Funnel Reboot

Do you own a Crystal ball to predict the future? No? Well, I have good news for you. You don't need one. When you feed lots of historicals into a machine, it doesn't have to know what those numbers mean in business terms. Thanks to sophisticated data models, machines can determine the trends behind your numbers, including a pretty accurate prediction of what the next numbers in the series will be.

That's not all there is to data science though. Our guests believe it's what takes our analytical abilities up the evolutionary ladder, from what happened, to how it happened, to how it might happen.

This episode talks about how cloud computing, which crunches these numbers, has changed data science, doing everything that high-end servers used to do, at a fraction of the cost. It also covers the skillsets of the people needed to help machines work. To learn about how you can start implementing data science in your marketing, I'm joined by two people who are well versed in the field.

Richard Fergie lives in the UK. He showed a penchant for math, which led him to Oxford University where he took his bachelors in mathematics. After spending time living in South America, he moved home and took a liking to the quant-heavy world of pay per click marketing. He has taken the 10 years of experience he got consulting on digital marketing and web analytics projects to found Forecast Forge, a quick and accurate forecasting tool that runs on Machine Learning.

Brett was an early SaaS pioneer and helped change the PR industry by creating one of the first companies to develop a real-time media monitoring and analysis platform that was able to successfully generate business intelligence from both traditional and social media.

Brett would lead the company as both the CEO and chief architect and developer of the platform as well as being awarded 2 patents.

Brett led his company through several significant transitions, including recognizing the need for big data and machine learning capabilities very early on as well as recognizing the importance of social media.

Brett also identified the need for both journalist and publication data from the aspect of creating new markets as well as leveraging the data to further improve the analytics.

Brett's company, MediaMiser, would be acquired in 2014.

Brett would later go on to improve his own analytical capabilities by achieving certifications in both data science and AI from the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto.

Brett also has a bachelor's degree from Western University and a diploma in PR and communications from Algonquin College.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Episode 84's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

The most common frustration I hear from people boils down to the phrase "I don't know why it's not working." This isn't verbatim what people say, but that's the gist. They have painstakingly built a series of offers and paid for traffic to see them, but the conversion rates drop off somewhere between there and the point where sales close. Can their funnel be fixed? Absolutely, but not without knowing a critical piece of data. Getting that data that helps fix the suboptimal parts of the funnel is our focus today.

To go through this I'm joined by Keith Perhac, a digital marketing expert and software entrepreneur. After growing up in the states, he headed to Japan to become what's known there as a salaryman. He moved back In 2010 to work with startups and digital marketers looking to grow quickly. He founded SegMetrics, a tool that lets you see revenue from the perspective of each touchpoint in your marketing funnel. Since then, he's appeared on over 35 podcasts & in 2020 published the book we're here to discuss, "Building Marketing Funnels that Convert, a 90 minute guide"

When he's not working on SegMetrics, Keith draws and attempts (futilely) to spend more time outdoors. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Episode 83's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

W. Chan Kim, author of Blue Ocean Strategy, said "The hardest battle is simply to make people aware of the need for a strategic shift"

I somehow feel that he was thinking of marketers with this phrase. We are changing the minds of our buyer so they'll choose our brand. To do that we are often changing our companies to produce the value our buyers expect. And changing the status quo in some companies means overcoming a lot of lethargy. This takes someone who's courageous, as today's author argues, it takes a renegade.

Drew Neisser is the founder of the marketing agency Renegade and Is the host of the podcast Renegade Thinkers Unite. Drew has been featured on network TV, many podcasts and writes a regular column for Ad Age. He talked to me from his Manhattan office about his 2nd book, Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands which came out in 2021.

