Episode 209 When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example: The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who’d commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so be…

Episode 208 People resist change. They only stop resisting when they’re convinced the change is needed. They’re only convinced change is needed when they grasp the truth. The best way to present them the truth is with data. You might think that what works on people is a dry statistical presentation of the data in all its Indisputable, inscrutable g…

Episode 206 There’s no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI’s do amazing things. Extrapolating how far they’ve come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We’re impressed by how clever they sound, and we’re tempted to believe that they’ll chew throu…

Episode 204 Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion - this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation. But knowin…

Episode 203: How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never f…

Episode 202 One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that …

Episode 200 Podcasts are tiny time capsules, preserving moments of wisdom and insight. Every time I revisit past episodes, I am reminded of how insightful our guests have been. Certain themes consistently emerge, echoed by guests from the very beginning of the podcast to just yesterday. The cost of ignoring these insights is so high that they bear …

Episode 199 Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things. Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict h…

Episode 198 A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor …

Episode 197 Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will …

Episode 196 There’s something we take for granted these days, something that wasn’t even possible a short while ago. Let’s go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That’s because at the time, the cellular networks could tran…

Episode 195 We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best. But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfittin…

Episode 194 There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it’s just different. - Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar - Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC - Programming can be done in various languages …

Episode 193 Those of us in the digital economy think a lot about growing our business, but we don’t think as much about the tech that enables customers to interact with our business. When our sites don’t run smoothly or aren’t available, our customers suffer and it stops working as our sales and marketing engine. Terms for these episodes: the site …

We've all heard of 1970's Apollo 13 mission that was supposed to send a 3-man crew to the moon, but once NASA became aware of an on-board explosion, it became all about rescuing the crew. Ron Howard's 1995 movie gives a glimpse of how mission control staff in Houston reacted to information about the explosion. When an alarm on the command module fl…

My sister-in-law Janice works at the forefront of Medical Sonography. You may know it by the name Ultrasound, where non-invasive sound waves are sent into the body, which bounce off tissue and get displayed on a monitor. It has the ability to evaluate anatomy in an increasingly wide range of structures such as abdominal organs, the heart, vasculatu…

In numerous companies, the approach to content strategy appears to be nonexistent, marked by haphazard content creation and dissemination. A notable absence of a cohesive plan to align content with overarching marketing objectives is evident, leading to a disjointed and less effective approach. In light of these challenges, it becomes imperative fo…

Increasingly, many Marketing teams have been forced to transform their own teams, or the Business as a whole has had to start transforming itself. But no matter how technically sophisticated they are, no matter how many consultants they have or how many Project management meetings they hold, most companies struggle through these transformations. At…

One thing that professional services and solo subject matter experts struggle with is building an audience and influencing their purchases. Creating a content marketing engine that achieves this can take agonizingly long - years even. But virtual events that are properly marketed seem able to shorten that timespan. My guest, Michael Tucker, has ref…

You could say that the marketing field is going through exciting times right now. But you shouldn’t say that everything’s rosy. Here are examples of issues we’re grappling with: The use of SaaS by Marketing may have freed us from being chained to the IT department, but after 25 years of binge buying all these point solutions, we’re saddled with loa…

Episode 183 As a Disclaimer, note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship with the vendor interviewed here. They're simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic. As trite as it sounds, the way that we look at the world affects our understanding of it. Let me tell you about a time I noticed this. When I was a kid, I would go t…

Today's episode looks at how pervasive voice technology is, and how marketers can make better use of it. After spending over twenty years in marketing agencies, Susan Westwater became cofounder and CEO of Pragmatic Digital. Susan has talked and written on the role voice & conversational AI plays in marketing and business strategy. Susan is coauthor…

When a person interacts with their device or goes online, who owns their data? Today’s guest says they do, and marketers should be paying them for the privilege. Right now, you might think this person wears hats made out of tinfoil. It may surprise you to learn they are the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics exec…

If you go to Wikipedia and type Zero-sum game, it’ll describe it as “a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one's gain is equivalent to player two's loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero” Many think that’s…

‘1 to 1 Marketing,’ sounds wonderful. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers wrote a series of books in the 1990s called this. We have thrown all kinds of technology, content, and persona construction at it over the last 25 years. But it still eludes us. Architecting communications that converses with each person, at their own point in a conversation with our…

Episode 179 This is the second of two shows on doing data-driven marketing, in a way that respects user privacy. No matter how much we crave, there will be fewer ways to capture it. At time of recording, Google says Chrome will stop supporting 3rd party cookies in 2024. Our choice should not be to switch to other forms of tracking, but whether we’l…

Today’s talk is with a technology vendor, as a Disclaimer, please note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. They're simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic. Today we’re going to talk about leveling up beyond KPIs to data that visualizes our full-funnel. Comedian George Carlin knew how complicated things get with…

If your job involves numbers, you likely spend time graphically plotting it. Whether it’s for analyzing or presenting, we usually toss our datasets into our visualization tool (mainly because it takes one button click) and start visualizing it. The problem here is that we’re making content before knowing our intent, we’re making the software master…

There were a lot of books covered on the podcast in 2023 - 44% of this year’s shows were with book authors. Combined with previous years’ book episodes, we have reached the 60-book mark on this podcast - you can sift through them all on our site by clicking on the “books” category on the right-hand menu. But I’ve had the chance to read books outsid…

