If you watch broadcast TV, I am sure you are happy the election is over and all we have to watch now are pharmaceutical and Christmas commercials.

One of the interesting things I heard in post-election analysis was that a billion dollars was spent on TV ads. At the same time, the most decisive information was distributed via free-to-access websites and apps. This was described as paywall and non-paywall media. I never really thought about that but it makes sense.

It becomes a matter of trust. Voters trusted without needing journalistic and regulatory confirmation that the information was accurate or even true. That works for elections, but you cannot take trust that lightly in business.

Like a human body, trust is a complex system with some essential parts, needs, and truths. It has a brain, digestive system, lungs, and a heart.

The body is a system, and the brain, the stomach, the lungs, and the heart all need each other for the body to function and survive.

Trust in business is the same thing. It takes thinking, seeing, and feeling to ensure your business relationships are built on respect and trust. They need to be fed with consistent quality information, thought leadership, and a dash of advice. You must constantly breathe new life into relationships while expelling the negative. It also takes heart to feel and empathize with how a relationship is mutually beneficial and not merely transactional.

AI has been part of our culture for a long time. Think about the movies that have predicted where we are now.

Although this is Hollywood and entertainment, we have realized most of this already:

• 2001 = Self-Driving Vehicles
• Matrix = VR Games and Headsets
• Her = ChatGPT, Siri, Alexa, and more impressive versions coming soon

The biggest thing holding AI back or impeding it’s progress is it knowing who it’s talking to. Personalization will need to go way beyond what information is available on the Internet. What it will need (and what you want to do with your marketing) is called Hyper-Personalization.

The problem with data is that it constantly changes. A real-life example is trying to do something very old-school: sending US Mail to customers. Chances are, you have a database or CRM where the records are old.

In no way, shape, or form am I saying that digital marketing (social and email) wastes time and money? I can tell you that human-to-human interaction will increase interactions with your digital presence.

Humans are complex, fickle, and emotionally charged beings. It takes just being there as another human being to build that trust again and again, as needed.

If you manage your own or other business websites, I imagine you are using Google Analytics or another data manager to explore the traffic to your website.

Generally, you measure how much traffic you get, how long people stay, and which pages or posts get the most traffic. Another key indicator is where the traffic is coming from. This includes organic search (Google searches), direct (typing or clicking a URL), referral (link from another website), organic social (multiple social media sites), and something called unassigned (catch-all for all others).

I have seen customers and clients who pay attention to numbers that have little to no connection to reality. What I mean is, how can you tell when a human is really getting to your website and spending quality time?

Google considers engagement as someone spending at least ten seconds on a page or post. Considering that is what most people need to read a headline, look at a picture, and decide if this is for them, that’s a pretty low bar.

Most content is posted once, and then forgotten. That assumes that it was only right for the audience who was following your business at the time it was posted.

What you have is an asset. That asset can be reposted to social media more often than once. It could be posted 10-15 times and seen by a different set of eyes each time.

That’s what happens when I repost my Baconisms. I post the same 30+ image sayings every month. I see random comments and likes each month that I have not seen before.

In this episode, we will explore how to increase views on your content by the right audience… at the RIGHT times!

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Gavin Zuchlinski is the founder of Be Family, an app to help parents take care of all of the work involved in running their families. Before starting Be Family, Gavin previously founded Acuity Scheduling which he scaled to support more than 50,000 businesses and handle millions of bookings worldwide. He sold Acuity to Squarespace in 2019 as part of Squarespace’s first acquisition, and later became VP Product there overseeing Scheduling, Platform, and Marketing Tools. Now along with growing Be Family, he enjoys spending time with his family of 3 boys and trying to start a home vineyard.

Last week I attended a CMO panel discussion sponsored by the AMA Triangle. It included CMOs from SAS, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and a couple of other independent medium to small-business CMOs. One of those people stood out to me.

His name is Frank Pollock and he’s currently the CMO of a couple of start-ups, but he also teaches business at Duke University. One particular line that he said is “The Devil is in the Data.” Now, I’ve heard the phrase the devil is in the details, so does that mean that the details in the data are the devil?

Things that make you go “Hmmm”?

You may or may not be aware of the fact that Google is changing the way it does analytics. UA is going away on July 1, and GA4 is replacing it.

The key thing that you have to remember is, that it is just data. As long as it’s being collected, you can learn and grow with it.

Also, if you wanted to, you could basically just start out by replicating what you’re used to and then get more sophisticated over time. But sooner or later, you’re gonna have to have a discussion about what data is important to you and your business, how you want to format it, and what can you do with those results.

In this episode, we will discuss why you need to convert to GA4 and how to start thinking about what data you collect and what’s important to your business.

Luis Help Businesses Engage Prospects And Build An Army Of Loyal Customers Using Automated systems that increase engagement and create a constant flood of sales.

Engage with your Leads, Increase Sales Conversions and Manage your Leads Effectively.

At Sales Studios, we have a proven structured system to drive your audience to view your offers.

A system that strengthens branding and positioning as we provide you with a custom strategy along with a set of strong follow-ups that will continue to nurture your leads while providing them with a unique and personalized experience. This translates to more engagement and therefore more sales.

We use a combination of multiple touchpoints to get leads and customers engaged, creating a feeling of omnipresence when communicating with them. For that, we combine emails, SMS, ringless voicemail and Facebook custom audience (ads).

This is the ultimate way to get your leads attention and get them to take immediate action.

Magician hand conjuring sparks on black background – copy space with magic

Back in 2015, I talked about my concept of the Marketing Trifecta. I will explain what that is in a bit, but there has been a lot of buzz over the last 8 years about new tools that will revolutionize marketing.

