Funnel Reboot

Throughout our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today's guest didn't do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.

Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them. That turned out to be a great money-making opportunity. That led to her owning her own physical store called Parlez Wireless, that operated as an authorized dealer for that carrier. She sold the franchise six years later and since then she has been providing consulting support to other businesses in Service and Retail sectors, as well as Speakers, Consultants and Authors.

After hearing the unconventional path she took, you can see why her philosophy on marketing isn't the same as everyone else. She believes using those old tired ways yields merely mediocre results, and she wants companies to do better than that. So she teamed up with Alan Weiss in 2022 to write her second book, "Masterful Marketing".

I first met her a dozen years ago at a Podcasters Across Borders conference and I'm so glad to have you join me to hear from Lisa Larter.

Ep 154 Shownotes include links to all people and products mentioned.

Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.

Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several european ecommerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms to turn raw data into usable marketing insights.

Working at an analytics firm that exposed him to BigQuery, he thought about sharing what he was learning. Seeing that the domain GA4BigQuery.com was available, he registered it and started posting there as a side gig. It got noticed by Simo Ahava, the founder of Simmer. That led Johan the release of the GA4 and BigQuery course on their training platform. As we fast forward to 2023, GA4BigQuery is now a well-known resource for marketers. And its creator is now consulting full-time on data analytics under his own brand, Select Star. Except for when he's having fun playing in a punk rock cover band.

See Ep 153 Shownotes for all people and links mentioned in the episode.

Consumers and corporate buyers no longer put blind trust in our brands. Nor do they trust big institutions. Nor religion. Nor the government. Nor the media. We do however still trust people like us. That's where influencers come in.

Gordon Glenister is a UK-based adviser on the business of working with influencers and running membership associations. Gordon launched the association arm of the UK's Branded Content Marketing Association, to support the influencer marketing industry. Additionally, he hosts "Influence", the global podcast on influencer marketing. In 2021 he published the book Influencer Marketing Strategy

For more details on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 102's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you're connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today's data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hybrid environments, and so many data pipelines the programs in charge of monitoring and logging the flows almost can't manage them. It becomes overwhelming to manually check and ensure the quality and integrity of the data. The more sophisticated the systems, the more errors creep into the data. If we rely on flawed data, the outcomes and insights we generate will be equally flawed. This is where data observability comes in.

In this episode you will hear about something called an observability platform. It identifies real-time data anomalies and pipeline errors in data warehouses. Now there's a twist here because we're in a cloud computing environment that charges by number of computing cycles. You don't want an observability tool that's another pipe accessing client data and running up the meter. The good news is there's an easier way to detect when data has gone awry, by comparing log files - basically metadata - they are just as effective at alerting you to problems.

If you'd like what this is doing described in a completely non-technical way, think of Hans Christian Andersen's Princess and the Pea. There is a girl who comes to a castle seeking shelter from the rain claiming to be a princess. The queen doubts whether she is truly of noble blood, and offers her a bed, but this bed has twenty mattresses and twenty down-filled comforters on it. A pea is placed underneath the bottom mattress to test if this girl detects anything. The next morning, the princess says that she endured a sleepless night; there must have been something hard in the bed. They realize then and there that she must be a princess, since no one but a real princess could be so delicate.

I spoke with Yuliia Tkachova, the co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data, a company which recently received $1.3M in a pre-seed round. Originally from Ukraine, Yuliia came to found Masthead after work that convinced her of the need for an observability solution. She had roles as a Product Manager roles at OWOX BI and Boosta, where their data solutions encountered problems. Prior to that, she did marketing for RAGT. She has Bachelors and Masters degrees from Suma State University, specializing in MIS & Statistics. She also serves as an Organizer at MeasureCamp, a volunteer community where analytics professionals come together to learn.

See Ep 152's Shownotes for links to all persons or products mentioned.

Think of the data you have on your customers as having value. It does, by the fact that the more you know your clients, the better you can serve them. This "unlocked potential revenue" of all your current customers can be quantified as your whole customer's lifetime value (CLV) added together.

This number is known by finance people as Customer Equity, but it's much more than a mathematical formula. The value that VCs and public markets have put on assets such as loyalty programs and subscription lists is often greater than the value of a company's capital assets!

While it might sound like it has to do with finance, this is all highly related to marketing. This is because each tactical decision gets vetted by whether it will optimize CLV; it becomes your company's North Star.

Allison Hartsoe has strategize d the digital customer analytics for dozens of Fortune 500 customers throughout her career. She now leads an analytics consultancy in Portland OR, Ambition Data, and published the book, "The Age of Customer Equity", in 2021. She has been published in Forbes.com, MIT Technology Review, and Fast Company and somewhere in between all this writing, she found time to cycle across the USA.

For more details on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 101's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment's required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value.

Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you'll see from his backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it's him.

