Actionable Marketing Podcast

How ethical is your marketing practice? Imagine describing your job to your best non-marketing friend. What's your response if they think your work is ethically gray or morally suspect?

Today's guest is Robin Cangie from The Empowered Freelancer. Robin talks about how to do work that's radically effective and ethical, where marketers avoid ethical shortcuts by focusing on work that is genuinely helpful for leads, prospects, and customers.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• The Empowered Freelancer: Real, raw talk about being self-employed
• Radically Ethical Marketing: Honesty, transparency, and genuine helpfulness
• What isn't radically ethical?
  • Retargeting ads without permission from customers
  • Copy designed to deceive rather than inform
  • Goal is to get users to convert rather than help them see product value
• Why should marketers choose tactics or structure strategy? Right thing to do
• Quit or speak up? Figure out your threshold, values, and what you can do
• What is a smart way to do good and better without the approach backfiring?
• Marketers/Leaders: Think about how negative perceptions harm the business
• Valid but Risky: Raising ethical concerns takes a tremendous amount of courage
• Beloved Brands: Wonderful products/services and messaging tone aligns values

Links:

• Robin Cangie on LinkedIn
• The Empowered Freelancer
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Robin Cangie:

"Radically Ethical Marketing is simply marketing that puts honesty, transparency, and genuine helpfulness at its center."

"People are becoming more wise to ways that marketers try to manipulate their perceptions, use their data to get them to buy as much stuff as possible."

"Being radically ethical is a more sustainable long-term choice."

"Truth be told, it was a matter of needing to look in the mirror every morning and feel good about the work that I was doing. That is something that's very important to me."

"You may have more power than you realize to effect change."

As a marketer, do you need to create content that applies insights derived from data and research? If so, pay attention to the right data and apply it the right way to produce the most effective work possible.

Today's guest is Anastasia Leng from CreativeX. She talks about where marketers get misled with data and how to merge data and creativity to create content that connects with customers.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Data-backed Content: Objective way to understand what's in each content piece
• Performance: After putting piece of content out, what has happened as a result?
• Views/Variables: Marketers should move away from biases and assumptions
• Trust gut or data? Marketers want to be right; get comfortable with being wrong
• CreativeX's Mission: Enhance and elevate creativity expression through data
• Consistent Content: Number of clicks vs. what reflects brand and audience
• Best Practices: Creative quality and distinctive brand assets to increase sales
• Cheat Sheet for Content:
  • What should your definition of creative quality incorporate?
  • Brand right away; marketers have 2-3 seconds to make impression
  • Don't waste money by running same piece of content across channels
  • Get around brevities

Links:

• Anastasia Leng on LinkedIn
• CreativeX
• Think with Google
• Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Anastasia Leng:

"It's really about having a common language for evaluating every piece of content that we create."

"Understand what is the long-term metric that really matters, and how can you start to get creative and whatever that KPI is closer together so you can understand the relationship and the journey these two things take together."

"Analyze content more objectively so that we're not letting our own biases drive our understanding of what is working and what is not working in our content strategy."

"If you're not even aware of these things, how can you truly be a good marketer? How can you truly put out great content if you're not actually able to really look deeply within it?"

Too often, content marketing strategies follow one of two paths: Keyword driven or driven based on what the writer thinks makes an interesting topic. The path to success is somewhere in between those two strategies.

Today's guest is Brad Smith from Wordable, Codeless, and uSERP. He talks about how to create data-backed and ROI-driven content strategies that blend both approaches for maximum results.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Problems: Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are incredibly competitive
• Affiliate Space: 70% of revenue comes from two or three keywords
• Temporary Approach: Create great content to find an audience
• Referral Traffic: Completely relying on what other people find interesting
• Ads: Companies turn to other channels that are less profitable, more competitive
• Game Plan: What components/expectations will move content and keywords?
• Marketers don't need more or better ideas—but test and execute them better
• Decision-Making Process: Do it or be grounded in reality to produce best results
• Wordable: Format, optimize, upload, and publish content in minutes for clients

Links:

• Brad Smith on LinkedIn
• Wordable
• Codeless
• uSERP
• Seth Godin
• HubSpot
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Brad Smith:

"If you're relatively small, relatively new, not well-funded, don't have a name for yourself or brand yet, that kind of excludes like 70 percent of the good stuff from a keyword perspective that you'd want to write for, ultimately, that's going to bring in ROI."

"When you're following this method of let's just create 'good' content, you're completely 100 percent relying on what other people find interesting."

"Social things are going to be a lot more beneficial shorter term. Over the long term, it's just about scale."