I have seen so many of them try and fail, come and go, or slowly find their lane. But none of them have really revolutionized marketing like they promised to do when they hit the marketing scene.

Which ones have you tried?

As I said, I coined the term “The Marketing Trifecta” in my book “The Bacon System” back in 2015. Although at the time I was working with solopreneurs and small businesses, it had limited success.

Once I started to apply the concept to larger business-to-business customers, it took off. AND… it’s continued to stand the test of time.

It starts by getting people to your website to consume the great content you create. That being said, you have to consistently create great content that people actually WANT to consume. To get people back to your website, you have to distribute digestible bites to get in front of as many eyes (and ears) as possible.

In this episode, we will discuss my Marketing Trifecta… and how it can work for your business!

Lisa has over 20 years of experience as a transformational leader, award-winning speaker, and expert in the fields of human behavior, leadership, and personal development.  She also trained in the “Winners Mindset” with Bob Reese, the former head trainer for the NY Jets, and helped a professional golfer win Golfer of the Year!

Lisa was V.P. of Business Development for an innovative start-up company using virtual reality to help clients with pain reduction, memory loss, and stress reduction. As a Certified Hypnotherapist and Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), she helps entrepreneurs and high performers from where they are to where they want to be much faster than conventional coaches.
Lisa is also trained as a Why Coach, helping people discover their Why, based on Simon Sinek’s, “Know Your Why”. Lisa not only helps individuals discover their Why, but she also helps people discover the Why of their business and how to use it in your branding.

Networking is a tool for meeting people. It can be performed online, or in person. It has real costs of time and often some money.

There are so many free and paid options. You can find lots of free-flowing or slightly structured meetings. You can also find highly targeted ones that are totally structured like a BNI or Vistage.

Finally, there are those one-on-one meetings like I had with Chip and Sarah. I also do at least 2-3 get-to-know-you Zoom calls each week.

All of those have one cost that is either overlooked or avoided. TIME!

How much does it take to acquire a new customer? It’s a very findable number if you add up all the tools and expenses you pay for. Often overlooked is the staff or C-level time to network, have a one-on-one meeting, and talk with referrals.

We tend to lump the time we spend on networking, relationship building, and meetings in general as the Cost of Goods Sold. It’s generally recorded as salary but rarely tracked as a system.

Documenting interactions and meeting with your team to discuss that can do more than create business, it can help you all get the pulse of the current business climate and the community at large.

In this episode, we will discuss how networking can be tracked as an ROI in your business!

Mark S. A. Smith designs and implements customer acquisition systems that find and recruit customers for disruptive products. He speaks at entrepreneurial events delivering pragmatic ideas to grow and succeed.

He is an electrical engineer, media technologist, computer programmer, hardware salesman, software marketer, and business owner who works with leaders who must develop the best way to bring in the right customers, fast!

Mark wrote 13 books and sales guides targeting government, educational, healthcare, and the private sector, including three with Guerrilla Marketing author, Jay Conrad Levinson. He has authored more than 400 magazine articles.

With his engineering, sales, and business background, he can teach information in a way that customers, salespeople, and management understand so that they can clearly communicate with their customers.

Creates powerful and innovative sales channel tools, combining product knowledge with proven sales skills. Creates custom white papers and books to sell technology to top management. Delivered thousands of speeches on selling.

I got hacked. Well, my credit card did.

I was balancing my books when I noticed two charges from GoDaddy India on a credit card with a $25,000 limit. I use GoDaddy for domain names, but not in India so that was a BIG RED FLAG!

Immediately, I called the credit card company and they closed that card and are sending me a new card with a new account number.

The problem is that 90% of my monthly bills are paid on that card. So now I have to watch and manage to pay my monthly bills with different cards this month and then update all of them with the new number when I get the new card.

Attention is power. There is power in attaining someone’s attention. If you really think about it, you can use money and knowledge to get in front of people, but you don’t control their attention. They do. Also, money and AI can buy you attention. But even if you buy ads (no matter how targeted) there is still an AI engine deciding for you who sees what you’re paying for and when.

Knowledge is power. You can look intelligent with Artificial Intelligence. If you really think about it, you control your intelligence through learning, but you don’t control Artificial Intelligence. It’s managed in the form of a computer, an app, or a browser.

Money is power. Buying ads or sponsoring posts can boost or enhance your ability to get your content in front of people who may not already buy from you. Ultimately, it’s up to them to pay attention or not.

If Money is Power, Knowledge is Power, and Attention is Power, how can you use all three to optimize your knowledge to gain attention?

In this episode, we will discuss how AI and your Quickbooks (or CRM) can help you reach your perfect audience with your creative content!

Hank is an author, speaker, podcast host and Sr. Manager of Client Solutions at iContact, a Ziff Davis company. With a passion for all things digital and social, combined with more than 20 years of experience in sales and marketing, he has been dubbed the Digital Marketing Infotainer because he makes marketing fun and successful.

I have to brag a bit… I won Board Member of the Quarter for the AMA Triangle. Back in January, I was recruited to join as the VP of Communications, and by April I was recognized as a winner!

I simply got the pulse of who the players were and what they needed. You have a unique pulse on your business and the industry(s) you serve. Your salespeople have boots on the ground, ears to the audience, and fingers on the pulse of what your clients and prospects are feeling fearful of or excited about.

Success is in the eye of the beholder. All too often with online and digital marketing, it’s measured in eyeballs and engagement. While both are exciting and a boost to the ego, in my world all that matters is action and conversations.

The keys to success are knowing your audience, creating quality creative content, and consistently delivering value to your audience.

