice can be best practices
• Friction Goggles: People tend to accept things and don’t see where friction exists
• Actively Disengaged: Effort isn’t productive, serving greater purpose
• Don’t shift the load; find ways to improve processes, and stop wasting time
• Software and tools help eliminate friction
• Acceptance of Fake Rules: This is the way things are done, or it has to be done
• Difference between friction and motivation; operate in opposition due to choices  

Links:

• Roger Dooley
• Friction
• College Confidential
• Brainfluence
• The Persuasion Slide
• Amazon 1-Click Ordering
• Uber
• United Airlines
• Harvard Business Review: Reduce Organizational Drag
• Cisco
• Netgear
• TurboTax
• Tom Peters
• John Padgett
• BJ Fogg
• AMP132: Why Best Practices Are The Worst Advice With Jay Acunzo From Unthinkable Media
• What topics and guests should be on AMP? Let me know!

Technology is supposed to help, not frustrate or overwhelm us. Do you struggle with using, choosing, or consolidating marketing technology tools? Marketers tend to love or hate specific tools. Is your favorite on Chiefmartec’s 2019 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic? If not, there are more than 7,000 tools to consider. Which should you use? What to look for? Who should make the decision?

Today, my guest is Scott Brinker, vice president of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot and editor at Chiefmartec.com. He suggests various strategies for selecting tools, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Purpose: Persuade marketing executives to pay attention to intermingling of  personalities and passions between marketers and technologists
• Categories Covered: Advertising & Promotion, Content & Experience, Social & Relationships, Commerce & Sales, Data, and Management
• Where to begin? Get clear on foundational systems (CRM, email, content management system, etc.)
• Significant investment in time and learning; identify gaps to intentionally augment foundation with more specialized tools
• Ecosystems developed around major platforms can help narrow your choices
• Makeshift Marketing: Is it good enough?
• Pieces of the Puzzle: Focus on the capabilities you need
• Marketing department should identify point person/people to be responsible for operational infrastructure and technology of marketing
• Ecosystem Mission: Evolution of product, partners, and programs

Links:

• Chiefmartec's 2019 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic
• Scott Brinker on Twitter
• MarTech – The Marketing Technology Conference
• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Marketo
• Creating Predictable Growth Is Not A Hack With Kieran Flanagan From HubSpot [AMP 126]
• How To Overcome Makeshift Marketing With New Marketing Superpowers

How long is your commute to work? Maybe 15 minutes or more, depending on traffic, weather, and other factors? Some marketers get to just roll out of bed and go to their home office. According to Upwork, 63% of companies now have remote workers and almost 50% use freelancers. How does remote working affect productivity, collaboration, and organization of marketing teams and businesses?

Today, my guest is Nathan Hirsch, FreeeUp founder and CEO. We talk about decisions and tactics to consider, if your company wants to embrace a remote working environment. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Short Version of Entrepreneurial Story: Broke college student to starting an Amazon business to owning a freelancer marketplace
• FreeeUp helps businesses grow by knowing when, who, and how to hire
• Managing and working within remote teams effectively
• Pros and Cons: Access to talent, overhead costs, flexibility
• Commitment to Communication: Nothing gets lost or misinterpreted
• Put plans and tools in place to avoid potential pitfalls
• FreeeUp’s Expectations for Freelancers: Skill, attitude, and communication
• Remote Culture: Separate office spaces, but on the same page
• Hiring always involves risk and reward; build trust and relationships
• Levels and Skill Sets: Basic (followers), Mid (doers), and High (experts)

Links: 

• FreeeUp
• Upwork
• Fiverr
• Skype
• Trello
• WhatsApp
• LastPass

Write a review on iTunes and send a screenshot of it to receive cool CoSchedule swag!

What separates the best managed and most successful marketing teams from the rest? How are they leaving you in the dust? What are the strongest predictors for success?

Today, my guest is Ben Sailer, content marketing lead at CoSchedule. We talk about our 2019 State of Marketing Strategy Report. CoSchedule surveyed more than 3,000 marketers to find out what they’re doing to be successful. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Inception and process behind State of Marketing Strategy Report
• Why do original research? Why put in so much time, effort, and energy?
• Generate your own data, instead of borrowing statistics
• How do you stack up? Sense of doing ok, but room for improvement to crush it
• 5 Marketing Insights about Top Marketers:

1. Being Organized: They’re confident about their organizational skills; 397%  more likely to report being successful
2. Setting Goals: They know which goals drive success; 376% more likely to report being successful
3. Documenting Strategy: It needs to be nimble and actionable, not detailed and lengthy; 313% more likely to report being successful
4. Planning Projects: Be clear about what needs to be done, by who, and why; 356% more likely to report being successful
5. Using Agile Methodology: Marketers implement it to manage projects and processes; 252% more likely to report being successful

Links: 

• 2019 State of Marketing Strategy Report
• AMP 127: The Case For Agile Marketing: What 400+ Marketers Reveal As Top Benefits And Barriers With Andrea Fryrear From AgileSherpas  

Marketers are always searching for advice that they can apply to their marketing efforts and strategies. Luckily, plenty of people are more than willing to share their expertise, ideas, and “best” practices. Don’t simply emulate them and their words of wisdom. The biggest problem is sameness. Everything is the same, and no one stands out.

Rather than just taking their advice, make it your own, put your spin on it, and do what works best for your business. Today, my guest is Jay Acunzo, founder of Unthinkable Media and author of Break the Wheel. He describes how to push yourself to ask the right questions and make the right decisions when surrounded by conventional thinking. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Two Stories to Jay’s Career: LinkedIn’s about logos, and liking process of making things through tinkering and not caring if anybody consumes it
• Google was a great place to work; brand, perks, awesomely smart co-workers
• Following prescribed path because that’s what you’re “supposed to do”
• Expertise and checking a bunch of boxes doesn’t make a great career
• Everyone wants best practices and guidance because they’re afraid of what to do
• Unthinkable Stories: People did something that seemed crazy, but they clearly explain why what they did was practical and strategic
• Being taught there’s a right and wrong answer, and approaching marketing the same way; the real answer is, it depends...on context
• Push yourself beyond commodity work and do something exceptional instead
• Problems: We don’t want to be average, and we don’t operate in a generality
• Understand your specific situation and use it as a decision-making filter to find clarity; borrow from your situation and what’s proven to work elsewhere
• Six fundamental questions to ask to understand how to operate in a more contextualized way for your environment
• Pike Syndrome: Psychological barrier to making decisions with clarity; based on situation, instead of generality
• Context parts in every situation: You/team, customer/audience, and resources
• Reasons for Decisions: Learned helplessness, foraging choice, cultural fluency
• Aspirational Anchor: Personal- or team-based mission statement; articulates behaviors to change

Links: 

• Unthinkable Media
• Unthinkable Newsletter
• Break the Wheel
• HubSpot
• NextView Ventures
• Who should be on the show? What topics should be covered? Send your suggestions!