• Have the traits of cool marketing CATS: Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful, Scientific
• Reverse your targeting – start with employees, then customers, then prospects
• If your content isn't of legitimate value to your customers, then don't release it
• Work with your CFO to radically simplify your metrics (8 KPIs or less).
• Don't overspend on martech, watch how much headcount it takes to manage the automation technology you take on
• Leave 10-20% of your budget for experiments
• Get your value proposition down to 8 words or less.
• Sell through service:think of what your customers would consider valuable; give it without regard to charging them for it.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Episode 82's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

It's been amazing, what we've achieved by connecting up computers world-wide, webbing them together. As its full name suggests, we gave ourselves an Inter-network that provides for our every information need, on command. But there is one change that the Internet made to us, it gave us more stimulus than our biology was made to handle. The demand for our attention suddenly exceeded the supply; and this economic shift is most noticeable in the world of advertising. The digital advertising marketplace has gotten more vast, more confusing, and it's far less clear what the rules are anymore.

Thankfully, there's been a lot of research at the intersection of advertising and human attention. Effective marketers who are aware of the trends can tune their advertising to make their brands heard and win the attention of their target audience.

To get the latest insights into this, we're talking to the author of the book, Paid Attention which just came out in 2022 with a revised edition.

Faris Yakob grew up in the UK and after graduating from Oxford University, led the digital innovation efforts at global ad agencies like McCann Erickson and MDC Partners. Following that, he and his wife Rosie co-founded Genius Steals, an innovation and strategy consultancy.

He also serves as a juror for marketing awards like the Clios and the London International Awards. He's also been a member of a non-profit consortium called the Attention Council that aims to better measure the influence of marketing on people's attention. Clearly someone who likes the written word, in addition to his books he puts out a monthly column in Admap and the Marketing Society.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Episode 81's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

When used properly, LinkedIn Company pages carry a ton of marketing value.

To help us learn how to leverage these assets, I asked Michelle Raymond to join me.

As a LinkedIn Pages Specialist, she helps businesses of all sizes use Company Pages to amplify personal brands, build up business credibility.

She is a Member of the SMB Advisory Council for LinkedIn Pages, a Top 1% LinkedIn Content Creator. She started using LinkedIn for social selling around six years ago for doing sales, using only the LinkedIn free tools. Closing deals convinced her of the power and she has branched out to using it for Digital Marketing.

In 2021 she and Co-author Lynnaire Johnston came out with a book called Business Gold: Build Awareness, Authority and Advantage with LinkedIn Company Pages.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Episode 80's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

Digital marketer isn't one of those occupations that kids in school blurt out when they are asked "what do you want to be when you grow up?" Thankfully, a book came out in 2019 that lays out very plainly many of the things I wish I'd known when I joined this profession. Becoming a Digital Marketer has elements that are tactical but it also weighs in on existential questions like 'what kind of lifestyle can I have being in this field?' and 'should I work client-side, agency-side, or be my own boss?" Though I've been at this for decades, I'll admit that I learned a number of things in the book, both about marketing and about Kombucha, which was the product used throughout the book's marketing tales.

Once our guest, Gil Gildner, got out of school, he worked in media for NGOs, where he traveled to over 45 countries, wore hazmat suits in Ebola units, and rode Ugandan motorcycles. Realizing that he wanted to survive into his thirties, he started doing marketing for a company that sold around-the-world airfares. It's in this company where he met his wife Anya, a paid search specialist. Listen to our conversation for more of the interesting story of how Gil and Anya wrote this book and founded an agency which they operate from wherever they are. Today he happens to be in his hometown of Fayetteville Arkansas, near Walmart world Headquarters

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Episode 79's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

Lots of experts have said that AI is transformational to business. Call me cynical, but when you look at how the average marketing team functions in 2022, it doesn't seem like much of our work has been transformed. My guest today, a mainstream marketer who hadn't been influenced by all the hype, will share her appraisal of AI's practical uses.

Cathy McPhillips is a longtime Cleveland-based marketer who has worked in corporate, agency-side, as well as owning a small business. She worked for years with the Content Marketing Institute which was led by Joe Pulizzi (who was on Episode 56 of the show). Nearly a year ago, she joined the Marketing AI institute as chief growth officer, but admittedly with very little hands-on experience with AI.