It’s never a set-it-and-forget-it activity. I know things can always be improved by constant learning, and developing your teams, tactics, and targets.

In this episode, we will discuss how Rightsourcing, and consistent content creation and distribution can help boost sales!

I could easily take my old blogs and ask AI to rewrite them to reflect today’s business environment better. That would certainly be faster than my two-finger typing, re-working sections, and asking a VA to proof and post, but would it or could it be more successful or effective?

Most businesses will ebb and flow between profit and deficit, and you sometimes have to cut expenses to offset a deficit of profits.

When it comes to marketing, outcomes are profits and content creation and distribution are part of the expense. As long as those outcomes lead to financial profits, marketing goes from being an expense to an investment.

Businesses have a longer and more chartable P.A.T.H. to purchase. They go from Awareness to Engagement to Inquiry to Purchase. By chartable P.A.T.H., I mean there are data points you can track and measurably follow from send to sale.

Colton led the development of the Interview & Interrogation (I&I) training for the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) which is recognized as breaking the mold for interviewing training and bringing science into the art of interviewing. This was done in conjunction with the U.S. Intelligence Community but transfers perfectly into cutting-edge training and fact-finding systems for almost any organization. While with the HIG, Colton taught the HIG I&I courses to thousands of members of the U.S. Intelligence Community as well as developing training programs for some of the U.S.’s premier law enforcement agencies and many of our foreign partners.

Through his 22 year career as an FBI Special Agent, Colton conducted thousands of interviews and led a variety of specialty teams in high-pressure, high-stakes settings domestically and internationally, including in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Colton brings a wealth of knowledge and experience relating to counterterrorism, counterintelligence, criminal matters, and the business world to every group he works with.

Colton is passionate about interviewing and about using the most recent science to work with your teams to help them become the absolute best they can be at their craft. Colton is a certified coach and brings a coaching ethos to working with your teams to fulfill their best potential. Colton has an M.A. from the University of Chicago and undergraduate degree from University of California, Davis.

Contact Colton at https://www.pyxisacademy.com/

It’s been years since I mowed my own lawn. Why? I have been blessed enough to afford to pay people to pick up dog poop and mow my lawn.

Common business logic tells us to focus on what’s important. If you make $50 per hour and you can pay someone $40 to mow your lawn, you are $10 ahead if it takes you an hour to do it yourself.

Do you view marketing as a chore? I like to think of it as an investment. Yes, you can buy tools (or rent them in the form of a subscription), but they require some time and some learning to get them to pay for themselves.

Outsourcing usually means that all parts of a system are handled by a vendor. I doubt anyone could find a landscaping company to trim and blow after we cut the lawn.

Rightsourcing your marketing (or sales) means that you only pay for people you need at the time you need them. This systemization only works when you and your sales team are actively involved by sharing your ideas and experiences.

In this episode, we will discuss how Outsourcing vs Rightsourcing, and how it can help you grow your sales!

Keith founded Publio to help clients transition from traditional marketing toward an ROI-based content publishing model to promote brands, build audiences, grow a sales pipeline, and optimize SEO performance to generate qualified leads. He has 25+ years of experience helping CEOs and agencies develop content strategies, marketing plans, and budgets, managing marketing operations, and producing media to attract customers. His work on go-to-market and demand-generation campaigns has yielded tens of thousands of leads, put hundreds of millions of dollars into sales pipelines and employers, and raised millions in startup capital. This experience led Keith to develop the “Publisher’s M.O.™” methodology Publio employs and teaches in client engagements and operations, a framework outlined in his 2019 book The New Content Culture: Think Like a Publisher to Grow Your Business.

Just like Family Style is big, and Tapas is small, content can be served up the same way. There are two common trains of thought when it comes to creating and serving up content.

Content served up Family Style ranges from 2000 to 3500 words. There is usually a lot of detail, facts, examples, and more. The point is to make your case while providing as much supporting content to help you really drive your point(s) home.

Content served up as Tapas ranges from 750 to 1500 words. These tend to be small, quippy, and easy to digest. The idea here is to present thoughts with the goal of leaving them wanting more (or sampling another dish).

Whether your content is short or long, your intro is the hook. You want to make that first bite as unique and tasty as possible to get people to savor your ideas.

In this episode, we will discuss how to serve up your content and the two kinds of hooks you can use to get people commenting and sharing!

Larry Long Jr is the Founder and CEO of LLJR Enterprises, which focuses on business & sales motivation, inspiration, and most importantly, transformation through speaking, coaching & training programs. He is the host of the weekly, ‘Midweek Midday Motivational Minute’ and Author of ‘JOLT!’.

As a former college athlete (He played baseball for University of Maryland… Go Terps!), Larry is extremely passionate about coaching, and helping professionals and leaders take their game to the ‘next level’.

It’s been years since I have been a conference attendee. The latest conference I attended was the 2023 Leadership Summit for chapter leaders of the AMA (American Marketing Association). What I learned at this conference is that not all chapters are the same. They are cohesive to the AMA brand, yet with diversity and individuality.

How can you communicate all the features and benefits of membership to multiple groups, with multiple needs and wants, and not bore everyone in the process?

How do you differentiate between enticing new members, while engaging current members with very limited time, budgets, and (more importantly) attention spans?

If you want to inspire and attract newbies, do a webinar or presentation on AI, and you will get the largest possible audience. But if you want to attract influencers, you have to be prepared to talk with a small, and very focused audience.

If you think about engaging those different audiences, influencers need to be inspired. And, it takes influencers to inspire newbies.

In this episode, we will discuss how segmentation can help you communicate with different audiences with different agendas, while still using the same messaging!

