Actionable Marketing Podcast

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) typically only stay with a company for only 24-25 months. That type of turnover at the top level of marketing departments is not good for marketers in leadership roles or with leadership aspirations.

Today's guest is Mark Donnigan, a marketing consultant. He talks about why CMOs need to think more like business strategists to better connect where marketing fits into the big picture within your organization rather than thinking about marketing as a set of tactics that are separate from what the rest of the business is doing.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why marketing leaders need to understand the business objectives
• Gartner: Average buyer over 50% through buying journey before making contact
• MBA Playbook: Where CMOs go wrong by following a concrete buying cycle
• Solution: Spend time with CEO to connect with company's strategy and revenue
• Attribution: Avoid ROI issues by shifting from cost center to revenue perspective
• Pitfalls: When marketing leaders focus more on building, not understanding skills
• No Excuses: Marketing leaders need to be business-aware, business-oriented

Links:

• Mark Donnigan - Growth Stage Marketing
• Mark Donnigan on LinkedIn
• Category Design Presentation
• Founders Marketing Playbook Presentation
• Gartner Global Research and Advisory Company
• Play Bigger by Christopher Lochhead
• The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• HubSpot
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Mark Donnigan:

"No longer is it sufficient in today's fragmented buyer journey to just basically build your whole program around a nice funnel."

"The average B2B buyer was...over 50% of the way through their buying journey before they even contacted the first vendor."

"You have the marketing tools to execute. There's no need to go to another marketing seminar, another martech seminar. Instead, spend time with the CEO."

"To be able to contribute in a sales meeting, you better know about the business."

How well do most CMOs know their CIO or IT director? Not as well as they should. It's important for marketers to build strong relationships with their technical teams to achieve marketing success.

Today's guest is Theresa O'Neil, CMO of Zylo, a SaaS management platform. She talks about what and why CMOs and marketing leaders need to navigate side by side with IT to get the most from their technology, to make sure they're not bleeding their martech stack budget, and to ensure that they're collectively driving the most ROI possible.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Marketers: Use the right tools to get the right jobs done for the right people
• How many SaaS applications does the average company purchase? A lot
• How many of those SaaS applications are not actually being used? A lot
• Marketing creates pipelines so sales can close deals and generate revenue
• Win-Win: Marketing and IT team up to make people happy, effective, productive
• Shadow IT: Marketing and IT collaborate and crowdsource selected software
• Goals and Objectives: How to build a bridge between marketing and IT
• Technology is great when it works, but who fixes the problem when it doesn't? IT
• Maintain and grow lifecycle mentality by putting technology, processes in place

Links:

• Theresa O'Neil on LinkedIn
• Zylo
• Coupa
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Theresa O'Neil:

"In marketing, to do a great job, you need the right tools, and it's never been more important than it is now."

"The average company has over 600 SaaS applications. Most of them, IT doesn't know about."

"38% of licenses go unused every month. Just think about it. If you could reclaim 38% of your tech budget, for a marketer, that could absolutely be found money that you could use for a new initiative, or program, or something else that can really help you meet your goals."

"By partnering together and making those employees happy and productive, you're also making sure you're not wasting budget."

What does email automation look like, how does it work, and what are its benefits? Discover how to grow, scale, and mature by owning and not making the same mistakes.

Today's guest is Jeremiah Utecht, Lead on Marketing Automation and Business Intelligence at CoSchedule. He takes the mystery out of marketing automation and makes it work.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Jeremiah's Role: Build, maintain, and refine CoSchedule's email marketing
• CoSchedule's Mission: Send the right email to the right person at the right time
• Happy Anniversary! Marketing automation message triggered by attribute/context
• Marketing Automation Internally: Means most relevant content at relevant time
• Successful Multi-Channels: Website customization and email for CoSchedule
• Clever or sophisticated? Trial-and-error process for practices/platforms that work
• Automation Attributes: Anything is possible with simple and flexible forms
• Oops! Emails: Marketing automation at scale is an incredibly unforgiving practice
• Communication and Confidence: Freeze, validate, test, isolate, fix error, move on
• Data Manipulation: Start small, create email list, and capitalize on investment
• Benefits: Marketing automation is data driven, use tools to try and test emails

Links:

• Jeremiah Utecht on LinkedIn
• MailChimp
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Jeremiah Utecht:

"Marketing automation at CoSchedule seeks to always send the right email to the right person at the right time."

