Funnel Reboot

The book we talk about in this show is #15 on the Amazon Best Seller list for Internet Marketing. Not to take anything away from past guests, but if you only listen to one of the 50 interviews we have done, I hope that you choose this one.

I think most marketers have heard of the Content Marketing Institute. The public figure at the centre of CMI, Joe Pulizzi, started it all with a blog post on April 26, 2007 "Why Content Marketing" His hypothesis in 2007 was that companies who put content on the internet would build relationships that blossom into future customers. He then went about literally putting out content that taught others how to do this. Once they came to the CMI site and got this free content, he would sell them everything from newsletters, to magazines, to training, and an annual Content Marketing World event.

For me personally, the story picks up in 2014 when I started listening to Joe's podcast with Robert Rose on the podcast series, This Old Marketing. I found this giving-away-expertise tactic to be quite unorthodox, as I was accustomed to thinking that companies should mainly communicate with their audience through advertising. Listening to them influenced how I've come to see content marketing's value.

While CMI was evangelizing how to grow a business on content, Joe didn't keep any secret about how well he was doing with growing his business. Already a bestselling author of several books, he came out in 2015 with Content Inc, that gave out the blueprint he was using. A year after it came out, he sold CMI in 2016 to the International Events company UBI.

He may have finished with CMI, but over the next few years, he stayed close to both corporate and entrepreneurial content creators. His keen focus on them led him to pitch his publisher on a second edition of the book, which rounds out the model by sharing the rest of his own journey of monetizing a Content-based business. the second edition that came out this year. I was amazed as I read it; so many new examples, all the updates on marketing channels, it's a total overhaul from the first edition.

This is one high-energy conversation. I was already pumped to talk to Joe, I'm not going to lie, and it seems we both got pretty keyed up as we spoke.

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned are on Episode 56's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

No matter where you look around in today's world, you use things that were conceived and built by engineers. There were engineering-minded thinkers in ancient times like Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci. industrial age thinkers like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built on their ideas, to manufacture many things that improved the quality of our daily lives. Since then, engineers like Alan Turing, Thomas Watson and David Packard ushered in an electronic revolution that gave us the technology that makes possible the communication we're having right now.

Engineers are great. But, they are also a breed apart. They have a stereotype of being way too exacting for most people's liking. They put a new spin on the proverbial glass half-full or half empty debate. While the Pessimist says "The glass is half empty" and the Optimist says "The glass is half full," The Engineer does some measuring and pronounces "The glass is exactly twice the size that it needs to be."

They also have a reputation for being notoriously tough to market to. Today's guest knows how to reach engineers, and in her 2020 book Content Marketing, Engineered, she gives us a formula so we can reach them as well.

Wendy Covey is a co-founder of TREW Marketing, an Austin, TX-based agency that serves technical industries such as engineering design and hardware manufacturing. Prior to starting the agency in 2008 Wendy produced global marketing and services programs at National Instruments. Another side of Wendy you should know about is how she loves outdoor recreations - in fact she is the current holder of a Texas fishing record.

The newest book in our #SummerMarketingBooks series talks about how to take sales & marketing beyond the printed or spoken word.

Our guest Tyler Lessard has worked at high-flying tech companies like BlackBerry and lives in the Waterloo Ontario high-tech hub with his wife and four kids. Whenever he speaks on stage or is a guest on a show, he talks about how to modernize the way sales and marketing people communicate. I consider him to be a marketer's marketer. What I mean by that is he's dialed in to marketing tech, so seeing him come out with a book in 2020 called, The Visual Sale, I knew I needed to pay more attention to video.

Listen in the show for the reasons why he thinks today's buyers expect us to show up visually, not just in text they read or orally over the phone. He walks us through how to make videos seen when prospects are researching a purchase, when they are ready to decide and even after the sale. Most importantly, take it from a guy who describes himself as a hacky video creator, how little you need to get started shooting video.

4 E's of Video:

• Educational
• Engaging
• Emotional
• Empathetic

Marshall McLuhan assertion that "The Medium is the Message"

How Walt Disney appeared on video (we've moved past this kind of talking head video)

• Retrofoam of Michigan weekly video series "Foam U"
• Marketo
• Co-Author Marcus Sheridan's book: They Ask, You Answer
• The book's companion site TheVisualSale.com.
• Tyler's profiles: Personal site, LinkedIn and Twitter
• Past episodes of the Creating Connections show on YouTube and Apple podcasts
• Tyler is VP Marketing at Vidyard, a video tool used by B2B companies for marketing and selling.

Great quote from his book: "If you don't think that video can do a better job than text on a webpage or text in an email, think again!"

Has this ever happened in your career?

• Sales told you that a deal was lost even though you have a superior product
• You've seen the positioning statements listed in your website or in your ads twisted by your competitors, to exploit some weakness
• You saw an industry award or splashy press go to a competitor rather than to you
• You faced a rival brand undercutting your pricing to grab your market share

It's maddening when this happens, but the truth is, marketers don't get participation ribbons. Each of these things may be unfair, but they are also situations where you could have grabbed the upper hand and reaped the benefit over your competitor.

That's the premise of the book Unfair Marketing (follow link for free copy) which came out in 2021, written by David Rodnitsky He is the founder of 3Q Digital, an agency that has over 350 digital marketers devoted to advertising, analytics, decision science, strategic consulting, creative, and conversion rate optimization. Many of 3Q's clients are in silicon valley, which is where they are based. You would no doubt know the names of the companies they serve.

