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TitreDateDurée
Through the Sound – Arthur Samuel Joseph01 Nov 2018

Arthur Samuel Joseph is the founder and chairman of the Vocal Awareness Institute. Arthur is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost communication strategists and authorities on the human voice.

His voice and leadership training programs teach Communication Mastery through a disciplined regimen of specific techniques designed to cultivate an embodied and enhanced leadership and personal presence. He’s coached Angelina Jolie, Sean Connery, Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Jerry Rice, and many more.

In this episode, Arthur talks to me about what vocal mastery is and why we need it. He provides tips you can practice to warm up your voices and have a huge vocal presence. Arthur provides several client stories and a very heartwarming tale from his biggest transformation.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Vocal Awareness Institute. Vocal Awareness is useful to everyone who speaks, but it can be even more powerful for those individuals with specific goals to have a vocal presence. Whether you are a sales professional, athlete, singer, politician, or stars like Angelina Jolie and Pierce Brosnan, Vocal Awareness has tools so you can capture audiences. Go to vocalawareness.com/scottking to see how to “Deliver Any Presentation Like a Pro” and receive $100 off of the Visual Voice pro by entering promo code 100OFFVVP.

Questions During Podcast
  • What is vocal mastery? Who is it for?
  • What are some routines or steps you recommend to become a better orator?
  • What did you learn from actors like Angelina Jolie, Sean Connery and who do you think made the biggest transformation?
  • How can those listening tell better stories and break through all of the noise?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
Contact Arthur

The post Through the Sound – Arthur Samuel Joseph appeared first on Scott King.

Get Off the Hamster Wheel – Arnold Huffman25 Oct 2018

Arnold Huffman is the Founder and CEO of Digital Yalo, a digital content, communications and channel strategy agency. There he is building a team focused on creating compelling content that is informative and entertaining. Arnold’s background includes marketing, business development, and alliances in high tech and software.

In this episode, Arnold talks about finding marketing inspiration from other art forms and how these applications can help you create a fresh perspective.

Questions During Podcast More content is being produced than ever before. How do brands break through the vendor fatigue?

You have to be differentiated, not only in your value prop but how you say it, how you present it and how you push it out. This requires atypical thinking to get outside of the rinse and repeat many marketers get stuck in. Look at the problem from a different angle. We use film, art, music, and sports to help inspire our clients thinking and to produce an atypical result. It also helps distill the hopes, dreams and ideas for a campaign or a website or an event into a singular emotional concept. Emotion delivers the best results, because it gets noticed in the market.

What is the best content you have seen in 2018? Why did you like it? How do you see digital marketing, content and experiences evolving?

More impactful storylines and more interactive technology integrating into marketing campaigns will elevate your campaign. You may not make the best or most interesting product or service, but that doesn’t mean you can’t push it’s agenda with an interesting story.

White paper or video? Podcasts?

I’d produce all of them. You need written content for SEO and to be found. You need video for engagement. Content is like a mall. You never know which door of the mall someone will enter through or have a preference for. Marketers need have all the doors ready for people to enter and engage.

What can brands learn from emerging disruptive brands?

Watch HOW those disruptive brands get your attention. There is a very short window to grab attention. It’s like an iceberg. The apex of the iceberg is above the waterline and that is the window you have to get someone’s attention. Don’t weigh them down with all the details of the product or service. That happens later in the marketing funnel once you have them interested. You should constantly bubble the best of the best from the bottom of the iceberg to above the waterline to make an impact. Elevating your vibe will differentiate your company and gain attention.

Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?

I listen to a lot of music. Gene Simmons of Kiss is a branding master and is an excellent inspiration. Kiss’s shock and awe, gets your attention and engages you. As far as marketing inspiration and boundaries, I read every page of Fast Company.

What do people ask your advice on?

People ask my advise on changing the game and looking at sales and marketing from a different perspective. This is why I find inspiration in film, art, music and sports to energize ideas from other industries or applications.

If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?

If I am not working I am hanging out with my kids, listening to music or exercising.

Closing thoughts?

Dare to be different to reach a different result and get off the marketing hamster wheel. Defy. Fly.

Contact Arnold

The post Get Off the Hamster Wheel – Arnold Huffman appeared first on Scott King.

Puppies and Puppet Masters – Ulli Applebaum31 May 201800:48:06

Ulli Appelbaum ( @FirstThetrouser ) is an international marketing and brand strategist. He is an expert in coming up with fresh perspectives to position a brands, products and companies. Ulli has developed a strategy exercise into a technique he calls Positioning-Roulette. Positioning-Roulette is a culmination of 1200 case studies provided as 26 flash cards. The flash cards promote creative thinking and facilitate a conversation from various perspectives.

In this episode, Ulli talks to me about creative thinking, branding and biases and limits we place on ourselves when looking looking at brands, reading news and interacting with services and brands.

Questions During Podcast
  • What is Positioning-Roulette?
  • Where dis the 1200 case studies come from?
  • What is some of the feedback resulting from the roulette exercise?
  • Why aren’t business people more creative and what can they do about it?
  • What can brands learn from successful marketers?
  • What was one of your most successful campaigns? Why was it successful?
  • Describe a time when a project you were overseeing did not go well?
  • What did you learn from that and how do you avoid that from happening again?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • What do people ask your advice on?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Ulli

The post Puppies and Puppet Masters – Ulli Applebaum appeared first on Scott King.

Don’t Overthink SEO – Ashley Ward24 May 2018

Ashley Ward ( @ashleymadhatter ) is a former journalist now serving as an expert content marketer and corporate evangelist for SEM Rush. Ashley previously founded and served as CEO for Madhouse Marketing performing digital marketing and business development.

In this episode, Ashley talks to me about SEO expectations and how getting back to the basics serves a site in the long term. She provides examples from past campaigns and what she learned in order to transfer that knowledge to her digital marketing students. Ashley finishes with tips on SEM, public speaking and travel.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Podcast
  • What do you consider the biggest challenge for SEO today? It seems it’s reached the point of diminishing returns after you get your infrastructure optimized and map out your content plan.
  • How do teams need to address these challenges?
  • How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  • How do you recommend content marketers break up long form content and optimize it for mobile?
  • Do you have access to cool data at SEM Rush?
  • You are teaching master classes, What surprises you during these classes?
  • What are your top 3 professional speaking tips?
  • What was one of your most successful campaigns? What made it effective and how did you measure that?
  • Describe a time when a project you were overseeing did not go well?
  • What did you learn from that and how do you avoid that from happening again?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • What do people ask your advice on other than SEO?
  • What is your best travel tip?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week, what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Ashley

The post Don’t Overthink SEO – Ashley Ward appeared first on Scott King.

What You Are Saying Without Saying It – Matt Bull17 May 2018

Matt Bull’s first job was working for the Superconducting SuperCollider in Waxahachie, designing user interfaces for the vacuum Control Systems Division. He spent three years studying BioPhysics at Rice before realizing he hated lab work, then crammed in an English major at the last minute. He then spent 16 years at the Richards Group, working on nearly every major brand on the roster.

This episode is the second of two episodes with Matt. In the first episode, Matt talks to me about causal marketing and how brands should develop personalities to isolate digital noise. This episode is all about what you are saying to your audience without explicitly saying it. Matt provides some examples of how advertising said the opposite of what it wanted to.

When Matt isn’t marketing for causes and building brands, he is riding his bike around Oak Cliff, spending time with family and combing Reddit’s first page of the internet.

Questions During Podcast
  • What do you mean by subtext?
  • Is this the same as subliminal?
  • Why do you read the front page of Reddit?
Links and Mentions Contact Matt

The post What You Are Saying Without Saying It – Matt Bull appeared first on Scott King.

Eliminate the Friction Points – Esteban Martinez06 May 2018

Esteban Martinez ( @addicted2ppc ) is an SEM specialist, trainer & speaker, with a strong passion for helping organizations become successful online. He has been building and optimizing SEM campaigns for a range of B2B and B2C clients in different industries since 2002 in the UK and Australia.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Podcast
  • What approach do you take when working with clients on new marketing initiatives?
  • How can marketers tailor PPC ads for the best results?
  • What are the pitfalls to avoid when building your PPC campaigns?
  • What are upcoming trends in PPC?
  • What are your thoughts on bidding under brand terms as well as competitor terms?
  • How long would should tests be?
  • What was one of your most successful campaigns? What made it effective and how did you measure that?
  • What is something you did for a campaign, initiative or ecosystem that was a long shot but ended up working out?
  • Which tools do you use to monitor and optimize your PPC activity?
  • Describe a time when a project you were overseeing did not go well?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Esteban

The post Eliminate the Friction Points – Esteban Martinez appeared first on Scott King.

Causal Marketing – Matt Bull03 May 2018

Matt Bull’s first job was working for the Superconducting SuperCollider in Waxahachie, designing user interfaces for the vacuum Control Systems Division. He spent three years studying BioPhysics at Rice before realizing he hated lab work, then crammed in an English major at the last minute. He then spent 16 years at the Richards Group, working on nearly every major brand on the roster.

In this episode, Matt talks to me about causal marketing and how brands should develop personalities to isolate digital noise. When Matt isn’t marketing for causes and building brands, he is riding his bike around Oak Cliff, spending time with family and combing Reddit’s first page of the internet.

Questions During Podcast
  • Why did you leave the big agency and go out on your own?
  • How did you get into causal marketing?
  • How old were your kids during the Baby Magic campaign?
  • Is causal marketing an effective strategy?
  • What is the biggest challenge facing brands?
  • How can we market items that aren’t personal?
  • Does Ted’s have a personality or a causal element?
  • How do you find a personality for a brand?
  • Why don’t brands use causal marketing?
  • What are some of your favorite brands?
  • What would you do with your time if you weren’t working?
  • Are you an expert in anything else?
Links and Mentions Contact Matt

The post Causal Marketing – Matt Bull appeared first on Scott King.

The Marketing Value of History – Rich Jurek26 Apr 2018

In this episode, I talk with Chief Marketing & Communications Officer of the Inland Group, Rich Jurek. Rich heads the in-house marketing and communication group and is co author of the best selling book “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program”.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Podcast
  • What do you consider the biggest challenge for CMOs today?
  • How do marketing teams need to address these difficulties?
  • How is your marketing team organized?
  • How much work do you have to outsource?
  • Your company is celebrating a milestone this year, 50 years. Anything special planned?
  • What are your goals for the 50 year campaign?
  • How did you pick the 50 employees for the 50 for 50 campaign?
  • Marketing the Moon is about the Apollo lunar program, right? What lessons are in the book?
  • Did you talk with anyone from the Apollo lunar program for the book?
  • What is your most proud accomplishment?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • What do people ask your advice on?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week, what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Rich

The post The Marketing Value of History – Rich Jurek appeared first on Scott King.

How to Market to the Government – Lou Anne Brossman19 Apr 2018

Lou Anne Brossman has over 30 years of public sector government marketing leadership experience gained while working at leading companies like Juniper Networks, immixGroup, EMC. Her manufacturing roots enable her to empathize and relate to corporate issues that her federal marketing customers are facing. She is a sought out speaker on Government marketing best practices and is a recognized expert on thought leadership campaigns on relevant federal, state and local government policies.

In this episode, Lou Anne talks to me about how to market to the Government and challenges marketers face on budget, content and misaligned expectations.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Podcast
  1. What do you consider the biggest challenge for sales and marketers selling to Federal markets?
  2. Why are Federal marketing budgets so small?
  3. Why do you think companies do not invest appropriately in the Federal market?
  4. Who demands that marketing material be Federalized?
  5. Do companies struggle with obtaining the correct certifications?
  6. How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving in the federal sector?
  7. What commercial brands are doing a great job in Federal?
  8. What was one of your most successful campaigns? What made it effective?
  9. Do you refer back to a failure that haunts you?
  10. Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  11. What do people ask your advice on other than Federal marketing?
  12. If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week, what would you do with your time?
  13. Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Lou Anne

The post How to Market to the Government – Lou Anne Brossman appeared first on Scott King.

Moneyballing Brand Economics – Edgar Baum12 Apr 2018

Edgar Baum ( @EdgarBaum ) is the Chief Brand Economist at Strata Insights. In this episode, Edgar describes a contemporary brand measurement approach to measure effectiveness and describes a case study how a tech company outmaneuvered the competition. If you are familiar with Moneyball, you will understand brand economics. Just as Billy Bean used a different dataset to formulate different outcomes, Edgar advises us on how to measure our brands in the internet era.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook. These playbooks have proven to increase lead conversion rates over 400%.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Podcast
  1. How has branding evolved over the internet era?
  2. What is a good current branding example?
  3. What is brand economics?
  4. What branding metrics are you referring to in brand economics?
  5. What size of companies need branding economics?
  6. How do you measure brand interactions?
  7. Where do you get the data on category importance?
  8. What influences customers?
  9. Does the board or CEO need to influence these large company resource allocations?
Contact Edgar

The post Moneyballing Brand Economics – Edgar Baum appeared first on Scott King.

Content Marketing Attribution – TJ Waldorf05 Apr 2018

TJ Waldorf ( @tj_waldorf ) is Vice President of Growth Marketing for INAP. TJ has led both sales and marketing teams and drives the marketing to make data driven decisions, and more importantly, revenue metrics. Currently based in the Chicagoland area, TJ spends his “free time” with his wife and 7 year old son. TJ and I talk about content marketing attribution, seo and how sales teams should leverage content.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook. These playbooks have proven to increase lead conversion rates over 400%.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Episode
  • Why did INAP acquire Singlehop?
  • Why did you decide to bring content marketing back in house?
  • Did you have anyone on staff already that could handle the SEO workload?
  • Was your staff excited to bring this back in?
  • What did you think would happen when you brought in SEO and content marketing from vendors?
  • What type of content was your team working on during the initial effort?
  • How did you create the content from the sales team and CEO?
  • Is your blog the most valuable content?
  • How do you prove content marketing works?
  • What are you doing for attributions?
  • What would the sales team say is the most valuable content?
  • What do you think buyers want from content?
  • How do you help the sales team with social selling?
  • Who on your team is looking for news and market influences?
  • What do people ask your advice on?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact TJ

The post Content Marketing Attribution – TJ Waldorf appeared first on Scott King.

Podcasting Built My Business – Doug Sandler29 Mar 2018

In this episode, I talk with Doug Sandler ( @djdoug ). Doug is a nationally recognized speaker, trainer, and podcaster. His podcast with Strickland Bonner, The Nice Guys on Business, has over 500 episodes and more than 1 Million downloads. Doug uses that experience to help businesses and brands grow their audience with TurnKey Podcasting.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook. These playbooks have proven to increase lead conversion rates over 400%.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Podcast
  • How many podcasts have you produced?
  • Who is producing successful podcasts?
  • Are your customers solopreneurs or corporate entities?
  • How do you make money with a podcast?
  • How do people decide to produce a podcast?
  • Are new podcasters scared with how much work is involved with a podcasts?
  • Who started a podcast from zero and is now successful?
  • Why is 20,000 downloads your reference point for a successful podcast?
  • What other podcasts do you listen to?
  • What is one thing you learned from one of your customers podcasts?
  • What do people ask you about other than podcasting?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities, what would you do with your time?
Links and Mentions Contact Doug

The post Podcasting Built My Business – Doug Sandler appeared first on Scott King.

10 Places You Should Be Using Video – George B. Thomas18 Oct 2018

In this episode, I talk with George B. Thomas. George is a recovering youth pastor, former pub bouncer and is currently an evangelist at Impulse Creative. He is a video marketing ninja and an inbound marketing Jedi with every HubSpot certification one can have. George and I talk about why you should be using video and where you should be using it. He mentions many tools, sites, services and experts to help you build your video toolbox so please take a look at the show notes for these and the 10 places you should be using video. I hope his infectious energy moves and inspires you to do more. Please welcome George B. Thomas.

5 Reasons you should be using video
  1. Simplify the complex
  2. To educate potential customers
  3. Be superhuman
  4. Disarm your potential customers
  5. Invoke emotional response
10 places you should be using video
  1. In prospecting early in your sales cycle
  2. Use video for personalized introductions
  3. Use videos in follow up emails vs. long copy
  4. Put videos on your landing pages
  5. Put another video on the thank you page after conversion
  6. Use video in your proposals
  7. Use video in your contracts to explain terms of services
  8. Use video in online meetings
  9. Use video in your chats or chatbots
  10. Place teaser videos on your blog posts
Questions During Podcast
  • Why should we be using videos?
  • Where should we be using videos?
  • What do you teach in your video workshops?
  • What do people ask your advice on other than video?
  • What do you read or watch for more information?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and mentions Contact George

The post 10 Places You Should Be Using Video – George B. Thomas appeared first on Scott King.

Using Humor in Storytelling – Kathy Klotz-Guest22 Mar 2018

In this episode I talk with speaker, author, and improv comedian, Kathy Klotz-Guest ( @kathyklotzguest ). Kathy left the Silicon Valley hustle but she didn’t leave her passion for telling better stories and banishing boring marketing behind. Kathy and I talk about how business storytelling drives great marketing, innovation and culture and how she came up with the term, #jargonmonoxide.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Episode
  1. How did you come up with #jargonmonoxide?
  2. Why don’t marketers understand how to tell better stories?
  3. What is the issue with product pitches?
  4. How do marketers get out of technical presentations and tell better stories?
  5. What company is telling a good story?
  6. How do product marketers tell better stories?
  7. What should they read or follow?
  8. How do you integrate human elements to tell a better story?
  9. Which of your accomplishments are you most proud of?
  10. Which of your projects did not work out like you expected?
  11. What do you read or follow for motivation?
  12. What do people seek your advice on?
  13. If you could do anything with your time, what would you do?
  14. Closing thoughts?
Contact Kathy

The post Using Humor in Storytelling – Kathy Klotz-Guest appeared first on Scott King.

The Wild Pendulum – Sam Mallikarjunan08 Mar 2018

In this episode, I talk with Sam Mallikarjunan (@Mallikarjunan ). Sam is an Executive Strategist at HubSpot and former Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs. Sam teaches Advanced Digital Marketing at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, and is the co-author of the book, “How To Sell Better Than Amazon.” He talks to me here about personalization, empathy, artificial intelligence, and sales alignment. Thanks so much for joining and please welcome Sam Mallikarjunan to the show.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Podcast
  1. What is a marketing fellow?
  2. Do you still perform the experimental marketing function?
  3. What do you consider some of the biggest challenges sales and marketing teams have today?
  4. Why do you like the recommendation engine from Netflix?
  5. How will Artificial Intelligence change the way we do sales and marketing in the next year, 3 years 5 years?
  6. What do you recommend the listeners look at or read?
  7. Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  8. What do people ask your advice on other than marketing technology?
  9. How do you like people to contact you?
Links and Mentions Contact Sam

The post The Wild Pendulum – Sam Mallikarjunan appeared first on Scott King.

