Funnel Reboot

In this episode I'm giving you the process that's used in my agency's work to get B2B companies onto Google's full analytics stack. This episode is split into two parts.

Installing GA4 (from 1:30 to 10:45) – For the first third of this episode, I go through the steps that companies should follow to install GA4, including setting up streams, conversions and links to Google Ads accounts.

Installing Google and third party components for consolidated analysis and visualization of your marketing data (10:45 to end) – the remaining time roams through the rest of the tools that give a complete picture of your B2B funnel.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00 - Intro to getting all your data in BigQuery

1:30 - Installing Google Analytics 4

10:45 - Setting up a complete set of your funnel's data on BigQuery

27:33 - Conclusion

For more details on the process, go to Ep 116's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

The funnel is dead. Long live the Persuasion Experience. That's the view of my guest today.

Alisha Conlin Hurd did something that's rare for people in their 20s by turning a side hustle into an agency that she co-founded. Their firm, Persuasion Experience, works on marketing brands that require funnels for lead generation, SaaS, and consumer branding.

She shares experiences learned working for every kind of brand, from emergency plumbers and home builders, to Brazilian butt lifts and porn addiction counselors.

• Alisha Conlin-Hurd – YouTube
• Alisha's Twitter profile
• Eugene Schwartz
• The podcast, Unapologetically Ambitious, which she co-hosts

You may also be interested in past Funnel Reboot episodes related to this topic:

• 16: Role of UX in a site's marketing effectiveness, with Farhad Khan
• 65: The theory and Practice behind CRO, with Deborah O'Malley
• 77: Stop arguing over leads; start scoring them, with Gary Amaral

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-115-optimizing-experiences-that-convert-with-alisha-conlin-hurd/

We don't have the right to retain our visitors' information just because it's possible on the internet.

Complying with data privacy laws can be a confusing, stressful process. We help businesses embrace a new way of working with data, going beyond compliance to create a privacy-friendly strategy that builds trust with customers.

Jodi Daniels is a privacy consultant. She founded Red Clover Advisors in 2017, and through it, she assists companies to create privacy programs, build customer trust and achieve privacy law compliance. Jodi also serves as a Fractional Chief Privacy Officer to small and medium companies. Through frequent speaking appearances and her own podcast, she shares practical tips so companies can carrying on marketing, but in a way that's compliant and ethical.

She holds a BBA and an MBA from Emory University, and lives with her family in Atlanta.

For more details on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 114's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Designing Websites involves dealing with Domain Registrars, Hosting Providers, CMSs, Page templates and scripts that run forms. We haven't even mentioned the things visitors see like text, images and audiovisual assets. It's a lot.

My guest has set out to take the complexity out of all this. Knowing that we learn best when we're absorbed in a story, he rolled all his principles into a book geared for anyone who's been handed the keys to a website or work with a web designer.

Patrick Villemaire is the founder of Blue Eclipse Inc, a Canadian web agency. His passion is making the web a better place and he has been building websites for over 20 years.

Patrick is a graduate of McMaster University with a double major in Multimedia and Communications, and a minor in English. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, son and a barking dog. Outside of building websites, he likes to listen to music and play the occasional game of hockey.

For more details on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 113's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

People focus too much on posting content and not enough on asking what content they should post. We can easily get on a treadmill, writing about topic after topic. This results in treating everything as a fluff-piece, overlooking the power of content. And though this hyperactivity may look good on our status reports, and please the search engines, is that who really matters in this endeavour?

I'm reminded of the movie Jurassic Park, as financier John Hammond briefs mathematician Ian Malcolm on how the dinosaurs. Malcome scolds him for tinkering with the building blocks of life.

In the same way, we should think about the person consuming our content, pausing not only to ask if we can create a piece of content for them, but to ask if we should create it.

Judging what content gets made is a time-honoured skill. News media and the publishing industry have formalized it into the role of the editor. Today we'll talk with someone with an editorial background, to learn how they think, so we can judge our content just like they do.

My guest spent 16 years as senior-level journalist and editor at top Canadian newsrooms, such as The Globe and Mail, CBC.ca and the Ottawa Citizen. Melanie then directed the content for non-profits and organizations like Export Development Corporation.

She's happy to share what she's learned about Digital Communications on the stage at TEDx, or as a lecturer at Carleton University, where she originally received her journalism degree.

She has now moved into creating content under her own banner as Owner of Big Stride Media. She lives in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, with her husband and two sons.

• Melanie's firm, Big Stride Media
• Melanie on LinkedIn
• Her newsletter, "Owning the Story"
• Intel's impactful story-based adThe disastrous experience Subway had with their spokesperson Jared

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-112-owning-the-story-with-melanie-coulson/

There is a lot at stake when Companies develop some technological or physical product. But they face an equally high risk in getting the product positioning right. Weak positioning can mean the difference between success or failure.

When we don't have our positioning nailed, it's as if we're talking to someone who doesn't speak our language. And when they don't acknowledge us, we repeat the same message even louder, as if that will get our point across. For those who remember John Cusack 80s films, you might be familiar with the movie Better Off Dead's scene with a French foreign exchange student having dinner with her American host family.

