Actionable Marketing Podcast

When customers leave negative reviews or complain about a brand or business on the internet, they just want to be heard, express their frustration, and want some sort of resolution. Businesses that take the time to reach out to unsatisfied customers can make things right. But how can they do that consistently and at scale?

Today's guest is Dave Lehman, President and COO at Birdeye, a platform that allows local businesses to collect reviews, run surveys, and get referrals to better engage with customers. Dave talks about how businesses should make online reputation management a top priority and do it the right way.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Birdeye Survey Guide - 2021 State of Experience Marketing:
  • 57% view reputation management as more important than advertisements
  • 88% believe there's a direct connection between reputation and revenue
• Birdeye: Helps businesses grow, attract, and convert new/existing customers
• Buyer Behavior: Shift from content to trusting shared customer experiences
• Reputation Management: Ignoring it is missing out on customer opportunities
• What are you looking/searching for? Relevancy, distance, and prominence
• Automation and Democratization: Make it easy for everybody to leave a review
• Digital Connection: Engage, respond, and listen to people on preferred platforms
• Indicators: Set goals, select metrics, and measure progress to drive improvement
• Mistakes: Marketers avoid responding to reviews and don't ask all for reviews

Links:

• Dave Lehman on LinkedIn
• Dave Lehman's Email
• Birdeye
• Survey Finds 57% of Marketers Now Emphasize Online Reputation Management Over Advertising
• HubSpot
• Blaze Pizza
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Dave Lehman:

"Most people will skip the first three ads or whatever. It's almost become default behavior."

"When somebody lands on your site, again, what are the conversion rates like? Are they getting that first taste of a real good experience themself when they start engaging your brand?"

"If you're looking for that prominence as a business, it's all about two things - review count and review score."

"It's got to be super easy to engage with you as a business."

What do people say and think about your brand online? It carries much more weight with potential customers than your own marketing messaging. Always responding to negative comments and reviews are opportunities for service-based marketers to turn haters and detractors back into customers and brand loyalists.

Today's guest is Michael Buzinski from Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing. He talks about why reputation management matters and how to make it right. The shortcut to good reputation management is awesome customer service. Under promise. Over deliver.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Reputation Management: Opinion of the general public about you/your company
• Reviews/Recommendations: Who do you trust - family members or strangers?
• Service-based Businesses: Getting new clients to know, like, trust is challenging
• Negative Comments/Complaints: Don't take them personally, but seriously
• Same Situation, Different Opinion: Customer isn't always right - understand why
• Positive Reviews: Systemize, automate, or incentivize reputation management
• Customer Scores: Do satisfaction, service, retention scores make an impact?
• Common Mistakes: Don't be too zealous or pushy, or you lose loyalty, advocacy

Links:

• Michael Buzinski on LinkedIn
• Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing
• Buzzrep
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Michael Buzinski:

"What strangers have to say about you and your company literally has more weight than what your mom says about you."

"People hire people. They don't hire features. They don't hire benefits. They hire the person to deliver those features and benefits."

"Seven out of 10 people will complain before they praise."

"The new way, one of the best ways to utilize reputation management is getting video testimonials on your website."

Setting aggressive marketing growth goals can be intimidating. Some marketers set the bar too low and try to achieve goals that seem impressive but decline year after year. Marketers want to help their organizations succeed but also set accurate expectations for stakeholders.

Today's guest is Darrell Amy, author of Revenue Growth Engine. He talks about how marketers can easily set, accelerate, and achieve ambitious and aggressive marketing growth goals to succeed.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Darrell's Elevator Pitch: Hit growth goals by aligning sales and marketing
• Revenue Growth: Make sure engine is firing on all cylinders to reach goals
• What drives revenue growth? Net new customers, revenue per customer
• Realistic Revenue Growth: Cross sell to reach aggressive 100% sold goal
• Business to Business (B2B): Know ideal client to know ideal prospects
• Outbound Marketing Mindset: What to do to get on radar, engage ideal prospects
• Aggressive Metric: Aim for 100% coverage for net new, cross sell engagement
• Marketing Automation System: How many, when, where did prospects engage?
• Ambitious vs. Achievable: Gauge overpromising, under delivering, playing it safe
• Onboarding Process: First 100 days sets relationship status within community
• Fail Forward: Explain what/why it happened and factors involved to fix outcomes
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): How are they connected to revenue?