After completing a Bachelor of Science from The University of Manchester and studying at the University of Cambridge as a Doctoral Candidate, our guest worked in the UK analytics practice of a global Management Consultancy. Due for a change after 6 years of that, he moved to Ottawa Canada and founded his own consultancy so he could offer a more independent approach. A while later started the firm he's been leading for nearly 15 years, Bronson Analytics.

In 2018 he began a recurring event in Ottawa called Beer & Analytics, which draws hundreds from the field together for learning and socializing. In 2022, the event went outside of Ottawa for the first time, being held in Toronto.

For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 151's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

It's fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot's 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that's becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I'm talking about marketing analytics.

This episode is compiled from experts in the world of analytics. It was recorded on location at the Marketing Analytics Summit that was held in Las Vegas. It's coming hot off the press from the June 2023 event.

Full speaker list and links in show 150's notes on the Funnel Reboot site.

When marketers from different companies get together and talk shop, it quickly becomes noticeable that each tackles their marketing problem differently. One by one, they throw into the conversation their own homebrew of channels, output tracking and the distinct expectations their stakeholders place on them. The more this study in contrast goes on, the more you hear them ask each other: "Why do you do it that way?"

The responses to this question all fall under one unsatisfactory theme. It's like Fiddler on the Roof, a broadway musical & movie set a century ago in part of the soviet union. A community of displaced Jews move into the slavic town of Anatevka. When townspeople ask them about their quirky customs, they give their famous one-word answer - Tradition. The main character defends his ancestors for starting the Tradition, even if nobody can remember why they made them in the first place.

Some of the marketing tasks we do are grounded in logic, which can be found by probing our institutional memory banks. But most of the time we don't probe, Instead relying on circular reasoning about the fact that we have them as justification for why we have them. Nothing changes; we cling to pointless traditions, which just ends up wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Our guest knows how to give marketing functions a checkup, teasing apart the traditional practices that boost productivity from those that have run their course. She's great at scrutinizing; at asking "Why do you do it that way?" She grew up in the republic of Georgia, shortly after the Communist system of the Soviets had collapsed. Would they transition to the new ways? Many were reluctant to, craving the familiarity of communism. This wavering delayed Georgia's emergence as a full-fledged western economy. Perhaps Khatia came by her bold way of questioning things from seeing the damage that's caused by clinging to the past.

Khatia Odzelashvili is the founder of a company called, not surprisingly, Bold Move Marketing. She is a public relations specialist with an entrepreneurial mindset who enjoys developing and implementing creative strategies. Since finishing her education at Algonquin College as well as the University of Göttingen, she has worked with and sometimes led a client's team as they build marketing programs.

For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 149's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

If you want to communicate your message to others in this world, you only have four channels to choose from. Paid, Owned, Shared and Earned. If we expect to get some attention through shared and earned media, we should be prepared to face resistance, because we're competing with the biggest and most attention-grabbing stories out there.

My guest Phil Gaudreau is a former journalist, who has turned his talents to serving the communication needs of other businesses. He does this through Make it Matter Media, the agency which he runs jointly with his wife Catherine. From their base in Kingston Ontario, they work with a diverse range of clients, including small and medium businesses, politicians, and not for profit organizations.

Phil has also been actively engaged in the academic realm. He has worked with educational institutions such as Queens University, St. Lawrence College & Algonquin College, starting with communications roles and progressing to become a part-time professor of the subject.

An area where Phil loves to apply his writing and podcasting skills is generating awareness for businesses in less-populated regions. Ever since he teamed up with an Ottawa-based publisher in 2019, he has been the front-facing piece of several media properties focused on Eastern Ontario, which is as large as, and is as sparsely populated as the State of Maine. His profiles convey how these companies bet their future on the local labour force, and how much is at stake for the community where the company chooses to locate.

If your brand, or your client's brand, shares any commonality with the ones Phil works for, then you'll agree with me that it's really tough to get media coverage for organizations like yours. That's why we need to hear from Phil, because he employs the scrappy, entrepreneurial tactics that you will need in order to get your message out there.

For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 148's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Small-to-mid-sized businesses make up half of the economy. When surveys are done on why one company is chosen over another, buyers most-commonly cite the people as the main factor why they buy from them.

It's great that the founders or select team members are known by those buyers. But what about those who don't know them? How can they get a wider circle to know about their expertise and how excellent they are at what they do?

The vehicle that my guest believes does this better than anything else is public speaking.

Majeed Mogharreban is a professional speaker, world traveler, and founder of ExpertSpeaker.com. Speaking professionally for 10 years, Majeed has worked with the United Nations, Fairtrade, celebrities, politicians, Olympic medal winners, CEOs, and top entrepreneurs to give speeches and tell stories that change the world.

He is the author of the international best-seller "Expert Speaker: 5 Steps To Grow Your Business With Public Speaking"

He is the highest-rated trainer in the world at Learning Tree International. Majeed resides in Quebec, Canada.

For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 147's page on the Funnel Reboot site.