Funnel Reboot podcast
Small businesses run on lean marketing teams and tight budgets, but don't count them out. They're the overwhelming majority of businesses on earth. Small companies have one function that's poised to figure out AI through experimentation, analysis and strategic changes in direction. It's marketing, and it may very well determine the winner of the AI race. After graduating from Laurentian University, our guest worked in corporate and consulting positions across Canada and even in Korea. He then founded a business which he grew to a successful exit, which led to mentoring students at Algonquin...
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Everyone makes content now. But having content doesn’t automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that carve out time for their content, while other brands’ programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What’s different between content that’s adored and content that dies in obscurity? The brands that win make content that audiences don’t see as branded content. Where the work they made was so genuinely useful, or surprising, or true — that instead of feeling exploited, the recipients felt like they...
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I can't prove it, but I think many marketers wish they could improve how they're perceived by corporate leadership. I have felt this way in more than one role, and racked my brain on how to fix it. I've entertained everything including coming to board meetings with a dozen custom-branded donuts. Thankfully, the a solution I have come up with isn't extreme and it doesn't require donuts. I was recently given the chance by a local association - the OPMMA - to give a talk and I picked this problem. I hope as you listen to how I think it's solved and the three moments where this...
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We humans like conversations that keep moving forward. Every time we share some detail about ourselves, we expect the other person to remember it. If they bring that detail back up in our next interaction, we feel pleased and want to keep that relationship going. Conversely, we get annoyed when they blast us with messages we had already said didn’t interest us. This is severely problematic for us sales and marketing professionals. The sheer volume of people and details we all encounter is too much to keep straight in our outbound emails, let alone in our heads, and that's...
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Episode 233 In the 2009 movie “Up” there’s a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel. We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let’s be honest and admit that we get caught on a treadmill of activity without stopping to ask ourselves if it’s having an impact. How do we break this habit? This month’s book says it’s by creating a...
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Episode 232 There is a quiet, enduring power in wisdom that resists the urge to conform. Wise people refuse to abandon their convictions. It’s not obvious who will be the Wise character in These Stories, the role often casts them as having lowly beginnings or in the shadow of others who are more powerful. But they speak out anyway, even if they are mocked or sidelined. Take: Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza, whom Quixote usually makes fun of, becomes so well known for his practical wisdom that he becomes a Governor. In the story of Sidharrtha, when the prince leaves his palace, he is...
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It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks. When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don’t have to raise N...
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Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales. This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way. A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would...
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Episode 229 We need to talk about what’s been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta’s ad platforms. A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy images, and a vague 'goal,' and we’ll take it from here." Performance Max (PMax) and Advantage+ are the ultimate "Trust Me, Bro" of the marketing world. They’ve turned "manual control" into a...
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How do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional justifications like “because we’ll make a profit out of this”? In the for-profit world, the justification for marketing spend is straightforward: you put money in to get more money out. But how do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional bottom-line justifications? For non-profits, associations, and social enterprises, the "profit motive" is replaced by a mission, yet the fundamental challenge remains identical—you must find and keep your "customers," whether they are donors, members, or...
info_outlineEpisode 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 was a fixture of the room, part of the furniture. It’s like the teacher didn’t persist as a person who had a life outside of the classroom. So when I was out at the grocery store with my parents and I saw my teacher, not dressed in their teacher clothes, not ensconced in their teacher setting, my brain just melted.
While this might be laughable, those of us using marketing analytics tools could be guilty of falling into the same trap. Credit for making this concept clear in not 1 but 2 great books must go to Avinash Kaushik. Think about it. According to Classic web analytics, visitors who hit our website had started an imaginary timer that we called a web session. We imagined in this race against the clock, they were viewing a sequence of pages which ferried them to forms we used as gates. We told ourselves that the gate-crossers had completed a successful session, converting from visitors into leads or customers.
Stepping back, there are a few things wrong with this picture. Users don't only exist inside of a session, just like the teacher didn't only exist in the classroom—they roam about as they please.
Today’s users aren’t confined to marketing content. The experience they have straddles our marketing sites, to sites and apps where their identity persists through being logged-in, where the interactions even span multiple devices - as we see on Slack and Discord for messages we’ve already read.
The user’s state changes - sometimes they complete a purchase, or become a paid subscriber, but at other times they may opt for a free plan or abandon their cart.
We need analytics for all of these actions. We need to step back and view the entire experience that people have with us over time. This is something that classic web analytics just can't measure.
This is why the new generation of tools allows us to analyze complex trends and behavior of our users. They are collectively known as event-based analytics tools, and they excel in portraying the way that users experience a product. The foremost product-oriented analytics tool out there is called Amplitude, and today, we are speaking with its product evangelist.
Since 2021, Adam Greco has been Amplitude’s Product Evangelist, guiding clients in understanding their tool through workshops, blogs, and videos.
He got into this field in 2005 when he joined analytics platform Omniture where he was a customer advocate for four years until Adobe acquired them and rechristened them Adobe Analytics. He then worked at consultancies for 15 years, showing people how to get the most out of Adobe’s tool, authoring over 200 blog posts along the way.
Lately Adam’s speaking and advising on analytics has had him splitting his time between Chicago and Amsterdam (where he was when this was recorded). When he’s in the states and not working, he enjoys restoring and going for drives in his 62 convertible corvette.
Timestamps/Chapters
0:00 - Intro
5:00 - Meet Adam; why event-based method works better than session-based method
24:00 - PSA
24:45 - how to get value out of recent analytics tools, including warehouse-native apps
56:20 - Adam’s coordinates and free resources
Links to all people and products mentioned are available in Ep 183's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.