Funnel Reboot

Delivering Data Analytics, with Nicholas Kelly

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 flashed, signaling a power drop, Flight Director Gene Kranz (portrayed by Ed Harris) turned to the mission controller in charge of emergencies...

Revealing visitor behaviour through tags, with Ricardo Cristofolini

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, vasculature and muscles in patients of all ages as well as the most commonly known purpose of obstetrical ultrasound. In the past 35 years, ultrasound ha...

Unveiling visitor impulses through tags, with Ricardo Cristofolini

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, vasculature and muscles in patients of all ages as well as the most commonly known purpose of obstetrical ultrasound. In the past 35 years, ultrasound ha...

Everyday use of Google Analytics, with Dana DiTomaso

Episode 188 Dana DiTomaso embarked on her digital marketing journey over 20 years ago, initially working in tech support for a CRM before founding a web design company in 2002. In 2000, clients sought her expertise in increasing website traffic, propelling her into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By 2012, Dana became an active participant in the SEO community, sharing insights on technical and local SEO topics. Dana, having typed her first line of code in 1982, consistentl...

High Impact Content Marketing, with Purna Virji

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 for companies to recognize the critical significance of implementing a robust content strategy. The upcoming discussion will delve into a methodolog...

Successful Change, with Susan Odle

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 best, when transformations succeed, they leave heart-ache and sore feelings  Most of them revert to the status quo they tried so hard to sha...

Hosting Events that Generate Leads, with Michael Tucker

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 refined a program that develops virtual events for clients, and over the past 3 years it has accelerated post-event prospect discussions and sal...

Prophecies and Pleas of an Advertising Man, with Myles Younger

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 loads of Technical debt, and the order to repatriate customer data from all these servers.  CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology ou...

Diverse Data Tracking Methods, with Adam Greco

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 to school, walk into my classroom, and see my teacher there. She was such a constant there, I imagined that she never left the classroom, she w...

Voice Marketing, with Susan Westwater

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 of Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences. Recently, she co-authored the book “Voice Marketing”  Chapters & Timesta...

Data For All, with John Thompson

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 executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.  John Thompson has written four books. I found out about him through hi...

Privacy & Data Governance, with Siobhan Solberg

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 how privacy regulations are affecting marketing. Anytime client privacy is upheld it’s at our expense. We’re losing; they’re winning. Zero-sum ...

Hello $Firstname, with Rasmus Houlind

 ‘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 brand is hard.  Is it marketing’s job to actually have 1:1 conversations? And with  what’s at stake if we  screw up personalization, can we imp...

Bye KPI. Hello Full-funnel dashboard, with Jacob Varghese

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 marketing technology. Or, you can imagine that when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing tech...

Visualizations that inspire action, with Lee Feinberg

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 over us instead of being its master.  Today’s guest says the visualizations that come from this won’t be intelligible, won’t make them motivat...

Must-reads for business in an all-digital world

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 outside of these, and found even more I’d like to feature. I’m not saying all all biz books that come out are good.  To be honest - a decent portion ...

Making sites that keep pace with customers’ needs, with Josh Garellek

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, they’re susceptible to cyber threats. Others invest heavily in cybersecurity - protecting not only themselves, but visitors as well.  Some sit...

GA4 and The Future of Data, with Jason Hackenberry

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 development agency Arctic Leaf. Prior to Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, a...

Getting Good at Google Analytics, with Jill Quick

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 making a move to take my budget and remove people from my department to fund new sales people. The work we were doing was having an impact, and...

Building AI out of Data, with Yash Gad

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. Yash Gad is a data scientist, education advocate, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Gr...

Media Mix Modeling, with Jim Gianoglio

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 which touchpoints were most influential.  The other approach they may use is Media Mix Modeling. From what previous podcast guest Kevin Hartman to...

Your data is f____ed, with Mark Mckenzie

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 company’s analytics  You feel the analytics platforms are backing away from their responsibility to streamline all this. Instead, the answer from t...

Marketing Memetics, with Mike Taylor

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 the internet has collectively assigned them new meanings.  Our guest was so interested in memes that he came out with a book in 2023 called Mark...