The Growth Marketing Playbook – Jon Brody01 Mar 2018

Jon Brody (@ThePokerCEO) is the CEO at Ladder. Ladder is a growth marketing agency helping companies navigate and implement thousands of available tactics to grow revenues.

In this episode, Jon talks about his company’s growth marketing playbook, successes, failures and how his  professional poker player past helps him market more effectively.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook. These playbooks have proven to increase lead conversion rates over 400%.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Podcast Transcription

Scott: Today we’ve got Jon Brody who is CEO, co-founder over at Ladder. You can reach him on Twitter if you have a question during the episode, while you’re listening or if you want to reach out to him after you listen. He’s @ThePokerCEO because he used to be a competitive poker player. We’re going to talk about that a little bit later. But Jon curious what Ladder is working on today. I know that you guys are some type of growth marketing agency and that’s kind of what I’m into. So, if you can just give us a little, maybe a commercial before we get started.

What does Ladder do?

Jon: Yes, absolutely. So everything we do at Ladder is based on the premise of us removing more guess work from how a company grows. Basically, what that means is the technology we build, the services that we offer especially SMBs is all based on the fact that growth is difficult because there is so much choice. There are literally thousands of things that you could do to get more traffic, convert more of that traffic and retain more of those leads or more of those customers. The really hard thing is you now have that choice that you have when it comes to digital marketing. It grows on almost weekly basis but that growth of choice has never actually been met by a system to help you prioritize out of all these things you could do, which you actually spend your time and money on. So, the Ladder Playbook which is our database of marketing tactics that is prioritized by actual performance data you that we collect and build. It all goes back to basically helping the business owner or helping the marketer when it comes to your own company prioritize better and just makes better choices. To help get a company from Point A to Point B where Point B should always be more revenues, more leads and there’s an improvement in their commercial bottom line.

Scott: Yes. You mean you mentioned the playbook and I took a look at it and that’s how I got connected with you. There are thousands of different items in there. It’s an excellent example of curating content and organizing it but you know there are so many. I’m really curious what makes a tactic worthy of being in the playbook and how do you help a customer navigate through all these? Reading the thousands of tactics out there would probably take longer than actually implementing one of those. How do customers figure that out? Because I couldn’t do it.

How do customers navigate through the growth marketing playbook?

Jon: Yes, you’re absolutely right. A good way of looking at the playbook is that those thousands of tactics represent the amount of choice that every business owner has at a given point in time. You’re absolutely right you know to just have that amount of choice is a representation of the reality, right? And the challenge that business owners and marketers have. What makes Ladder unique from a technology and also services point of view, is how we actually help a company prioritize out of those thousands of things. Which one should they actually spend their time on executing to get more traffic or convert more of that traffic or retain more customers? So, from the start when you look at that playbook every tactic has a purpose which is either get more traffic, convert more traffic or retain you know more of those customers and leads that you’re getting. The way that we prioritize is really two-fold. The first is that on all those tactics that we see in the playbook you know we’ve spent $10M building up a database of performance information on the success rates and the context on when they work and don’t work. We pair that up with our own expert services team to basically remove that guess work for a company and help prioritize which ones they actually should be working on.

Scott: If you help a customer or prospect prioritize the list, how many tactics do you implement? If a customer comes to you and they come on day zero and then they agree to become a client, how many are you trying at first? Are you trying one? Are you trying ten? What’s the number?

How do you help customers prioritize tactics in the playbook?

Jon: It’s a good question.  On average we’re there to help build winning strategy that identifies where a company is weakest, right? When it comes to traffic or conversion and then based on that and the KPIs that we identify as needing improvement that we’re going to measure. We then start prioritizing on average ten tactics every single month to do the actual execution and reporting of to get those KPIs that drive commercial success and move in the right direction. How we pick that number, really came from most testing at ourselves and also modeling it after elite growth teams at company’s like HubSpot. The amount of experiments they’re able to execute in a given month that combines- be really aggressive on trying lots of things, to learn faster and drive performance faster, but also taking into account the realities of making sure you set up these tests and tactics in a scientific way. We’re able to actually learn from them and gain insights you know not just have information overload.

Scott: Yes, so you said ten tactics a week, right? So that to me it sounds-

Jon: A month.

Scott: A month?

Jon: Yes.

Scott: Okay. Still, it sounds like a lot.

How many people are required to do this both on your side and the client’s side?

Jon: Yes, that’s a great question. So on the client’s side, it really requires one point of contact whether it’s the CEO of the company or you know whoever is managing marketing. You’re absolutely right though, to actually execute that many tactics in a given month are really difficult. It’s also really difficult because a company’s growth is never just one thing, meaning there’s no silver bullet. It’s not just trying to spend some cash on Facebook and expecting success. It’s never just sending out you know e-mails to a prospecting list. In a given month, winning strategy involves KPIs that go beyond just focusing on one thing. It’s things from cross-channel traffic acquisition, creative and copywriting tests, all the way down to landing page tests and email automation testing. Now to actually do that it requires a really unique set of skills. With Ladder our whole service is model and this goes back to prioritizing, tactics based off of what’s most likely to work for our company and being agnostic to which tactics those are and then doing the full-service execution. You know at Ladder we basically modeled a growth team that we offered to our partners turnkey. So internally we have engineers, we have data analysts, we have strategists, we have copywriters and designers. They’re all there to make sure those tactics get executed in these given month sprints.

Scott:  That makes sense. When you talk to prospects and you  give them the pitch and you tell them you have all these tactics in this giant playbook? What kind of pushback do you get?

How many people think this is BS or what are some of the objections you hear?

Jon: I guess one of the first objection goes back to the main challenge that every prospect has which is, you know like how are you going to know what’s going to work, right? Which is a really fundamental question. The way we address that is that very transparently we accept the fact that you don’t know for certain what’s going to work until you try it. The way that we position ourselves as being the ultimate choice for our company to help navigate that uncertainty is — one, we have a complete set of data. We have more information to make decisions on and what’s going to work in the first place. Now that actually doesn’t guarantee that every single tactic will work. But, it does guarantee that when you work with Ladder you have more information, more data going into the decision making process. When it comes to the actual execution, because we accept the fact that we’re trying lots of new things each month to be prioritized unlike a typical marketing campaign or a typical agency or even in-house marketing team. You know we don’t just put all of our eggs in one basket or two baskets and spend a month putting lots of resource into one thing or a small set of things. We structure our monthly tactic sprints that we execute like scientific tests where every single one we’re trying to execute using the least amount of resource in terms of budget to prove the case for it. Then once we get back measurable improvement that’s when we can make a clear business case with our partners to double down and put more resource on those winning tactics.

Scott: Does, is there a favorite tactic of yours? Or, is there one that sticks out on the top of your mind that gets used most often? Depending on who your customers are and their kind of evolution and digital marketing that would vary.

Which tactic gets implemented more often than not and do you have a favorite?

Jon: Yes, great question. So I’ll mention two tactics here that I would say that if your and B2B. And you aren’t doing these two tactics right now, make sure you do them within the next month. So the first really goes to the demand generation. The interesting thing here is that you know just getting somebody to enter an information for a sales inquiry or a demo request, that’s really good. But at the end of the day you know as an owner of business you want yourself or your salespeople to actually get those requests booked in calendar. Just getting somebody to, submit demo requests is great, it shows intent. But at the end of the day, you need that book on the calendar to really start driving value from it. The way that Ladder approaches that are really through up-sell tactics on the, what we call the post success page, on your landing page. So typically when you go to a landing page and you fill out information for a demo request, you enter information and then you see something that says, “Hey, great. We’ll be in touch soon and to try schedule a call.” That’s a good way of getting let’s say 10% of those demo requests to actually book and meet with their sales team. The way to get the number to go from 10% to 25% or higher is to- on that post you know success page add in a simple button links to let’s say account or booking system that allows the prospect to automatically, at the moment when they’re most interested in your services, just to book right away. Book automatically you know in your calendar without requiring any more information on their part and not requiring your sales team to have to be hustling out there, you know chasing them down trying to get them to book. So, I think that would be one tactic that I would say, in the B2B space worked extremely well, but also is surprisingly rare for how a few companies actually execute.

Scott: Yes, you know a lot of times you’ll see the links in and an email signature to I think Calendly has a free service you can sign up for to book appointments. It’s a good point. Because if someone has intent right then you might as well you know help them book a specific time spot because you know you got to contact that guy inside like five or six minutes anyhow, before he moves on to something else. So that’s a good example.

Is that the tactic you recommend most often or from a B2B standpoint is it that one or is it another one?

Jon: No, that one right there. Really high success rate when it comes to B2B companies. One of the tactics I’d want to mention if you’re in the B2B space, is using a tool called Sniply to get more leads and get more demand generation by leveraging any PR or content that you’ve written. So, what Sniply does basically and Ladder actually does this ourselves and we transparently open up our own growth playbook for how we grow our own company on our blog and we’ve stood about this tactic before. But, essentially what it means is you know when you get a backlink in an article you know that has high authority like Hubspot or Salesforce or entrepreneur.com or whatever it might be. You know it’s great to have that content sitting there that you’ve written, but how do you actually leverage it to get more demand? Because creating content takes a ton of resource, getting PR is really difficult so how do you actually trace that back to demand generation you know if you’re a company? The way we do that is use Sniply. Which allows you to actually run advertising campaigns. It could be e-mail, it could be LinkedIn, it could be Adwords where all you do is promote that article, that got published on a high ranking, high authority site and you drive traffic to it. What that does is allow you  to leverage the authority of these people that have written about you and you don’t come across salesy at all. Now the great thing about that is you’re more likely to get cheaper clicks and more engagement on that content and boost your brand recognition in the eyes of your prospects. What Sniply does is it actually follows those prospects to that piece of content and then provides them on that third party site, a call to action button to drive right back to your demand generation funnel.

Scott: That’s a really cool trick, I’m definitely going to check that out. I like that. Is there a campaign or project that you worked on that you thought was going to be a home run but it just didn’t work but you learned from it, so you know I’m sure that you have a ton of examples, is their one that just kind of haunt you and you always say, “Hey, remember that time?” or anything like that?

Is there a campaign or project that you worked on that you thought was going to be a home run but it just didn’t work?

Jon: Yes, and I think one interesting one was we worked for a company that was a marketplace. It was part B2B and part consumer in the night life space targeting restaurants and bars in that scene. At a high level all of their metrics looked pretty good pre-launch. We tested messaging. We tested demand generation. People were signing up on the on the business side and everything looked absolutely fantastic from  everything we had done. You know that’s said it was before the company had actually launched their full product. What ended up happening was the product ended up going live and it launched. And when people actually engaged the software itself that was being used, the market responded really negatively. All the economics went out the window. And I think for me personally it was a case of you knows never get your hopes up to high until you actually try something for real you know in the wild when you’re actually measuring it. It’s very easy for business owners and marketers as well to get really excited by things sounding interesting and this case it wasn’t just like theory. We’d actually tested things out kind of in a pre-launched environment, but even then it goes to show that until you’re actually trying stuff in the wild with real consumers and you’re measuring everything to trust but verify you know as they say.

Scott: Yes, that is a secret lesson, I like that. I have a bunch of lessons like that. Yes, but I am kind of interested to move on to your twitter handle, @ThePokerCEO. You are a competitive poker player which I think is just fascinating. So when choosing these tactics and helping these companies, kind of map it back to playing poker, because I would assume that a poker player has some situational awareness and is using statistics on outcomes. Do marketers really get that many, do they get to play that many hands? Do they not understand kind of the statistics around their situational awareness or does being a poker player help you? How does that work?

Do you think being a professional poker player helps with your situational awareness?

Jon: Yes, it is a fantastic question. First I think my experience in poker has definitely helped me when it comes to taking a really like unique but effective approach to growing companies. So my background is playing online poker which I think is really important to note. You know, when you play online it is very similar to the way a digital marketer launches campaigns and uses tools like Google Analytics. So taking a step back, like what poker is all about and ultimately what Ladder believes marketing and growth should be about is accepting the fact that you have to make lots of choices with incomplete information. The information you have is typically, when it comes to marketing, just based off like water cooler recommendations. It is what you heard from somebody else. Its what you yourself personally tried. It is really like a small sample of data and the game is really all about how you can get complete information to make better choices off of it, right? Essentially do a better analysis and build better strategy. Poker is the exact same where you are playing, you are making lots of decisions on ROI, right, just like digital marketing. And, when it comes to online poker, software existed for quite some time but basically it is just like Google Analytics on steroids where it looks at and tracks all the data that is being collected and measured at the poker table over a long period of time and it takes all the data, and start serving it to you the player in an intelligent way. That then allows you to make better choices when it comes to how much do I invest in a decision? How much do I bet? What type of bet should I make in the first place? That directly corresponds to the challenges and opportunities of a digital marketer which is basically saying where should I focus resources, my bets? How much should I bet in the first place? Do I have a process in place where I can you know, learn a maximum amount of the choices I make without betting the farm on it, right? And, being able to manage a bank roll effectively. A bank roll essentially is basically just having your monthly media budget.

Scott: That is a great analogy. It is something that I think everybody can grab on to because there are so many unknowns and many other factors when you are playing poker and the same goes for marketing, especially in the B2B world. One of the things that are water cooler talk right now, is you know the social media platforms will change an algorithm and it affects your strategy and your media budget things like that. So I think the situational awareness is, that is a great analogy. I mean that is a whole podcast in itself I think. You should do that sometimes. So Jon, what else do you listen to or read to get inspiration or, do you have anything for continuous learning anything like that.

What else do you listen to or read to get inspiration?

Jon: Yes, my answer is going to be a little bit of cop out, but it is a true one. Now there are really two things that I have read and got inspiration from. The first, generally is the Ladder blog. We have an incredible content marketing team who preachers like radical transparency in everything we do. And then really Ladder is at a point where we work with lots of companies. We do extremely interesting stuff on a weekly basis. The blog that we have is a great way of transparently kind of bullet pointing what is happening, what are these trends we are seeing in the Ladder playbook, in our own database and experience, and what does that mean for companies. So at this point, I honestly, our own blog or something that I personally read really often and get an inspiration from that great team. Beyond that, I am actually really big into like twisty, like mystery books in the fiction space. I think the reason for that is when it comes to growth and the way that we always try to be really innovative with Ladder, it is always kind of thinking outside the box. What often happens with the company is when we work with them, they come to us with a growth problem. Let us say, their growth has really plateaued. What we never want to do is simply start like reciting the ABCs and formulating and clean cutter in our approach. And in order to be innovative, you have to just really have an open mindset that looks at all the information that is there right now. It is isn’t afraid to think outside the box and say well, “You know if you want to get from point A to point B you can’t keep doing the same thing. You know you can’t just keep trying new things that essentially are playing in the same arena that you currently are.” Sometimes you kind of have to, we architect the entire game in the first place and shift your whole strategy around in the outlook to have success. So, for me, reading kind of interesting you now a mystery, fiction books. You know I’ve always found this keeps me imaginative and helps me like always have that mindset when it comes to looking at a new challenge with the company.

Scott: Ha! That’s interesting. Yes, I’m kind of a non-fiction guy so I don’t read like that. But, I will check out the blogs that, thanks for plugging that. We’ll link back to it. Do people ask your advice on anything else other than growth marketing, growth hacking, and poker? You an expert in anything else?

Do people ask your advice on anything else other than growth marketing, growth hacking, and poker?

Jon: Yes, and once they have an expert at this. But at this point, we have grown Ladder bootstraps in less than 3 years to now, a 40 person company. We have worked with hundreds of businesses. We have manage remote teams. We recently bought a company located in Europe as well. And so it has been a really interesting journey to learn me on the operations side, the finance side, and like that. So, at this point, I am always like really enthused to talk to other business owners who are going on a similar journey and to share learnings.

Scott: Okay, that is outstanding. You said you bought a company can you say what that is?

Which company did you recently acquire?

Jon: Yes absolutely. So really, just this past month when we bought a 10 person growth hacking agency located in Western Poland. It was founded by an ex-Googler and the interesting thing with them is they were taking a very similar methodology to growing companies that Ladder has always have. They actually ended up finding us through our own content and we ended up just striking a really good friendship at first. We realized that we both saw the world of marketing the same way. Just recently we have officially joined forces and now have an additional crew of awesome people helping us to grow businesses.

Scott: That is super. And they found you on your blogs. That is cool.

Jon: Yes.

Scott: So Jon, thanks so much. Any closing thoughts as we shut down today?

Any closing thoughts?

Jon: Yes, the only closing thought I have is if you are a B2B marketer or business owner listening to this right now, and you want to find immediate value from the Ladder playbook, the first thing as always is how can you simplify. So you are going to see lots of options and if you want to lever those options without having to work with Ladder directly, number 1 rule I would say is always starting decision making with the goal that you have in mind. The single goal should be totally commercial. It should be as simple as saying we get 10 demo request every single month right now. We want to get to 20. Every single thing you do in terms of strategy, every tactic you evaluate whether to get more traffic or to get more traffic, always train yourself and your team to forcefully trace that back to, okay how is that going to get us from 10 requests to 20. Because, marketing is tough. There are lots of things you have to choose from. There are also choices you have to make. So always being mindful of the commercial goal is super helpful as a process point.

Scott: Well perfect. Hey, thanks Jon for your time today. I really appreciate you investing time in my learning and the audience. So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Jon: Totally Scott, great to be here.

The post The Growth Marketing Playbook – Jon Brody appeared first on Scott King.

How Sales and Marketing Can Use AI22 Feb 2018

In this episode I talk with my friend, Chad Burmeister ( @scalexai ). Chad is the is the co-founder and CEO of ScaleX. Chad and I talk about some of the complexities that still exist inside sales and marketing teams when trying to use personalization and role specialization. Chad provides some technology examples of how break traditional barriers and increase sales activities using artificial intelligence.

A typical business development rep averages 30-50 sales activities a day. Our reps average 500 – 1000 sales activities per day and produce 25-50 meetings per month.

A sales person will talk with 3-5% of the leads that marketing sends them.

Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook. These playbooks have proven to increase lead conversion rates over 400%.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Questions During Episode
  • What is ScaleX?
  • What do you mean when you say the sales process is complex?
  • Why can’t we get past sales and marketing misalignment?
  • What do executive teams need to do to address these challenges?
  • What type of person is required to integrate disparate technologies for “conversation automation?”
  • How can sales and marketing teams use AI?
  • How can we increase reply and conversion rates?
  • Are chat bots effective?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Chad

The post How Sales and Marketing Can Use AI appeared first on Scott King.

Marketing KPIs – Joe Chernov15 Feb 2018

In this episode, I talk with Joe Chernov (@jchernov ). Joe is currently the CMO at InsightSquared. He previously worked at HubSpot and Eloqua so he knows a lot about marketing technology. Joe and I talk about measuring marketing KPIs, how to use social media effectively and some of his successful and not so successful campaigns.

Contact Joe Sponsors

This episode of The Scott King Show is sponsored by ScaleX.ai. ScaleX is a sales acceleration platform using powerful artificial intelligence. If your sales reps are not each booking 25-50 appointments a month, then they need AI-based personalization. ScaleX works with all modern marketing automation and social media platforms to get more meetings and multiply hours spent talking with prospects. Visit ScaleX.ai/scott and receive three Playbooks for dormant Leads, downgraded opportunities and the popular outbound playbook. These playbooks have proven to increase lead conversion rates over 400%.

ScaleX.ai/scott

Podcast Transcription

Scott: Well hey, Joe welcome to the show, thanks a lot for joining me.

Joe: Thanks for having me, Scott.

Scott: Today we’ve got Joe Chernov, CMO over at InsightSquared. You’ve may have seen him in the CMO circles at Eloqua and Hubstop and writing all over. Content marketing institute awarded you content marketer of the year. How’d you get that Joe? That seems pretty cool.

How did you win content marketer of the year?

Joe: Yes, so what happened was, I was the first one to get the award and I think it came down to he or she who could prove the value of content marketing would get the inaugural award because the industry association itself had an interest in proving that content marketing really worked. I just so happened to have some data to support my campaign, if you will. I suspect that made the difference, it wasn’t about the quality of my output it was about the impact of the output.

Scott: It almost sounds like a job, somebody had to figure out how to measure everything and then you come along and they paid you with the first award.

Joe: I had an unfair advantage. I worked for Eloqua at the time and we were a really data-driven marketing organization and I had a strong team that reported to me and that was adjacent to me, so I had a little bit of a leg up just given where I worked and the nature of that organization.

Scott: Yes, you would have an unfair advantage, Eloqua is a big system and you’ve been at Hubspot now InsightSquared. It seems like you are stuck in the martech vendor space and all of those different vendors solve different problems. I’m interested in what you consider to be the biggest challenge for CMOs today. Do you think that it’s in the martech space just because that’s where you live or do you think it’s something else?

What do you think the biggest challenges are for CMOs?

Joe: I can really only speak to my corner of the world and you right I’m stuck in my corner of the world in the mar-tech side. I think it’s funny term stuck, I laughed a bit when you said it.

Scott: I mean, some people may think that you’re crazy because that’s hard stuff.

Joe: I think it’s hard because the expectations are really high given that we tend to be at the front edge of change given that we represent the technology that will later cascade into the market more broadly. I don’t mean that as a boast but more so a statement of fact. What is most difficult for me and my cohorts of marketing leaders is that the expectation has spread from initially being expected to be responsible for building a funnel to now being responsible for throughput in that funnel, so we’re pulled more deeply into the sales process itself, I spend as much if not more of my time talking about sales follow up as I do creating demand itself. Now, there are rumblings that will be pulled all the way through the funnel and out the other side into the customer lifecycle. The expectations are that we will help retain, grow, renew, cross-sell, up-sell our existing customers to grow the business that way. The function itself, the CMO function is no longer limited to, quote on quote, just marketing but marketing plus sales plus customer success and that becomes a really big job.

Scott: It’s impossible, well not impossible, but very difficult for one person to do it. You’ve got to build a team around you to do all those different functions especially all the way through the backend customer renewals and everything. Everything is SAS based now so you have to renew customers all of the time. What do you think all of the executive teams, the CEOs and the boards, what do you think that they need to do to address the expectations on one person and how should they help him? How are you being helped maybe?

What questions are you asking to the CEO and the board?

Joe: I’m prone to say, show me how I’m measured and I’ll show you how I behave. I think it all begins with the right KPIs and the right metrics.  If my metrics are all pinned to the top of the funnel, if I am responsible for lead generations and I keep my job, I get a promotion, I get raises, I get my bonus all based on the number of leads.  and then you go and tell me that you’d also like me to focus on customer renewals. Well, if my KPIs don’t reflect that request then where am I going to spend my time? Show me how I’m measured and I’ll show you how I behave. I would urge leadership executive teams, CEOs, boards, to spend a disproportionate amount of time putting in place metrics, shared metrics, common metrics across sales, marketing and customer success that force, not just alignment but sort of functional integration. That’s the way to solve this. It’s not really through technology. It’s through putting goals in place that motivate the right behavior. At the end of the day the way I look at it is this. It’s going to work a little like this. I took a ski lesson one day and the coach, he told me a really great skier could lose a ski. One of the two skis could fall off during the run, and they could get to the bottom pull up to the lift and then realize that they are missing a ski. They are in such good balance that they don’t even realize a ski disappeared. So for me, the gold standard for sales, marketing, customer success should be if one of those executives dropped off the face of the earth the next day, could one of the other two fill his or her role and you never even notice that person was gone. That is an extreme way to look at it. But, metaphorically I think a lot about that advise that coach gave.

Scott: Yes, that’s interesting because a lot of the martech pundits talk about the machine. The marketing machine. They want the machine to work so that if one cog or one piece does go down that the machine doesn’t break the supply-chain of sales doesn’t break. So that is an interesting analogy, I’ve been skiing before and I’m pretty sure that I’d need both to get all the way down. I’ve accidentally skied on one when one fell off but I quickly realized, hey, I need two.

Joe: Yes, I’m in the same boat with you, that’s why I said I think it’s an aspiration more than a reality.

What is your favorite KPI metric and why is it you’re favorite?

Joe: It’s revenue growth. It’s funny I talked to my team  as we started going into plan for 2018 my team and I were talking about the metrics that are more equal that others. The metrics that kind of bubble up to the top of our priority list. We went around the room and talked about if you have to pick one which one do you use to sort of grade yourself. I was the only one who said revenue of the business. In a way I kind of appreciate that everybody one the team is looking for the number that they can most directly impact themselves. That’s probably a healthy outlook but you also need somebody on the team that looks at it as, if we hit all of our numbers but the business doesn’t grow did we really do the right thing for the business? The reciprocal is if we missed our numbers but the business is growing, everybody is going to forget that we missed our numbers. Nobody is going to beat us up over that. It all comes out into the wash based on how the business is performing.

Scott: Yes, because revenue growth is really what pays the bills right. You can’t go to the grocery store and buy your groceries with such and such conversion rate please give me all of my groceries. It takes dollars.

Joe: Exactly.

Scott: Yes so revenue is my favorite because that solves all problems.

Joe: I’ve been in board meeting where we missed the number but marketing metrics looked good. I always feel a little dirty boasting about marketing’s metrics. Ultimately all that matters is that they contribute to the business’s success. So, it feels a little icky to say you smashed your number but the company didn’t smash it’s.

Scott: Yes, supply chain problems. I want to shift over to your earlier days really talking about content. You’ve created content for a long time, content marketing institute awarded you, Content Marketer of the year because you were ahead of the game. You had all of these metrics and you helped them. Do you have a favorite piece of content, like one that was way more successful than the rest?  Maybe one you did yourself or do you have a favorite piece?

Do you have a favorite piece of content?

Joe: I do, by a country mile. It had nothing to do with business. One day, I read this article about shark finning. The study estimated that 100 million sharks are killed every year just for their fins, for soup. Everything else just dropped to the bottom of the ocean, the whole animal. I read it and then 5 minutes later I said, wait did I get that number right 100 million? 100 million? Yes, it was 100 million so I created with a buddy of mine, a designer who I had worked with in the past professionally. He had done most of the infographics and design work for Eloqua. I called him up and said, “Look man, how can we visualize how big 100 million is?” I said, “What if we faked an infinite scroll and we create an infographic that shows icons of a shark but we got 100 million of them of there?” And he’s like, “There is no CMS in the world that could support that.” So I said “Okay, divide 100 million by 12 and we’ll do how many are killed a month.” He said, “There’s no CMS that can support that.” So I said, “All right divide it by week.” On and on we went until we got to how many sharks are finned an hour and even that is like an infinite scroll. Why I love this piece is, it had an incredible amount of PR around it. I had people calling me saying, Kevin Smith, the film maker was talking about it on his SModcast. But the part that I really liked is that the fining tends to be a problem primarily in Asia. At least most acutely in Asia and there was a press conference. It was about environment sustainability, a press conference in China. The organization printed out the entire info graphic and rolled it out as if it were a red carpet and everybody that attended the press conference had to walk across it and physically experience the scope of this slaughter. I was just overwhelmed by that in that sense of contribution.

Scott: Wow, that’s pretty cool. did you just do this out of your own pocket? Like “Hey, sharks are cool I want to buy an infographic” or did the designer do it pro bono? How did that work?

Joe: It was a partnership so I didn’t pay. I would have but I didn’t have to. Robin the designer, Robin Richards he was able to develop quite a name for himself on the back of this. We were just a team. We both cared about it. It was something that startled us, the scope of that. He felt similarly to the way I did and we just decided to strike up a collaboration.

Scott: Well that’s outstanding. That’s a good use of data visualization and social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter.  Everyone talks about we should use those but how effective are they? How are sales and marketing teams using social platforms like LinkedIn well? You just provided a really good example of how I could put out content and then share it and it even showed up as a red carpet.

How are marketers using social platforms well and how could they be using them better?

Joe: Yes, in some ways there’s almost an embarrassment of riches when it comes to social media’s ability to facilitate the connection between one person and another. There’s an embarrassment of riches. That is to say, it is just really easy to find people and to interrupt them. The way I think it is being employed poorly is people who use LinkedIn messaging to side step email.  They send you a connection request. You accept the connection request because they have a common industry or common school, there’s something that tells you it is not spam.  Then, low and behold 30 seconds later you get a sales pitch. That is how they are doing it poorly. I’ll talk about the challenge with how it’s being done well.  How it’s being done well is, as we publish more and more of our thoughts, like people know that I care about shark finning or environmental issues, people know what my political leadings are, people know that I like to ski, all of this stuff is kind of fair game it’s out there. When people ignore, when people don’t stop to kind of study someone and develop almost of a scouting report on that person and then tailor their pitch to what that individual does, likes, his interested in, is concerned about and ignores that massive amount of unstructured information when they pitch and they just race to the close, that’s what flawed. The challenge is it’s very difficult to scale, where it’s effective is when folks stop, look and then respond. I can give you a really good example, I was pitched by a marketing automation company, I’ve worked at two of them Eloqua and HubSpot and I’ll use a third, Marketo. Somebody from a fourth wrote me. It was a BDR pitch, inside sales person, entry level rep pitch and said, “I know you’ve worked at two of our competitors. You probably know who we are. But, there is an element of our business you might not know about.  That is, we started with content in mind and I know much of what your focused on is content marketing. I’m okay if you don’t want to continue the conversation, I just really wanted you to know what our difference is.” It was such an unbelievably good pitch that I responded and I said, “I’m not in the position to buy, we just signed on with Marketo.” But, this is as perfect of a pitch as I’ve received. It’s short. It’s relevant. It’s focused on your value and I copied it to his entire executive team. He wrote me after to say, “I’d rather have my executive team see that response than the sale at this point in my career.” To me, I want more people should do that. That guy really nailed it and if I was in the market for a marketing automation product I would have given this company a shot.

Scott: Yes, that brings up a good point; One, on the bad example. I got one of those this morning. A connection request then immediately, “Hey I sell this.” I’m like “Dude, your doing it all wrong.” I have had because I put my self out there quite a bit. I got a pitch one time and it was articulating my history down to when I coached my daughter’s soccer team at the YMCA. My response was much the same, “Hey, thanks a lot for actually being interested.” What happens is the conversion rate on those are really high but the quantity is really low. It’s like “Hey, I need a million leads this month or 100 million, if your sharks”, where are all of my leads? People get lost in the quantity versus the actual conversion rate of an actual conversation. If you can create a conversation, I talk a lot of the podcast about B2B marketers need to humanize themselves and humanize their brands more like B2C. We are all people and social media makes it easier. I think it goes back to your KPIs, “Hey, maybe we need to look at the number of conversations we have versus the number of leads we’re getting.” The number of leads is irrelevant if nobody ever talks to each other.

Do marketers need to look at the number of conversations we have versus the number of leads we’re producing?

Joe: But, the flip side of that is if you have to get 100 sales to make your number and you can have 50 conversations even if every one of those goes on to buy, you’re going to miss your number by half. That’s why I said there’s a scalability problem with being too precious in personalization. You have to strike this balance. We have ethos internally where we say first is best. Meaning the first discovery about something that interest somebody or someway that you can make your pitch more relevant, that’s good enough. Stop there and then craft your pitch around that. That’s our way to try to create some degree of personalization at some level of scale.

Scott: Yes, total agree. It’s hard to read everybody’s LinkedIn and write a custom pitch. It’s just really slow, effective but slow you’re right. Outside of the shark infographic example, what’s one of your most successful campaigns? Do you have something else maybe for work that worked out? What made it effective and how did you measure the success of it? Do you have an example that is at the top of your mind?

What’s one of your most successful campaigns?

Joe: Yes, I do. I’m going to go in a different direction. We run direct mail programs. Really premium direct mail programs. Not sending people coffee mugs with your logo on it but like luggage tags with their initials on them and we do this for open opportunities. So this is designed to generate revenue for the business. That is, the marketing has already sort of done its job. We’ve sourced the lead. We’ve passed it over to sales. We’ve warmed up through nurturing and now there are in the sale cycle. In most companies marketing is done at that point and they go back to the top of the funnel to try to procure the next one. What we try to do is market all the way through the funnel. We partner with sales and we will run some direct mail programs at open opportunities. There are open opportunities that meet different criteria that will make them eligible for different levels of direct mail. We’ve looked at our close rate when we run those programs versus our standard optic close rate when marketing sort of abandon ship and goes back to trying to procure the next lead and the close rate is about 40% higher, when we stay involved throughout the entire sales process. We know that we are having an impact . Only one person sees the marketing output. That is the recipient. By definition can’t go viral because it’s one to one marketing. The impact on the business is significant so that’s what excites me about those programs.

Scott: Yes, that’s pretty cool. I like the middle of the funnel sales process that always works because sales people are sometimes looking for items to push a prospect from one point to another. In the direct mail piece are you sending anything specifically? Or does it vary?

Are you sending anything specifically in your direct mail campaigns?

Joe: It varies. We’ve done a variety of programs. We sell to sales teams. Sales teams are the users of our product and so we sell to a lot of tech companies. Their sales floors look a lot like our sales floors.  A lot of young guys with baseball caps on backwards and we’ve branded energy drinks, sort of Red Bull like energy drink. We’ve branded them with InsightSquared logos and some data visualization looking graphics. At the very top of the funnel if someone looks like a really good fit for us, we send them a case of those. What I like about that program is they get shared, there’s 24 sugary beverages being circulated on the sales floor, now everybody in that sales team knows who we are that’s why I like that program. But I like more of a spoke more one to one programs. We know if you used to use InsightSquared but have gone on to either a new company that doesn’t or if you were in our sales cycle once and you didn’t buy but you re-entered our sales process a second time, you’re three times more likely to purchase. For those cohorts we do our come running back program, which I think is kind of fun. We send them a postcard saying “We missed you. Come running back to InsightSquared” and the postcard has a URL where they add their shoe size. It’s kind of weird its all like running themes down the postcard and we send them a pair of Nike sneakers branded with InsightSquared colors. That is sort of a fun way to give the sales team an excuse to get engaged with this contact. They always take the call after getting that campaign. I look at our job as, similar to the agent in Hollywood. It’s not the agent’s job to get their client the part. It’s the agent’s job to get the client the audition and in my world the audition is somebody taking a phone call. My job is to get as many of those phone calls to happen as possible.

Scott: Yes. That’s a good analogy, I like the agent analogy that’s pretty cool. That is successful but you probably have some projects that you spend either a lot of money or time or resources on that didn’t work out.

What have you learned about things that didn’t work out?

Joe: Most things don’t.  It’s noisy out there, right?  It’s more and more difficult every day to get your signal heard amongst the noise. I run programs that I thought for sure were going to be a home run. For a while I was marketing to developers. It was kind of fun because they hadn’t seen the flavor of marketing that had been so delicious for marketing to marketers. That is some of the creative stuff, the info graphics, the videos. It just hadn’t been applied to that persona and I create this deck with a designer that was all themed around Tarot cards and the design was beautiful, he did such an incredible job. Nobody, I mean nobody consumed it. With marketers, it would have gone over like gangbusters. Developers are just to weird and it was just miscalibrated. So my lesson there was that you really do have to understand, that the content isn’t good or bad in absolute. It’s good or bad relative to who it is designed for. Not everybody would like Chopin. Classical music fans would like Chopin. A 20-year-old would like Taylor Swift. They’re not good or bad in absolute. They’re good or bad relative to their audience and I was looking at content in absolute in that regard. Another that I wouldn’t say it was a failure, I just have no idea if it was successful or not was last year we ran an out of home campaign. We sell a lot to venture-backed tech companies and we surrounded those companies with bus stop ads, outdoor ads throughout San Francisco. They were fun ads. They’re build like a bunch of sales reports and they would ask a provocative question like can you figure out what’s going on in this company? We knew we’re going to measure it by anecdote. We knew it was going to come down to were prospects acknowledging that they had seen this? We seeing Twitter activity. Were we seeing geographical search volume increase? In the end, we got a few anecdotes. I have no idea if I paid myself back for that. But, I do know the one lesson here is, you will never get a home run if you don’t take that bats and you’re going to miss as much as you hit. But look, the Hall Of Fame in baseball is filled with people who missed 70% of the time. You’ve got to accept that there’s going to be some trial and error here.

Scott: Yes that’s always the tough part. The at bats are always a good example because like you said the Hall Of Fame guys, the good ones get in on a 300 average. 700 is misses in and . I think most marketers get that. Especially if you are marketing to marketers. You kind of live in a different world because people like different stuff. But developers they just want free software. They say, “I have a problem right now can you help me solve my problem right now?” Let me go search for it, let me see what I can find. It may not be Tarot cards something like that. You’ve done this for a while and you’ve been marketing to sales and marketing folks for a long time.