Brought on to grow the relatively new institute in a hurry, Cathy's gotten up to speed on how to use these tools. She'll tell us her story, including how the way we traditionally do things has to change in order to get the benefits of AI. Cathy lists many resources and tools, which have been compiled into a table that's in the show notes. I hope by listening to Cathy, you'll try some of them out, and come away as excited as she is about how AI can be a superpower for today's marketing.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Episode-78's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.

Two things are required to get a clear view of Revenue Growth. First, the two groups must come together to jointly-define the thresholds at each stage of a lead's lifecycle. Second, they must apply points to a lead's every action, either manually or by layering automation on this process. My guest believes that lead scoring systems not only bring pipeline visibility, they improve the collaboration between Sales & Marketing. In fact, he claims that by pooling their information on leads and letting AI find the patterns, they can tell when a lead is ready to buy, upsell, or churn.

Gary Amaral held several positions at places like at BlackBerry & Hootsuite, always at the intersection of marketing and sales. Seeing how poor scoring led to frustration for all involved, he joined forces with two other serial startup entrepreneurs.

In 2020 they co-founded Breadcrumbs, which is a revenue acceleration platform based on a co-dynamic lead scoring and routing engine. Listen for Gary's advice on what you need to do to get scoring right. Just as good communication helps keep couples together, the Sales & marketing relationship needs good communication on the status of leads. Lead scoring could very well be the glue in this marriage.

• George Box's quote "All models are wrong. Some are useful"
• Zero party data - optional information that the consumer chooses to willingly provide to a company
• ABM - Account-based Marketing
• Codynamic lead scoring, originally developed by Eloqua
• Breadcrumbs.io's Revenue Cafe podcast and revenue acceleration manifesto
• Gary's email & LinkedIn Profile
• You can also check out these episodes involving lead scoring:
• Ep 48 with Casey Cheshire, reviewing the book "Marketing Automation Unleashed"
• Episode 14 with Lindsay Sykes

Download Breadcrumb.io's lead scoring template

For more detail, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-77-stop-arguing-over-leads-start-scoring-them-with-gary-amaral/

There's no shortage of things to do in paid media marketing.

There are so many options available for automating what the platforms do. Those of us who have taken the plunge into automation all agree it makes sense, both the logical kind and even literal cents, the currency kind. Yet many still resist automation. Not really resist, but given all the things each ad platform does, and all the third-party tools out there, the problem some have is knowing where to begin.

Our guest today can help us there. Ameet Khabra has spent the last decade figuring out why people do what they do online, what prompts them to take action, and how to use this insight to make marketing work better. She uses that experience in her agency, Hop Skip Media, to design campaign strategies for clients and teach future generations of PPC pros at the university level. Ameet loves her dogs Luke and Leia & the Dallas Cowboys, and Celine Dion songs.

Listen to her take on where this goes right, and in cases like Google Ads' optimization-scored recommendations, where this can go wrong.

For more details and links, please visit Episode 76's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Today we're going to talk about the limits to growth marketing, aka "growth hacking." In his book "Growth Hacker Marketing," Ryan Holiday defines this person as:

"A growth hacker is someone who [works] with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users." There's nothing wrong with this practice per se. But there are stages in an industry's life cycle where it's the wrong approach. You can't, for example, continuously improve a metric when there's no data to base the metric on in the first place. There are other industries where privacy or perceptions require you to use a different approach.

This is the world that Ned Nadima lives in. Growing up in Ottawa, he now spends much of his time in Newfoundland, studying and working as a marketer in the Biotech industry

His main passions are growing businesses that involve neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He avidly follows his crossfit routine and practices optimal living, experimenting with fasting, sleep hacking, diet and other ways to promote longevity. Like Ryan Holiday, he's also into stoic philosophy.

Listen to Ned explain what you CAN do when you CAN'T growth hack.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show are on Ep 75's showpage on the Funnel Reboot site.