Funnel Reboot

We all want to know how to improve the number of conversions we get on our websites. A lot of the time, we try to do that by rearranging the layout or switch up page elements. Then we go to our dashboards, see if the number went up or down. You've probably spotted the flaw in this. This is circular reasoning, a change in customer behavior can't be proven by "looking back at data, trying to decide whether or not it was some sort of change that we made" As conversion expert, Matt Gershoff puts it. What's the right way to do this? It's simple, reverse the order of events and start off with your hunch about what you should change, run an experiment on your customers, proving or disproving if the thing you believe causes their behaviour actually has that effect.

This discipline is called CRO, which stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. There's someone who's superbly qualified to talk about this and I'm lucky to have known her for the past few years.

Deborah unknowingly ran her first optimization study in school at the age of 8, when she put her classmates through a science experiment where they looked at pieces of construction paper tacked on a bristol board. Little Deborah grew up to earn a master's of science degree, specializing in eye tracking technology. Today, Deborah applies her specialized skillset to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). She founded a well known resource website where she has published hundreds of client A/B test case studies. She also has a certificate in graphic design, giving her the blend of left and right-brain thinking that's just right for working in CRO.

Some things to listen for:

• Marketers who run paid search & paid social will want to listen to what she has to say about mixing traffic from various channels together.
• She explains what minimum traffic constraints we're under for A/B tests, and why with small volumes we're better to put 2-pages into a test where only 1 thing has changed, versus testing multiple pages or multiple variables at the same time
• She has some tips on how we can maintain objectivity as we run our tests and as we present the results to our leadership.

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-65-conversion-rate-optimization-with-deborah-omalley/

We all want to know how to improve the number of conversions we get on our websites. A lot of the time, we try to do that by rearranging the layout or switch up page elements. Then we go to our dashboards, see if the number went up or down. You've probably spotted the flaw in this. This is circular reasoning, a change in customer behavior can't be proven by "looking back at data, trying to decide whether or not it was some sort of change that we made" As conversion expert, Matt Gershoff puts it.

Before 2020, most interactions between sellers and buyers were done in-person, at industry conferences. To attract and retain customers, companies held their own seminars or user group events. Of course, none of us have been driving or jetting around for the past year and a half (I'm recording in late 2021) and as of now here in Canada and elsewhere, we have filled the void with virtual events.

These are more than just webinars, If you have attended one, it's likely been a paid affair, though cheaper than it's IRL counterpart. These virtual events enable you to interact with others, you can either take part in breakout sessions, ask speakers questions & take their polls, or sit at virtual tables to chat and network.

So while it's unclear whether we will keep using virtual events as much once face-to-face meetings return, there's no denying their powerful advantages.

I'm speaking to someone who knows more about virtual events than almost anyone. Jarrod Goldsmith has tons of experience running physical events and hosting exciting virtual events for others. He is better described as a Canadian small business community builder and is the embodiment of the small business spirit. He founded Sax Appeal (Canada's Premier Saxophone Ensemble), Jarrod also shares his passion for entrepreneurship through the eSAX Podcast series and the Pivoted Success Podcast which he co-hosts. You can also follow Jarrod on social media; he's easy to spot, he'll be wearing his ever-present Fedora.

All People/Products/Concepts mentioned have links in the Ep 64 Shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

The element of marketing that occupies the largest chunk of our time and energy is the collection of software tools that we use. We usually termed it as our technology stack. Some people have seen enough things done with tech stacks, they can spot the do's and don'ts that marketers should follow. I brought somebody on who I think is really good at this.

Dave Hicks is a front end digital marketing strategist, photographer and designer whose tools of choice are Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. He's also a backend developer who knows JavaScript, Jquery, Node.JS, Ruby and PHP. But what he's especially good at is making sure that the tech stack a company uses conforms to the marketing objective that the strategy calls for.

I met Dave through some of his community minded pursuits including his organization of live meet ups for social media and marketing folks in Ottawa. I also enjoy gawking at the creations he makes out of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's as a hobby. After doing a lot of moving around in his youth, he settled in Ottawa, where he lives and works on cool projects as a freelance marketer.

For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-63-marketing-stack-dos-and-donts-with-dave-hicks/

Our guest, Morgan Friedman, loved math as a kid, so it may not surprise you to know that his life as a marketing professional centred around pay-per-click, most recently as the CEO of a few digital agencies.

That's interesting in its own right, but when we step back to Morgan in his 20's, he was already doing different things than what I did at that age:

- He Cofounded "Overheard in New York.com," dubbed one of the coolest blogs by Time Magazine, it still exists 17 years later, with bazillions of pageviews.

- He published my two Amazon bestseller humor books.

- He ran an experiment to gauge human communication. He bet that good actors could convey story lines solely through body language, and he tested this by watching an entire season of the sitcom Friends without sound.

- He obtained a bachelor's degree from UPenn, with studies in English & History. Not just history, but Classics in particular

This last activity brings us to why he's here today. Classical philosophy influenced Morgan heavily, and he feels that philosophy can teach us much about marketing. As someone who's overseen a lot of client relations, he believes practicing thoughtfulness is a key ingredient to good agency-client collaboration.

As a mini pandemic project last year, Morgan put out some posts illustrating how various philosophers would adapt their approach to Pay-per-click marketing. Of course his posts were tongue-in-cheek, but they paved the way for today's conversation.

Listen to why philosophically inquiring about what we know helps us frame problems. Hear him tell how communicating with empathy impacts how well others understand us. I'm sure you'll catch these and other deep ponderings that have very practical application in our day-to-day digital marketing jobs

Episode Reboot. Please don't ever utter a sentence in conversation starting with "Obviously…."

