Our favorite thing about hosting the Actionable Marketing Podcast is picking the brains of  marketing heroes. So, we’re absolutely blown away by the amazing marketers we’ve gotten to learn from over the past two years.

To our listeners, you’re the reason we do this. It’s all about bringing the best of the best to you. To celebrate the 100th episode of AMP, here are some of our favorite guests, takeaways, and thoughts from more than 60 hours of marketing gold!

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Janna Maron: No more frustration by banking content and scheduling it to auto publish; publish less, but at higher quality
• Michael Brenner: The most compelling way to guide everything you do as a marketer - what’s in it for the customer, colleague, and company?
• Brian Clark: His biggest marketing mistake was the curse of knowledge - a cognitive bias where you assume the audience knows certain things you know
• Noah Kagan: Helped Mint scale to its first 100,000 users in less than a year; what’s your goal and timeline?
• Andrea Fryrear: Marketers are asked to do new projects all the time, but prioritize and simplify backlog of projects to be successful; plan your work, work your plan
• Joanna Wiebe: Describes how to go deeper than Calls To Action and into Calls To Value; clearly articulate the ultra-specific value on the other side of a click
• Tim Soulo: You should write 2,000+ word articles to rank in search engines, but people don’t want to read - they want answers to questions to solve problems
• Nir Eyal: Psychology of habit formation and how marketers can capitalize on it; every product you use is to modulate your mood and alleviate pain
• Jeff Goins: Four qualities in best-performing posts - piece is well written, contains a compelling promise, keeps that promise, and wows reader with value
• Rand Fishkin: Remarkable customer research determines TRUE influencer status and who to partner with for co-promotion; share what audience values

If you enjoy AMP, write a review on iTunes and send a screenshot of it to be entered into a drawing to win the 100th episode giveaway, which includes a $100 CoSchedule swag package, bundle of three marketing books, and $50 Amazon gift card!  

Links: 

• How To Create A Bank Of Content (And Plan Ahead) With Janna Maron From Smart Passive Income
• 3 Questions To Guide Your Marketing Program With Michael Brenner From Marketing Insider Group
• Copyblogger’s Best Advice On How To Scale To 8 Figures With Brian Clark From Copyblogger
• How To Grow From 0 to 1 Million Customers With Noah Kagan From SumoMe and OkDork
• How To Use Agile Project Management To Organize Your Marketing With Andrea Fryrear From AgileSherpas
• How To Use Conversion Psychology To Get Better Results With Joanna Wiebe From Copyhackers
• How To Get Your Content To Rank #1 On Google With Tim Soulo Of Ahrefs
• How To Use The Psychology Of Habit Formation To Be A Better Marketer With Best-Selling Author Nir Eyal
• How To Use A Scorecard To Create More Effective Content With Jeff Goins From Goins, Writer
• How To Do Remarkable Customer Research With Rand Fishkin From SparkToro

What’s the best way to market and grow a business? Do you often lock yourself in a conference room to avoid distractions and answer that question? Does one idea keep coming to mind? Guest writing for influential publications. 

Aaron Orendorff does it. He is the founder and CEO of iconiContent, as well as the editor-in-chief of Shopifyplus. Guest blogging was a foundational ingredient to scaling his personal brand. Aaron’s used guest writing to build clients for his own business and help land a job at Shopify. He shares the importance of writing for such publications, where to start, how to find ideas for articles to be accepted, and how to pitch articles.