Who or what do you listen to or read to stay on top of your game or to be inspired?

Joe: To stay on top of my game I try to curate a list. The people I follow on Twitter tend to be a pretty reliable signal for what matters. But if I had to pick a person, I think Jon Miller at Engagio consistently puts out the best stuff. I think he is extraordinarily bright and he gets where this industry is going. I think Jon is extraordinary. A couple colleges of mine at Eloqua Steve Woods and Paul Teshima, they run a startup called Nudge. They’ve written a number of blog post lately that I think are spectacular. They have one about how hustle is overrated and how volume is overrated very similar to our conversation.  They’ve discovered  the only way to advance the business is to try to help somebody to add value in every single conversation you have with them even if it’s a conversation that has nothing to do with what you sell. They’re kind of re-thinking their go to market around that ethos. I think those guys are putting out really interesting stuff right now and I know them both well and they’re extraordinary guys. I think those folks, the three of them are doing really well. I think the CMO at Engagio, a woman name Heidi Bullock. She spent a lot of time at Marketo. I think she is very strong. I think the best marketer in tech full stop is, Maria Pergalino who is now at Anaplan.  She was recently at Aptus. Her speeches are incredibly insightful because they are really tactical. It’s interesting she is one of the most prominent marketers in tech, she’s SVP’s CMO and yet she gives these really hands-on tactical presentations. It’s refreshing seeing someone at that altitude being able to talk about what people and their team do on a daily basis. She doesn’t get stuck rarefied air. So I think Maria is also a real inspiration.

Scott: Alright cool. Definitely I’ll take a look and search around for those blog post and link back to them, does sound interesting. What do people ask you Joe for advice on? Outside or martech and sales and marketing are you an expert at anything else?

What do people ask you about?

Joe: I don’t know if I’m an expert at anything let alone anything else. The email I always respond to is the LinkedIn message, I always respond to it. It is one about starting a career, changing a career, people that are trying to think about how they might want to adapt what they are doing, where they feel like maybe painted into a corner a bit career-wise. I enjoy those questions and I respond to those questions, I try to respond to those questions in as sincere a fashion as I can. I really try not to mail it in those responses because I’m incredible flattered that somebody would reach out to me on that. When it comes to, even with my team, my litmus is, I tend to manage people in Tech-Marketing. They are young and I tend to manage quote on quote millennials and what I try to optimize for is, when they go home at thanksgiving or if they drop off their laundry and their parents house, what do they tell their parents about their job? What do they tell their parents about their boss? What do they tell their parents about the projects that they are working on? I try to optimize for a response that the mom or dad says to them, “Wow you’re in a really good place, I wish I had found myself in that place at that stage in my career” and if I’m getting there, if they are having that conversation then I’m doing my job.

Scott: That sounds pretty cool. Pretty tough to measure because you’re not there at Thanksgiving with everybody else but good idea.

Joe: In marketing they are things that we measure that we can prove to be right. It’s a KPI. But, there are also things we need to do that we just know to be right whether or not we can prove them. We as an industry have shifted so far to prove to be right that we sometimes lose sight of the things that we simply know to be right.

If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week Joe what would you do?

Joe: I would try to get incrementally closer to try to lose one ski and find my way to the bottom of the trail without killing myself.

Scott: That sounds good. We should be getting more snow than ice these days so so hopefully you can you can find a downhill to go mono-skiing I guess. But a monoski is an entirely different thing. Have you seen one of these?

How do you prefer people contact you?

Joe: If it is something that is public you can ask on Twitter. That will get the fastest response. If it’s something private they could connect with me on LinkedIn and ask the question in the connection request and then I’ll accept it responded if I can.

Any closing thoughts on what we talked about today?

Joe: I am glad that we got to touch on the notion that not everything in marketing can be measured and there are certain things you need to do marketing simply because you know them to be right. I enjoyed talking to you about marketing KPIs and how ultimately in the end, if you want to induce the right behavior it all begins with attaching the right metrics from the very start. Show me how measured and I’ll show you how to behave. I think it’s important that marketers keep their content skills sharp by producing content that not only makes sense for them professionally but also inspire them personally and we talked a little bit about a passion project of mine.

Scott: Brilliant. Thanks Joe so much for talking with me today. I really appreciate your time. I learned a lot and hopefully the audience learned a lot. I just want to thank you for your time.

Joe: Thank you, Scott

The post Marketing KPIs – Joe Chernov appeared first on Scott King.

When to Protect Your Intellectual Property – Vincent LoTempio08 Feb 2018

Vincent LoTempio ( @LoTempio ) is a Registered Patent Attorney. His practice focuses on intellectual property matters including patent, trademark, copyright prosecution and infringement litigation. Prior to his current practice, Vin practiced intellectual property law as a sole practitioner, was a Felony Trial Attorney with the Erie County District Attorney’s office and co-author of “Patent Fundamentals for Scientists and Engineers”

In this episode, Vincent talks to me about the difference between a patent, trademark and a copyright. He explains the process and costs associated with each and when inventors and marketers should seek protection. Vincent then talks to me about what inspires him and how he overcame losing his right hand in an accident when he was 12 years old.

5 Levels of Trademark Distinctiveness

  1. Generic
  2. Descriptive
  3. Suggestive
  4. Arbitrary
  5. Fanciful
Questions During Podcast
  • What is the difference between patent and trademark and copyright?
  • What is the America Invents Act?
  • When do marketers and entrepreneurs need seek legal protection?
  • How are marketers and entrepreneurs being taken advantage of?
  • How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  • What is your most proud accomplishment?
  • Describe a time when a project you were overseeing did not go well?
  • What did you learn from that and how do you avoid that from happening again?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • What do people ask your advice on other than law?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week, what would you do with your time?
Links and Mentions
  • Coca Cola
  • 7up
  • Dicks Sporting Goods
  • Nike
  • Adidas
  • Puma
  • National Gazette
  • Coppertone
  • Apple
  • Million Dollar Genius
  • Selfie Stick
  • Wayne Fromm
Contact Vincent

The post When to Protect Your Intellectual Property – Vincent LoTempio appeared first on Scott King.

Speak Like Your Ideal Customer – Jeffrey Shaw01 Feb 2018

This episode is all about writing and creating content using your customer’s own language. My next guest, Jeffrey Shaw (@JeffreyShaw1 ), talks to me about how to help businesses stand out, attract their ideal customers, and create brand loyalty that supersedes price. His latest book, LINGO, helps business owners and entrepreneurs understand their ideal customer on a deeper level to increase engagement and profits.

Contact Jeffrey Podcast Transcription

Scott: Who is this book for? Is it for the solo-preneur or is it for the entrepreneur or is it for marketers, sales people? Who is it for?

Jeffrey: I tend to refer to it as being for the uncommon entrepreneur. Meaning those of us that are out there doing something out of the ordinary. What I often say that one connective tissue and all the different industries that I coach people from is that we’re likely to be in an industry for which there’s no formal business training. So, there’s a lot of skills so we can learn a lot skill sets or technology but no one ever teaches that tries to make money on this thing. So this book is sort of geared towards that. Which I also can say it’s really for people that are in relational and not transactional businesses. Because to speak someone’s Lingo, to speak their secret language is that relational building strategy as opposed to transactional business and that would fall under–Yeah, for me I primarily think entrepreneurs. My podcast is the same way like creative warriors. We really gear to it being a show for people, you know, probably five or fewer people in the company, many of them solo entrepreneurs. The interesting thing is, which I guess have been a little surprise for me is that I’m followed a lot by marketers and that’s been interesting to me because it’s a little intimidating. I don’t consider myself a trained or professional marketer. I’m just an incredibly well experienced marketer. I’ve been in business for so long and I was out there as a photographer selling one of the most challenging things you can sell. I think I have a level of expertise as a marketer but I never set out to attract marketers because I was intimidated by their education and experience and having a right to claim themselves to be a marketer. Oddly enough, they get that what I have to say is interesting. So I have a huge following amongst marketers.

Scott: Why would a marketer be intimidating, right? I’m a marketing guy but like you, not by training but by practice, right? I was a sales guy and this like they said, hey, you’re really good at opening conversations and writing and doing all the stuff that we think a marketing person should do. Would you mind doing that? So I said, okay, sure. So why do you think marketers are intimidating?

Jeffrey: Not so much that they for who they are as a person. I’m an entrepreneur through and through. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life and, you know, I mean, my whole life like from being a young teenager fourteen year old selling eggs door to door and never really gotten a paycheck and I also didn’t go to college. It wasn’t really an option in my childhood. So I get intimidated by the idea that people are smarter, more educated, or have a degree that I don’t have and I sometimes forget. You have this wealth of experience of having been an entrepreneur and what makes my work unique is because I was that lower middle class kid ending up serving the wealthiest people in the country. That took a unique marketing mindset and that’s what Lingo is all about. So when I say, yes, that’s not who they are as.. as nice kind people or their profession, it’s, oh my gosh, they’re formally trained and I’m not. Do I have a right? But I said I just have to remind myself that, yeah, I absolutely have a right to because my journey has been unique and that’s how I think I can help people.

Scott: It’s interesting that you said that because marketers are trained yet maybe they’re trained in like the secret language in the Lingo and that is what your book is about. It’s actually how to get into an area or a circle that you maybe don’t belong yet but you’re trying to drag yourself in and that’s what Lingo is.

Jeffrey: I actually think that often what we’re trained in, sometimes keeps us on the surface of things and I actually my hope is that Lingo is a deeper version of what marketers may have thought about doing up to this point. You know, it maybe, not all, but some marketers and as a profession and even for entrepreneurs they may have been really concentrating on the buyer personas, the avatars, the demographics and the stats and that’s actually my dream is–is that we realize that, I believe, consumers of the future are going to demand more in-depth understanding of who they are in order to gain–for us to gain their business that I think sometimes when we’re highly trained in something you take that what I’m saying.. I’m a trained photographer but being good at managing the camera and being trained in the technique of photography is not why I have had a super successful business. It was because of the humanity and the connection I created. So, I think sometimes formal training in something actually can become a little bit of a barrier. So that’s what my hope here is that with this actually conversation Lingo opens up an opportunity for marketers to even think in more depth.

Scott: Yeah. I totally agree. I’m thinking when you talked about the technical aspects of photography, back in the old days when you had dials and knobs, aperture and speed and light and like all of these and focus and depth and all those things that photography have had to offer for an experienced professional. A marketing person understands all these marketing automation tools as well but there’s all types of tools. If you’re not telling the right story and if you’re not dragging your user in your demographic, you’re missing half of the picture. I think you kind of stumbled into that with photography and then figured out how to sell a luxurious product and I think you actually did bridge the gap.

Jeffrey: Well, you’re raising a great point. It’s like you go to any art school. You go to a photography and you learn about composition but it’s often the most compelling thing is you create or when you break the rules of composition. Right? So, any time we’re formally trained in something, we’d get the structure we need and as a marketer you may gain and great knowledge about layout and impact and how to. But it’s actually when you think outside of that box, when you break that mold and you actually create your most compelling art. We see the same brands every day. It’s the brands that we know. Geico I think is an interesting example. It’s almost if you follow it they almost break all the rules. It’s crazy how many different styles of ads they are running. It used to be the caveman. Then it was the little lizard. Then like the Loch Ness monster coming out of a pond of a golf course. The squealing pig. There’s almost no unification to their branding, but then why does it work?

Scott: That’s interesting. I haven’t thought of Geico as an example but it does work, right? Or, maybe you’re crossing over different demographics, maybe whatever you’re watching or reading, maybe they have missed targeted you. Or, you see more because I don’t think I’ve seen the Loch Ness monster thing. I forgot about the caveman. I remember the gecko.

Jeffrey: The caveman was a long time ago but that was one of the original concepts. They break all the rules. Well, not all the rules, but they certainly break some rules of marketing as far as continuity and consistency and brand identity. There’s a campaign going now. I’m trying to think of what it is but, you know, the first few times I saw the ad I didn’t realize it was even Geico. So they’re breaking a lot of commonly held ideas around marketing and yet it’s working because they’re breaking the rules in a way and yet there is. I’ve looked at them enough to figure what’s going on here. There is a common denominator and it is that you can get cheaper insurance in fifteen minutes. You can save fifteen percent in fifteen minutes. So there is In every case, there is an easy component that ultimately comes forward in the commercial. But from an identification perspective, they’re all over the place and yet it works.

Scott: Maybe they are more advanced? Maybe formally marketed or formally trained marketers like we were talking about earlier are beyond the four Ps. The promotion and the price and the product and all that and these guys have evolved with the way we consume media, right? So, ever since we got Facebook and the smartphone, marketers do know more about us. They know our location, you know, for one because we’re on the phone and we’re emitting that information and you can grab that and maybe Geico maybe they’re just more in tune with the technology and plus they buy a lot of media, right? They spend like a billion dollars on ads. They’re everywhere.

Jeffrey: And yet, I think this is what separates us in our industries. There are a lot of insurance companies out there selling ads, buying ads and selling to us, State Farm. This is progressive. I refer to it in Lingo as, owning your space. Geico has a space that they own and which we expect them to present their products and services under. State Farm has a very different space, right? State Farm space is much more traditional insurance. We’re over there when you need us, very stable. That’s their insurance space. So there’s a lot of progressive–which I don’t think works as well–that does trying the whole Flo, you know, Flo the character and they’re trying a humor, trying to get to you through humor but it’s not. I don’t know. I just don’t find it as they’re almost too close to Geico, right? Geico is all humor–Progressive is just kind of playing to the left of it and so therefore it’s not strong enough. But if you put Geico and State Farm, side by side, they are competitors. But, look how worlds apart they are in their style and they’re attracting. Which is the whole point of Lingo, they’re attracting, very different customers, people with different values, different mindsets, different attitudes.

Scott: I think it was last night I was sitting around the dinner table and talking to the kids about who knows what and progressive came up. I said, oh, yeah, we’re a Progressive customer and the look of disappointment on my fourteen year old daughter’s face was like. I didn’t really think of it then, but now, talking to you, and talking about the different insurance companies that there was this look of disappointment. Maybe here expectation was that we should be a customer of something else because she identifies with it better.

Jeffrey: Yeah, but that can’t you be, you know, why aren’t you a customer of something cooler, right? That’s probably what, you know, a fourteen year old’s thinking about and the perfect example of this I think is it’s just… look at a couple like Sears. Can anybody say what Sears stands for anymore? I don’t think so.

Scott: To me it stands for my grandparents.

Jeffrey: Exactly. It’s just so… you just don’t need to say about it. I mean, the closest is they kind of stand for appliances, right? There’s still a pretty good resource for appliances but that’s the problem. J.C. Penney, too. The companies that we see in our world that were at one-time thriving and really stagnant now. You can kind of look at them and say the problem is they don’t own a space. No one can clearly identify what Sears represents. They were vanilla in a world that needs pistachio and they were just like laying there flat and stand for nothing. I mean, I guess that’s where you run in and buy Hanes underwear. I don’t know what you do at Sears. I don’t know that a lot of people do which why you’re not compelled and drawn to go in there.

Scott: Yeah, there’s not even Sears near me anymore because they all closed. I do remember the last time I went into a Sears. It was about six or seven years ago maybe and we were shopping for something like an appliance. Some big, hard, good like that. We walked in. It just felt weird and we just left. My wife and I we just left because it felt weird and I think we went to some specialty store. You go into the specialty store because we knew we were shopping for and they understood maybe our Lingo, right? So, so we kind of stepped into a situation that made us more comfortable. The sales person was more knowledgeable and we bought something there, right? Maybe they don’t really know where their space is anymore because they got so diluted and you saw Amazon and Wal-Mart kind of take over and those guys are just dead. You know, same with J.C. Penney. I can’t tell you even why you go there. I saw J.C. Penney ads over the holidays and I was surprised that they were even advertising. Who goes in there?

Jeffrey: Look what happened a few years ago when they decided the CEO had the bright idea to no longer have sales. They were just going to make their pricing, everyday pricing with no more sales. Well, that killed them. Because they took away, they talked about not understanding the Lingo, their ideal customer. Gap did this, by the way, when I talk about the same Lingo a lot of people realize that several years ago, I think it was 2010. The Gap tried changing the logo.

They just wanted to change the look of the logo. It’s still going to be called The Gap and it was the same color scheme. This is for rearranging elements and it lasted for a week because when they put it out there their social media following went nuts. Right, because they didn’t want the change. So, these brands occasionally, usually brands that had been around for a while they lose their identity and they lose — in JCPenney when they abolished the sales, they made a disconnect to the language of their ideal customer who likes the thrill of getting something on sale. But they know that those other times that might be more expensive but if you take away that game that right they took away the game of occasion of the only reason why you’d want to go there and they’ve never really recovered from it. So, you talk about Sears, like to me, I love that you said you felt weird going into Sears. There’s no one talking like you walk into a Sears and I do not mean just in its literal sense although there was kind of a required hum to the Sears like they really literally almost as isn’t anybody talking but there’s nothing about that store that’s stands out that you feel like there’s any conversation going on. The reason you were drawn into that specialty store is, likely not only because they knew your secret language but that you’ve walked in there because you’ve recognized them as speaking your language which is what drew you in on the first place and this is all part of the 5-steps, the 5-strategy steps that I explained in building this language strategy. The second step is familiarity, right? We’re drawn to what’s familiar to us because hey, it’s already speaking your language. So I would say you’re probably drawn into that store in the first place and then found what you needed because, “Hey, here’s a place speaking my language.”

Scott: So yes, you talk about the secret language in Lingo in the five steps and that was the second one. What do you describe in Lingo that are the other steps?

Jeffrey: Sure. So to backtrack to the first step is to understand the perspective of your ideal customer. So you could see this even a step prior to that which is knowing who your ideal customer is, which, Scott, honestly was a surprised to me. I actually wrote the entire book and started doing podcast interviews and which repeatedly getting asked by people saying, “Well, how do we know who our ideal customer is?”

Honestly, Scott, I thought people knew that. I’m like, “But you’re already in business how do you not know who your ideal customers and you’re already in business or on podcast? I felt I was speaking to entrepreneurial podcast who the audience–they are entrepreneurs. It’s like, “Why is the host asking me that, do we even know?” We actually went back and wrote a chapter on defining your ideal customer before I could lay out the 5-step strategy, the first step is perspective. You cannot build a business and this is the downfall — I don’t know if I say downfall — but this is the challenge I think most businesses set for themselves right at the beginning. Businesses are built backwards. Particularly entrepreneurial ventures because what happens is people have a great idea that they want to build a business. They build a business and then they spend who knows how many years running around trying to fit people into that business, what we call customers.