I have 30+ years of experience as a catalyst for leaders who want to grow in self-awareness, harness their innate talents, and enhance their performance to create a meaningful impact in their life and work. I especially enjoy working with multi-generational leaders because we need great leaders in every generation converging to make a difference.

My introduction to professional coaching came at the height of my career leading a nonprofit for 20+ years. I realized I had plateaued personally and professionally in the midst of the demands and pressure of work. This realization was a game-changer that propelled me to grow and develop. Completing a Masters in Leadership and a Professional Coaching Certification (PCC) from the International Coaching Federation (ICF) fueled the convergence of my passion, purpose, and talents to become a professional coach.

My clients are CEOs, VP’s, Directors, emerging leaders, entrepreneurs, and business owners from a variety of industries and organizations including Deloitte, Transloc (Ford), Johnson and Johnson Eye Care, and municipalities like the Town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

I have a problem. Well, it’s more of an annoyance. We have RING cameras on the front and back of our house. In order to see the widest possible views, they had to be placed up high.

The more the cameras are accessed when a delivery comes or when the dog and I are in the backyard playing ball, the faster the battery drains.

They take 4-6 hours to recharge so it’s a hassle. So, I jumped on Amazon and bought solar recharging panels. To work effectively, these have to be positioned to have the most visibility of the sun per day.

Content is like a battery. It powers your business but needs to be recharged. Some businesses power it monthly, but it becomes more powerful when energized daily or weekly. The more the content is viewed, the less current and interesting it becomes. In other words, the faster the content battery needs recharging.

Just like exposing the batteries to the sun supercharges them, getting your content in the light (of computer and cell phone screens), supercharges your messaging by getting it in front of more eyeballs!

All of this is to stay top of mind, stay relevant, and hopefully start conversations.

In this episode, we will discuss how Daily and weekly content, shared through social media and email, can supercharge your audience!

Garrett Moon is the CEO and Co-Founder at CoSchedule, the web’s most popular marketing calendar and the fastest growing startup in North Dakota. Ranked as the best business tool built by a startup on Entrepreneur.com, CoSchedule helps more than 9,000 marketing teams stay organized in more 100 countries around the world. In 2016, CoSchedule was named one of the top five startups in Tech. Co’s Startup of the Year Competition.

As a thought leader, Garrett is the author of “The 10x Marketing Formula” and has been blogging and speaking about content marketing, social media marketing, and startup business for more than eight years. He’s been featured on sites like Forbes, Entrepreneur, AdWeek, and Content Marketing Institute.

Content Marketing isn’t living up to it’s promises. For the past several years, content marketing has been all the rage. There are current success stories seemingly everywhere. Like I imagine so many of you have experienced, we adopted content marketing with high hopes here at CoSchedule. When we started up, we needed the traffic… we needed the success story to be our story… but we weren’t getting it. Instead, we found quality + consistent content wasn’t—and couldn’t—be the promised driver of ROI. It just wasn’t enough.

Since then, we’ve honed the 10x Marketing Formula to grow from zero customers to 9,000+, zero email subscribers to 250,000+, and pageviews from zero to 1.5 million every single month. And we did it all in less than four years.

Do you own a lathe? If you do, chances are woodworking is your hobby or business.

Do you own a 3D printer? If you do, chances are you are in the manufacturing or design fields.

I don’t own either, but owning a 3D printer would be cool and give me status. But, I don’t know the first thing about using it or how to make it pay for itself.

Tools in the hands of an expert speed up results. Tools in the hands of a tinkerer can lead to wasted time or just be dangerous.

One place you are certainly an expert is in how your business helps others solve problems. You understand your client’s needs, wants, and issues. I am sure that you could talk about this for hours in ways that would certainly resonate with your clients and prospects.

One way is to ask questions. If you add a call to action (think, banner ad) that says “Got Questions? Click Here!” you can be sure that at least some of the page visitors will take you up on that.

So, if you want to stand out from your competition and get the attention of your audience, you have to know how to translate your knowledge into content that resonates with them in a way that piques their interest in your topic.

In this episode, we will discuss how mastering your topic, title, and then tools can help your messages rise above the rest!

I was listening to a podcast interview with comedian Mike Birbiglia. I was not familiar with him, but I found his take on comedy interesting.

He believes that comedians have a one-on-one relationship with their audiences. Social media and podcasts can help to create a more intimate relationship with fans. Some influencers lose that connection because they become an outsized version of themselves. They get lost in the audience’s abyss and lose the connection with individuals. They become unapproachable.

I find the same thing with marketing. We tend to lose sight of that one-on-one relationship and get lost in the abyss of the avatar.

A comedian is selling entertainment with jokes. You, on the other hand, are selling profits or solutions through hardware, software, and services.

As a sales and marketing organization, you need to craft a story around your products and services that will resonate with individual buyers.

Getting potential customers to know, like, and trust you is a journey. Each has a unique place in the Customer Journey.

Mark S. Babbitt is President of WorqIQ, a community and change management consultancy that helps organizations understand leadership’s impact on culture and the company’s collective level of Workplace Intelligence (WQ).

Mark is also CEO and Founder of YouTern. This career-focused community enables college students, recent graduates, and young professionals to find their first or next internship or job with the right organizational culture for them.

Mark co-authored A World Gone Social: How Companies Must Adapt to Survive and is co-author of the upcoming (September 28, 2021 | Matt Holt and BenBella Books) Good Comes First: How Today’s Leaders Create an Uncompromising Company Culture That Doesn’t Suck.

Followers also find Mark’s advice in Entrepreneur, Inc., Forbes, and many other publications. An in-demand speaker, Mark was named one of Inc. Magazines’ Top 100 Leadership Speakers.