"The irony of my job is that it's more about not sending certain emails and saying, 'No,' a lot than it is actually blasting things out."

"Marketing automation is triggering marketing content messaging based on an attribute, a context."

"As a rule, being super clever almost always blows up in your face."

Do you create great content for an awesome business but still find it challenging to be found on the internet? Building relationships with the right partners can build your audience by getting in front of the audiences of others.

Today's guest is Brett McGrath, Vice President of Marketing at The Juice, a content distribution platform for B2B content. It's like Spotify, but for business content. Brett shares how to develop content partnerships to launch ambitious new companies.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Content Collaboration: Takes time and effort to work the correct way
• Priority #1: Meet people and have conversations with them
• Learn Two Things: If marketing messages resonate, what's on marketers' minds
• Podcast: Having a show helps build partnerships and talk about passion projects
• Mutual Benefits: Build relationships to create, present, share, and add value
• Mindset and Philosophy: Launch product and company with people
• Biggest Win: Streamlining content process to create content with social proof
• Where to Meet/What to Say: Be comfortable and confident in social communities
• Podcast Practice: Ask questions, facilitate feedback, and promote people/brands

Links:

• Brett McGrath on Twitter
• Brett McGrath on LinkedIn
• The Juice
• The 3C Podcast: Curating Content Creators
• Leah Friedman from Guru
• Jimmy Daly from Superpath
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Brett McGrath:

"When I joined The Juice, priority #1 was meet people and just have conversations."

"Reach out to people and do it in a way that is authentic and natural in building partnerships."

"We, as B2B marketers, need to move away from me-centered marketing or marketing for our own KPIs and our metrics or what our bosses want."

"Find the places where people want to go and learn and are like-minded and find ways to engage."

Marketers understand the value of search engine optimization (SEO), but they need to clearly communicate why it matters to get buy-in from executives, stakeholders, and clients.

Today's guest is Eli Schwartz, a consultant and growth advisor. Also, he is the author of Product-Led SEO, a new book that describes how to communicate the value of SEO and think strategically and philosophically about SEO to be successful.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What motivated Eli to write the book? Explain to leaders how to do SEO sensibly
• Sweet Spot: Start SEO when spending at least $1-2 million on paid marketing
• Disparity: How much is your company spending on paid marketing versus SEO?
• Big Problem: SEO blackboxes things and mystifies it intentionally with metrics
• Metrics vs. Outcomes: SEO is about speaking the same language, not keywords
• Big Budget: Put money in to produce content, create product, and make a profit
• Big Consequence: Prioritize SEO or continue to fall behind business competitors
• SEO Do's and Don'ts: Focus on content but not allocate enough resources
• Monetary Value: Clearly communicate what you need and why to impact ROI
• SEO Standpoint: Create content from a product perspective for user engagement
• Priorities: Base SEO on users, not search volume/traffic, to get biggest benefits
• Leaders don't need to understand SEO, but they need to know the outcomes
• Recipe for Success/Failure: Create product, product flops, and ideas don't work

Links:

• Eli Schwartz on LinkedIn
• Eli Schwartz's Website
• Eli Schwartz on Twitter
• Product-Led SEO
• SurveyMonkey
• Ahrefs
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Eli Schwartz:

"I am a huge fan of not creating any sort of content unless you know that there are users that will consume it, it makes sense for users, and it will end up converting."

"If you don't do SEO, then your competitors move ahead of you. If you don't do the right SEO, you just lose your entire investment. But that's not the way most people think of it."

"Social media is a little bit lower in the funnel. I think paid marketing is at the bottom of the funnel. Brand marketing is potentially higher in the funnel than SEO. Make them all work together and that's where SEO will be the most profitable."

"They don't need to understand how SEO works. What they do need to understand are the outcomes, and the work that's going to be done, and of course, the investment that's going to be made."