They’re literally trying to market a pole in like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, where the right way to be, if you want to make your life easier then decide who you are meant to serve, what your skill set, to find your ideal customer, where does your skill set best serve? What are your innate qualities? What do you have to bring to the table? So then you know who your ideal — that’s the title of the chapter on defining your ideal customer. By the way is called ‘Who would love that?” Because that’s the bottom line. It’s like, “All right, this is who I am. This is what I’m good at. This what I have to offer, who would love that? That’s who your ideal customers. Once you know that then, “Okay what’s their perspective? How do they look at the world? What are their values? Are they innately pessimistic or they innately optimistic or how did they look at the world? When they go shopping currently, what is it look like? When they go online, where are they going? What’s their traffic pattern now? You have to understand that before you can do anything else so that you end up with the business that you build for the people you want to serve so step number one is understanding their perspective. Step number two, as I said a moment ago, familiarity which I think it’s insanely powerful and yet overlooked, right? Because we always want to be innovative and innovation’s great. I’m not saying by familiarity that what we do or what we build on our websites and then we don’t want it to look like anybody else or other brands but you’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you don’t understand what feels familiar to your ideal customer because that feeling of familiarity that people that we as humans feel, it creates comfort and lets us know we’re in the right place. To overlook the power that is a huge gap, right? So you don’t want to copy but if you understand the perspective of your ideal customer and what like, your experience, you and your wife’s experience in a store like that feeling of what’s familiar and what’s not familiar is tremendously powerful to let people know, “Hey this is, I’m in the right place. This is somebody I want to do business with. This is a business where I belong.” So it’s powerful.

Scott: Yes, everyone has examples where you walk in to some place and it just doesn’t feel right.

Jeffrey: That’s me in Home Depot. Like I break out in a sweat in Home Depot. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just not a brand for me. It’s just things are going to fall in my head.

Scott: So you like Lowe’s better, right? Because Lowe’s tailors more to the consumer where Home Depot tailors more to the construction or trade professional.

Jeffrey: I’m a service-oriented guy. I like a lot of help. I don’t like to figure things out on my own. I’m always amused by IKEA which actually I can really enjoy the IKEA experience of unfolded prop for and I talked about them and Lingo as well. Like in so many ways is such a brilliant business model but I referred to it in the book as absolutely sadistic. Like who came up with this business model? Like it’s fascinating and that’s why it works but think about IKEA like there’s nothing easy about that experience, right? You follow a set path through entire store and if it’s a big IKEA it’s like floors and you’re following the arrows and then you had to go pick out your own merchandise. One of the example I give in the book is understanding whether your customer, your ideal customer, are they time-conscious or cost-conscious. Now, IKEA is not appealing to the time-conscious customer and I actually don’t think they’re — I mean they are very cost-conscious like the prices are great. I think the language that IKEA is speaking is the satisfaction of the do-it-yourselfer, right? People that really enjoy the IKEA experience take a great deal of satisfaction in making it through the maze of the store, pulling things off their shelf, managing to somehow get all those components in your compact car — which is always like people strap on the roof–and getting it home, building it. Nothing about this is saving time but you stand back with your hands on your hips and you’re like, “Damn, I did that.”

Scott: Yes I think my most recent IKEA example was just after the holidays. My daughter wanted a desk and so we said, “Okay we’ll go to IKEA and get one.” There wasn’t even a discussion of other stores. We are going to go there and get one. Navigating through the aisles I tend to wander around. My wife hates it and she never can find me in the store. I’m just wandering around looking at stuff. Then, they find a desk that they like. Yes, we’re going to go pick it up and my daughter’s about to pull the wrong color because the item numbers are the same but there’s just a little circle with the color on it.”Whoa, whoa, whoa — I said, — that’s a brown one you wanted the white one.” It’s in another bin. Then taking it home and assembling I showed her the manual. I said, “Okay I want you to see how far you can get with this.” I said, “Show me how many languages are on this manual, right? There’s no languages at all on the manuals, just pictures and I said, “Because it’s global business they don’t want to translate all the stuff so they just do pictures, right? Lego is the same way. She just couldn’t get through the manual so I helped her through it. When I was unpacking the box, I was amazed at how much little extra material there was in the box. I mean it goes all the way down to the packaging. The overall process like you said. It’s either time or cost-conscious. Me driving to IKEA which is like 20 miles away from my house to having the finished product was over a day, right? Because I didn’t even finish assembling the thing on the first day and we had to stop and have lunch there where I had to buy this Swedish fish, right? All that stuff and I mean they do kind of suck you in but the whole experience there and watching everybody else do the same thing is really, really interesting but it’s a hugely successful business.

Jeffrey: Yes.

Scott: Yet it’s not that innovative, right? I mean they just have a bunch of stuff for your home. I guess that is their, the do-it-yourselfer is kind of their tribe.

Jeffrey: Yes but I say, exactly, that’s what I mean by Lingo. It’s like that’s the language they’re speaking. I will tell you the only I have ever been in IKEA is because I’ve been in a relationship with someone who was a do-it-yourselfer. I, on my own, I’m not in any way, shape or form an IKEA customer. I will go there to buy, I don’t know, sheets, maybe drapes or something that’s pre-made. I’m not a builder guy. I’m not a build-it-yourself-guy so they’re not speaking my language so that’s the last store I would think of. If I wanted a desk that’s the last store I would think of.
I’m going to go to a furniture store, right and that’s the point of Lingo. It’s like it’s understanding your language and creating that alignment between your ideal customer. I’m really not — like so I’ve been on it and experienced it and it’s always been because I’ve been in a relationship with someone who enjoyed that experience. So I’m a willing participant but on my own: absolutely no interest in that. I’m more of a, “Let me go to a furniture store and I’ll pay more, right? Because I’m not going to be as cost-conscious but I’m more time-conscious and I don’t really gain — first of all, I know that the IKEA building experience is not going to give me the feeling of satisfaction and personal achievement that others might get because I’m going to completely fail at it and I know that. I’m not good. I’m going to be so frustrated. I’m going to put wrong pieces together so it’s actually going to be a humiliating experience for me so I don’t do it. I’d rather pay more and go to a store and buy a desk.

Scott: Yes and then I mean it goes back to your third step, right ? Which is about style, right? So your style is different than mine because I shop at IKEA and you don’t.

Jeffrey: Yes, style and style is the decision maker. That’s how I refer to it because we were a short attention span society. We make decisions everyday based on what? It’s often on style. When style is everything, it could be the style of your branding. They just like the choice of your font. It’s how your website feels. It’s how your storefront feels. A comparison scenario I offer in Lingo is a — which is an experience I do know — if you go to a T.J. Maxx or you go to a store that carries a variety of designers, you’re shopping by size. So I’ll go up the shirt rack with all the mediums and within that section of mediums you’ll have a variety of designers and as you flip through the hangers what makes you stop on one versus another? You bypass 90% of them but something will make you stop. What makes you stop is because, “Hey, that style is me. That style resonates for me.” That is exactly what makes people stop on your website. If you are a really — like I feel the same way about when I book trips online for hotels like, I like a contemporary style, warm but contemporary. I’ve flipped through all the website go right passed all the ones with big grand chandeliers.
So I have my one excursion like that every now and then but overall that doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t like grandeur, big chandeliers, big force. I like warm contemporary straight line so as we flip through things in our life whether there it’s walking down main street, walk down a mall, flipping through websites, we are instantly making decisions about what brands and businesses resonate for us on the style of whether that style speaking on our behalf. I think it’s a really important component that is often overlooked in a very detailed one. This is where pay attention to the font that you choose. Is it conveying the style that your ideal customer resonates with or not? Because often what we buy as brands and who we choose to do business with is really an extension of our own voice. The clothes we put on our body along with the book, there was a course called the Lingo Course and we’re talking about style in last week’s call and I gave everyone an assignment which was for the next week: Pay close attention to the message you’re sending based on how you chose to dress that day and as you go about life over the next week, pay attention to how often you make a decision based on style because really the style that resonates for us, really, I said, it’s kind of an extension of what we already want to say about us.

Scott: Yes and that’s interesting. I do that all the time and speaking of fonts. If I had to pick a font, oh, that will drive me crazy. I don’t know, All I know serif and sans serif, that’s about it and so just pick one and go. But the style–it kind of goes back into what we’ve been talking about the whole time is you’re manufacturing a style based on your ideal customer and if you don’t know your ideal customer, you can’t really manufacturer a style that they’re going to like.

Jeffrey: Absolutely. You’re going to miss it.

Scott: Yes, so, you’re going to miss. But then how do we figure out how much the style is worth to them, right? Because you go on in your book and you’re talking about pricing in words but like how do you figure out the price. Is there a tolerance so do you try to move them up move them down? I know you talked a lot about the whole $99 trick which is just a dollar short of a hundred but that’s a big deal, right? Because $100 looks way bigger than 99 cents or $99 and in I don’t know who –how many years ago — figured that out but it’s true–

Jeffrey: If you want to–

Scott: –and then Walmart moved to 97, right?

Jeffrey: Yes, if you want the customer that’s going to be conscious like that needs to be conscious of that, right? One of the things that drives me crazy is how often I work with entrepreneurs who complained that their customers are nickel-and-diming them but then I look at their pricing structure it’s a completely nickel and dime price structure, right?
So if you’re going to — if you’re going to bring a high level of consciousness to the price by — as Walmart does — pricing your merchandise, your services to the 100th of the cent by making the whole transaction expire running entire ad campaigns about rollback pricing you’re going to bring high-level consciousness to your pricing then you can’t complain that you have people that pay a lot of attention to the price. That’s actually who you’ve called forward. You’re speaking that language or speaking the price conscious language. It’s why if you look at high-end brands it’s all extremely vague.

You go to a restaurant, a super high-end restaurant there aren’t even prices. Or, stores that I studied to build my photography business like Ralph Lauren’s flagship store in New York City, Bergdorf Goodman. The brands that I studied that were high-end for what I wanted to kind of emulate because I wanted to speak to who they’re speaking to. I want to understand what their language was because I didn’t know it. I grow up lower-middle class so I had to understand what is the language of affluence. When I found it from a comprising structure is that it’s very vague. Everything is rounded off. Nothing’s rounded off to the 100th of a cent or even as $500 or as $5,000. It’s 250. There’s vagueness and so vague that — and I talk about this in Lingo that it’s not just, it’s also the visual, right?

Even putting a dollar sign in your prices is bringing consciousness to the fact that you’re talking about money as opposed to something cost 250 like at my price list. As a photographer, if a portrait is $1,000, it’s just going to be a 1,000, no decimal point, no dollar sign, right? So I’m taking a consciousness off of that dollar sign even visually because I want to speak the language of very vagueness about money because I’m dealing with people. I want to speak the language of people who don’t need to care that much.

Scott: That’s interesting how you just, I mean you’re basically anchoring them not on the dollar, right?

Jeffrey: Right and it’s your choice. This is what I say in the book. I’ll tell you that pricing creates perception. So, the first thing, one of the thing I do with my coaching clients when we come home we get down to the nitty-gritty of working out the pricing. The first that I make them do is to decide, make a list, describe three to five words of the perception you want people to have about your business based on your price.
What is the perception you want? Is it affordability? Is it high quality? Like what’s the perception you decide on the perception first. Then, decide what price. Does it need to go get that perception? I give you, Scott, a direct example. When I return at 20 years old to my hometown to start my photography business, I struggled and failed for the first three years. Then realized that I was on a luxury product that I needed to speak the language of affluent people so I completely reinvented and rebranded myself after having studied these high end brands and developed a new business as a photographer two hours away from a current location of my hometown. There was a short period of time of a couple months there where I still have a foot in both markets.

So I was, on one town I’m selling an 8 X 10 for $48.02, which is already crazy number and I explained that in the book. I learned the formula how to price things so I follow it verbatim so already in my hometown I’m telling my community I’m a high end photographer but selling it for $48.02 which is low-end pricing. Whereas the new market I was opening up as a photographer I was selling that same 8 by 10 for $300.
Now, there were slight modifications. One is a better mounting board but nothing that I did added up to a lot of dollars to create a greater impact but here’s what made the difference. It was all about perception. I would not have been perceived as the high quality photographer producing the best work for the most sophisticated people if I charged too little. I actually had more pressure on myself to make sure I charged enough to create the perception that aligned with the people I was going to serve. So you actually get to this, people feel powerless by pricing. They feel like they’re going to lose customers by pricing. The reality is you get to decide what perception you want your ideal customer to have. What market? Where you want to be positioned in the market and then establish your pricing.

Scott: Yes, I totally agree and I love the $48.02 because then when you negotiate two cents off then you feel like you’ve won.

Jeffrey: I was one of those people complained like, “Why are my customers not willing to pay? Why are they nickel-and-diming me?” Well, I’m charging two extra cents. Like it was so ridiculous but at 20 years old, I couldn’t see it.

Scott: Yes. Yes. So you mentioned a lot about the book, where can we grab the book? Obviously, online or where do we get that?

Jeffrey: Yes. Yes, it’s the lingobook.com, is a landing page for but it’s also of course, Amazon so yes it’s out there and ready to go.

Scott: Then if anybody had a question for you, Jeffrey, based on anything that they heard today, what is your preferred contact method, social media, email, what do you like?

Jeffrey: Yes, actually what I like is to give — again because my whole thing is about speaking people’s language. I like to make sure people have the opportunity to get to know me better and my work before we even begin to form a relationship so I actually like to give something away. So we created for your listeners the Lingo Media Kit which they can get at jeffreyshaw.com/scottking. It’s pretty simple to remember. In and in that Lingo Media Kit is actually an infographic of a visual of the 5-Steps of Developing the Secret Language Strategy. There is also a free chapter on perspective which is not the first chapter by the way. It’s, I think, the third chapter, first chapter is just too easy. I want to give away the one that is most important and this is the most important chapter on the book and the there’s an audio version of the free chapter as well which have has sound effects and all that. So the whole entire Lingo Media Kit is available at jeffreyshaw.com/scottking.

Scott: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Jeffrey. I really appreciate you spending time with me today and teaching my audience about pricing.

Jeffrey: Awesome. Pleased to be here. Thank you so much, Scott.

The post Speak Like Your Ideal Customer – Jeffrey Shaw appeared first on Scott King.

Creating Long Form Content – Miles Anthony Smith25 Jan 2018

Miles Anthony Smith ( @Miles_Anthony ) is a seasoned content marketer and provides some tips on how to perform solid keyword research using a reputable tool. How to curate content with solid on-page SEO elements. Then, how to push your content out for initial clicks and links.

3 Phases for Longform Posts
  1. Solid keyword research using a reputable tool.
  2. Curating long form content on a topic with solid on-page SEO elements.
  3. Distribution (initial eyeballs) and quality link building.
Why Posts Fail
  1. There is not enough search volume for the keyword to matter.
  2. Too competitive compared to domain authority.
  3. There is no search intent.
Questions During Podcast
  1. What process do you use before writing an article?
  2. Why do you like SEM Rush better than Moz?
  3. What do you consider a long form post?
  4. What do you to get the initial audience for a post?
Links and Mentions Contact Miles

The post Creating Long Form Content – Miles Anthony Smith appeared first on Scott King.

Chatbots – Peter Lisoskie18 Jan 201800:28:32

 

Peter Lisoskie (@chatbotnation ) is helping companies integrate AI chatbots into their marketing, branding and customer service strategies. Peter thinks there’s a  shift happening and much of the current digital economy has transformed from a blessing to a curse. Email, websites, social media, and webinars are becoming the new NOISE of the marketplace.

It’s time to think different.

Early adopters are building ai chatbots. In this episode, Peter, explains to how chatbots will be the next form of owned media especially now that Facebook is reprioritizing its news feed. Peter talks to me about the different types of bots, how to build them and how to increase conversion rates using AI bots. Enjoy!

Contact Peter Full Podcast Transcription

Scott: Hey Peter, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot for joining me.

Peter: Thank you, Scott. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re going to have a great time talking about all the stuff that you probably want to know the role of Chatbots.

Scott: Yeah, today with me on the show is Peter Lisoskie. He’s on Twitter @chatbotnation, and we’re going talk about Chatbots. Peter is going to tell us a whole lot about what we need to know to run these things on our websites, in our messaging services and for customer service and sales perspectives. Peter, starting off, can you kind of level set us what the difference is between a chatbot that runs on my website and maybe one that runs in a messenger service or wherever it runs. Because I understand the website one because I like to interact with those, I can circumvent a lot of marketing automation by just going straight to the source and talking to the bot or maybe a person that’s monitoring one of those.

What is the difference between the website bot and the messenger bot?

Peter: Well, there’s a really kind distinct differences and use the backup just a second, Scott, everybody is on the same page with us. Chatbots really you probably heard the term there automated software service programs that aid in conversation. They can help you do a lot of things we’ll get into that here with Scott in the show. But as far as a website chatbot, if you guys go to website and you look down at the bottom and you click on chat typically in the past one of two things happened, either somebody popped up and you started talking to them and I was live chat or the other problem happened which is you clicked it and no was there and they said, please leave us an email and will get back to you in 24 hours. That’s become a real problem because everybody wants instant these days.

The website Chatbot can handle a lot of customer service. Nowadays, Scott, too we have what’s called Artificial Intelligence and machine learning where we build these engines that it starts out with like a FAQ, its Frequently Asked Questions but then it can learn based on people’s questions and answer back from the questions that was given that weren’t part of the original frequently asked questions, okay. That’s kind of a role of website Chatbot they set in your website, the other part that Scott was mentioning is the Messenger app and there’s different ones we build they could be for slack kick, but the biggest and most popular is Facebook, as you guys know, because Facebook as a couple billion people and they’re pushing, Scott, about 1.6 billion messages a month through a Facebook Messenger right now. Now, what I love about the Messenger app is the fact that they’re instant. So in other words, when one of somebody clicks on a link or scans a messenger code which we can talk about or types a keyword into a social comment the messenger window pops up and the chatbot immediately and instantly starts interacting with that person. A website Chatbot can’t do that yet. So that was nice and they can start engaging them right away and that instant is really, really powerful. It’s like think of the instant news feed notifications you get on Facebook, the other thing that chatbot can do in a Messenger feed is they can do auto responders like an email system.

So you can do a whole nurture sequences inside the chatbot based on what is important and relevant to the user. It can also do segmentation, Scott, where as a user’s conversing or clicking on buttons or typing in questions the chatbot is segmenting and putting that person in a particular interest area or bucket so it is giving them content that’s relevant to them or that is interesting to them.