S. Chris Edmonds helps leaders create and sustain purposeful, positive, productive work cultures. He is a speaker, author, and executive consultant who is the founder of The Purposeful Culture Group. He’s one of Inc. Magazine’s 100 Top Leadership Speakers and was a featured presenter at South by Southwest 2015.

Chris is the author of the Amazon best seller The Culture Engine and is co-author of the upcoming title, Good Comes First. Chris’ blog, podcasts, and videos are at DrivingResultsThroughCulture.com. Chris’ short, rich Culture Leadership Charge video episodes can be found on YouTube.

There is a famous saying, “What gets measured gets managed”, or “What gets measured, gets done”. It’s often attributed to Peter Drucker (but his organizations said it was not him initially).

But when it comes to measurement… what happens when you are measuring the wrong things? Does that lead to doing the wrong things and inaccurate data?

Humans will tend to engage anywhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes on your website. What you want to measure is that engagement.

What you want to measure first is what are the engagers engaging with. That can be found by looking at what pages are getting around 1-3 minutes of time on that page. Keep in mind that bots can drop that to below 1 minute if they are the majority of the hits, so don’t immediately throw out data as says 1 minute or less.

One way is to ask questions. If you add a call to action (think, banner ad) that says “Got Questions? Click Here!” you can be sure that at least some of the page visitors will take you up on that.

Another way is to predictively answer questions. We do this with a Decision Tree. This (like the banner ad) gets people to click through. The difference, is they are not forced to give info to get answers.

This provides intelligence into their website visits and activity which can be analyzed and utilized by management and/or salespeople.

In this episode, we will discuss how to increase engagement by getting people to search and answer their own questions!

Avish Bhama is the founder and CEO of Sonia Automation, a technology company that builds A.I. to automate client facing workflows. Prior to Sonia, Avish co-founded Vaurum, a bitcoin exchange, and Mirror, a fintech startup. Avish began his career as a derivatives trader and worked at Apple on their foreign exchange team. He resides in New York and SF, where Sonia has offices, and enjoys reading, hiking, and helping early-stage founders.

Have you ever been in an endless loop or Mobius strip conversation with a toddler? You know… the endless circle of WHY?

When a toddler keeps asking “WHY?” in response to everything they hear or see, it’s called the “why stage” or “why phase”.

If you get frustrated, you can try to end the loop by saying, “Because I said so… THAT’S WHY!”

Simon Sinek explores the word WHY in such an exciting way in his book “START WITH WHY: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”.

I suggest you ask yourself, “WHY do I want or need more sales?”, “HOW can I entice people to do more of what is already working?” “WHAT do I need to do to entice people to do more of what is already working?” and “WHY would that convince them to make a purchase?”

If you noticed, Simon Sinek starts with WHY, HOW, and WHAT. This is the power of three. So let’s explore WHY three choices help you increase the chances that your ideas and messaging will be engaged.

Ultimately, your WHY is going to be different than almost any other business. That means your HOW and WHAT are also going to be different than most other businesses.

In this episode, we will discuss WHY presenting your marketing with three choices can be the best way to increase engagment!.

Cloris Kylie, Marketing MBA, helps you build authority and attract the right clients online and offline. She shows you how to leverage connections with influencers and leaders of marketing platforms so that you can grow a magnificent business that produces positive impact and growing revenue.

A sought-after speaker, trainer, and author, Cloris has been featured on network television, and on top-ranked podcasts and YouTube shows, including the #1 podcast for entrepreneurs, “Entrepreneur On Fire.” Cloris’s articles have been published on websites with millions of followers, such as TinyBuddha, MindBodyGreen, and Addicted2Success.

Starting from scratch, Cloris has grown a large network of influencers, who have played an essential role in the growth of her coaching and consulting business.

She has interviewed best-selling authors and world-class entrepreneurs such as Chris Brogan, Dorie Clark, Neil Patel, Mel Abraham, and Serena, Saje and Skye Dyer, the 3 daughters of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.
Cloris’s unique background in industrial engineering and marketing allows her to design efficient and effective solutions for her clients, but Cloris knows you need more than tactics to succeed. That’s why she also empowers you to, as she says, “Reveal your magnificence.”

I am always amazed that 80 tons of people, luggage, metal, and fuel, lifts you up in the air and flies you 1000 miles in about 2 hours, and it’s almost 1000 times safer than driving in a car.

On top of that, most people don’t give a second thought about how complex our air travel system is. During the last year, we saw how planes that could not take off caused delays, cancellations, and even a collapse of certain airlines’ systems.

If not having the right airplane at the right gate at the right time can cause chaos, imagine how not having the right person, at the right web page, at the right time could affect your business systems.

A B2b business usually has a very niche audience of specialists in search of a solution to their problem. You want to help your website visitors land at the right gate. That way they can make their connecting flight (talking with your sales staff) or reach their destination (buying from your company).

So the question to ask yourself is, “Do I need more traffic or do I need to have better conversations?”

Website creators often look at a website as a linear experience. You arrive at the entrance (home page), read the departures board (menu), then navigate to your gate (pages or blog). I like to think of your website as a non-linear tool.

If people have questions, they walk up to the gate staff and ask questions.

Your website can also accomplish this by using links and banners (on pages, blog posts, and below videos), to point people to more information.

In this episode, we will discuss how to get travelers at your website to their gate (destination) faster!.

Bob Kastl is the son of a Military Attorney and Judge, so he grew up in many places including: Texas, Alaska, Alabama, New Mexico, Virginia and Panama. He majored in Mass Communications at James Madison University, and, while in school, served as the Assistant Program Director at WMRA, Public Radio for the Shenandoah Valley.