For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-52-unfair-marketing-with-david-rodnitzky-summer-books/

Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov was famously beaten in 1997 by a supercomputer built by dozens of IBM technologists. A Slate article looking at how Deep Blue changed chess said "The change here wasn't just that a computer could win, but that a computer could help human players win if incorporated into their training regimes effectively."

The same thing is happening with PPC Platforms. Since 2011, Google has been integrating AI into many of their products, and every campaign feature Google Ads rolls out seems to take away control from us humans and give it to their machines. So if we're going to follow Kasparov' lead and get better at this game with the AI, the question becomes, what's the process for training an ad platform's AI, when it's writing programming that only it knows, and even the technologists running it don't know?

Some answers are contained in the book Digital Marketing in an AI World. Fred Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as Google's AdWords Evangelist. Today he serves as Co-Founding CEO of Optmyzr, a PPC management software system. Fred is a fixture on the marketing conference circuit and blazed new trails with online industry learning through Optmyz's PPC Town Halls.

• Google Ads Scripts: One compilation by Fred's company and another by RankHammer
• Tools like Google Ads Seasonality Adjustment and GA4 Data filters, that train Google to omit anomalous periods by imputing data they should not factor into their machine learning models.
• Vickrey Auction system used by PPC platforms
• Google Ad Customizers
• SKAGs: Single Keyword Ad Groups
• Follow Fred on his Twitter or LinkedIn profiles for info on his upcoming book, "Unlevel the Playing Field"
• Company co-founded by Fred, Optmyzr

Episode Reboot:

Remember, computers have a different kind of smarts than us.

Are you looking at how your marketing can use AI? That's good if you are, but it's not enough to know how it works. Whether you are embedded in marketing operations or you're an executive who oversees it, you must also figure out how to get your organization to buy into AI. You'll need stakeholders who own precious data, you'll need knowledge experts to train your models, you'll possibly need operations folks to change what they deliver...as AI informs what you offer. Lastly, you'll need money - getting that money will take you proving that investing in AI yields a positive ROI. So by now, you're probably wondering how you can implement AI. Well, if you are, you will definitely be interested in the framework called the "The AI Marketing Canvas"

It's all detailed in a book by the same name, co-authored by Raj Venkatesan, along with Jim Lecinski.

Professor Venkatesan is a professor at the Darden School of Business at U of Virginia. He is also a co-author of the book Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics. Before coming to Darden, Venkatesan taught graduate students at the University of Connecticut. There, he was the recipient of the MBA Teacher of the Year Award. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Houston and his B.E. in computer engineering from the University of Madras. He has consulted with firms in the technology, retailing, media, industrial goods and pharmaceutical industries.

For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-51-the-ai-marketing-canvas-with-raj-ventakesan-summer-books/

This is the fifth book of our "Summer Books" series and we're even going social with the hashtag, #SummerMarketingBooks on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. This book focuses on Pay-Per-Click marketing, and whether you do any PPC yourself or outsource, you should be aware of how much of a ground-shaking shift artificial intelligence is making here. Remember that Google & Facebook have been investing enormous sums of money on AI. Their ad empires pretty much run on AI now, and it's vaulted them to become two of the world's top 10 companies.

While acknowledging that this sounds ominous for advertisers, our author believes that by joining with them on campaign automation, we can actually thrive. Our author's seen this shift happen first-hand, as part of the NY-based agency Adventure Media, where he serves as COO. his book, Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the age of Automation, came out in 2020.

For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-50-join-or-die-digital-advertising-in-the-age-of-automation-by-patrick-gilbert-summer-books/

This is the fourth episode in our Summer Books series.

Anyone who's joined a Twitter chat or attended a conference session about it knows that discussing PPC stirs up strong opinions. The criticisms around Google, with its near-monopoly, grow louder and louder. Whether it's making their auction more competitive, their campaigns more automated, or their data reporting more opaque, it seems that everyday there's something Google does to tick off its users.

It is against this backdrop that Kirk published "Ponderings of a PPC Professional" in 2020. For the last decade, Kirk's agency, ZATO marketing, has specialized in Google Shopping Ads. His moral compass clearly points towards what's best for the advertisers that are his clients. Kirk is not afraid to tackle these things head-on. In some areas, the book offers a philosophical slant, keeping it fresh for whatever a PPC marketer in the future might be grappling with.

For complete Show Notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-49-ponderings-of-a-ppc-professional-by-kirk-williams-summer-books/.

Our book is "Marketing Automation Unleashed" by Casey Cheshire. From 2011 to 2021, Casey was the Founder of Cheshire Impact a From Nashua, New Hampshire-based consultancy focused on Pardot. He is the host of the Hard Corps Marketing Show which has just blown past its 250th episode. You'll also find him sharing his views on marketing automation at industry events including Dreamforce.

Prior to Cheshire impact, Casey served in the U.S. Marine Corps and he maintains that physical stamina as a skydiver, mountaineer, triathlete.

He released the book in 2019 and I have not only read it but gifted it to others.

For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-48-marketing-automation-unleashed-by-casey-cheshire-summer-books

Marketers know that Artificial Intelligence is being integrated into our work, but many are unsure how they can apply it to their daily work. Our guest is Christopher S. Penn, the author of AI for Marketers: A Primer and Introduction, just out in its 3rd edition.

Our guest is an authority on analytics, digital marketing, and marketing technology. A recognized thought leader, best-selling author, and keynote speaker. He has been named by IBM as a Champion in IBM Analytics.

Chris is a cofounder and Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights, a Boston -based digital analytics firm. He is co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. He has also run the marketing for a series of startups in the financial services, SaaS software, and public relations industries.

For complete show notes, please visit: https://funnelreboot.com/episode-47-ai-for-marketers-by-chris-penn-summer-books/