"The whole ranking thing is like the chicken and the egg. I can't rank for big keywords until I'm big, but I'm not going to be big until I rank for some keywords."

"Marketers don't need more ideas. They don't need better ideas. They just need to execute better, and executing better comes from processes and boring systems and operations."

CoSchedule started as an editorial calendar WordPress plugin created by an agency that co-founders, Garrett Moon and Justin Walsh, ran called Todaymade. Since then, CoSchedule has grown. Not only has the core content calendar gone through a lot of changes, but so has the company.

Today's guest is Nathan Ellering, Head of Marketing at CoSchedule, which now offers multiple different product lines under one brand name. Nathan explains how CoSchedule made pivots and tackled some risks and challenges. His advice will help you navigate from being one company that makes one product and expand to one company that makes four products.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Product Positioning: How to funnel people in and say the right things
• Marketing Automation: Where to build out those funnels and nurture people
• Marketing Design: Make sure everything published is visually built and modern
• Customer Service: Incorporate customer service much more with marketing
• History of CoSchedule: How core marketing calendar software evolved
• Company Philosophy: Start where you're at with a smaller test product
• Marketing Work Management Software: Organize everything in one place
• Content Calendars: Meet deadlines and manage work effectively, efficiently
• Agile Marketing Tools: Hire product to finish work, deliver projects, prove value
• Current Products: Marketing Calendar/Suite, Headline Analyzer, Headline Studio
• Academy: Marketing education platform for marketers to understand, build skills
• Mission Statement: CoSchedule wants to help every marketer do amazing work
• CoSchedule Experience: Get the right messaging to get them into a product
• True Tenants of Agile: Where to ship, measure, learn, iterate, and begin
• Testing Culture: Launch something new with other people's market research

Links:

• Headline Analyzer
• Headline Studio
• Marketing Calendar
• Marketing Suite
• CoSchedule Academy
• Marketing Strategy Guide
• Nathan Ellering on LinkedIn
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Nathan Ellering:

"We're aiming to create experiences that help out people who really are being marketed to...from a customer service perspective. That's been really fun so far."

"We were working a lot with bloggers and we discovered many years ago that marketers are starting to turn to blogging as a great way to do content marketing."

"We identified the need that they had to just organize everything in one place. We say those words all the time. They really resonate with people."

"We want every experience at CoSchedule to be a positive one and one that lasts a lifetime of you being a marketer."

Why are marketers good at content production, but not so great at content distribution? They are judged based on how much work they get done, rather than the actual results that they produce. Also, content promotion with traditional channels is harder to do.

Today's guest is Jonathan Gandolf from The Juice. He talks about a better way for content marketers to produce and distribute value. Curation is actually more powerful than creation.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• The Juice: A startup that aspires to be the Spotify of B2B content
• Beta Program: Marketers distribute curated content and consumers discover it
• Content Distribution: Same channels, same audience equals diminishing returns
• Keyword Salad: Who are we creating content for? Algorithms or humans?
• Talk to Consumers: Understand why quality content is not producing returns
• The Right Content: Prospects want solutions to problems, not more content
• B2B Buyer's Journey: Map out funnel and map content to it
• Down the Drain: 59% content isn't read, 23% budget applied to content creation
• Forms: Don't expect good things from content consumers with such deliverables
• Safe Space: Create platform to be anonymous, no contact, or generate leads
• Marketers: Slow down and curate content for consumers at right time and place

Links:

• The Juice
• Jonathan Gandolf on LinkedIn
• Jonathan Gandolf on Twitter
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Jonathan Gandolf:

"What ends up happening is we create really compelling content, but then we end up going to the same channels and the same audience over and over and over again."

"You hit this law of diminishing returns. You're getting less returns out of that same audience. The only way to get more returns is to create more content. You end up on this hamster wheel of content creation."

"Nobody, right now, is looking for more content. They're just looking for the right content."

"Curation is actually more powerful than creation."

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3) and artificial intelligence (AI) first made their way into the marketing industry last year. There's been a lot of talk about whether or not robots will take over content marketers' jobs. Probably not, as long as they're doing quality work. Machines like a degree of certainty.

Today's guest is Jeff Coyle, co-founder and chief strategy officer at MarketMuse, an AI-driven content planning and strategy platform. He knows how AI is and will affect content marketing by making our jobs easier and our work better. What do content marketers need to know to prepare for the inevitable future?

