Julie Stoian, digital marketing consultant and tech coach at Create Your Laptop Life® and head coach and funnelbuilder at ClickFunnels talks about tools and training that can enable smaller company entrepreneurs in the online world to develop powerful, customized sales and marketing tools . . . without hiring expensive technical experts or big-budget marketing firms.

In this candid interview, former nationally-recognized social media blogger Julie Stoin discusses how divorce, a surprise pregnancy, a desire to impact the lives of more people, and business savvy inspired her to envision and invent what grew to be, in only a few years, a million-dollar-plus business. This initiative, Create Your Laptop Life, is a coaching program and course that has provided thousands of entrepreneurs with the needed skills and strategies to create, build, and grow profitable online businesses.

Julie also builds marketing funnels, writes, and coaches clients at Russell Brunson's ClickFunnels (https://www.clickfunnels.com/), a company that provides entrepreneur/owners at smaller companies with a comprehensive online marketing, sales, and product delivery tool. Components of this fast and effective do-it-yourself, plug-and-play tool include a central dashboard, a drag and drop webpage editor, sales funnel templates with conversion functionality, smart and up-sale capable shopping carts, affiliate program software, and email and FaceBook marketing automation.

Julie can be contacted at: juliestoian.com.or through her agency course, Proposal Secrets at: proposalsecrets.co,

Carrie Simpson, founder at Managed Sales Pros, Everywhere Managed, and THC Results (Las Vegas, Nevada and Winnipeg, Manitoba) put herself into the cold-calling business two decades ago as a stay-at-home mom—by cold-calling companies to sell her services as a cold-caller, winning contracts with major companies, hiring and training other stay-at-home moms to cold call part time, and developing a scalable strategic process for outbound B2B IT sales calls and appointment setting.

Churn is a given in cold-calling. Critical to Carrie's success is not that she figured out how to eliminate cold-caller turnover, but because she figured out how to minimize the effect of churn. In this interview, she emphasizes several strategic decisions her company made to build traction, optimize cold call effectiveness, and generate demand:

• Avoiding diversification and maintaining an exclusive marketing strategy: cold-calling for a single product type: managed services
• Laser-targeting and qualifying her clients' potential customers
• Knowing her customers' products, their clients triggers
• Utilizing "pay for performance" in order to maintain control of database data that can be leveraged for vertical market development
• Tracking trends and marketplace changes that create risks and opportunities

Carrie can be reached on her company's website at managedsalespros.com or by email at: [email protected]. Mention Carrie's name, and your message will be routed to her.

Bobby Palmieri is CEO at Lilo Social (Brooklyn, New York), a social-media-based marketing agency focused on creating better social content. In this interview, Bobby explains his company's objectives for its clients: to get a customer to buy the client's product, grow the client's social following, grow the brand, and/or increase a viewer's engagement time—and how utilizing Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest (and some LinkedIn) can provide "the best bang for the marketing buck."

Increasingly, people are realizing effective marketing is not about "impressions," it is about "engagement." Lilo works with two classes of customers: leading brands and startups. Bobby is very aware of social media platform trends, open to working in challenging spaces, and dedicated to applying technological expertise to enhance customer experience.

For such leading brands as Microsoft, Live Nation, Foot Locker, and Under Armour, Lilo creates innovative, interactive content (e.g., chatbots, micro games, Snapchat lenses, Instagram Stories) to entice viewers to engage for minutes instead of seconds—boosting engagement and building brand equity.

Startups and scale-ups need to get the next user at the most cost-efficient rate. Lilo facilitates user acquisition and e-commerce sales. In today's environment, Lilo has found that the most scalable way to deliver maximum lifetime value to customers at the lowest acquisition cost is through Facebook and Instagram ads.

Tomorrow's greatest social media platform? Who knows? Tomorrow's technological innovation? Again, who knows? Technology comes in ever-evolving waves, and Bobby notes that each new iteration brings opportunities for savvy marketers able to adapt to everything new, build sophisticated assets, and stay ahead of the technology curve

Bobby can be reached on the company website at: lilosocial.com or by email at: [email protected].