Scott: And then with the Facebook bot does that fit on my website? Forgive me, because I actually don’t know. Do I have to be logged in to everything for it to work? So say for instance, I’m not logged in to Facebook Messenger on my laptop because I’m primarily a desktop user and I go to a website but they have a messenger bot.

Will it work or do I have to be logged in to everything all at the same time for it work?

Peter: That’s a really good question, Scott, the answer is no. For example, you could even have a messenger button so you had it on the side bot. Let say, Scott, you wanted to give them a — we have like a marketing strategy playbook for chatbots for companies. So I would say I have that on my right sidebar they can click on that and basically the Facebook Messenger window pops up automatically you do not have to be logged in to Facebook for the Messenger window to pop up and for them to start interacting with the chatbot.

When do people realize they need a chatbot? When do you do this? Or do you do it now because it’s hot?

Peter: The way I look at it, Scott, we have moved over the course of history. It’s been kind out a decade at a time. We went from PCs then we went to the internet, then we went to smart phones and now we’re moving to messaging not Messenger but messaging as the new platform. Conversation is the new economy. So this is not a fad, it is new and it is going to be look at very carefully in 2018 by a lot of companies and it’s something you should if you’re listening to the show, you should look at very carefully as well. The chatbots can be used, let’s say, you’re doing you could do a Facebook Ad, Google Ad, you could do a podcast show like yours, Scott, you can do blogging, you could do social media comments, whatever you’re doing out there in the digital space you can bring all of that into the chatbot and then the chatbot can do leave qualification. The chatbot can do customer service, the chatbot can collapse your sales models to get to a point where there interested and they want to contact your dealer or they want to buy something online from you.

But think about it this way, Scott, the biggest and most powerful way to look at it is every company has a customer journey and the chatbot creates this conversational journey that parallels the customer journey. Sometimes a user needs to have live interaction with the human being and sometimes it’s very appropriate for the chatbot to carry the load in many of those situations in the conversation. So that’s how we work with different clients as we’re mapping out their customer journey and then were overlaying the conversational journey that supports that customer journey.

How do I build a chatbot?

Peter: If you want to do it yourself there’s about 300 and counting now different chatbot platforms out there at the very low end the very basic one is ManyChat but there’s other ones. There’s Motion.ai from HubSpot, there’s Conversica, there’s Engati and there is Chatfuel there. And they all serve different purposes. They have different focuses and different specialties. Again, what you need to know is like what kind of bottom I’m trying to develop and then how techie are you? If you’re not very techy my recommendation is use ManyChat because it’s really built for very low end what we called done bots where they’re just kind of guided conversations. ManyChat has some functionality but not a lot compared to the others but you can still develop a bot a few days and have it out there. If you want to just have something as simple as I want to bring people into the bot and I want to give my lead magnet and build the least. ManyChat can do that just fine. But if you want to do something a little bit more interactive like what we do it Active Attention Design was talking animated characters and some intelligence with AI and functionality, you need to be more technical and there are different bot platforms to do that.

You mentioned AI a couple times, is this some type of algorithm that you wrote or you subscribe to? How does that work?

Peter: There’s different levels of Artificial Intelligence. One them is they can be built into the platforms where it is called a natural language understanding engine, Scott, and it has machine learning. In the customer service world, for example, what we would do is we put in we build the engine out with the number of questions that we would anticipate the customer might ask and then we would provide the appropriate response, okay? That’s a baseline and then from there the bot through machine learning and through all of the user sitter coming in and the questions that are being asked you can start learning what kinds of phrases and things that are being picked up and it can provide answers back based on its algorithms, okay, that’s one way. The other way is the ability to set up Artificial Intelligence through a more technical fashion like what use to be call API.ai which is now call Dialogflow it’s a tool by Google where you can actually create what they call intense and advance and it can trigger certain responses or functionality based on responses or inputs given by the user. And then there’s a third form AI which is called Deep Learning AI which is done with the tool like a TensorFlow where you actually your training the bot but it is getting the intelligence factor is much higher after you train it. It can handle even contextual things in language, phrases, you know, certain types of words like to, too, and two, right, where we have to the box, the number two or I want to go as well too, right. The TensorFlow can handle those kinds of things but you do have to train it and it has to have some deep learning.

Do you have any data on some of the retention rates or open rates or engagement rates that these things help drive for your customers?

Peter: It’s quite a bit better. We have what we created as called Active Attention Design and that only means that they open in click-through rates. I noticed a long time ago, Scott, my background is in tech and everything I try to do is I want to create this human connectedness, right. One of the first things in my work life, Scott, was when I started it was we have VT100 terminal we didn’t even have PCs, and when we first got our first Mac classes and I pull out of the box and the screen lit up and there was like files and folders. I mean was this almost this emotional interactions like, wow! This is like really cool.

When we created Active Attention Design, it was born out of the fact that the world right now we have a real problem and that is everybody’s in the sandbox of websites, email marketing, social media, things like that. Well, you know what, the problem we have is like HubSpot just reported a couple months ago over 55% of people spend less than 15 seconds on website now. Email marketing industry averages about 20% open rate, 1% to 2% click-through rate, social media it just adding more and more to the noise.

From customer standpoint, what used to be a blessing is now a curse and we are creating more and more of this noise and not only that, Scott, but its passive. I mean, if you think about the email marketing situation you could be using a very powerful tool that is doing segmentation, but the problem is is that that person that customer still has to go to their inbox. They have to open the email — open their inbox, they still have to find the email, read it and clicked though it. And the average American these days is up getting about a 121 emails a day, that’s average.

Hence, how do you get in hold a customer’s attention, right? That’s the problem, so we moved a different sandbox with chatbots and what we call Active Attention Design. We’re using talking animated characters, we’re using neuroscience and cognitive biases, we’re creating a conversational user interface standard, Scott, that don’t exist. And we’re doing this by looking with our clients, looking at the analytics and seeing what’s working and what it’s not working because if you think about it somebody way back when a graphical user interface standards had do the same thing, they didn’t exist, right?

What this is all lead to is typically we’re getting north of 80% open rates typically around 90% and we’re getting north of 35% click-through rates. So if you compare that to email marketing and say like you’re getting 2% and I’m getting 35% I’m getting over 16 times a click-through rate for the same cells back.
Then it begs a question, well, why would I go hang out an email on an own standpoint when I can do that and get a much better response in a chatbot, because I can build a bot list on the chatbot.

Scott: Yeah, and until it getting more and more difficult. Like what you said about email as passive because yeah you go and you fill out a form and it takes you forever to actually talk to somebody and get like a real answer but a chatbot you can either qualify in or out that person almost immediately and then advertising is getting more and more difficult especially when what was it? Was it last Friday when Facebook announced that they’re going to reallocate the feed to be in a more of the people that you want to hear from unless for advertiser.

Could you use Chatbots in that instance where our Facebook cost-per-click is going to go up so maybe we shift up those funds to maybe a Chatbot strategy and our engagement rates go up.

Can we save money by doing the Chatbot or they just as expensive as advertising? What’s the cost benefit here? Am I on the right track? Is that makes sense?

Peter: Yeah. No, that’s a really good scenario you bring up and it’s very important. I don’t know if you guys have heard but Zuckerberg last Friday this was reported, I saw it in Bloomberg News their market cap would down about 3.3 billion dollars. With his statement which is I’m planning to shift users news feed towards content from family and friends at the expense of material and media outlets business, right? I already know, Scott, because I own a Health and Wellness Center it’s a Brick & Mortar and I’ve been doing Facebook Ads for the last three years and my cost per lead is gone from about two bucks to ten bucks and that’s just in that period of time.

Now, if you start taking away the news feed for businesses in media’s they’re forced to go do pay. Facebook is already come out for the last year-and-a-half. In fact, they even said that by the end of 2017 they’re going run out ads based on their news feed. So if you look at a basic Economics 101: Supply-Demand, what do think is going to happen to that advertising cost? It’s going go way up, right? That’s a paid, right.

If you look at companies, they’re probably listening, if you’re a CMO, you think of things in terms of pay and turned it on, right. So, you’re paid strategy on Facebook anyway is going go up. We already know where Google PPC is that’s gone up depending on what your keywords are and things like that. In the earn space, you know, Scott, you’re doing a podcast so you’re getting sharing of your show but there’s also social media, there’s blogging and things like that. You can still do and that’s a good strategy and earned it harder to scale and it takes time, right.

If you want more of a scale of a list of response you got to go over to the pay. But either way at the end of the day the owned is where this is going and where I think it’s going for 2018 in a huge way and that is if I am spending money and the cost of advertising is going up and I’m spending time and which time is money in the earn space too as well, I better have a good own strategy and in my mind really there’s only two good ways to do own, one, is email marketing and other is chatbots.

If you look at — let’s just do the math really simply for all your listeners. If I’m bringing in a thousand leads to an email marketing campaign and I’m only getting a 20% open rate I only have 200 people that opened an email. If I do the same time thousand leads in the chatbot and I have an 80% open rate I have 800 people that saw that message and open it.

Now, if I go the click-through and I say, out of those 200 I’m only getting a 2% response that’s only four people that click-through an email marketing. If I get a 35% or 40% response on the chatbot that had 800 people have opened it I’m looking at about what is that 300-350 people that click through versus four people. So you just do the math, I mean just the math tells you along which one would you pick. And by the way, Chatbots are interactive, they’re conversational. We do animated characters and make them entertaining and fun and engaging. They have artificial intelligence.

They do segmentation relevance like email but they have so much more capability and so much more richness while you’re developing a list and having this interactive conversation that you can’t have with email.

Yes, that’s really really tough. I mean it sounds like a great deal if the metrics are what you say, do you have anything that we can read, point as to or are we just supposed to take your word for it?

Peter: We have different — so if you go over to our website botnation.tech, it’s botnation.tech. We have different Play books and case studies and white papers that you guys you can look at it and see for yourself on these are basic — because we have clients across manufacturing space, craft breweries, coaches, authors and speakers, software. And it’s very similar across the board.

Obviously, each of them have their different conversations but at the end of the day if a customer has the ability to talk to someone instantly to be able to get content and information that’s interesting and relevant to them. We’re not shoving something down their throat in a marketing message to be able to choose their own journey and get the results they want when they wanted it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week you’re going to get a better response and we’re seeing that in our numbers.

I am going to try this and I’m going put it on my own site somehow. What should I do?

Peter: Yeah, it depends on kind of which approach like in the conversational journey what bot strategy, if your focus more on, hey, I want to just see what happens if I put on my website for customer service then I would do a website bot. If you’re more focused on I want to try this out for lead qualification, marketing, branding then a Facebook Messenger bot is more appropriate for you, Scott.

Well, I am going to try it out and hopefully I don’t stay up too late doing it.

Peter: I know you have some technical background you can figure it out. The thing is this market as with any technical market and I’ve been in technology for my whole career, a lot of pride in element is moving pretty fast, there’s always new things that are coming up that you can add to functionality. So the best it’s either do it yourself or come to us in a company if you wanted to have it done for you and then we keep up on all the technology and add either version 2.0, 3.0. And were having talk about voice that’s coming in a big way not just in home voice like in smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home Products but also voice out there on the internet as well that you’ll see some of that happening later in 2018.

What do people ask you for advice or opinion on outside of chatbots and health?

Peter: I talk to people quite a bit about just business in general as far as how do you strategically — I love the innovation of business and where things are going but there’s also some basics in business as far as marketing strategy, financial strategy and analysis and things like that. I have people that asked me about that I’m going to be jumping on a couple boards here for high-tech companies to help out and do those kinds of things. It’s just general, I’ve grown different businesses, I run the visions for corporations and so there’s a little bit of experience that I have that feel like I could help and pass on to people.

What do you listen to or read to get inspiration? Do you follow anyone, anything regularly?

Peter: I guess as far as reading, couple of books I’m reading or have read or reading right now, one of them is Play Bigger by Christopher Lochhead and gain in fact, we talk — he’s working with us on the Active Attention Design. He, by the way, has a really cool podcast it’s called Legends and Losers and it’s been named by Forbes Magazine podcast for Silicon Valley. He has some very interesting guess to come on.
The other book that I am reading now which is been around for the while but it’s a really good book, The 12 Week Year, which I find very fascinating to see, how do get that clarity and focus to make sure you’re moving through and making things happen 90 days at a time.

If you didn’t have any responsibilities at work or work next week what would you do with your time?

Peter: Probably go travel back to Europe. I travel all over the world and there’s been some cool places that I’ve to and then there’s some places that I was like, because it was always business, Scott, so there’s places like, “Wow, this is really cool place,” but I never had time to explore because all those working. So I’d like to go back to different countries in Europe and just travel around and have some take some time.

Scott: Business travel you always get to see the hotel, the conference room in the airport.

Peter: Yeah, that’s about it. And occasionally on the weekend you get a little bit of time over but not earlier though.

Scott: If you stay an extra day or two and then you got the family call in your like, “Hey, aren’t you done? Can’t you come back?” Well, thanks Peter. Any closing thoughts on chatbots or anything else?

Peter: If you want we have — if you guys want to see what this is all about we do — if you go to botnation.tech there were some demos down at the bottom of the homepage. If you want talk to us there, you can, if you want to hang out with us I have group called Chatbot Nation, it’s a closed group but you can certainly join it, free of charge. I do live streaming in there and talk about what’s going on in conversational experiences and things like that and chatbots and that’s freeway for you to learn about this whole world that were moving into.

What is your preferred method to people contact you with a question based on what they heard today or you know anything else?

Peter: Just go to botnation.tech and go to contacts in the contact menu and you can ask a question there. Typically, where we’re going is everything is getting importance to the chatbot. So then the chatbot can help you out with a lot of things but if you want to talk to me directly then just put in that request and we’ll switch it over and we’ll have a chat.

Peter, well thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed the education and hopefully we taught everybody a little bit about chatbots.

Peter: Thank you, Scott, I appreciate you having me on your show.

The post Chatbots – Peter Lisoskie appeared first on Scott King.

Contemporary Branding – Justin Foster and Emily Soccorsy11 Jan 2018


Justin Foster (@fosterthinking) and Emily Soccorsy (@emilyatlarge) operate Root and River. Root and River is a contemporary branding practice that finds a leader’s branding mission and enables the machine to spread the word.

In this episode, Justin and Emily talk about how to find and define your mission. We discuss how to attract the right customers and repel the rest. They talk to me about my brand and dozens of tips you can implement for yourself or for your company. This episode is full of outstanding advice and quotes.

80% of the time a leader doesn’t know what their personal mission is.

The biggest challenge is to identify your personal mission.

Many leaders are detached from their own identities.

Don’t overly define your mission based on your audience.

Branding is as much as about repulsion as it is about attraction.

You can’t focus group your mission.

A contemporary brand is a combination of culture, customer experience and Innovation.

Questions During Podcast
  • How do you find a leaders spirit?
  • If you are supposed to find a leaders mission, how do you describe your own mission?
  • What do you consider the biggest challenge for brands today?
  • How do you create a 21st century brand?
  • What is the difference between a rebrand and a relaunch?
  • What is your favorite brand? Why?
  • Which brands miss the mark?
  • What would you advise that I do with my brand?
  • What do people ask your advice on other than branding? Are you an expert at anything else?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Justin and Emily

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Leadership Traits for a Growth Mindset – John Murphy11 Oct 2018

John Murphy is an executive coach helping business owners, senior executives and management teams deliver what they are capable of. John’s background in the corporate world and as an entrepreneur enables him to make a difference to CEOs, Senior Executives, and Business Owners.

In this episode, I talk with John about instilling behaviors and enabling leaders to align and create a growth mindset amongst teams. We talk about how to clarify business goals amongst global teams to create engaged employees that can execute with agility and continuous improvement.

The results you are getting are a consequence of the actions you are taking. Those actions are a consequence of your behavior and your mindset. If you want to change the actions in order to change the results, you have to change the behavior and the mindset.

Questions During Podcast
  • What do executives tell you their greatest challenges are?
  • What challenges do they have that they don’t tell you about?
  • If teams don’t know their priorities, do they realize it?
  • What is the root cause when teams are not work
  • How do executive teams need to address these challenges?
  • As teams become physically disconnected in current work cultures, how do leaders know their teams are moving in the same direction?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • What do people ask your advice on other than leadership?
  • If someone had a question for you, what is your preferred method to be contacted?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact John

The post Leadership Traits for a Growth Mindset – John Murphy appeared first on Scott King.

Limit Buzzwords – Theresa Lanowitz04 Jan 2018

Theresa Lanowitz (@vokeinc) is Founder and Head Analyst at Voke. She is globally recognized as a relentless advocate for software quality. She is a strategic thinker, and influencer in the software development lifecycle including; testing, virtualization, cyber security, release management, and mobile. Theresa authors the popular “IT Superhero Series” of books.

In this episode, Theresa talks about how marketers should use analysts and experts. She advises marketers be more aggressive and to stop leaning on buzzwords and instead message your unique value proposition.

Questions During Podcast
  • How has the market for experts and influencers changed?
  • In this age of consolidation what should technology buyers look for from the analyst firms and when should they seek more specialized advice?
  • What advice would you offer them to be more effective in positioning themselves?
  • How have you seen vendors most effectively use the interactions and outputs for their own marketing?
  • What do you consider the biggest challenge for vendors today?
  • What software or market would you want to sell in?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Theresa

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Using Machine Learning to Mine Social Media Data – Lou Jordano14 Dec 2017

Lou Jordano is the chief marketing officer at Crimson Hexagon, bringing more than 20 years of experience building and leading high-impact teams within global enterprises and high growth startups. Prior to Crimson Hexagon, Lou served as the CMO for Attivio, a privately held cognitive search and insight platform company. Previously, Lou was the CMO at Ektron, now Episerver, and held leadership positions at TIBCO Software and EMC, now Dell. Lou holds a Master of Arts from Hofstra University and a Bachelor of Arts from Holy Cross College.

In this episode, Lou and I talk about the cultural differences and constraints at companies trying to use social media platforms. Lou then explains the prevalence of shared images and how machine learning will provide marketers with powerful context to sell more products and services.

