Funnel Reboot

When you hear the words "Manufacturing" or "Industrial," it probably conjures up pictures of smoke-billowing factories somewhere in the American rust belt in the mid-20th century. Those hay days are long gone, that sector's jobs, which used to account for half of all jobs in the 1950s, had slid to less than 10% by 2009. The last dozen years though, have brought something of a renewal to manufacturing. Thanks to the Internet of Things, specifically the Industrial IOT movement, many companies are now making 'smart' products that scoop up data about their own health and how they're being used, a real goldmine for the products' makers. Thanks to Moore's law, they are designing things faster and cheaper, 3D printing takes the minimum number you need to fabricate from huge lots down to single units. The outlook for manufacturing jobs in the 2020's in places like the US is rosy, with 13 Million workers, producing a total of $2.00 trillion in goods, or a fifth of the entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product). It's not only a good time for manufacturing production people, it's good for the marketers that work there too.

My guest today is someone who embodies this upbeat outlook. Caine Ruckstuhl is Head of Marketing, North America for CAREL. He has worked with clients in highly engineered products in Manufacturing businesses, much of it in the HVAC & Humidification space. He knows what it's like to be in an environment dominated by engineers, who are notoriously numbers driven, and who aren't easily impressed by marketing.

He also has experience marketing consumer products, as his wife perceived young women demanding better hygiene in public washrooms, He and his wife created a brand of paper toilet seat covers in 2008, doing everything from designing, sourcing, distributing and of course marketing it. When Caine isn't flying around North America, South America and Europe, he can be found at home with his wife and a lot of very small dogs.

Listen to some excellent insights about this tough, quirky environment of marketing manufactured products. Hear what has worked for him, so you'll come away appreciating what it's like to be an industrial marketer.

Glenn's blog post on lessening importance of specs in marketing

For another episode on marketing engineered products, check out Episode 55.

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-74-marketing-manufactured-goods-with-caine-ruckstuhl/

If you have been a marketer for a while, odds are you have been helped by a mentor. The use of the word Mentor to mean someone who shares knowledge with a less-experienced colleague is relatively new in English. But the concept of a mentor can be found in cultures all over the world, Going back millennia.

If you have been helped by a mentor, a good question to ask yourself is, "should I start mentoring others?"

There are great benefits to doing this, provided you're well-matched with the person you're mentoring. One person who's been at both ends of the mentoring spectrum is Anu Adegbola, Director of Paid Search at Marin Software. Originally from Nigeria, Anu moved to the UK and got a bachelor's of computer science, with a master's in marketing. She is also one of PPC Hero's 25 Top Influencers for 2021.

Listen to her as she describes what internal traits to look for in a mentee you're considering working with, how senior marketers should balance advice on technical expertise with general professional advice, how to balance managing others and getting your job done, and how much you should open up about your own personal struggles to your mentee.

Enjoy the episode.

• How the archetype of Mentor began with a story in Homer's Odyssey
• Anu's profile on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Anu's #PPCChat Roundup Podcast

When you're asked to mentor someone, know that what you are saying yes to is primarily asking them questions. That's the best way you can help them.

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-73-marketing-mentors-with-anu-adegbola/

There's a counter-intuitive saying that goes: good fences make good neighbours. Nobody does marketing today completely by themselves. Whether we are in-house or are on the vendor-side, we always have partners in the mix, and most of us approach them in a neighbourly way. But there's one task in the relationship-forming process that makes most of us squirm - contracting

They contain what's important to both sides, so instead of springing them on the other party at the last minute, their contents should be shared early on, to help everyone get a feel for what they are getting into.

Our guest, Julie Bacchini, is a professional speaker, has been in the PPC space for over a decade and has been helping businesses grow online in one way shape or form for two decades, through her own consultancy, Neptune Moon.

Julie has been named on "top influencer" lists, including PPC Hero's Top 25 list perennially, making the list again this year, 2021.

She is also the Managing Director of PPC Chat, where paid search professionals gather weekly on Twitter to talk shop. She's known for her practical, rubber-meets-the-road outlook so who better to talk to about

contracts. She says contracts lay the foundation for good Vendor-Client relationships and argues that we shouldn't shy away from talking about them.

So let's go hear how to make contracts that are a win-win, with Julie Bacchini.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

According to Kirk Williams "contracts define and preserve the intent of the relationship.

Agreement subtopics covered:

• Service levels and days/times for communications responses, including timezones
• Upfront work such as discovery, setup of marketing creative/content/campaigns
• Expectations of both the vendor and the client
• Price structure, extra charges, frequency of invoicing and payment terms
• Legal protections for Intellectual property and force majeure interruptions.
• Termination and dispute resolution clauses

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-72-contracts-the-foundation-of-great-relationships-with-julie-bacchini/

As cliche as it sounds, Content is king. Digital marketing demands that we write, record, edit, and layout content. This precious material is used in prospect research or in client interactions, and it's up to us to anticipate their every content need. We rack our brains to imagine what questions they might have, and most of us have done everything we can think of to make the answers available. But there's one thing most marketers haven't done - that is structuring their site's content using Schemas.

These pieces of code matter enough to marketers that, even if we're not too technical, we should understand the basics of what they do. So I've brought someone who's so confident in the positive ROI schemas can bring companies, she and her cofounder built a business around it.

Martha van Berkel is the CoFounder and CEO of Schema App, an application that looks at your site and helps tag your content so search engine bots can crawl and read it.