Moira Vetter, Founder and CEO of Modo Modo Agency (Atlanta, Georgia), built her company with a focus on "marketing for business people." Modo Modo serves a B to B client base and some larger organizations with B-to-B and B-to-C challenges—leveraging value, developing story, and strengthening brands in the face of company carve-outs, acquisitions, divestitures, and reorgs—times of great potential risk—and great opportunities for transformative change.

Moira notes that companies often come to Modo Modo with what they perceive as isolated problems, e.g., "We need to improve our website." Rather than addressing a discrete issue, Modo Modo uses a broad approach, digging for strategic objectives (not "What do you want to do?" but, "What do you want to achieve?" "What are your strategic objectives?"), analyzes options, and implements connected marketing initiatives—to produce ever-better long-term value for clients.

In this interview, Moira addresses crossroads perception (how we see our options), the relativity of risk and how it affects decision-making, and the importance of milestones as motivators. She talks about the difference between using "the community's filter to assess risk," falling back on your "parents' filter," or, at some point, developing and adopting your own filter; and then explains how assessing progress in one parameter relative to another (e.g., I am this age, and I am here in my career) can provide the needed impetus to inspire change. She illustrates this with examples from her life—when external situations collapsed her rising career trajectory, and she made subsequent decisions that led to even greater success—and with examples of marketing at-risk companies and brands, and positioning them "in a new space."

Moira can be reached by phone at 770.436.3100, ext. 702, on the company website at: modomodoagency.com, by email at: [email protected], and on Twitter: @moiravetter and @modomodoagency.

Ron Tite, founder and CEO of Church+State (Toronto, Canada), discusses the evolution of content and advertising and how, today, a marketing problem is no longer a content problem or an advertising problem—it's one unified problem—winning the battle for the consumer's time. Church+State operates under the premise that every ad can be a piece of content if it is good enough, and every piece of content can be an ad if it is authentic enough.

Agencies clamoring for relevancy may define their businesses by affiliation with a (HOT!) narrow niche markets or a specific (and inherently volatile and evolving) platform (such as Facebook). Ron feels it is important to think larger and drop the "buzzwords," since environmental/technological/legal/platform evolution issues can render a tightly-defined business model irrelevant.

Church+State has developed a consistent flexible approach and process that "elevates the conversation out of chaos," consistently distilling and bringing focus to those client issues impacting marketing effectiveness. Ron believes the foundation of great brands—and the great people who inspire and lead those brands—is based on what they think, what they do, and what they say.

• What they think: Mission and vision are meaningless. Finish the statement. "We believe that _____." What is your purpose? More than product, more than transactions . . . what values do you believe are significant and important?
• What they do: What products, services, actions, and processes justify those values and bring those values to life?
• What they say: If you have a product that reinforces your brand belief, what is it? How do you promote it? How do you talk about it? Where do you place that promotion? Where do people go after they consume that promotion? How do we repurpose content for distribution across multiple channels?
• And, finally, how do you ensure that whatever material you provide for customers is compelling enough that people will find it worthwhile?

Ron can be reached: @RonTite on. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, whatever. His company's website is: churchstate.co.

In this interview, David Mullen, president and partner of The Variable (Winston-Salem, NC), explains how any company can defeat its biggest competitor and drive sustainable, long-term growth. David articulates the holistic mindshift and strategies needed to develop products people want to buy, build "people-friendly" companies, and win long-lasting, loyal customers. He emphasizes the need to focus on changing:

• Customer experience to people experience (inclusive of product developers the frontline [those interacting with customers], suppliers, influencers, stakeholders and shareholders, and customers]
• Buying something to buying into something (shaping people's experience at every touchpoint)
• Positioning your company in the minds of customers to positioning your company in the lives of customers

Key strategies for building people-friendly companies include:

• Consulting with the business:
• • analyzing business, brand, and communication strategies
  • identifying the right problems to solve
• Creating solutions for the right problem. Solutions might include:
• • great advertising campaigns
  • rebranding an organization
  • content
  • innovation roadmaps, product concepts, and product development
• Engaging to take solutions to market. Areas of concentration:
• • Employee engagement throughout the internal culture
  • integrated media planning and buying
  • social/PR
• Underpinned with a foundation of Analytics to
• • understand what's happening
  • assess the magnitude of impacts
  • identify weakest link, opportunities, and challenges, and
  • guide timely change implementation to ensure continued progress and drive growth

David can be reached on his company's website at: thevariable.com, by email at: [email protected], or on LinkedIn.