Questions During Podcast
  • Are you scraping social posts and data and helping companies determine what is happening with their brands?
  • What do your your customers tell you about what your platform does for them?
  • Do you watch marketing trends for your own business?
  • Can you tell us what is trending right now?
  • Have you ever pulled an all-nighter playing with the Crimson Hexagon platform?
  • What are some tips on using social media data to inform online/social as well as offline marketing campaigns?
  • How do you advise companies on using social media platforms?
  • How do you scrape metadata from images?
  • What is your perspective on AI and machine learning, and how does this affect the future of marketing?
  • What is your favorite social campaign?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • How can AI help marketers optimize their campaigns and messaging?
  • What is the most common question people ask you?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Lou

The post Using Machine Learning to Mine Social Media Data – Lou Jordano appeared first on Scott King.

The Search for Marketing Strategy – Adam Pierno07 Dec 2017

Adam Pierno (@apierno) is a thinker, tinkerer and Chief Strategy Officer for Santy. His experience and cross-platform thinking led his leaders to task him with mentoring up and coming industry talents. He was to deliver the same marketing training he received. Therein lies the problem. Adam is self-taught. He didn’t receive formal marketing planning or strategy training.  Adam is a senior marketer like many of us and evolved with the internet as it emerged into the communication platform it is today.

In this episode, Adam talks about his search for marketing sources in order to mentor his agency staff. He describes finding materials full of jargon and not fit for the rubbish pile that eventually led him to pen his first book, “Under Think It.” “Under Think It” delves into the foundational aspects of marketing strategy and is a foundational piece for any marketing planner. Outside of work, Adam enjoys relaxing with his wife and kids, and claims to generate his best ideas while running and listening to podcasts.

Questions During Podcast
  1. Why did you write Under Think it?
  2. Why do marketers hide behind jargon and unclear language?
  3. What is the problem we are trying to solve?
  4. What does success look like?
  5. What are the constraints?
  6. What birthed the case study?
  7. Is influencer marketing the same as paid media?
  8. Where do brands not spend enough time on among brand foundation, customer personas, and campaigns?
  9. How would you advise a CMO to measure a customer journey?
  10. How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  11. Who or what do you listen to, watch or read to get inspiration?
  12. If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  13. Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Adam

The post The Search for Marketing Strategy – Adam Pierno appeared first on Scott King.

How to Create Personalized Videos at Scale – Eric Porres30 Nov 2017

The average consumer attention span continues to dwindle down to seconds. Eight seconds to be exact. So how are brands and marketers expected to truly connect and grab a customer’s attention?

Competition to gain and retain customers is fierce and the simple tactic of merging {First Name} and {last product viewed} into an email or a web page isn’t cutting it anymore, we have to get personal.

In this episode, newly appointed CMO of SundaySky, Eric Porres joins talks with me about constructing hyper-personalized videos using customer or data from pulling in data from the Facebook API.

Questions During Podcast
  • I watched some of the videos on your site. How do you do that?
  • Does the service read the Facebook API?
  • How fast can I target users on Facebook based on activity that day?
  • Can your service read my Facebook location data?
  • How many pieces are in a modular video?
  • How have your customers improved their second campaign?
  • What brought you to SundaySky?
  • What do you think is the most personalized web experience?
  • What do you think about a highly complex video platform solving for complexity?
  • Can I make a sales video with your platform instead of an on-boarding video?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work, what would you do with your time?
  • How do you prefer people contact you with questions?
  • Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Eric

The post How to Create Personalized Videos at Scale – Eric Porres appeared first on Scott King.

How I Won Webinar of the Year23 Nov 2017

Webinars are both a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing since you get a nice piece of content archiving a conversation for remarketing purposes. The archived webinar is easily shared amongst your prospects, partners, customers and digital campaigns. However, they are a curse because they have a lot of moving parts. Live webinars are difficult to produce since many marketers and speakers don’t invest enough in preparation.

In this episode, I explain how I won to webinar of the year by popular vote on an industry site by changing everything. I mean everything. I changed the story. I changed the presentation. I changed the graphics. I completely flipped our sales presentation upside down. I created an entirely different piece to tell an entirely different story in only 9 minutes.

And, It Worked…. Here is how I did it
  1. Create an analogy for the viewer they know is true or cannot dispute
  2. Provide data on what success and failure will look like
  3. Explain the end state you want your viewer to have in the future
  4. Present your solution to heal the situation
  5. Make them feel comfortable with you
PowerPoint Template

The entire PowerPoint deck is available for free. Drop your email address in the form and you will immediately receive a link to download the slides.

[display_form id=9]

The post How I Won Webinar of the Year appeared first on Scott King.

Optimizing Content for SEO – Aaron Agius16 Nov 2017


Aaron Agius (@IAmAaronAgius) is one of the world’s leading digital marketers according to Forbes. Aaron is the CEO of Louder Online, a content marketing and digital agency, and a regular contributor on Entrepreneur.com, Hubspot.com for Search, Content Marketing and Growth Hacking.

His clients include Salesforce, IBM, Coca-Cola, Intel and scores of other leading brands. Aaron joins me today to talk about Content Marketing and SEO and how to use that to grow your business or career.

In this episode, Aaron talks about SEO, growth hacking and hiring content marketers. Aaron walks me through an SEO case study where Salesforce.com increased organic traffic by  30% after optimizing stronger content and removing weaker performing content.

Questions During Episode
  • Who normally contacts you? Is it a content marker or someone in charge of search?
  • How do you explain the ROI of SEO?
  • How do you walk people through the SEO process to set expectations?
  • If a marketing department has a goal of increasing organic traffic that is a large organization. How do
  • you help or advise smaller companies gain more organic traffic?
  • How do you see SEO evolving?
  • Is growth hacking a temporary fix?
  • What your thoughts on hiring content marketers or using an agency?
  • What is one of your the most successful content campaigns?
  • Why did Salesforce.com want to remove so much content?
  • Who was the project for?
  • How did you increase organic traffic by removing content at Salesforce.com?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work, what would you do with your time?
Contact Aaron

Website: https://louder.online/scottking/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronagius/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IAmAaronAgius

The post Optimizing Content for SEO – Aaron Agius appeared first on Scott King.

Growth Marketing Risk – Laurent Bouty09 Nov 2017


Laurent Bouty (@LBouty) is a C-Level international Marketing and Strategy professional. Laurent brings has 25 years of international experience in Marketing, Sales, Strategy and Leadership. He has a broad Marketing experience including latest trends like analytics, social networks and mobile gained in Telecommunication, Advertising and Financial sectors. Laurent is academic Director @Solvay Brussels School and co-founder of The Beyonders, a Trendsformative Brand Agency.

In this episode, Laurent and I talk about overcoming marketing complexities and the risks involved in growth marketing. We touch on influencer marketing, artificial intelligence and questions his students ask him about marketing evolution.

Growth is like chocolate, the more you have, the more you want – Laurent Bouty [ Click to Tweet ]

Questions During Episode
  1. What do you consider the biggest challenge for CMOs today?
  2. Why is complexity the biggest challenge?
  3. How would you advise marketers to grow in the right niche?
  4. Why don’t brands use the same strategy as Nike’s “Just Do It”?
  5. What is your view on influencer marketing?
  6. What do your students ask you about marketing?
  7. How do you teach your students to be relevant?
  8. What is one of your most successful campaigns?
  9. Did you refurbish the family stores with the marketing budget?
  10. What are some of the things the marketing team was worried about when refurbishing the stores?
  11. Do you have a project that did not go well?
  12. What do you read or listen to for inspiration?
  13. What do you do in your free time?
Contact Laurent

Website – https://laurentbouty.com
Twitter – https://twitter.com/LBouty
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurentbouty/

The post Growth Marketing Risk – Laurent Bouty appeared first on Scott King.

Hyper Personalization – Brett St. Clair02 Nov 2017


Brett St.Clair ( @brett_stclair ) is an energetic, empathetic, humorous and passionate speaker interpreting the technical world into entertaining and actionable layman’s terms. Brett’s expertise is specifically focused on building businesses and helping small and large companies through their digital transformation journey to Exponential Growth.

In this episode, Brett talks about how hyper personalization can help attract the right customers and win them over for life. Brett speaks of his work at Barclays and how difficult it was to transform 25,000 user journeys into the marketing systems to enable hyper personalization marketing.

Questions During Episode
  1.  What does Siatik do?
  2. Describe what technology stacks you redesigned at Barclays?
  3. How does the CMO at Barclays Bank prioritize a customer problem?
  4. How do marketers solver for hyper personalization?
  5. How is Emirates using personalization?
  6. How difficult would it be to transform a website to be hyper personalized?
  7. If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time
  8. Closing thoughts?
Links and Mentions Contact Brett

The post Hyper Personalization – Brett St. Clair appeared first on Scott King.

How to Sell a Website – Jock Purtle26 Oct 2017

Jock Purtle is an expert on valuations of high growth internet companies, website valuations, and website brokerage. He has been featured and quoted in Forbes, CNBC, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Inc.com, Wired, CBS News, Geekwire, TechCrunch about digital businesses. In this episode, Jock explains how to sell a website, the CMO’s role in customer acquisition costs and keeping up with metrics in order to increase the valuation for a digital exit.

Jock’s Big 5
  1. Sales
  2. Cost of goods sold
  3. Sales per marketing channel
  4. Profitability per marketing channel
  5. Overall profit of the company
Questions During Episode:
  • What do you consider the biggest challenge for CMOs today?
  • What happens to a company that doesn’t have data feedback loops?
  • How do executive teams need to address these challenges?
  • What are some simple tools companies can use to gather metrics?
  • What was your clients most effective channel?
  • What does your client think is the most important metric?
  • What is the most important metrics to prepare for a sale?
  • How do companies find themselves in trouble when spending so much money on advertising?
  • Why do people want to sell their business?
  • What are buyers looking for?
  • Are there any commonalities or trends for when sellers are ready to sell?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Contact Jock

The post How to Sell a Website – Jock Purtle appeared first on Scott King.

The Blockchain – Miko Matsumura and Jason English19 Oct 2017

Miko Matsumura ( @mikojava ) and Jason English ( @bluefug ) are expert enterprise software marketers that both recently moved into marketing and evangelizing the Blockchain. Miko founded crypto exchange Evercoin, and is a Limited Partner with the Pantera Capital ICO Fund. Jason is VP of Protocol Marketing at Sweetbridge. Sweetbridge sponsors the development of blockchain-based economic protocols and applications to transform high-friction global supply chains into Liquid Value Networks.

Together, Miko and Jason give me an education on the Blockchain, Bitcoin and where distributed ledgers lie in these marketplaces. They are working on fascinating problems and talk with me about how difficult it is marketing something understood by so few people.

Questions During Episode
  1. How did you get into the blockchain?
  2. If Blockchain will add 10X value to the internet, what will it look like after the change?
  3. What does decentralization look like in supply chain?
  4. Where can we see blockchain and bitcoin today?
  5. What will the world look like after blockchain?
  6. How does blockchain create more value in supply chains?
  7. What is your opinion on centralized banks’ view on Bitcoin?
  8. Where do your audiences go for information?
Links and Mentions Contact Miko and Jason

Miko Matsumura – Miko.com or @mikojava

Jason English –  Sweetbridge.com or @bluefug

The post The Blockchain – Miko Matsumura and Jason English appeared first on Scott King.

Marketing to Generation Z – Kathleen Hessert04 Oct 2018

Kathleen Hessert (@kathleenhessert) has invested over 30 years working with premier sports and entertainment brands from Peyton Manning and Shaq to ESPN, Big ten network, NBA, and the NFL. Kathleen recognized the leagues and sports teams focused on current aging fans and lacked understanding on how to enlist and build young fan bases for the future. She guided these brands to develop programs to engage younger audiences and to ensure they became lifelong fans. Her work led her to develop WeRGenZ.

WeRGenZ is a research-based Teen Think Tank of more than 1000 kids. Its goal is to give voice to and “amplify the voices of the generation” that already spends $44 billion annually in the US and influences $600 billion in family spending. By 2020, GenZ, NOT Millennials, will be 40% of the US population. The rules that govern their lives will govern all of our lives. Those born after 1995 (the first true digital natives) are changing the way we consume information, adopt and use technology, evolve our economy into a token or cash-based economy. They embrace and expect diversity from brands and in fact will be the first predominantly non-white U.S. generation. GenZ’ers also think globally and have a well developed social conscience. Their backyard is the world, not a street address.

In this episode, I talk with Kathleen about GenZ’s influence will have on the future and what companies and employers can do to properly recruit and engage this group.

Questions During Podcast
  • How did you get into covering Gen Z?
  • Who exactly is Gen Z?
  • How much influence does Gen Z have on purchasing?
  • What is your opinion on how technology effects this generation?
  • What will happen to these kids when they enter the workforce?
  • What companies are investing in Gen Z?
  • How would you recruit Gen Z employees?
  • What are employers doing that repel these young workers?
Links and Mentions Contact Kathleen

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Content Marketing & SEO – James Norquay12 Oct 2017

James Norquay ( @connections8 ) founded Prosperity Media in 2012 after working in the SEO & Content Marketing space for over 10 years. James started working in digital marketing by developing his own network of content websites which went on to generate well over 24 million unique visitors from organic search with a strong focus on the US market. These websites were later sold on to a US media company.

James then moved into enterprise-level consulting, driving SEO and inbound marketing growth for large-scale businesses such as Virgin Mobile, Optus, David Jones, Woolworths, BWS, Apparel Group, Maurice Blackburn, Slater & Gordon, Travel NT, Citibank and many more. James’s experience enabled him to develop advanced SEO training courses for his large-scale customers.

In this episode, James talks about how to set up and measure SEO for growth oriented companies. He talks about some of the pitfalls he sees with customers and how to rectify those issues. James then describes steps you can complete to measure and increase your organic traffic.

 

Links and Mentions Contact James Questions During Episode What do you consider the biggest challenge for site owners today?

The biggest challenge is the ability to stay up to date with all the changes from a search point of view. It is also very difficult to complete all the required work in a competitive skills market.

How do teams need to address these challenges?

We partner with resident marketing teams and business owners to provide information, expertise and guidance to assist with rolling out SEO & Content Marketing growth.

What are some tools your team depends on more than the others?

Ahrefs is a great tool for reviewing link profile data which is useful for our business. Other tools we love to use are SEM Rush (Keyword Analysis), Screaming Frog (Full website scraping) and Tenon.io (accessibility testing at scale)

Why does it perform better than others?

Ahrefs is a great tool because they have a fresh link index which is far superior to other tools on the market.

How do you see search and digital experiences evolving?

I do see the emergence of voice search in the near future. Digital teams should look to make use of other search platforms like YouTube for customer acquisition at scale.

Are you doing any experiments with voice search?

We are testing featured snippets on scale for several clients which can trigger voice search results.

What was one of your most successful campaigns? What made it effective and how did you measure that?

Work for Campaign Monitor to help scale their SEO & Content efforts which assisted to high growth and 250 million investment.

Work for clients in the education niche which saw over 400k increase in monthly users to the site. https://moz.com/blog/increasing-organic-seo-traffic-by-400000-unique-visitors-a-month

What is something you did for a campaign, initiative or ecosystem that was a long shot but ended up working out?

We acquired a domain for a client for around $700 from an expired domain auction. The domain went on to be one of the top websites this media company generating millions in revenue from organic and paid media. The original $700 investment was a long shot on a domain which has a historic link profile and it paid off after investing considerable time into the project with our team.

Describe a time when a project you were overseeing did not go well?

Most projects we work on do well because we are selective on who we partner with as clients. We do not simply take on every client like other agencies we are selective. Campaigns have not performed as well as they have when we have not had internal buy in to make development changes on large domains or when clients take down content campaigns which have secured great visibility and do not redirect them.

What did you learn from that and how do you avoid that from happening again?

We have installed more effective guidelines for internal teams and offered training for all departments to ensure changes are not done without input from the wider digital team and or agency.

Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?

To stay up to date with the latest and get inspired I attend conferences like MozCon in Seattle, listen to great podcasts like Experts on the Wire, Growth Everywhere. We also run our own events in Sydney called Online Marketing Sydney.

If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?

Take a holiday to a location I have not been with my girlfriend. I would also like do work on my house and things for personal growth.

Closing Thoughts?

Do high quality and ethical marketing, do not take shortcuts with any strategy think will this be fine in 5 years time.

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How to Create Effective Infographics – Brian Wallace05 Oct 2017

Brian Wallace (@nowsourcing) evolved from a CTO to an expert in infographics. Throughout the years Brian and his team worked on many different digital media campaigns and tactics. They looked to specialize so they evaluated their collective skills and found that visually telling stories about complex ideas was what they were best at. A specialization in infographics ensued.

An Infographic is a purposeful well thought out campaign effort consisting of four high-level steps.

  1. Concept – What is the concept or idea you want to communicate
  2. Data – Researching your idea and validating it with interesting primary data to tell the story
  3. Design – Visually grabbing your viewer
  4. Implementation – Getting your idea to the right media

There have been many great infographics but many fail to grab attention. Most times not enough thought goes into the beginning of the process and teams fail to realize an integrated approach is necessary. Brian explains failed infographics and how to launch a successful one in this episode.

Questions During Episode
  • What is an infographic?
  • What do you think the hardest part of creating an infographic is?
  • How does someone know they need an infographic?
  • Why do you only focus on infographics?
  • How do you personalize infographics?
  • How much lead time do you need in order to produce an infographic?
  • Do you also construct presentation slides?
  • What is your favorite infographic?
  • How do you know one idea will work over another? Is it magic?
  • Do you have a favorite place to go get interesting data?
  • How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  • What do you do in your free time?
Links and Mentions Contact Brian

 

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Social Selling for the CEO – Jon Ferrara28 Sep 201700:41:51

Jon Ferrara ( @Jon_Ferrara ) invented customer relationship management, CRM, before the term actually existed. Jon created the award-winning customer management product, GoldMine, which was eventually acquired by FrontRange in 1999. Today, Jon is the CEO at Nimble, a SaaS CRM software platform designed for social selling.

This episode is full of educational nuggets from someone practicing what he preaches. Jon is an advocate of social selling and provides several tips on how to become more effective and get more done by connecting with people the right way. Jon talks about some of the common pitfalls of CRM systems today and describes a better way to do it. He walks us through one of his personal examples on how he secured 30 meetings from a Twitter list that eventually led to Microsoft reselling his service.

Notable Quotes from Episode

There are five “fs” that connect people: friends, family, food, fun, and fellowship.

— Jon Ferrara, CEO Nimble

A marketer today should be inspiring and educating on a daily basis about how their prospects and customers may become better, smarter, faster and become their trusted advisor. The easiest way is to get someone they trust to trust you.

Hashtags and mentions are Fishing lures in the digital river.

The more digital we get the more human we need to be.

