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Actionable Marketing Podcast

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Now displaying: April, 2021
Apr 27, 2021

Data and thought leadership are two things that work better together, especially in public relations and content marketing.

Today’s guest is Amy Littleton, Executive Vice President of Public Relations and Content at KemperLesnik. Amy talks about how to make thought leadership more accurate and authoritative to land massive PR wins. She knows what it takes to use data-backed insights to tell stories that earn media attention.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Thought Leadership: Common reasons it fails and doesn’t produce results
  • Good and Bad News: Search for and find information that is right, not wrong
  • Authenticity and Credibility: Marketing agenda vs. thoughtful data-driven advisory
  • Proof Points: Always better to have examples and information you need to know
  • Research Resources: Surveys are simple to complex and everything in between
  • Content Length: Consumed on multiple channels, equipment, and platforms
  • Curiosity: Gives info to get customers to care, explore new things, drive results
  • Inputs In/Out: Fill your brain to produce better ideas and make better decisions

 

Links:

 

Quotes from Amy Littleton:

“Even the way that we search for news and information in our personal lives, in business, you’re looking for news and information, and you can get that from multiple sources.”

“The first thing you would do is lose trust with your audience if you put out crappy content. You’re not going to get people to want to come back to you for information if the information you put out is really a marketing piece disguised as thought leadership.”

“Data can come from anywhere. I think your own curated data, third-party data, information that you’ve found that is already publicly available, and any combination of that, can help you to inform a thought leadership piece.”

“It’s about credibility. You want your piece to have credibility.”

Apr 20, 2021

How ethical is your marketing practice? Imagine describing your job to your best non-marketing friend. What’s your response if they think your work is ethically gray or morally suspect?

Today’s guest is Robin Cangie from The Empowered Freelancer. Robin talks about how to do work that’s radically effective and ethical, where marketers avoid ethical shortcuts by focusing on work that is genuinely helpful for leads, prospects, and customers. 

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • The Empowered Freelancer: Real, raw talk about being self-employed
  • Radically Ethical Marketing: Honesty, transparency, and genuine helpfulness
  • What isn’t radically ethical?
    • Retargeting ads without permission from customers
    • Copy designed to deceive rather than inform
    • Goal is to get users to convert rather than help them see product value
  • Why should marketers choose tactics or structure strategy? Right thing to do
  • Quit or speak up? Figure out your threshold, values, and what you can do
  • What is a smart way to do good and better without the approach backfiring?
  • Marketers/Leaders: Think about how negative perceptions harm the business
  • Valid but Risky: Raising ethical concerns takes a tremendous amount of courage
  • Beloved Brands: Wonderful products/services and messaging tone aligns values

 

Links:

 

Quotes from Robin Cangie:

“Radically Ethical Marketing is simply marketing that puts honesty, transparency, and genuine helpfulness at its center.”

“People are becoming more wise to ways that marketers try to manipulate their perceptions, use their data to get them to buy as much stuff as possible.”

“Being radically ethical is a more sustainable long-term choice.”

“Truth be told, it was a matter of needing to look in the mirror every morning and feel good about the work that I was doing. That is something that’s very important to me.”

“You may have more power than you realize to effect change.”

Apr 13, 2021

As a marketer, do you need to create content that applies insights derived from data and research? If so, pay attention to the right data and apply it the right way to produce the most effective work possible.

Today’s guest is Anastasia Leng from CreativeX. She talks about where marketers get misled with data and how to merge data and creativity to create content that connects with customers. 

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Data-backed Content: Objective way to understand what’s in each content piece
  • Performance: After putting piece of content out, what has happened as a result?
  • Views/Variables: Marketers should move away from biases and assumptions
  • Trust gut or data? Marketers want to be right; get comfortable with being wrong
  • CreativeX’s Mission: Enhance and elevate creativity expression through data
  • Consistent Content: Number of clicks vs. what reflects brand and audience
  • Best Practices: Creative quality and distinctive brand assets to increase sales
  • Cheat Sheet for Content:
    • What should your definition of creative quality incorporate?
    • Brand right away; marketers have 2-3 seconds to make impression
    • Don’t waste money by running same piece of content across channels
    • Get around brevities

 

Links:

 

Quotes from Anastasia Leng:

“It’s really about having a common language for evaluating every piece of content that we create.”

“Understand what is the long-term metric that really matters, and how can you start to get creative and whatever that KPI is closer together so you can understand the relationship and the journey these two things take together.”

“Analyze content more objectively so that we’re not letting our own biases drive our understanding of what is working and what is not working in our content strategy.”

“If you’re not even aware of these things, how can you truly be a good marketer? How can you truly put out great content if you’re not actually able to really look deeply within it?”

Apr 6, 2021

Too often, content marketing strategies follow one of two paths: Keyword driven or driven based on what the writer thinks makes an interesting topic. The path to success is somewhere in between those two strategies.

Today’s guest is Brad Smith from Wordable, Codeless, and uSERP. He talks about how to create data-backed and ROI-driven content strategies that blend both approaches for maximum results. 

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Problems: Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are incredibly competitive
  • Affiliate Space: 70% of revenue comes from two or three keywords
  • Temporary Approach: Create great content to find an audience
  • Referral Traffic: Completely relying on what other people find interesting
  • Ads: Companies turn to other channels that are less profitable, more competitive
  • Game Plan: What components/expectations will move content and keywords?
  • Marketers don’t need more or better ideas—but test and execute them better
  • Decision-Making Process: Do it or be grounded in reality to produce best results
  • Wordable: Format, optimize, upload, and publish content in minutes for clients

 

Links:

 

Quotes from Brad Smith:

“If you’re relatively small, relatively new, not well-funded, don’t have a name for yourself or brand yet, that kind of excludes like 70 percent of the good stuff from a keyword perspective that you’d want to write for, ultimately, that’s going to bring in ROI.”

“When you’re following this method of let’s just create ‘good’ content, you’re completely 100 percent relying on what other people find interesting.”

“Social things are going to be a lot more beneficial shorter term. Over the long term, it’s just about scale.”

“The whole ranking thing is like the chicken and the egg. I can’t rank for big keywords until I’m big, but I’m not going to be big until I rank for some keywords.”

“Marketers don’t need more ideas. They don’t need better ideas. They just need to execute better, and executing better comes from processes and boring systems and operations.”

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