Before starting this company, she earned a degree in Applied Math and Engineering, a certificate for Innovation and Strategy at MIT and managed technical services on a global scale at Cisco Systems. Whenever she gets the chance to speak or write, Martha takes the chance to encourage site owners to use proper, connected schema markup. Martha does all this, plus being a Mom and a rower, from her home in Guelph Ontario.

Get ready for an interview that will energize you to markup your site's content in order to stand out in search.

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-71-structured-data-stand-out-in-search-with-martha-van-berke/

Those of us who work in a marketing role or are marketing our own company can debate how this tactic is better than that tactic. Depending on which conference you attend or article you read, you'll get a different opinion. But there are a few elements that a company must have to make all of this possible – their web and social properties. These foundational assets are what everything else sits on top of, and though I may be preaching to the choir here, these basics must be properly managed, or it's all for nought.

My guest, Avery Swartz, has had her own business for 15 years. She's seen nearly every problem that can happen, through her experience as a web consultant. 10 years ago, she established CampTech, a company which holds workshops showing the right way to use marketing and website applications. So she knows whereof she speaks.

Her clear explanations of web technologies earned Avery spots on nationally-airing Canadian TV shows and on the radio. She also writes a tech column in one of Canada's national newspapers that reaches 6 million people a week. She's here today because in 2020 she authored a book covering the fundamentals of managing these pieces.

Listen as we cover everything from domain registration and maintenance, accessibility, privacy laws, PPC channels like Google Ads, marketing metrics and more.

For more details, please visit our page at https://funnelreboot.com/episode-70-see-you-on-the-internet-with-avery-swartz/

The act of rotating yourself with one foot anchored is called a pivot. This mechanism our bodies use to face a new direction provides the perfect analogy for how people should think as they move fully into digital marketing.

Our guest, Eric Schwartzman, is a digital marketing consultant, with over 20-years of experience serving clients such as Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, the United States Marine Corps, and hundreds of SMBs. In 2021 he published "The Digital Pivot: Secrets of Online Marketing" and he joins me on this episode to talk about digital pivots.

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-69-digital-pivot-with-eric-schwartzman/

Has this ever happened to you? You're working as a Marketer, either in-house or as the agency serving another business. You work earnestly to do what leadership asks. You might even be part of the leadership team, directing the marketing efforts. But inside, you're bugged by a question. While you architect campaigns, answer emails and sit in meetings, the question is there in the back of your head. You wish it had an answer, but that magic bullet keeps eluding you. It's "How are we going to grow?"

My guest says that growth can happen, but it's part of a larger challenge, and not just one that marketing has to tackle. For growth to happen, both marketing (who's got a pivotal role here) and the whole company have to retool themselves into an entity that can scale.

Felix Velarde began as an entrepreneur, starting a web design agency in 1994, when websites were just starting to be a thing. He then became a journeyman CEO for a string of digital agencies, eventually moving onto a role where he chaired those businesses. He has also been an adjunct professor at Hult International Business School and UK lead at Vint Cerf's People-Centered Internet coalition.

In 2014 Felix broadened the advisory role to other companies like tech startups, at which point he boiled the growth principles he'd learned down to a system that any businesses could use. In 2021 he published the playbook of his two-year program that he claims will triple a company's size, called "Scale at Speed"

Listen to how instrumental Felix considers the role that marketing plays in building the firm's proposition. Also watch who he says should be in charge of growth; it's probably not the roles you'd expect to be most effective at it.

For details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-68-scale-at-speed-with-felix-velarde/

Our talk doesn't start out sounding the way most sales & marketing talks do. That's because of the alarm being raised by our guest on the forces around us that are polluting our digital environment. Why does this matter? Because this sludge messes with our innate ability as humans to relate to each other, and without that personal connection, the ability for a buyer to gain enough trust to put their faith in your business is out of the question.

The book in question is Human-Centered Communication. It was co-authored by Stephen Pacinelli as well as our guest, Ethan Beute. He is VP of Marketing at BombBomb, a software company in Colorado Springs, CO that helps people create simple video messages. Prior to that: he ran marketing for local television stations on-air and online.

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-67-human-centered-communication-ethan-beute/

One of the basic principles taught in marketing is to suss out why someone buys a product. That seems a simple enough thing to do, but is it? What makes this complex is the fact that different jobs demand different products.

Let's say you're sending a physical object to someone who's on another continent. You aren't going to take it there yourself, so your likely option is to mail it. To you, the mail service fits the mold of the product you should buy in this case. But let's pretend this object is a birthday present and their birthday is tomorrow. Now, what you require is a 'it-absolutely-positively-has-to-get-from-here-to-there-overnight' product and for that, only a global courier like FedEx fits the mold. Not every product in a category suits the job the customer has in mind, so those of us selling products must know the job our product is bought to do. And these jobs can loosely be divided by whether they:

• help us improve something we may not feel an urgent need for – Vitamins
• immediately solve something we absolutely positively need – Painkillers

That's how someone I know describes these two job types. She's joining us to explain how knowing which type we have impacts positioning, customer service, product roadmapping and more.

Dipalli Bhatt is the head of marketing at Incognito Software Systems. She has 15 years of product and corporate marketing experience and has worked with organizations like Disney and TD Canada Trust which listed her as one of '30 under 30′ marketing professionals to watch. Honoured by Adobe as 'Fearless 50 Marketer 2019-2020' across the world.

She is a member of Forbes Communications Council and is involved in mentoring tech-startups and women in leadership. Dipalli also volunteers at Tie Ottawa Chapter and Invest Ottawa.

She has a Master of Business Administration from University of Ottawa

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-66-vitamins-vs-painkillers-with-dipalli-bhatt/