Links:

• Darrell Amy on LinkedIn
• Revenue Growth Engine
• HubSpot
• Mark Hunter
• Seth Godin's Blog - Permission Marketing
• Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman
• Pablo Giacopelli on Facebook
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Darrell Amy:

"I am passionate about helping companies hit their growth goals, specifically by aligning sales and marketing to achieve those goals."

"When sales and marketing are not aligned, it really slows everything down."

"You can drive a lot of revenue with an audience where you already have permission to communicate with them."

"One of the most important cylinders in your revenue growth engine is really considering the onboarding process."

How can content marketing and product marketing teams have different goals and responsibilities, but still work together to achieve incredible results and help their companies grow?

Today's guest is Yaag Ganesh from Avoma, a leading management, collaboration, and AI assistant platform. Yaag talks about how content and product marketing teams can best collaborate and work together toward shared objectives to drive top performance.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Roles and Responsibilities: Depends on size of organization
• Product Features: Ensure customer awareness and adoption
• Content Friction: Are you writing for the customer, prospect, or bot?
• Consequences: Content experience brings people closer or further from brand
• Brand Impact: What and whose problem are you solving? Seek and gain clarity
• Common Goals: Consider entire journey to fill in gaps, achieve cohesive results
• Team Sport: Speak same language to understand and align culture, purpose

Links:

• Yaag Ganesh on LinkedIn
• Yaag Ganesh's Email
• Avoma
• The Juice
• HubSpot
• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Salesforce
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Yaag Ganesh:

"As the companies grow bigger and you start scaling each of those functions, I think product marketing tends to take ownership of how you execute the positioning side of things."

"It is still collective responsibility of both these teams to ensure that the communication - anything that goes on the website - is aligned to what the company stands for."

"With every of these touchpoints, people are either coming towards your brand or they're getting deflected away."

"Your products can change. The problems that you're solving can change, but the fundamental belief system needs to be aligned."

Great content marketing can come from great storytelling. Who better to tell great stories than journalists? Marketers can learn from journalists how to create content that resonates with people through the power of storytelling.

Today's guest is Ben Worthen, CEO of Message Lab, which combines journalism, data, and design to help organizations create content that resonates with real people. Ben discusses valuable insights for anyone interested in creating content that matters by combining journalistic storytelling techniques with data and design.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Marketers: Be skilled storytellers to reach out to people about what matters most
• Modern Marketing: Takes advantage of times when people don't want to buy
• Storytelling Problems: Why content marketers miss the mark with storytelling
• People's Patience: Half of them leave content piece before the 15-second mark
• Journalists vs. Marketers: You don't have to be a journalist to tell a great story
• Empathy, Sympathy, and Authenticity: What readers need from marketers
• What's the problem? People care about the experience, not a company's product
• Listen and Learn: Take time to talk about ideas with others to get their opinions
• Storytelling Skills: Uplevel by knowing data, information to make better decisions

Links:

• Ben Worthen on LinkedIn
• Message Lab
• The Wall Street Journal
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Ben Worthen:

"As there's so much choice about what you choose to pay attention to, what you don't want to pay attention to, when you want to pay attention to one thing, and when you get to pay attention to another, it's more important to be able to reach people with things that they care about."

"People are biologically programmed to want to pay attention to a good story. It's something that goes back to when we all lived in caves and sat around the fire."

"If you want to broaden your reach, if you want to have more influence, if you want to break out of a sales-only moment in time where you can have a meaningful interaction with someone, stories are the way to do it."

"When we think about the coolest experiences that we've had, they tend to be experiences that someone has created for us. Those are things that we tend to share with people."

Great work starts with great workflows. How do the best product marketing teams structure their workflows?