Forget the Funnel, with Georgiana Laudi

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 best customers. Value to customers is then delivered — whenever, wherever, and however they need it — throughout their relationship with the compan...

The Smart Branding book, with Dan White

One message, many media: the varied impact of your content across channels, with RJ Licata

Did you know that how your message is received is mainly dependent on where people received it? This is a fact of life in an era that’s framed by paid, earned, shared and owned channels, best known in its acronym form as the PESO framework. Focusing in on what we want our brand to be known for, we’re soon hit with the reality that the same content plays differently when it's issued in a corporate release versus an influencer’s social post versus a customer’s review versus a direct mess...

How priorities shift as you grow, with Shannon Clement

What we can learn from musical artists, with Fred Pike

Today we're talking about what analytics has to do with music (check out this music about analytics by songwriter Kai Feng). We're looking at a musician's work style and seeing what analysts can adopt from it. According to today's guest, these two disciplines have much in common.   Fred Pike is a father, a grandfather and a string musician who both plays in and is president of the Milwaukee Mandolin orchestra.  He is also a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Google Analytics and Google ...

Search Marketing: change = opportunity, with Giannina Fumigalli

This is the second episode in a series on having a thriving career. There is one specific subfield where this challenge is harder than usual - it's marketing within paid and organic search. There are always new tools and techniques coming along, and In our guest's opinion, to be a search marketing professional means upgrading yourself, to master them while the iron is still hot.  I'll be talking with someone who has dealt with more than her fair share of change - but who feels she is bette...

Charting your course as a young marketer, with Marissa Homere

There's a lot you need to deal with in a marketing career, such as:  What skills you should chase after when in an entry-level vs what's needed at higher levels How to manage both above and below your level What continuous learning actually looks like Knowing when a job isn't panning out and you need to cut  your losses Balancing whether to join a company based on the brand's cachet, the title, the salary and what you will get out of the experience Advice when interviewing for marketin...

Do It! Selling, with David Newman

If you want to learn about sales and start Googling, you quickly run across self-professed gurus, who claim to know the secret to selling. If you faithfully follow this method (available today only for a low low price), you'll have sales success. Despite feeling a twinge of skepticism about their pitch, you're so deep into their slick, pressure-filled pitch at this point that you pay for their books and courses…which end up being disappointing.  Today's guest says these gurus have put you ...

Revenue Growth Engine, with Darrell Amy

How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable. In the 27 years since he graduated with his MBA, Darrell Amy has worked  heavily in the tech sector, mainly i...

Stop Looking for Zebras, with Robert Smith

The relationship between those who generate creative work and the rest of us in revenue-related roles can be …strained. From those I've talked to in graphics or visual arts, being left to their lonesome makes it hard producing creative that's exactly what the marketers and other stakeholders wanted.  That's one reason why I hope you listen to today's talk with a graphic designer who wrote a guide for other graphic designers.  To help your interactions with your creative counterparts.  ...

The Revenue Acceleration Playbook, with Brent Keltner

"So, what does your company do?" This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I'm asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps.  This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing's hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and  intent-based campaigns aimed at key Accounts can all be for naught if sales doesn't have a game-plan for their co...

The Automatic Marketing Machine, with Danny Decker

In this episode, I spoke with Danny Decker about the book he co-wrote with RJon Robins, "The Automatic Marketing Machine" which came out in 2022. The book combines direct marketing, nurturing emails and retention tactics to form a sustainable supply of ready-to-buy leads.   Danny Decker spent most of his childhood in West Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he was young, he saw people spending a large portion of their day getting water. In a similar way, businesses...

Adscam, with Bob Hoffman

Masterful Marketing, with Lisa Larter

Throughout  our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today's guest didn't do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.  Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them...

Boosting GA4 with BigQuery, with Johan van de Werken

Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.  Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and  pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several european ecommerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms ...

Data doesn't lie...or does it? with Yuliia Tkachova

Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you're connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today's data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hybrid environments, and so many data pipelines the programs in charge of mon...