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Horizon Scanning: What are we going to be doing a year from now?
• MarketMuse: Sets the standards for content quality by investing in clients
• Hype Cycle: AI's influence on writers' jobs isn't going away, but ramping up
• MarketMuse's Mission: Improve content quality on the Internet
• Content: AI is making writers more efficient and giving more time to be creative
• Cost of Content: Two-order disconnect to value and revenue
• AI: Takes guesswork out of things that drive anxiety, figures out quick wins
• Stage One: Experts have blind spots and forget stuff
• Stage Two: Create content briefs
• Stage Three: Insight is personalized prioritization of content
• AI Branches: Natural language processing provides insights and editing lens
• Competitive Analysis: Publish page on concept, don't copy or make good enough
• What comprehensiveness means? Creating dice-roll content by copying others
• Wisdom: Knowing what was regurgitated, commonly used, and SME aspects
• Correlation Hangover: Susceptible to competitive risk
• Content Efficiency: Do you know it? Document processes, post-publish tuning

Links:

• Jeff Coyle on LinkedIn
• Jeff Coyle on Twitter
• Jeff Coyle's Email
• MarketMuse
• Grammarly
• Hemingway
• Amazon Echo
• Copyscape
• Garrett Moon on LinkedIn
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Jeff Coyle:

"Focus on the client and focus on our audience, even if they're not clients. How can they ensure that they're getting the most out of their investments in content?"

"The various aspects of artificial intelligence that influence writers' jobs isn't going away. It's only going to ramp up. But is it coming for their jobs? Not really."

"Content already in many businesses has a two-order disconnect to value and revenue. Some people don't have the real value of content. They don't understand the true cost of content. They don't understand how it connects directly to revenue."

"That's what AI can do. It can figure out those quick wins versus those infrastructure pieces, versus those risk avoidance pieces. It can actually help to define why you're writing."

"if you go copy those people, you're sorely mistaken. That is one of the biggest pitfalls, and one of the biggest misconceptions of search engine optimization."

Some marketers have side hustles to learn new skills, explore their passion projects, and make a little extra cash. Are you a marketer struggling to overcome challenges to be successful outside of your day job?

Today's guest is John Bonini of Databox, a business analytics platform, and his side hustle, Some Good Content, a subscription-based marketing education product. John offers advice on how to find balance and avoid burnout with content marketing.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why start a side hustle? Two reasons:
  • Passionate about a specific subject and can't not talk about it
  • Accelerates learning by creating content and building a community
• Why you shouldn't start a side hustle: Motivated to get rich quick, make money
• Some Good Content: Advice, education, training should be helpful, not general
• Content Marketers: Expectations over their heads to drive traffic, generate leads
• Launch to Learn: Do something to get started, solicit feedback, feel productive
• Emotional Experience: Short-term setbacks and long-term mindset for side jobs
• Busy Work: Start quickly and don't doubt yourself or get lost in the details
• Side Hustle Scope: Growth goals vs. supplemental time and money boundaries

Links:

• John Bonini on LinkedIn
• Databox
• Some Good Content
• The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch by Dan Norris
• HubSpot
• Drip
• G2
• Help Scout
• Animalz
• Gong
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from John Bonini:

"You really enjoy and/or are passionate about a specific subject and you can't not talk about it."

"You get to play founder with none of the risk."

"Most content advice, most content education, most content training is often too general to be helpful."

"I just saw this gap between people wanting to get better at content and the content out there not really existing to help them do that."

"When you start to get lost in those thoughts of, 'I don't know if this is viable,' what you end up doing is, you start defaulting to busy work."

When you're in a leadership position, sometimes it's hard to know who to ask or where to look when you need answers to questions and solutions to problems—especially because others expect you to have all the answers and solutions.

Today's guest is Simon Berg, CEO at Ceros, an experiential content creation platform that empowers marketers and designers to create engaging, interactive, and immersive content experiences. Simon talks about what to do when forced to use your own critical-thinking and problem-solving skills instead of a paint-by-numbers playbook. Creativity matters!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• COVID vs. Conventional Wisdom: Layoff people during global catastrophe?
• 2020: Incredibly difficult year of suffering, fear, desperation, anxiety, uncertainty
• Real Life: Other feelings of presence, pause, introspection, reflection, unity
• Adversity and Constraint: Ceros chooses opportunity for growth and creativity
• Big Deal: Happy Birthday, Mr. Berg; time to get drunk because the deal is dead
• Creativity in Captivity: Takes transparency, compassion, doubt, experiences
• Survive and Thrive: Commit to not touch salaries/jobs, if you support each other
• Best Year Ever: Build confidence and grow by believing in yourself and others
• Advice to Leaders: Stop looking in the book, instead look up and in front of you
• I can't…What can you do? Only thing that you can truly control is yourself
• Reminder: Opportunities and problems are never easy, but hard to do
• Leadership Playbook Police: Break free from constraints by reframing goals

Links:

• Simon Berg on LinkedIn
• Ceros
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Simon Berg:

"There's a lot of feelings involved. Feelings of the people that you lead, and feelings as the leader."