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Aaron spent 2 ½ years guest posting, guest blogging, and writing articles for publications that he respected and wanted to be like
• Aaron began building relationships and cold pitching to editors anywhere and everywhere to get ahold of email addresses
• He understands that social proof is one of the most powerful levers to convince somebody to enter your funnel or start talking to you online
• Cold Pitching Process: Reverse engineering of popular topics; speaking language/terminology of audience; using Buzzsumo to find popular social media
• What are the headline formulas? What’s the word count? How did they use images? How are they interlinking? Did they like a lot of data?
• Aaron sent publishers a complete article tailored to their publication; he identified topics related to popular posts on their site and discovered competitive holes
• What gets responses from editors? Behind-the-scenes work, show instead of tell, and sending publishers a brief email with the attached article as a Word doc
• Go to About or Contact Website pages for the publications or use tools to find email addresses of the editors
• Rejections: Write an entire article for a specific publication, send it to the editors; wait to get rejected
• Risk-to-Reward Ratio: Once rejected, tweak it and send to a different publication; work your way down a publication list; risk goes way down
• After first “yes,” doors open and it’s far easier to write for publications a second, a third, a fourth time; promote articles after published to maximize opportunities
• Guest writing has helped by getting attention from editors/other writers and building relationships with them through customized, valuable articles
• To start guest writing: 1) Write complete articles tailored for specific publications; don’t send pitches; 2) Find what’s popular at their and competitors’ sites

Links: 

• iconiContent
• Shopifyplus
• Buzzsumo
• Google Trends
• Email Permutator
• ContactOut
• Write and send a review to receive a CoSchedule care package

As marketers, you’ve probably been told that you have to pay to play. But how do you make the most out of what you put in? People buy from people who they know, like, and trust. 

Today, we’re talking to Amanda Bond, owner of Ad Strategist. She tells us how to get more results from our Facebook ads, how much to spend on ads, and how to scale the use of ads. She shares her “secret sauce” comprised of a 3-step formula that goes from engagement to purchases. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Stop guessing, get results with Facebook ads; manage ads to get a better ROI
• As Facebook ads gain popularity and attract more advertisers, cost for them will only continue to rise; stay ahead of growth curve and remain competitive
• The Strategy System: Put people through a customer journey - Connect, Commit, and Close
• Connect: Amplify content, put the brand out there, and engage your audience; review Facebook Page Insights to identify how your organic content performs
• Commit: For lead generation, Ad Strategist only targets warm custom audiences; a custom audience is one that has previously interacted with your brands
• Close: When you set up your Facebook ad, it is the first thing you do; patch up holes of close/sales retargeting ads for them to convert to purchase decisions
• Take 3 main objections submitted to customer service and turn them into Facebooks ads to overcome those objections and increase sales conversion rate
• Make sure you can sell an offer before spending lots of money on Facebook ads
• Continue to fill pipeline with new members and scale sustainably by figuring out what information an audience needs to know to make a future purchase decision
• Targeting broad audiences can be just as cost-effective; power of Facebook ad tools and optimization
• If brand new to Facebook ads, don’t start Facebook advertising before you understand your earnings per lead

Links: 

• Ad Strategist
• Facebook Page Insights
• Write and send a review to receive a CoSchedule care package

Want to provide a better experience for your prospects and customers, and make your work life a little more efficient at the same time? That’s the dream behind marketing automation. It’s about delivering the right messages to the right people in the most effective way. 

Today, we’re talking to Chris Davis, director of education at ActiveCampaign. He teaches us that marketing automation goes beyond email marketing and shares ideas on how you can improve your customer experience with automation. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Marketing automation is the process of employing technology to execute a marketing strategy
• Hire and train each tool that you use in marketing to solve a problem
• Owners wear many hats; marketing automation lets them do more of what they want to do in their business, than what they have to do
• Examples of automation include someone filling out a form and your company following up or giving away something for free to obtain email addresses
• Biggest mindset shift to automation is looking at your platform not as a way to send out emails, but as a way to collect data
• Sole purpose of marketing automation is to scale personalization and make people feel individualized; automation allows you to sort or segment contacts
• Before doing anything technical, define segments in your business; who are you going to be talking to? First 2 segments: customers and non-customers
• Simple things become complex when understanding isn’t in close proximity; most businesses struggle to understand marketing and technology
• Email can be the channel or means in which a message travels; send a message to customers to break the barrier of technology
• Marketing automation qualifies customers and determines who should follow-up with them; automation serves as a facilitator
• People prefer to buy online, rather than going into a store; their guards are down, but everybody still wants to be treated like a human being and individual
• Outsourcing marketing can be a mistake; you may need someone internal to your business that is involved in the day-to-day to unleash your marketing

Links: 

• ActiveCampaign
• Jobs to be Done
• Drip

Write and send a review to receive a CoSchedule care package