There are websites and then there are websites. Some give User Experience short shrift, slapping together generic templates that look pretty... generic. Others use experts to make interfaces that are optimized for mobile and PC environments, and anticipate what users want and present their content in engaging ways. Some with so little security, the…

Today, we’re talking about the future of data with Google Analytics 4. It’s been about 6 months since we all had Universal Analytics. It’s good to talk to others who use GA4 to do their jobs, to compare notes. Although GA4 is here to stay, it still has gaps that need bridging. That’s why I spoke with Jason Hackenberry, Head of Partnerships from web…

GA4 is now our de facto analytics tool. Regardless of how familiar we were with the previous tool, GA4 is here to stay so we may as well get good at using it. I’ve got just the person to make the transition relatively painless for us. Our guest’s love for analytics was a happy accident after she worked in a company where the sales director was maki…

AI won’t end up being one thing, it will be present in many little applications - hopefully that will help us in our marketing. But what kind of AIs do we want? Are we looking at the ingredients that go into them? Those are the kinds of questions innovations our guest considers as he makes AI models for healthcare and the retail marketing sectors. …

Whenever your marketing is being assessed by an analyst, they will use one of two approaches. The first is called Multi-touch attribution, which takes a customer who’s made a purchase decision, then puts weights on the touchpoints they had on various channels (Google calls their model ‘Data-driven attribution”) on the way to that point, to say whic…

You did everything just the way you were told. You took the tags the free tools gave you and installed them on your site, you configured platforms and poured over their reports, you connected the systems and even hired developers to hook everything up to a database. And yet, you have little value to show for all the work you’ve put into your compan…

Memes act as our collective memory’s transportation system. The instant they are seen or heard, our minds hop to whatever emotion the meme conveys. The use of this brain-hack is as scary as it is impressive. Memes rarely come to us via broadcast media. Instead, they spread organically online. Most of the original uses for these have faded, while th…

A trend that’s currently having its day in the sun is Product-Led Growth. According to our guest, it’s a fine model, but our companies need growth that’s based on a more foundational element - advocating for Customer-Led Growth. CLG begins with creating organization-wide understanding around what experience is most appropriate for the company's bes…

Darryl Praill is the CMO at Agorapulse where he leads a global team of 40. Prior to that, he held executive roles with companies like SAP, IBM, Kinaxis, Airbus and VanillaSoft. He has consulted for AC Nielsen, Salesforce.com, UBM and Tweed. He is also a speaker at keynotes and on podcasts (which at last count runs into the hundreds). You become con…

If you've listened to this show, you know that I believe we can base all the marketing decisions we make on data. Janet Driscoll-Miller brings over twenty years of search engine marketing experience to Marketing Mojo and is considered a leading expert in her field. Janet has spoken at search engine and marketing conferences including Digital Summit…

What needs to be done with marketing data to make it usable?. Essentially, it must be taken from its original source, formatted cleanly, and put into your database to be analyzed. This is handled by a process called ETL, Extract, Transform & Load. This process was done manually in olden days, but AI is now facilitating this task to be almost entire…

In this episode, I talked with Farhad Khan, an Ottawa-based expert on UX. He started out working as a software engineer for high tech companies and then formed a Web development agency called Grype Solutions in 2009. Listen for his description of how design impacts a site’s marketing effectiveness, what jobs your website has, using your analytics t…

This episode looks at the impact of fraudulent traffic on digital marketing. We’ll talk about how big a problem it is for publishers, ad platforms and advertisers. We will step through what advertisers can do to make their campaigns less vulnerable to attacks by fraudsters, and give thoughts on how to give your non-marketing colleagues reasons why …

This episode takes us through the case of a company that seized the chance to market their product using content, tailored to each buyer’s vertical and funnel stage. Hear how they: Implemented the email communications and marketing content into their Marketing Automation tool. What kind of marketing resources they needed to build and maintain the p…

By Glenn Schmelzle

By Glenn Schmelzle

Billboard staffers discuss Taylor Swift's "Lover," Brockhampton's "Boy Bye," Sleater-Kinney's "Reach Out," Miley Cyrus' "Slide Away" and Jorja Smith's "Be Honest" ft. Burna Boy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Billboard staffers talk Beyonce's 'The Lion King: The Gift,' Whitney Houston & Kygo's "Higher Love," Noah Cyrus' "July," Haim's "Summer Girl," ShooterGang Kony's "Charlie" and Charli XCX and Christine and the Queens' "Gone." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the fifth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. An experience is created with the content you write; but content alone does not an experience make. You can’t just throw together a collection of words and expect it to do anything. Here I talk with a web copy expert on how to craft content that provides a positive experienc…

This is the fourth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. In this episode, we talk about traffic; not the automotive type but the web visitor type. This solocast talks about all the ways web analytics tools classify traffic to your site. Then I focus on four of those channels that you can affect for getting more traffic to your si…

In this episode, we look at both sides of a website interaction. We discuss how visitors progress through a website and how marketers make conversion offers for the visitors to complete. Marketers make a critical choice when deciding the conversion actions they use, so we go through the most common actions used on leading-edge websites. Listen in f…