After college, he took a job as an Advertising Sales Executive at the alternative newsweekly, Creative Loafing, in Charlotte. Eight months after his hire, Bob was promoted to the role of Sales Manager. He served in that role for five years, eventually being promoted to Associate Publisher. He left Loafing in 1997 to work at The Charlotte Observer, eventually returning to launch a weekly edition of Creative Loafing in Sarasota Florida in 1999.

After a stint out of the media advertising world, he returned in 2008, and joined AT&T, the publisher of the local Yellow Pages and yellowpages.com for Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Goldsboro, and several other markets. He joined WUNC in 2018, and was promoted to the Corporate Sales Manager job in August of 2019.

The first thing that happens when you get to a restaurant is you are guided to your table and handed a menu. Menus are generally organized into appetizers, meals, and desserts.

Could you imagine if the menu included articles about how each meal is prepared, where the ingredients were sourced from, and what cooking ware is used to prepare your meal?

Your website is like a menu for visitors. It is generally categorized based on how your visitors want to eat, but all too often they try too hard to over-explain the options. That’s what the wait staff is for. Wait-staff serves as the primary interaction point between your customers and your business.

Your website visitors may come to your website with a goal, a problem, or a question.

If all they want is to get to know your business (products and services) it’s the brochure they are looking for.

If they are looking to make a purchase, they may want to know the price and availability, That’s when the store model (similar to Amazon) makes the most sense.

If they are researching their issues and possible solutions, they will be looking for your card catalog with the Dewey Decimal System (search box) and expect your website to act like ChatGPT (with detailed expert responses).

All too often, you will find small business websites that try to incorporate all three modalities to reach the broadest audience. But sometimes, “If you make the choose, they get confused!”

In this episode, we will discuss how to get visitors to your website to strike up profitable sales conversations.

Steve Hoffman (Captain Hoff) is the Chairman & CEO of Founders Space, a global innovation hub for entrepreneurs, corporations, and investors, with over 50 partners in 22 countries.

Hoffman is also a venture investor, founder of three venture-backed and two bootstrapped startups, and author of several award-winning books. These include “Make Elephants Fly” (Hachette), “Surviving a Startup” (HarperCollins), and “The Five Forces” (BenBella).

In addition, Hoffman served on the Board of Governors of the New Media Council, was the founder and Chairman of the Producers Guild Silicon Valley Chapter, and was a founding member of the Academy of Television’s Interactive Media Group.

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How often do you find yourself getting ads for something that you just searched for? It can be both creepy and annoying.

I went to a local golf shop to have some clubs regripped. While I was waiting I was shown an area where they will evaluate your swing and give you a mini-lesson. I booked it and came back a couple of weeks later. What I learned is that my ball flight is good but my swing speed is slow. Swing speed = distance.

So you are probably asking yourself, “What does golf have to do with marketing?” Well, I believe that to better your game, you have to master the system. or SYS-TEM

• SYS stands for “Sell Your Salesperson”
• TEM stands for “Timely Emotional Messages”

Building a SYS-TEM means creating a synchronized marketing system. Trying just to implement a simple fix or change is not going to do the trick.

You have to master all parts of a golf swing to make solid contact. The same goes for marketing. The goal is to make solid contact, and that makes it easier to get the ball in the hole (make a sale).

In this episode, we will discuss how you can build a SYS-TEM around your marketing.

I want to do something a little different today. I want to share with you my why. If you can figure out your why, I believe you are halfway to success. Simon Sinek tells us to start with why. But I believe that why is not all-encompassing and as simple as finding one why on your way to the top.

I believe there are a series of whys. Why are you in or running a business? Why are you in the niche or market that you serve? Why do you offer the specific products or services you sell?

The other thing I have found is that, over time, your why can change and evolve as you change and evolve.

I believe that understanding the “why” questions and how others may perceive you is not only useful but critical in business. It can help you get a peek into how clients, prospects, and vendors may perceive you before you start to interact. Then, the rest is up to you to collect data from interactions.

VICTORIA SONG is the Leadership Advisor to successful founders and CEOs of the fastest growing technology companies in Silicon Valley and celebrities with power, platform, and influence.

Victoria began her career as a venture capitalist investing in technology startups, where she got to see first-hand what the most successful entrepreneurs did differently to win.

She was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for her investment success. After studying economics at Yale University and leadership at Harvard Business School, she received her most valuable learnings from over 24 of the best coaches, therapists, and alternative healers in the world who teach lessons not available in even the most exclusive universities.

If you want to build a successful business, you have to stay top of mind, provide value, and continue to learn, grow and change. What follows are three experiences I had in the last week or so that will help me make that point!

My friend and associate, Chuck Hester, has a habit that I not only follow but support. While I post a quote of the day in the morning, and a caption contest at night on Facebook, he does the same with a dad joke of the day!

My business coach (Marla Tabaka) and I had an awesome conversation about my progress and how I crushed my vision board (the dad part is coming). If you are not familiar with a vision board, Marla convinced me to buy a pin board, hang it on my wall, and fill it with pictures of what I want to achieve. I searched and found a big check (with a big number to make me debt free), a golfer, a for sale sign on my home, a new home, and pictures of my perfect customers.

Some people you meet online are Zoom-worthy, while others are coffee worthy. Coffee-worthy means I have to take a shower, get in my car, and meet them for coffee. I had such a Coffee-worthy meeting with a new friend and business associate Chip Royce. The main reason for the meeting was to help each other see our respective businesses through a fresh set of eyes.