Today's guest is Sergey Sundukovskiy, Co-Founder, CTO, and Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Salesmsg. Sergey talks about how to develop successful product marketing workflows and processes.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why product marketers should document, structure defined workflows/processes
• SalesMsg: How company views product marketing and management all together
• Product Management Stages: Ideation, collaboration, construction, and transition
• Repeatability: Work is always the same; improves orchestration between parties
• Product Marketing Debt: Things are just simply going to eventually slow down
• Too many tools? Use depends on purpose and internal/external communication
• Accountability: CPO is responsible for templates documenting workflow/process
• Outcome/Result: Software adopted by existing customers should be measured

Links:

• Sergey Sundukovskiy on LinkedIn
• Sergey Sundukovskiy's Email
• SalesMsg
• AMP 245: Developing Editorial Workflows and Content Creation Processes That Make Awesome Content Possible With Justin Zimmerman From Salesmsg
• InVision
• TryMyUI
• HubSpot
• Intercom
• Jira
• Asana
• ClickUp
• Confluence
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Sergey Sundukovskiy:

"We look at product management in four stages. It's the ideation, collaboration, construction, and transition."

"The improvement in repeatability as well as the work orchestration between multiple parties is always the same."

"At SalesMsg, product marketing is focused on existing customers, and marketing all together is focused on prospects and leads."

"Execution on the product marketing side becomes a competitive advantage."

For SaaS companies, onboarding emails help establish long-term relationships with customers to understand and effectively use software tools. Yet, onboarding processes and email copy are often overlooked. The best way to learn what customers need is to talk to them.

Today's guest is Samar Owais, SaaS and eCommerce email expert. She talks about everything you need to know to make onboarding emails an effective part of your customer acquisition and retention strategy. Samar's advice on how to talk to customers and identify their pain points can apply to any marketer.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why are onboarding emails important? Shows how to use tool to solve problem
• Onboarding Emails: Take pressure off customer support and set expectations
• Biggest Mistakes: Don't hide branding, create copy that starts conversations
• Map Email Journey: What is the purpose of an onboarding email sequence?

Links:

• Samar Owais
• Canva
• Linktree
• ActiveCampaign
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Samar Owais:

"Until and unless your users are not using your app, it doesn't matter whether they're paying for it or not. You are failing at the one thing that you were set out to do, which is solve the problem."

"We need to onboard with retention in mind."

"Email is often used as a marketing tool, but it is a communication tool."

"Email journey is an entire ecosystem. For SaaS companies, you need to map out every customer touch point and then just focus on them."

Marketers struggle with the fear of focusing on the right things and doing things the wrong way. However, there are ways to use, gather, and apply data to get on the right path to generate a return.

Today's guest is Carolyn Lowe, Founder and CEO at ROI Swift and author of Business Growth Do's and Absolute Don'ts. Carolyn talks about how to use the right data to make the right decisions.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Paid Platforms: Amazon, Facebook make a profit and ad dollars go up in flames
• Margins for Error: Marketers have more leeway at big businesses hiring experts
• Isolation vs. Network: Compare performance to know if you're missing something
• Self-Doubt: Lack of confidence can corrode team's ability to be successful
• eCommerce/Marketing Strategy: Test, iterate, tweak to measure and manage
• Business Growth Book: Get basics right and scale core values for positive path
• Brands: How are you different? Break through noise to sell a story, sell a product
• Quantitative/Qualitative Research: Get to know your customer base via surveys
• Best Metrics: Prove what marketers are doing is working or not to be profitable

Links:

• Carolyn Lowe on LinkedIn
• ROI Swift
• Business Growth Do's and Absolute Don'ts
• Dell
• Chewy
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Carolyn Lowe:

"I like the idea of outsourcing the expertise when you're small because you can't know everything."

"When you're always self-doubting, it's really hard to move forward. We used to always say, 'If you can measure it, you can manage it.'"

"I'm all about test, iterate, and tweak."

"It starts and ends with the customer."

What do marketing leaders and teams need to know about gender equity in the workplace? Make it a priority to be a great communicator, highly effective, and flexible to drive change.