Erik Lokkesmoe, Principal at Aspiration Studios (Nashville, TN), provides insights into how strong branding, a brand's relational partners, and brand-based distribution systems are changing marketing; highlights how some of the "newer players" (NetFlix, Amazon Prime, Hulu) are tracking audiences' viewing viewing data to establish future project direction; and comments on how marketing metrics illustrates the critical alliance between marketing's creative side and its service side. Aspiration specializes in distribution (theatrical through digital) and marketing (ideation through execution) for films, TV, and media programming.

In this interview, Erik explains the differences between and impacts of:

• Integrated, technology-driven marketing distribution vs. the more traditional functional siloing
• Relational partners (leaning in together) vs. transactional partners (breakdown potential)
• The "Blue ocean" strategy (uncontested market space) vs. "red oceans" where competitors fight for dominance

Erik spent 10 years in politics, where he learned about marketing . . . and that politics was not nearly as effective in shaping hearts, minds, behavior, and beliefs as was storytelling. Today, he is a "producer of marketing distribution" for "makers of content" (creatives). He identifies three issues driving marketing and content today:

• We have the "most cluttered" marketplace in history
• Audiences are "tribal"—more fragmented and segmented than ever
• Traditional systems and old ways of doing things are breaking down.

He also defines three ideals that motivate younger generations:

• Community (belonging to something)
• Craft (being good at something)
• Cause (believing in something)

Erik authored the book, Different Drummer. Theme? Intentional avoidance of "common knowledge" communications to facilitate independent thinking. Erik is available on Twitter at: @eriklokkesmoe and @AspirationHQ. His email is: [email protected] and the company website is: https://aspiration.is/

Tommy Swanson, is CEO of Stripes Agency, a Dallas, Texas based, performance-marketing-focused social advertising agency. In this interview, Tommy talks about intriguing changes in digital marketing, including the increased use of FaceBook as a marketing platform, other trending platforms and platform tools that will impact the industry, brand lift studies, and how behavioral data supersedes demographic profiling for effective customer targeting. A couple highlights:

1. Keys to marketing success on Facebook:

• Understand that behavior is a better predictor of action than demographics
• Instead of trying to hyper-target the "ideal" customer, trust the platform to find the customer
• Decrease reliance on revenue-sharing (questionably reliable) "third party" data providers

1. Brand lift studies, which came out in the most recent presidential election, will become increasingly important in the future as a way for marketers to measure impact. These studies:

• Attempt to measure your campaign's perception, intent, favorability, and choice impacts rather than counting dollars or leads
• Facilitate tailoring future creative efforts to target audiences.

Tommy can be reached on his website at: stripesagency.com or by email at: mailto:[email protected].

Jake Finkelstein, CEO of Method Savvy (Durham, NC), a full-service, data-driven, omnichannel marketing agency working primarily with mid-market enterprise brands, spoke at Atlanta's 2018 Digital Summit (where this interview took place) on how user experience design principles and human experience design impact SEO performance.

In this interview, Jake talks about his company's 5-phase core-value-based methodology that ensures strategic focus and tactical efficiency. Method Savvy is not about "doing a particular thing" to ensure client greatness. Instead, the company strives to solve particular problems (e.g., demand creation or customer life cycle management) through the implementation of iterative, scalable processes across a broad range of (increasingly integrated) channels.

Jake provides an example of integrated technology where a customer's response to one channel (e-mail) triggered an automated activity in another channel (direct mail). He sees a great future in what he refers to as augmented intelligence, where, as happened with the Industrial Revolution, repetitive brain-numbing jobs are done by automated systems, in this case, making it easier for marketers to do the right kind of great (creative and innovative) work. Jake emphasizes the importance of:

• marketing and advertising transparency and accountability,
• aligning marketing activities with what truly creates business value, and
• setting up systems that build predictable and scalable revenue growth.

Jake is available through his company's website at: www.methodsavvy.com, or through email at: [email protected].