Questions During Podcast
  • What is Nimble?
  • What do you consider the biggest challenge for CMOs and marketers today?
  • How do executive teams need to address these challenges?
  • How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  • How can a salesperson use social when they don’t have time?
  • Which one of your customers taught you the most?
  • What did they teach you?
  • Are sales and marketing teams blind from too much data?
  • What is your most proud accomplishment?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
Links and Mentions

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Why Your Brain Filters Out Marketing – Brynn Winegard21 Sep 201700:38:31


Dr. Brynn Winegard (@DrBrynnWinegard) is a world renowned business brain expert. She is a full-time professional keynote speaker who combines brain and business science to dissect, redevelop, and augment how we work. Dr. Winegard teaches about persuasion and influence from a brain perspective and provides several actionable tips.

In this episode, Dr. Winegard explains how our subconscious mind makes decisions over our conscious mind and how that affects buyer behavior. She talks about how social processing versus emotional processing influences the way we interact with each other. She then explains how persuasion and influence are like cognitive ‘jujitsu’ and take advantage of fault lines in our human processing. We are all susceptible, therefore it is effective for sales and marketing people to take advantage.

Questions During Episode
  1. What do you think we need to know about neuromarketing?
  2. What do you mean by imaging?
  3. What are companies doing to better understand their customers?
  4. Which companies do this well?
  5. How much does the subconscious process relate to social proof?
  6. Do you have a favorite story about the sheep / follower effect?
  7. What are your thoughts on social media platform interactions?
  8. What type of social effect is that creating?
  9. What do marketers need to change to become more effective?
  10. What do you do when you aren’t studying brain science?
Links and Mentions Contact Dr. Winegard

Brynn’s 5 most popular keynotes:

  1. Sales Success: The Brain Science Secrets of Persuasion and Influence
  2. Success Secrets: Harnessing the Power of Your Subconscious Brain
  3. The Aging Brain: Maintaining Accuracy, Productivity, Relevance
  4. Neuroleadership: Using Brain Science to be a Better Leader
  5. A Motivated Mind: The Brain Science of Motivation and Productivity

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Intent Based Buyers – Doug Llewellyn14 Sep 2017

Doug Llewellyn (@DougLlewellyn) is President & Chief Operating Officer, at Purch. He is responsible for the company’s three core business units, strategic planning, corporate development activities, and Purch’s business metrics and operational framework.

In this episode, Doug discusses how different web properties at Purch serve audiences with content and information enabling better and more informed purchase decisions around IT products and services. Purch owns and operates several properties like Toms Hardware, Toms IT Pro, Business.com and Space.com. Doug explains how Purch enables its marketing customers to reach intent based buyers and how he seeks to optimize customer content and increase the lifetime value of a member. Later on, Doug talks about what metrics he reads and how they help him make data-driven decisions and measure engagement scores. Doug concludes the conversation summarizing why digital marketing is so complicated and speculates on how it will evolve at faster rates.

Doug’s member engagement score metrics:

  • Where did a member come from?
  • What content did they engage with?
  • What purchase did they make?
  • Have they come back?
  • Are they engaging with email?
  • Are they taking advantage of coupons?
Questions for During Podcast
  1. What does Purch do?
  2. What do you consider the biggest challenge for CMOs today?
  3. How do you deal with the fragmented problems and how do you advise your customers to deal with the same challenges?
  4. What do you read at Purch to make data driven marketing decisions?
  5. Do you have a name for a super user?
  6. What is your approach to market research?
  7. How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  8. What reports or data points or KPIs do you monitor in order to optimize?
  9. Do you look at your metrics per property or all together?
  10. Do the web properties have different infrastructures?
  11. How does your team manage all of the different properties?
  12. What can brands learn from emerging disruptive brands?
  13. What is your most proud accomplishment?
  14. Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  15. If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
Links and Mentions Contact Doug

Twitter – @DougLlewellyn

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Growth Marketing is Not a Hack – Eddie Yoon07 Sep 2017

Eddie Yoon (@eddiewouldgrow) is a personal think tank and advisor on growth strategies. He learned and cultivated his craft at The Cambridge Group where he worked for 18 years teaching CEOs and senior leadership teams within Fortune 1000 corporations how drive growth by understanding how to methodically unlock new sources of consumer demand. Eddie is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on Category Growth, Category Creation and Superconsumers—highly passionate and profitable customers who are intensely invested in a company’s category.

In this episode Eddie describes how companies often choose the wrong growth path containing more than the required obstacles. He explains how to measure growth and how looking in different areas could enable you to capture adjacent markets and grow faster than competing head to head.

Eddie sums up the conversation and talks of his personal scorecard to evaluate growth marketing campaigns he has worked on like iRobot, American Girl and Sara Lee.

How to Evaluate Marketing Results:

  • Did we learn something new?
  • Did we come up with a different strategy?
  • Did we do something about it?
  • Did we get a marketplace result?
Links and Mentions Contact Eddie

Website – eddiewouldgrow.net
Twitter – @eddiewouldgrow
eMail – eddie@eddiewouldgrow.net
Book – Superconsumers: A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth

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How to Optimize Lead Acquisition – Shanik Patel31 Aug 2017

Shanik Patel (@Grammarly) is the Head of Acquisition at Grammarly. Grammarly helps you write mistake-free on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and nearly anywhere else you write on the web.

In this episode, Shanik talks about four years work of acquisition campaigns using channels like Search, Display, Facebook, Affiliate, YouTube, Sponsored Content, and TV. In each case, he had to do it with a strict focus on ROI and making data driven feedback loops to make the best decisions. Grammarly was a bootstrapped startup until recently so Shanik has seen ad spend grow from a few hundred thousand dollars per month to several million dollars per month, while maintaining the same level of profitability.

Questions During Episode
  • What is a head of Acquisition?
  • Why should people use Grammarly?
  • How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  • Where are you looking for competitive advantages in acquisition?
  • What type of data driven decisions are you making?
  • What reports or data points or KPIs do you monitor in order to optimize?
  • What was one of your most successful campaigns?
  • What made it effective and how did you measure that?
  • Did you take what you learned from the YouTube ads and feed that back in other campaigns?
  • What is something you did for a campaign, initiative or ecosystem that was a long shot but ended up working out?
  • What is your most proud accomplishment?
  • How has your knowledge of finance and trading helped you in marketing?
  • Do you have any specific tools for data decisions?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • What do people ask your advice on?
  • Is Grammarly Hiring?
  • What do you do in your free time?
Links and Mentions Contact Shanik

Email – shanik.patel@grammarly.com
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanikpatel/
Web – Grammarly.com

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Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication – Alan Siegel24 Aug 2017

Alan Siegel (@siegelvision) is the CEO and Founder at Siegelvision and Chairman Emeritus at Siegel + Gale. Alan has spent much of his life working on over 300 campaigns simplifying for the sake of clarity. His accomplishments include creating new credit documents for Citibank, simplifying the 1040EZ form and creating the current NBA logo.

In this episode, Alan describes how brands need to embrace simplicity on new media formats and channels to engage their audiences. He elaborates on why transforming to these new digital media channels from traditional marketing is a company’s biggest challenge and will continue to cause high turnover among top marketers. Alan then explains why marketing directors need to grab the customer journey and be the glue that binds the customer experience to create consistency across all platforms.

Marketing directors have to be the glue of the customer experience and get rid of the complexity.

Alan provides impressive statistics emerging from his work at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. John Jay years ago transformed itself from a “cop college,” to an institution of higher learning to become a fierce advocate of justice and remains one of the top colleges in the country. Alan then finishes the conversation talking about his design of the NBA logo, his work at the American Theater Wing and the Tony Awards.

Questions During Podcast
  • What are you working on today and the rest of the year?
  • What goals do the educational and medical organizations you are working with work to achieve.
  • When do these organizations realize they need help?
  • Would your work at John Jay College translate into other educational institutions?
  • How would you measure the impact of the branding exercise?
  • How long did it take for all of these changes?
  • What is the common denominator in successful branding programs?
  • What happens with the brand when the chief advocate leaves the company?
  • What do you consider the biggest challenge for CMOs today?
  • How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  • Do you have a favorite campaign that you worked on?
  • Is there a campaign that you wished had turned out differently?
  • What do you do in your free time?
  • Are you still a Tony Award voter?
Links and Mentions Contact Alan

Website – https://www.siegelvision.com/
Email – asiegel@siegelvision.com
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/alsiegel/

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How to Relaunch a Global Brand – Josh London17 Aug 2017

Josh London (@joshdlondon) is the first ever CMO for IDG. IDG is the worlds largest media and technology service company with hundreds of properties in 147 countries. It’s mission is to enable a global audience make the smartest technology purchase decisions through it’s various web properties like Computerworld, InfoWorld, CIO, and CSO.

In this episode, Josh talks about why he was brought on board and how IDG realigned itself into central functions from silos in order become more efficient and to create economies of scale. Josh describes some of the exercises IDG performed for the relaunch like custom research, customer outreach and internal communication. He then provides some details of how he converged the marketing stack and how his organization measures success.

Josh concludes the interview talking about his own CMO interview series, IDG CMO Perspectives. Josh talks to CMOs on how they are driving growth for their companies and has found after talking with them that many companies have the same issues but in their own distinct markets. Enjoy…..

Questions During Episode
  • What is IDG and what does IDG do?
  • How has IDG’s go to market strategy changed over the years?
  • What did you see as a realignment opportunity when you came in as CMO?
  • How many times in your brand research did you hear individual employees named?
  • What the most successful part of the relaunch?
  • How did you measure the brand relaunch?
  • Are you changing anything in marketing at IDG right now?
  • How many people work in marketing at IDG?
  • What is the sales organization’s opinion of the rebranding effort?
  • Do you perform direct outreach to the CMOs in the video series?
  • What do you talk to your CMO customers about?
  • How do you contact the other CMOs you want to talk with?
  • What do you do with your free time?
Links and Mentions Contact Josh

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Digital Marketing is Dead – Tim Hughes10 Aug 2017

Tim Hughes (@Timothy_Hughes) is the CEO at Digital Leadership Associates providing social media consultancy for businesses. Tim helps organizations at the C-Level build new business by creating social selling programs. Tim’s programs engage several departments at these companies and creates goals for each in order to change behavior for more effective habits using social media.

I can get higher in an organization using social than emailing or cold calling – @Timothy_Hughes [Click to Tweet]

In this episode, Tim and I talk about how digital marketing is being blocked by our short attention spans and ad blockers. Tim goes on further to state, “ digital marketing is dead ”, since fewer people pay attention to ad and messages pushed out from brands. Tim goes on further to describe what is in his 12-week social selling class and provides some case studies on how he got into big account plus how a CEO used social selling on him.

Salespeople should have a personal brand that states how they are going to help [Click to Tweet]

Questions During Episode
  1. What does Digital Leadership Associates do for social?
  2. How do you describe social selling?
  3. How do you recommend people remain visible until the timing is right for the prospect or customer?
  4. What is your view on what a salesperson should have on their LinkedIn profile?
  5. Digital marketing is ramping up not down. Why do you think it is dead?
  6. If companies are looking into digital marketing, could they skip a step and go straight to social selling?
  7. If a sales guy can only control his own actions why do they depend on so many other factors like digital marketing?
  8. If all solutions solve a problem how do you recommend sales people break through all of the digital noise?
  9. How much time should a sales guy spend on LinkedIn and Twitter? Or social media for that matter.
  10. How do you connect to someone that is not on social?
  11. What do you do in your free time if not collecting vinyl?
Links and Mentions Contact Tim

Twitter – @Timothy_Hughes

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Building High Performing Work Cultures – Lee Caraher20 Sep 2018

Lee Caraher ( @LeeCaraher ) is the founder and CEO of Double Forte PR & Digital Marketing, a 15-year-old national agency that works with beloved and up-and-coming consumer, technology, and wine brands. An acclaimed communication strategist, Lee is known for her practical solutions to big problems.

Lee has a reputation for building cohesive, high- producing teams who get a lot done well and have fun at the same time. She is a straight talker who doesn’t hold too many punches, although she does her best to be pleasant about it. Her big laugh and sense of humor have gotten her out of a lot of trouble.

In this episode, I talk with Lee about her book, “The Boomerang Principle.” The book describes Lee’s experience and advice on rehiring employees and building lifetime loyalty amongst your current and past employees. We talk about how to create high-performing work cultures ready for the future.

Questions During Podcast
  • Why is the title of your book, “The Boomerang Principle?”
  • I read a lot about the “gig” economy. How can you maintain loyalty if talent wants to go from job to job?
  • How do executive teams need to address these challenges?
  • Why did you write this book? Was this an issue you had before?
  • What makes an employee leave and come back? Don’t they leave because they feel undervalued?
  • What companies have cultures that keep employees coming back?
  • Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
  • What do people ask your advice on other than business advice?
  • If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week, what would you do with your time?
  • Closing thoughts?
Contact Lee

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Podcast ROI – Tom Schwab03 Aug 2017

Tom Schwab (@TMSchwab) is the Chief Evangelist at Interview Valet where he helps authors and influencers speak on established podcasts. Tom and his team found The Scott King Show and have suggested several marketing practitioners and CMOs that I’ll have on in the future. Tom was gracious enough to come on this show and talk about the podcasting ecosystem and how marketers are using this tactic in their content marketing mix.

 80% of podcasts die inside of the first 10 episodes [Click to Tweet]

In this episode, Tom talks about podcast ROI, why podcasts are so effective and provides some examples of how marketers are using podcasts to increase conversion rates for leads and new business. He provides statistics on how many people are listening to podcasts, the benefits of podcasts and some of the pitfalls show hosts suffer from.

Podcasts see conversion rates between 25-50% [Click to Tweet]

If you are considering starting a podcast, this is a must listen. Tom gives us several pros and cons for starting a podcast and talks about how being a guest on established shows like this one can significantly increase your exposure with minimal effort.

Be a guest on an established podcast instead of starting your own [Click to Tweet]

Questions During Episode
  • What does Interview Valet do?
  • How do people find you?
  • Where is podcasting heading?
  • What is the feedback your customers have given you?
  • Is everyone going to do a podcast?
  • If I am an inbound marketer and want get leads, should I start a podcast?
Links and Mentions Contact Tom

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasmschwab/

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The Biggest Marketing Challenge – Ryan Shelley27 Jul 2017

Ryan Shelley (@ryan_shelley) is a self proclaimed conversion junkie. He helps new and established companies get the most of SEO and lead conversions for all types of products and services. Ryan hails from Melbourne, Florida and has found an interesting niche amongst engineering firms fueling public and private space programs.

In this episode, Ryan and I discuss what he perceives as the biggest marketing challenge and how to over come it with some simple steps. Ryan explains some of his personal habits and provides actionable advice on how to become more efficient, reduce noise and to be ultra productive in order to make time for physical well being. Ryan then offers his practice of how he gets ready for the day by getting mobile, relaxing and meditating in order to get more out of his day.

Questions During Episode
  1. What is your day to day look like?
  2. Any habits that benefit you every day?
  3. What do you consider the biggest challenge for on-line marketers today?
  4. How do web and search teams need to address these challenges?
  5. What do people ask your advice on?
  6. What is one tool or service your team depends on more than the others?
  7. Why does it perform better than others?
  8. How do you see digital marketing or digital experiences evolving?
  9. What type of data driven decisions are you making?
  10. What reports or data points or KPIs do you monitor in order to optimize?
  11. What was one of your most successful campaigns? What made it effective and how did you measure that?
  12. Describe a time when a project you were overseeing did not go well?
  13. What did you learn from that and how do you avoid that from happening again?
  14. If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
  15. Where do people find you?
Links and Mentions Contact Ryan

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LinkedIn CMO Network Q & A – Sean Sheppard20 Jul 2017

Sean Sheppard (@seanasheppard) co-founded GrowthX Academy. GrowthX Academy trains individuals who want to transition into a career in Sales and Business Development, Growth Marketing or UX Design.

Sean Sheppard is a serial entrepreneur who has successfully grown dozens of early-stage companies across a wide variety of products and markets.

At GrowthX Academy, Sean is focusing on sharing his expertise in monitoring and adjusting revenue pipelines to help startups improve the probability and predictability of sales and marketing success.

In this episode Sean and I sought interesting questions from LinkedIn’s Chief Marketing Officer CMO Network – #1 Group for CMOs that were previously unanswered. We talk about the questions and provided answers via this podcast. We are very curious how the experiment will turn out and would like feedback on if it was helpful.

Questions During Episode Links and Mentions Contact Sean

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The Challenges of Being a CMO – Kimberly A. Whitler13 Jul 2017

Assistant Professor Kimberly A. Whitler (@KimWhitler) recently released “The Trouble with CMOs” in Harvard Business Review. The article summarizes years of analysis on CMOs’ job descriptions, educations and how expectations rarely align to their actual job responsibilities.

80% of CEOs are unhappy with the CMO and 74% of CMOs say they could have a greater impact [Click to Tweet]

In this episode, Kim and I discuss some of the data in her article and feedback she has received following its release. Kim also shares her personal story of how she helped realign her CMO job once she realized the odds were against her success while running marketing. Kim discusses why the CMO role is perceived as the “walk on water” role and offers advice on how to rectify the situation.

I had been looking forward to this interview for months and am really happy to provide you with this episode. Please enjoy and engage in the discussion.

Questions During Episode
  • What has happened since the article was published?
  • Who would possibly not like the article on why the CMO job is so difficult?
  • 80% of CEOs are unhappy with the CMO and 74% of CMOs say they could have a greater impact. Why the mismatch?
  • Why is there a big disconnect between the expectations of the CMOs and their responsibilities?
  • How do we fix this? How long will it take?
  • How can we guide CEOs to design the job requirements correctly and get the right person for the job?
  • CMOs have the shortest average tenure at 4.1 years according to the Korn Ferry numbers in your report.
  • Is this because the CMO job is relatively new or that there is indeed higher turnover?
  • Why is the CMO role considered the “water walking job?”
  • Why do you believe the CMO job is so difficult?
  • You influenced the CMO redesign at one of your last jobs. How far into your job were you when you realized the problem?
  • How long did it take you to fix it?
  • What advice do you have for CMO candidates when finding their next role?
Links and Mentions Contact Kim

Why The CMO Job Is The Hardest in the C-Suite: Honored to Be Interviewed for #CMO Podcast Series https://t.co/NI4YXHHEnN @thescottking pic.twitter.com/4I2nZkeuEP

— Kimberly Whitler (@KimWhitler) July 13, 2017

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The post The Challenges of Being a CMO – Kimberly A. Whitler appeared first on Scott King.

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