Your life, business, and money tree need nurturing, care, and sustenance to keep growing. Maybe you want to try a vision board. Maybe search for a coach, mentor, or friend to help you see things from different perspectives. It may be a coffee, a beer or glass of wine, a round of golf, or just a walk, but seek out others for whom you can provide value, and whom you can find value with.

In this episode, we will discuss how to gain a new perspective on yourself and your vision (board).

Erika Andresen, CBCP, JD, MPA, is a recovering lawyer after nearly two decades of experience in both the corporate finance world and the military. Erika became a subject matter expert on national security and disaster preparedness and response while advising different commands on their authorities and during high-risk situations in Afghanistan. Her work with actual disasters led her to attain a Master of Public Affairs.

Erika left active duty in 2020 and has since started EaaS Consulting, LLC, with the goal of keeping businesses in business. To that end, she authored How to Not Kill Your Business: Grow Your Business in Any Environment, Navigate Volatility, and Successfully Recover When Things Go Wrong, a conversational introduction to business continuity enjoyed by CBCP practitioners and business owners alike. Erika is also a professor of emergency management for the MPA program at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has been quoted in articles for Forbes, Dark Reading, and MoneyGeek on the issues of business continuity and disaster preparedness.

After a career of working in actual disasters and high-risk situations where things changed every day and the consequences were actual life and death, Erika saw that business owners needed similar services to survive but did not know where to start. If you are a business that wants to stay alive and grow with security, Erika’s mission is to get you there!

was listening to “The Square and the Tower”, subtitled “Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook” by Niall Ferguson. It argues that most organizations are hierarchical. “It’s about emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and field marshals. It’s about states, armies, and corporations. It’s about orders from on high.” Networks have nodes and have always been with us. From our family, and founding fathers to Facebook, it’s about whom you know and whom they know that forms your network.

Most of us would think that if we can get the ear or heart of the CEO, King, or Owner, we can reach underlings with our messages. But this book talks about Thomas Cromwell who was the principal secretary to King Henry VIII. Cromwell had access to over 20,000 letters belonging to the dynasty, hence he had access, knowledge, and insight that few could have prior to the invention of the printing press.

The purpose of that peer-to-peer networking meeting is about who needs what. Not about, “does what I sell, meet their needs”, or “whom do they know who needs what I sell?” It’s 100% about whom I know, that’s a quality connection, who can help them solve a problem.

So back to my theory that maintaining fewer connections with quality networkers is much more fruitful than riding the coattails of those influencers with the most connections.

In this episode, we will discuss the difference between hierarchical and node networking.

Struggle with creating content? Jeff Herring provides tools, templates, software, and strategies to make content creation easy! No experience necessary.

Jeff Herring AKA The Content Marketing Guy is an internet marketer specializing in article marketing, teaching internet marketers, authors, speakers and self-employed professionals to write and market articles for more prospects, publicity and profits, and to create multiple streams of income with their content.

Jeff began as a marriage and family therapist, with a thriving practice for over 25 years… He began writing a weekly syndicated column and found that he became the “Therapist in the Paper” and grew his private therapy practice into a thriving business, with people and groups on his waiting list and filling the practices of his colleagues with the overflow. Afterlife happened and Jeff found himself divorced, his children have moved away from Florida to Georgia so Jeff moved to Georgia as soon as possible and in addition to some long-distance therapy clients, he began teaching other people how to quickly and easily create content to promote their businesses. When the internet took off, he found the same type of articles from his syndicated column worked wonders for bringing targeted traffic to his (and his client’s) websites. And the Content Marketing Guy was born…

Jeff’s students and clients discover how to write more articles in less time, get their information in front of more eyes in as many consumable forms as possible, create a massive web presence, build a highly qualified and highly responsive list, and create multiple information products to build their information empire with their content.

When Jeff turned his content marketing expertise on the internet, he created a flood of traffic to his web sites that he could not stop if he wanted to, and he doesn’t want to. He is perhaps the most prolific Content Marketing expert in the world, practicing what he preaches with well over 1.5 Million article views online. See some of Jeff Herring’s articles here.

In this final part of the series, I wanted to show how and why following traditional marketing thinking can hamper your success in B2b marketing.

B2b marketing differs from consumer marketing because it’s more relational than transactional, and it often takes longer to go from awareness to trust. That means that there are more steps, and more interaction required. It also means that it requires more patience, which is rewarded with bigger paydays.

With that said here are some things we have learned over the last few years (through actual client experience):

1. People spend 15-20 minutes per week on LinkedIn
2. People hit a brick wall after 35 minutes on webinars & meetings
3. Gif posts are more effective than short video posts

What that tells us is that people in business are too busy to read long posts. It’s short, to-the-point content like images and gifs that get the most clicks. Once people click, they continue to want short, quick engagement or actions to take.

Once you get people on your website, the holy grail is always getting their contact information. But what if they are not willing or ready to? That is where a Decision Tree help.

In this episode, we will explore… how to keep your customers engaged in your content, and track their buyer’s journey!.

Shawn Finder has always been an entrepreneur at heart. At age 24, Shawn entered the entrepreneurial world after competing as one of Canada’s top-ranked tennis players. He started out importing packaging from the Orient and selling to top retailers in North America. However, knowing he always loved selling and list building, he founded ExchangeLeads in 2013 which helps his company build quality lists for outreaching new prospects. This was followed by his new venture Autoklose in 2017 that combines both sales engagement and list building all-in-one platform

In part 1 of this series, I hinted that in this post I was going to outline a system we are working on that helps capture data from visitors in a way that traditional methods are either missing or lacking. I decided that before I devolve the system, I should add a little context as to why it’s so important and needed. So, this will now be a 3 part series.