All People/Products/Concepts mentioned have links in the Ep 62 Shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

What needs to be done with marketing data to make it usable?.

Essentially, it must be taken from its original source, formatted cleanly, and put into your database to be analyzed. This is handled by a process called ETL, Extract, Transform & Load. This process was done manually in olden days, but AI is now facilitating this task to be almost entirely done by technology.

Our guest can help us get familiar with how this works because he approaches it more from a marketer's perspective than a technical one. JD Prater has a background in the world of paid media marketing, probably the niche that's most famous for doing detailed analysis on large amounts of data. He has recently become Marketing Lead at Osmos, the maker of a tool that uses AI to help companies with ETL work. Besides that, JD has done marketing in-house at Amazon and Quora, and worked on brands while with a PPC agency. Besides that, he's well known for speaking on digital marketing and being involved with several podcasts, and when he's not on dad duty, you'll catch him somewhere in his home state of Oklahoma, out cycling on an open stretch of road.

For all links mentioned and more, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-61-tools-for-wrangling-marketing-data-with-jd-prater/

Do you know a marketer who is adept at using Google Ads or a similar platform to turn out a steady supply of leads? Like Liam Neeson in Taken, what these specialists "have are a very particular set of skills" Not only that, without a standard industry certification, the only way to see if someone possesses these rare skills is to divert some media budget and see what they do with real money.

Those that do well at this sort of thing can be described as having Multipotentiality or Renaissance qualities.

• Part-numbercruncher
• Part-editor
• Part-scientist
• part-librarian

Does such a person exist that can do all this? If there is, they may well be the Perfect PPC Professional. But even if there isn't, it falls to some of us to hire a person to run our paid ads, or we ourselves may be that person, who's figuring out which skills to develop. In either case, it's important to identify the right traits needed for this role.

Greg Finn has known how to run PPC marketing campaigns for more than a dozen years and now hires and develops people in this role. Many in digital marketing know him by the hundreds of articles in Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He founded the agency Cypress North with his partner Matthew Mombrea and is one of the hosts of the long-running podcast Marketing O'Clock.

Episode Reboot: Don't stop at just reading about a topic, write about it so you get a really good understanding of it.

All People/Products/Concepts mentioned have links in the Ep 60 Shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

I don't know if you frequent the same social channels that I'm using for the podcast: IG, TW and my personal LinkedIn feed. I've put posts for the last 3 years on those platforms and the one thing I can tell you is that without paid promotion, it takes real work to reach a decent audience.

I wanted to know how others play this game so I asked someone who started promoting things on Facebook 15 years ago. He's not on all the social channels and doesn't pretend to keep his Twitter account active, but for the company that's his day-job and the clients he serves through his agency, he knows how to use content that gets noticed.

Today's guest, Kyle Turk, has headed the marketing teams at both public and private sector organizations. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration from St Francis Xavier University, and is a recipient of Ottawa's Forty Under 40 award.

Listen for his explanation of how to conceive and create content. He also does a great job of outlining how social selling should work to smoothly shift from public commenting with someone to continuing the conversation through direct messaging.

Let's learn how to up our social media game, with Kyle Turk!

For full shownotes, please check https://funnelreboot.com/episode-59-strong-social-strategies-with-kyle-turk/

Voice technology is so prevalent, I'm giving a disclaimer on this episode that we'll refer to some voice assistants by name, so smart-speakers or digital assistants within earshot will, you know, notice.

Many of us may be users of voice recognition, but few of us know how to use it for marketing our companies. Coming up with applications is hard, with a platform whose interface is invisible. Few of us are exposed to the artificial intelligence behind it, so we can't picture what we'd do with it. As the Steve Jobs quote goes, "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

To help us with this, we'll talk with a company that launched a voice AI tool, and is happy to peel back the curtain on how this all works. Our guests are both from UCLab, a software development firm in Ottawa, where Debra is a Partner and Justin is CEO.

Listen for how this technology began with simple single-word commands, to where it can now process whole paragraphs containing advanced grammar structures. You'll learn how it goes beyond turning itself on or off, to interacting with calendars and documents. They will share how AI monitors which points someone brings up on a call and whether it was said in a positive or negative way, so before you talk again, you're ready for that objection. Also hear how detecting different human voices lets it assist with meetings by pulling out of the discussion, email them to people action items.

Bound to be some good ideas here for how to use this in your marketing or your work life.

For links to People/Products/Concepts Mentioned, go to show #58's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

If every part of your customer acquisition can be measured, you'll figure out how to do it profitably. That premise has driven why digital marketing, and especially Pay-per-click (PPC) is managed by experienced humans. These professionals scour through data for the relationship between a company's ads and the buyers actions; once found, budgets get shifted to achieve that optimal effect.

A wrench has been thrown into our acquisition dreams by the ad platform titans: Google, Facebook and Microsoft (who own LinkedIn). Thanks to major AI investments they have made in the last five years, they've been able to automate much of the work that marketing professionals have done. In tandem with implementing their 'smart' software that runs autonomously, they have been restricting a marketer's ability to manually control campaigns.

The platforms believe their AI is smart enough to run marketing, so we can either be passive, letting them spend our money as they see fit, or we can choose to give them navigational assistance while they drive. The point is, you should have a game plan that works with the platforms' AI. One that, over time, will generate the leads you need at the best possible acquisition cost.

I believe listening to this episode will give you that plan. It covers:

• How marketing has become more computationally complex than humans can handle
• What was in it for the platforms to automate PPC marketing
• Stages of maturity for dealing with data, ending with predictive analytics
• Why you shouldn't fight ad platform automation, but instead use your business data to train algorithms how to market you more effectively
• How you should integrate your in-house systems and apply data science to uncover insights

Links to all People/Products/Concepts Mentioned are available in the Shownotes