Too much marketing is based on guesses not backed by data. Paid tactics, like pay-per-click (PPC) and social media advertising, can burn through your budget when guesses are wrong. How can you use data to make marketing more predictable to forecast performance and adjust to shifts in trends to increase your ROI?

Today's guest is John Readman from BOSCO, a digital analytics and predictive modeling platform for retailers and eCommerce companies. He discusses what it takes for predictable marketing to be successful. It involves understanding historical data, performance, and trends across a client's channels.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What is predictable marketing? Getting all data in one place on an ongoing basis
• Why should marketers make decisions driven by data, not gut instinct/intuition?
• Data and Decisions: Depend on volume, understanding data to base decisions
• Challenges: Digital marketing data is used to scale ROI in one particular channel
• COVID Comparisons: Causal effect of supply and demand during the pandemic
• BOSCO: Helps marketers predict future w/ machine learning, Bayesian statistics
• Out-of-Date Numbers: Forecasting runs scenarios, planning, and model analysis
• Different Data Sources: Connect platforms to quickly predict what could be done
• Wasted Budget? Run and identify data models that are hugely, scarily accurate
• Two Key Metrics: Cost per acquisition and understanding that by channel
• Clients/Conversations: People make decisions emotionally, justify them with data
• Control: People get nervous about not doing things the traditional way
• Predictive Analytics Platform/Practice: Get buy-in by leading conversation with potential results, starting small, and using data to quantify progress and success

Links:

• John Readman on LinkedIn
• BOSCO
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from John Readman:

"If we've got the right data in the right format, and we understand what is going on around certain targets, what makes it predictable is understanding the metrics and the outputs we are trying to achieve."

"Fundamentally, why do people need to make data-driven decisions to really explain where they're spending their money, where are they getting their ROI, and then how can they scale it?"

"It all starts with getting all your data organized in one place, then looking at what I am willing to pay to acquire a customer, and then maybe looking at customer lifetime value."

"The thing to stand out will be a better proposition, a better product, and a better promotion, which is sort of the traditional marketing going around in a full circle."

Great content doesn't happen by accident. It's usually a byproduct of refined processes that help teams work together efficiently and effectively. However, planning editorial workflows and implementing content creation processes can be challenging.

Today's guest is Justin Zimmerman from Salesmsg. Justin talks about how marketing teams can develop and implement editorial workflows and content creation processes to create better content.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Creative Control: Why marketers should create editorial workflows for content
• Four Cs: Collaboration, connection, creative control, and compensation
• Flow State: Focus on the process and the results will show up
• Neurological Map: Goal in world of workflow is to align teams for higher purpose
• State of Enjoyment: You have 3 places you live—work, home, and inside yourself
• Start Right: Avoid potential pitfalls, pain by having workflow process for outcomes
• Lessons Learned: Listen and do something to not repeat the same mistakes
• Continually Improve: You can't have a sense of progress without a process
• Content Team Roles: At minimum—a writer, designer, and project manager
• CoSchedule: Tool that separates chaos from clarity
• Person at the Helm: Make sure work gets done, but it doesn't mean you do it
• Four Ps: Purpose, people, process, and product
• Context Switch: Too many tools, channels, and notifications lead to distraction
• Complicated vs. Simple: Basic elements of workflow/work management process
• Mistakes Made: Start small, take it slow; workflows are change and require change management

Links:

• Justin Zimmerman on LinkedIn
• Salesmsg
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
• Scrum
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Jira
• Slack
• The Big Lebowski
• E. Deming
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Justin Zimmerman:

"Self-reflection and experience really allow me to look at the word process not as a dirty word, but as a way to align teams."

"Flow state is, I think, the ultimate outcome of teams working together towards a common goal and feeling that sense of higher purpose."

"I think words matter because they give an indication of the actions that follow them."

"Workflow is the way that connects where we are today with the progress and results that we want."

Do you believe in the power of personal video in video outreach or do you remain skeptical? If a pitch for something isn't interesting on its own, how will a video that takes longer to watch than reading a simple email grab your attention and sway your opinion?