I also mentioned, your website is kind of like a mousetrap. It has food for thought and attracts creatures who sneak in and out. You may be able to see them scurry, but it’s hard to trap them (meaning their data).

The goal is not to just capture information and badger people, but to follow their journey, to understand their needs and wants better, and how they go about using your website to investigate answers to their questions.

All businesses have one main goal, to make a sale. In the B2b world, that generally requires interpersonal communication (a conversation between a salesperson and a prospect). All of those tactics can generate leads, data, and sales, but there is a caveat. It all assumes that someone sees your stuff at the exact time they are deciding to buy. I believe that the best method to really achieve that is through relationship building.

Understanding the path that websites, email, and social have taken will help you better understand how to integrate all of those into your overall marketing plan

In this episode, we will explore… a little history of the web, search, email, social & more!.

Julie Migliacci has over 17 years of high-touch customer service and event planning under her belt. There isn’t an event type she hasn’t planned before, from large celebrity fundraisers, virtual conferences and premier cooking shows. She is always up for a new challenge and creating unique experiences for clients and their guests. Hailing from France, Julie has lived in 4 countries and considers herself a global citizen. She currently resides in Boston, MA and is always looking for an opportunity to jump on a plane to do something new. If left on a deserted island, Julie would bring her sourdough starter (named Steve) and her cats.

Lastly, a fun fact: Chip was the first to place a keyword ad buy in 1997 (Yahoo!)

In our last house, we had a small problem. Mice!

If you think about it, your business is like my garage. Specifically your website. It has food for thought and attracts creatures who sneak in and out. You may be able to see them scurry, but it’s hard to trap them (and you certainly don’t want to kill them off). You want to be able to capture them (or at least capture their data).

The ultimate goal is to get people to exchange their contact info for quality content like an ebook, training videos, and such. You will only get a small number of website visitors who are willing to do that. It may take two, three, or more visits to your website before they are willing to engage in that way. It makes sense to try and track use with cookies, so when they scurry into your form or email, you have the opportunity to trace their path (understand how they got there in the first place).

Unlike the mice in our garage, you don’t want to get rid of them, you want to create conversations that keep them coming back. But you still have to feed them and track their path, or journey to your cheese while keeping your content safe and inviting!

P.S. With those mice, I used peanut butter which lasted longer and was stickier 

In this episode, we will explore… How to attract and capture your website’s users’ attention… and data!.

How do you define success? Success is not measured like temperature with a static scale or counting system. It is an abstract system that is different for every person and business.

With today’s Attention Economy, you may think that likes and clicks are the most important metric. But I am here to tell you that profits are the main thing to measure in business. Profits come from sales.

In this Attention Economy, companies are trying different tools and techniques to stand out. You have two invaluable assets that others don’t have: relationships with your current and past customers and their contact information. In other words, you already have their attention!

Creating USP messages and thought leadership content that is focused on those who already know you is faster, cheaper, and better than trying to snag the attention of people who don’t already know, like, and trust you.

Kurt Scholle is an entrepreneur who understands what it is like to own your own business and to be responsible for the livelihoods of your employees. He measures business success only one way: profits. He founded Web Asylum in 1996 and has had equity interests in a couple of local Internet Service Providers that delivered high-speed Internet and reliable web hosting.

Website success and social media are passions. Kurt speaks on developing successful website strategy, Internet Marketing and Social Media, including Twitter and Facebook workshops.

Join his Facebook Fan Page http://www.facebook.com/websiteroiguy or Email: Kurt@WebAsylum.com

I luckily learned a lesson back in the 1980s when I worked at AT&T. During a performance review, my supervisor said, “Son, you are an expense. I can hire two people for what you are asking for and I would do better with that than with you alone. So the answer is NO!” Let me repeat that… “YOU ARE AN EXPENSE”

I realized that if I did not make a change, no one would do it for me. I needed to leverage my time, and leverage the time of others in a way that was successful, repeatable, and valuable to clients in a way that they would want to invest in and integrate my solution into their business.

I started with writers (people who could do it better than me) and started to build systems around them. Next, I found people who could manage websites, create emails and social posts, and topped it off with a project manager who had extensive corporate experience. I can bring people into some consistency of repeatable projects with room for them to learn and grow with other clients.

This model allowed me to bring in an expert at just the right time to complete a task and then let them focus on other customers they were working with. The key was a level of expertise, that could work the client’s ebbs and flows of needs and wants. It allows them to access an incredible pool of talent who bring creativity and innovative solutions to keep them at the forefront of trends.

In this episode, we will explore… how to look at what you do as an invaluable resource to your clients or bosses, and not just as an expense.

He is the author of the bestselling book “Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life” which includes a Foreword by Visa founder Dee Hock.

Aidan is the host and founder of the Innovation Show, broadcast globally and on national radio stations in Ireland and Finland.

Aidan is a Change Consultant and Executive Coach. He works with organizational teams to improve how they engage and innovate.

He is a champion for change and has reinvented his own career after rugby. Aidan worked in transformation for digital, innovation, and now culture and leadership.

Aidan played over 100 times for Europe’s most successful teams: Leinster and Toulouse and represented Ireland.

He developed the digital eco-system for Communicorp Media Group, served as Head of Innovation for Ireland’s National broadcaster, and worked as an innovation consultant for Global company Katawave.

Today he sits on the board of National Broadband Ireland, rolling out connectivity to the remotest parts of Ireland.

He developed and delivers a module on Emerging Technology Trends in Trinity College Business School, ranked 1st in Ireland and in the top 100 globally.