Analytics - worth the investment, with Martin McGarry

Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment's required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value.  Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you'll see from his  backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it's him.  After completing a Bachelor of Science from The University of Manchester and studying at the ...

Marketing Analytics Summit Experts on where we go from here

It's fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot's 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that's becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I'm talking about marketing analytics.  This episode is compiled from experts in the world of analytics. It was recorded on location at the Marketing Analytics Summit that was held in Las Vegas. It's coming  hot off the press from th...

Giving your marketing programs a check up, with Khatia Odzelashvili

When marketers from different companies get together and talk shop, it quickly becomes noticeable that each tackles their marketing problem differently. One by one, they throw into the conversation their own homebrew of channels, output tracking and the distinct expectations their stakeholders place on them. The more this study in contrast goes on, the more you hear them ask each other: "Why do you do it that way?"  The responses to this question all fall under one unsatisfactory theme. It...

Earned media: how to win coverage, with Phil Gaudreau

If you want to  communicate your message to others in this world, you only have four channels to choose from. Paid, Owned, Shared and Earned. If we expect to get some attention through shared and earned media, we should be prepared to face resistance, because we're competing with the biggest and most attention-grabbing stories out there. My guest Phil Gaudreau is a former journalist, who has turned his talents to serving the communication needs of other businesses. He does this through Mak...

Grow your market by going on stage, with Majeed Mogharreban

Small-to-mid-sized businesses make up half of the economy. When surveys are done on why one company is chosen over another, buyers most-commonly cite the people as the main factor why they buy from them.  It's great that the founders or select team members are known by those buyers. But what about those who don't know them? How can they get a wider circle to know about their expertise and how excellent they are at what they do?  The vehicle that my guest believes does this better than an...

Should your marketing include a podcast? with Sherrilynne Starkie

The theme of these next few episodes are channels for getting our content out there.  The concept of marketing through a podcast is familiar to a high percentage of marketers (for those listening to my show, it's 100%), but it has some quirks that other channels don't.  A key issue for those thinking about podcasting is the volume of shows that already exist. There are  arguably over a million active shows on Apple Podcasts. Why would marketing in such a crowded field be a good idea?   ...

Building your own Community, with Paul Bradley

What traits do humans have that distinguish us most from other species?  There are a few answers, but one I like is from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said it was our ability to form Society. In fact, he saw it as critical adaptation that ensures our survival:   “...the only way in which [men] can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single ...

Producing Videos that Produce Results, with Robert Weiss

Video is the most persuasive medium there is. That's why Many of us are building our marketing programs around it. Inevitably, the wildcard that crops up when we have an idea for a video is what will it take to produce it? The answers to this are all over the map.  How much production value it takes is - as much as is needed for the video to produce your desired results.  The impact a video has isn't always reflective of the amount spent.  Our guest started MultiVision Digital, a video ...

Not Another Pair of Shoes, with Alexander Novicov

As my eldest son has been in university, he's worked part-time at a sporting goods store. The section he works in is the category-leader in the store - as you can probably guess - it's shoes. Need to admit that I'm not that into shoes.  I am fascinated by the conversations my son has with customers when it comes to shoes. They not only talk about the design features of a specific shoe. They also chat about the athletes who've worn it or collaborated with the  brand to design it. They bri...

Prove It, with Melanie Deziel

For several years running, noted marketing expert David Meerman Scott would access all the corporate press releases captured by major wire services. These covered product launches, major client signings and other moments when companies would talk about what distinguished them from their competitors. He posted his analysis of all this data and, without fail, almost all of them chose the same words to describe themselves. They made matters worse by, in David's words, by "using gobbledygook-l...

Stop Listening to the Customer, with Adam Ferrier

Our guest says that marketing  has a problem: "I think there's an over-reliance on people's opinions at the expense of creating a vision and sticking with it." and he claims this hurts our ability to build brands that get strong traction. Already a published author, he devoted his second book to this argument. The book's title is his plea to marketers: "Stop Listening to the Customer: Try Hearing Your Brand Instead" Adam Ferrier is the founder of Thinkerbell, an agency that creates ‘measur...