Today's guest is David Jay, founder of Warm Welcome, a personal video platform. Discover the value of video, how video can be used, and its full potential by making business communication that scales and creates personal conversations and human connections.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Use Cases: Supercharge outreach, make website welcoming, improve onboarding flows, lead generation, and sales
• Videos: Personalized versus personal - David describes the differences
• Do's/Don'ts: How to make a video worth watching to solve someone's problem
• Mindset: Business is built on trust, and trust is built through relationships
• Instant Video Connection: Talk to humans - nobody wants to talk to chatbots
• Emotion or Information? People buy and sell things online to other people
• Improve ROI: Measure and track customers' loyalty, evangelism, engagement

Links:

• Warm Welcome
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from David Jay:

"Video can be personalized or it can just be personal. There's kind of different directions you can go with it."

"There's a lot of ways to use video in our business."

"The first thing not to do is don't think of it selfishly. Don't think of it as a way to get what you want. Every sales and marketer, we're guilty of this."

"I think business is built on trust, and trust is built through relationships."

Audience growth - whether in the context of social media followers, email list, podcast listeners, or YouTube subscribers - whatever the case may be, it's easy to believe that more is always better.

Today's guest is Matt Johnson, author of MicroFamous: Become Famously Influential to the Right People. Also, Matt is the founder of a podcast PR agency, Pursuing Results, and host of the MicroFamous podcast. He talks about how to be micro-famous with the right people and learn to grow as an influencer within a given niche.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• MicroFamous: Be famously influential, but not to everyone, just the right people
• Focused Approach: Reorient strategy to grow smaller but better following
• Benefits: Expect to drive better results by attracting just the right people
• What People Want: To working with the #1 name that solve their problems
• Who's the right person? Until you know, you don't know what content to create
• Audiences want clarity and focus; put content into the world without shouting
• Wave of the Future: Know who to talk to, identify correct niche to focus on
• Who are the right people? The most valuable, open-minded, and influential
• First or Only: Uncover clear, compelling idea that appeals to a given audience
• Three Stages of Influence: Get seen, get noticed, and get known
• Practice What You Preach: Share what you do, be featured, build name for self

Links:

• MicroFamous
• Pursuing Results
• MicroFamous Podcast
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Ryan Deiss at Traffic & Conversion
• Tim Ferriss
• Marc Benioff of Salesforce
• Tony Robbins
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Matt Johnson:

"When I go to an industry conference, it's full of my ideal people. I absolutely want everybody there to know who I am. That's really what it means to be MicroFamous."

"If you're not number one, you're facing an uphill battle."

"You want to be famously influential, but not to everyone, just to the exact right people."

"The thing that generated sales was delivering the exact right content that the right people cared deeply about and it resonated with them."

If you have a podcast, are you repurposing your content assets across other channels and formats? If not, then you are missing out on opportunities to reach potential listeners and customers.

Today's guest is Holly Pels, Vice President of Marketing at Casted – a podcast platform for B2B marketers. Holly talks about how and why marketers should turn their podcast into a content creation engine to drive return on investment (ROI).

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• How and why marketers shouldn't struggle to make the most of their assets
• How to turn things around to better distribute podcast content
• Benefits of sharing and repurposing podcast assets across platforms/channels
• Why marketers should pay attention to podcasting as a channel to use right now
• Experts at everything? Marketers are expert storytellers, not always SMEs
• Marketers fail to maximize assets by creating silos, producing one-off episodes
• Missed Opportunity: Plan to repurpose richer, better, and engaging content
• Repurpose/Repromote: Makes things easier, engaging, saves time, offers insight
• Getting Started:
  • Embed player on blog and website
  • Create certain amount of evergreen social assets
  • Schedule blog posts to highlight podcast content
  • Pull key information rather than listening to full episode

Links:

• Holly Pels on LinkedIn
• Casted
• OpenView
• Lumavate
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Holly Pels:

"Podcasting is a channel that is very authentic. It's two people having a conversation versus what a brand necessarily wants you to hear."

"Content planning is really important when it comes to podcasting, but this is much richer, better, engaging content than anything."

"Traffic is great but conversion is better."

"If it seems to be resonating with our audience, we want to make sure that we're giving them more."