Shouting doesn't work when you're using the wrong language, and it doesn't work with the wrong positioning either. Luckily, someone has come up with the process for finding the best positioning for our product, saving our market from being subjected to random jargon.

April Dunford was a startup executive, running sales, marketing and product at seven B2B technology startups over the course of 25 years. She is now a consultant who has had the privilege of bringing her positioning expertise to more than 100 companies. She codified her process in the 2019 book "Obviously Awesome," which makes these ideas about positioning accessible to any company

• Scene from Better off Dead (mentioned segment starts at 1:30)
• Violinist Joshua Bell
• Net Promoter Score
• Wordle
• Clayton Christiansen

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-111-obviously-awesome-with-april-dunford/

We humans are good at dealing with small numbers. So good, scientists have coined the word Subitizing to describe how we know small numbers as well as the back of our hand. The opposite is also true. We can't differentiate big numbers. We know that 10 to the power of 10 is bigger than 10 to the power of 9, but how much bigger? Even on hearing that they differ by a factor of billions, we stumble to gauge that kind of scale.

This puts those of us who present numbers in a pickle. Historical greats like Florence Nightingale had a terrible time presenting her data to government leaders. She broke with convention, framing everything in terms of soldiers not statistics, to argue how to prevent needless deaths in military hospitals. The book in today's show explains methods used by her & others to convey numbers that the brain has a hard time grasping.

Knowing tactics that worked for Florence, should at the very least help us convince management to approve our marketing initiatives.

Since graduating with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from NYU, Karla has written columns for Medium and appeared on NPR and CBS Sunday Morning. She has also written for many magazines and won an award for the Best Science/Health story from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her first book was Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others. We're talking today about the second book Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, with Chip Heath

For more details, please visit the show's page at https://funnelreboot.com/episode-110-making-numbers-count-with-karla-starr/

William of Ockham - 1287 – 1347 was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and catholic theologian, born in a small village in Surrey England. He had a way of reducing explanations down to their essential core, frequently and effectively showing that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon was usually the right one. Ockham used this so much, his name has become associated with this principle - which we know today as Occam's razor.

Dan White graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He is equally passionate about using imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. If people understand and remember an idea thanks to a clever framework or visual metaphor they will be able to use it in their day-to-day work. You can consider his book Smart Marketing to help you apply Occam's Razor to today's marketing problems.

All the people, products and concepts mentioned are linked in Episode 109's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

In 1942 economist Joseph Schumpeter claimed at the core of our economic system was a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." He called it creative destruction

Half a century later, Harvard professor Clayton Christiansen wrote in "The Innovator's Dilemma" that "By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption…The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption."

Which of these two is telling the truth? They both are, it depends on companies and the individuals within them. It's up to them whether they will change with the times or be left behind.

My guest today is Engelina Jaspers, who has experienced revolving-door CEOs, business course-corrections and lots of reinventions during her 30-year corporate career. Across all her VP leadership roles — marketing, brand strategy, environmental sustainability, corporate communications — none escaped disruption. After being tapped to lead multiple company-wide transformations, Engelina became a student and teacher of business and career agility.

These experiences led her to develop the MARKETING FLEXOLOGY Management Framework™ — a mindset and a toolset for future-proofing your career, your team and your marketing platform. Engelina shares marketing agility know-how in her book, presentations and workshops so you, too, can anticipate and prosper from unplanned change.

The people, products and concepts mentioned in episode 108 can be found on the showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

Email is a powerful medium. At minimum, it serves a company's need for transacting with vendors & customers, etc. But some companies go much further, putting it at the centre of their business. The author of today's book, has done this in three distinct businesses. How did he get there? Just listen to his story.

In his primary school years, Matt Paulson played games like SimCity on his family's PC. Keen to share what he learned with other fans, he made a website and watched as visitors started coming by the hundreds. Learning that you could make money by putting banner ads on your site, he signed his little website up and small cheques started rolling in. But for the time being, it just served him as a way to make pocket money.

Like many University students, he found himself in the middle of his studies, needing money to cover tuition costs. The college newspaper had part-time job openings for writers. Between that and taking freelance gigs on ProBlogger, mainly about personal finance, he managed to get by.

Matt then fused his writing skills with selling banner ads like he'd done before. He launched a finance blog that generated about the same income as you'd make on a computer science graduate's salary. He made many websites along this theme, and because they were highly dependent on Google's algorithm for traffic, they rode some high highs and low lows. In the aftermath of one rankings smackdown, he resolved to never give a tech platform the power to damage his business like this.

The solution was to manage their own content distribution. That meant showing their brand on a variety of finance portals, but also networking directly with their audience, getting them used to seeing the site's brand in places like their email inbox. So they launched an email newsletter. That newsletter, called MarketBeat, now has three million email subscribers. Financial product companies pay top dollar to advertise in the newsletter, to get a piece of the one million monthly outbound clicks it receives. Along with premium subscription products, this business now employees thirteen people and grosses more than $25 million in top-line annual revenue.

You now know the story of a young guy who founded an email empire. And while he's proud of it, he's equally passionate about living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota with his wife and 3 young kids.

Links to the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 107's page on the Funnel Reboot site.