"I attempted to lead through, predominantly authenticity, being authentically myself, and then also, trying very hard to make sure that I was at the right time in the right ways leading through vulnerability."

"Every single person in a position of leadership, or otherwise, is a human being, and human beings are fundamentally flawed."

"Step forward and fight for what I believe made sense and have the courage to do the difficult thing."

"You won't find a chapter that says, 'how to run a company in a global pandemic with civil unrest, economic crisis, and an insane president. It's not in the book."

Data problems are probably lurking somewhere inside of your marketing stack. Don't freak out, just yet. Most analytics packages and marketing software services that deal with data have some gaps or inaccuracies.

Today's guest is Dan McGaw, CEO and founder of McGaw.io, a marketing technology and marketing analytics consulting company. Dan talks about how to make better marketing decisions—identify and fix deeper issues to avoid data disasters. He explains everything you need to know to keep your data clean and metrics moving.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why is data cleanliness important? Analytics + Bad Data = Bad Decisions
• Directional: Data is not meant to be perfect, the goal is to grow and take action
• Data Spectrums: Everybody has unreliable data—how bad is it?
• Marketing Stacks: Different problems stem from data issues
• Taxonomy: Common problem is not having consistent or connecting names
• Be Intentional: Set up and configure marketing tech, or set yourself up for failure
• Audit: You know there's a problem, but you don't know what it is, where to begin
• Solution: Plan and be more proactive by understanding how data flows in
• Best Practices: Urchin tracking parameters (UTM) are culprits of bad data
• How to Build Cool Sh*t: Take it slow, take your time, don't try to rush projects

Links:

• Dan McGaw on LinkedIn
• Mcgaw.io
• McGaw.io Downloads and Resources
• How to Build Cool Sh*t by Dan McGaw
• UTM.io
• KissMetrics
• Pluralsight - Code School
• BrowserStack
• Segment
• Tag Inspector
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Dan McGaw:

"If you have analytics and your analytics have bad data that means your analytics are wrong, which means that you're naturally going to be making bad decisions."

"Companies that are typically growing the fastest, are the ones who are less focused on definitive and more focused on how do we get directional data that's going to tell us which way is growth and let's start moving and let's make action."

"If you take the quality time to do taxonomy right, you see really, really good outcomes. Trying to make sure that taxonomy works across the stack I think is where you get the best outcomes, as well."

"The best way to audit is really to build good rigor around your analytics, understand how that data flows in, and use the auditing tools to be able to do that."

How does design happen, and how do designers and marketers collaborate? As a common courtesy, provide details to get more work done better and faster. CoSchedule is consistently committed to quality design and creative output.

Today's guest is Tim Walker, visual designer at CoSchedule. Tim talks about how he infuses brand with individual style that is distinctly CoSchedule. Discover how to replicate CoSchedule's processes and philosophies.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Onboarding: Intimidating, exciting, and challenging to integrate individual style
• Standards and Guidelines: Set and define them to have fun within them
• Design Playground: Time and place to test new ideas, styles, and color palettes
• Collaboration Challenge: Communicate clearly about team/department needs
• What Works, What Doesn't: Specificity, purpose vs. vagueness, no direction
• Intent: Good design doesn't happen by accident, it takes thoughtful planning
• Investment: Don't cut corners—good aesthetics authenticate your brand
• Inspiration: Collect designs from Pinterest, Dribble, Ehance, and Instagram

Links:

• Tim Walker on LinkedIn
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Tim Walker:

"Every designer has their own style. A lot of designers can do a lot of things, but I think each designer kind of has their own unique kind of signature. Integrating that into the brand, that's always a fun little challenge."

"It's really important to kind of have those standards set in place and well-defined, and then you can kind of have some fun within those. It was enjoyable to try to meld my own style with the existing guidelines."

"Everyone's really great at communicating exactly what they need from design and the purpose of the design, too, and what we're trying to achieve with it."

"If you have valuable content to share, why not give it some great clothes to wear?"

"Humans are visual creatures. When we see images, our brains store the details verbally and visually. If you want people to pay attention to your content, and recognize your brand, or buy your product, share your posts, you need to have strong design or you'll be forgotten and ignored."