Today's guest is Ashley McManus, Senior Director of Global Marketing at Smart Eye. She is a tech startup marketing leader with extensive expertise in inbound marketing. Her thoughtful branding and organized approach to execution resulted in acquiring the tech startup, Affectiva.

Ashley is able to break down challenges, come up with creative solutions, and drive results quickly within budget. She combines strategic thinking with tactical execution, analyzing problems, and identifying steps to results by being adaptive and resourceful.

Also, Ashley designs strategies for tech companies to position them as industry thought leaders. She does this by deliberately creating high-quality content that resonates with their target audience and is in line with their vision.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Equity vs. Equality: What's the difference and distinction between genders?
• Imbalances: Promote gender equality by empowering women to be equal
• COVID Impact: Why gender equity in the workplace is a concern for everyone
• Diversity of Views: Output isn't as helpful when everyone looks/thinks same way
• Marketing Role: Customer targeting and company representation, reputation
• Positive Benefits and Negative Effects: People talk, culture misfits, and churn
• What can women do to get unstuck? Who do they talk to be hired and promoted?
• Gender equity from the ground up:
  • Create inclusive hiring practices
  • Simplify job requirements
  • Don't ask for salary history
  • Candidates should meet diverse interview panel
  • Build enabling human resources department
  • Allow autonomy to be accountable (flexible hours, remote work, etc.)
  • Give recognition, encourage visibility, and advocate for yourself

Links:

• Ashley McManus on LinkedIn
• Smart Eye
• Affectiva
• Glassdoor
• Slack
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Ashley McManus:

"Equality between men and women, it doesn't mean that men and women have to become the same. But it's just that their rights, responsibilities, opportunities, they don't depend on whether they are born male or female."

"Gender equity - that means fairness. Fairness of treatment for men and women according to their respective needs."

"Equity really leads to equality."

"Women are responsible for, I think, 70 to 80 percent of customer purchasing."

It's smart to organize content when you have a core piece of pillar content linked to several smaller pieces covering sub-topics around your main topic. Also, it's about knowing what to include in a topic cluster and how to organize information within a hub-and-spoke content model.

Today's guest is Skyler Reeves from Ardent Growth, a content intelligence consultancy. Building out topic clusters can be expensive, especially when mistakes are made. How much time and resources does it take to produce multiple pieces to make something like the hub-and-spoke model work the first time around?

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• How to use content intelligence to create better topic clusters
• Content Intelligence: Intersection between content strategy, business intelligence
• Marketers should care about topic modeling when building topic clusters
• Tedious Topic Process: Takes time if marketers don't start with parent keywords
• Content Value: Where should marketers prioritize things to get the most value?
• Budget: Two ways to do things—do them right or do them again
• Data and Decisions: Go with gut feeling and/or accurate data to make decisions
• Current Constraints: Does business need more awareness? Sales material?
• Tools: There's things they can't do that you want them to do, so create your own
• Conversion Data: Where it is going to take a minimal amount of effort to get ROI
• Problems: Avoid wasting time, energy, and budget by creating a bunch of content

Links:

• Skyler Reeves on LinkedIn
• Skyler Reeves on Twitter
• Ardent Growth
• Traffic Think Tank - Slack Community
• Superpath by Jimmy Daly from Animalz
• HubSpot
• Ahrefs
• ActiveCampaign
• QuickBooks
• Xero
• Keyword Insights
• SE Ranking
• Semrush
• Moz
• Keyword Cupid
• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Skyler Reeves:

"Something we're constantly trying to do is figure out ways to simplify things for everyone with the way they do their work, so they can get it done faster and more accurately."

"We want to know about the content before we actually go to make those decisions. You can think of it as a precursor or an overarching theme to content strategy and content marketing."

"How do you know what the perfect hub is? How do you know when something needs to be part of hub A or part of hub B, especially when you're trying to rank these things on search engines?"

"One of the easiest, quick ways to solve cannibalization without having to rely on your gut - just go look at what Google's telling you."