Actionable Marketing Podcast

Great content doesn't happen by accident. It's usually a byproduct of refined processes that help teams work together efficiently and effectively. However, planning editorial workflows and implementing content creation processes can be challenging.

Today’s guest is Justin Zimmerman from Salesmsg. Justin talks about how marketing teams can develop and implement editorial workflows and content creation processes to create better content.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Creative Control: Why marketers should create editorial workflows for content
• Four Cs: Collaboration, connection, creative control, and compensation
• Flow State: Focus on the process and the results will show up
• Neurological Map: Goal in world of workflow is to align teams for higher purpose
• State of Enjoyment: You have 3 places you live—work, home, and inside yourself
• Start Right: Avoid potential pitfalls, pain by having workflow process for outcomes
• Lessons Learned: Listen and do something to not repeat the same mistakes
• Continually Improve: You can't have a sense of progress without a process
• Content Team Roles: At minimum—a writer, designer, and project manager
• CoSchedule: Tool that separates chaos from clarity
• Person at the Helm: Make sure work gets done, but it doesn’t mean you do it
• Four Ps: Purpose, people, process, and product
• Context Switch: Too many tools, channels, and notifications lead to distraction
• Complicated vs. Simple: Basic elements of workflow/work management process
• Mistakes Made: Start small, take it slow; workflows are change and require change management

Links:

• Justin Zimmerman on LinkedIn
• Salesmsg
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Scrum
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Jira
• Slack
• The Big Lebowski
• E. Deming
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Justin Zimmerman:

“Self-reflection and experience really allow me to look at the word process not as a dirty word, but as a way to align teams.”

“Flow state is, I think, the ultimate outcome of teams working together towards a common goal and feeling that sense of higher purpose.”

“I think words matter because they give an indication of the actions that follow them.”

“Workflow is the way that connects where we are today with the progress and results that we want.”

Great content doesn't happen by accident. It's usually a byproduct of refined processes that help teams work together efficiently and effectively. However, planning editorial workflows and implementing content creation processes can be challenging.

Today’s guest is Justin Zimmerman from Salesmsg. Justin talks about how marketing teams can develop and implement editorial workflows and content creation processes to create better content.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Creative Control: Why marketers should create editorial workflows for content
• Four Cs: Collaboration, connection, creative control, and compensation
• Flow State: Focus on the process and the results will show up
• Neurological Map: Goal in world of workflow is to align teams for higher purpose
• State of Enjoyment: You have 3 places you live—work, home, and inside yourself
• Start Right: Avoid potential pitfalls, pain by having workflow process for outcomes
• Lessons Learned: Listen and do something to not repeat the same mistakes
• Continually Improve: You can't have a sense of progress without a process
• Content Team Roles: At minimum—a writer, designer, and project manager
• CoSchedule: Tool that separates chaos from clarity
• Person at the Helm: Make sure work gets done, but it doesn’t mean you do it
• Four Ps: Purpose, people, process, and product
• Context Switch: Too many tools, channels, and notifications lead to distraction
• Complicated vs. Simple: Basic elements of workflow/work management process
• Mistakes Made: Start small, take it slow; workflows are change and require change management

Links:

• Justin Zimmerman on LinkedIn
• Salesmsg
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Scrum
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Jira
• Slack
• The Big Lebowski
• E. Deming
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Justin Zimmerman:

“Self-reflection and experience really allow me to look at the word process not as a dirty word, but as a way to align teams.”

“Flow state is, I think, the ultimate outcome of teams working together towards a common goal and feeling that sense of higher purpose.”

“I think words matter because they give an indication of the actions that follow them.”

“Workflow is the way that connects where we are today with the progress and results that we want.”

Do you believe in the power of personal video in video outreach or do you remain skeptical? If a pitch for something isn’t interesting on its own, how will a video that takes longer to watch than reading a simple email grab your attention and sway your opinion?

Today’s guest is David Jay, founder of Warm Welcome, a personal video platform. Discover the value of video, how video can be used, and its full potential by making business communication that scales and creates personal conversations and human connections.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Use Cases: Supercharge outreach, make website welcoming, improve onboarding flows, lead generation, and sales
• Videos: Personalized versus personal - David describes the differences
• Do’s/Don’ts: How to make a video worth watching to solve someone’s problem
• Mindset: Business is built on trust, and trust is built through relationships
• Instant Video Connection: Talk to humans - nobody wants to talk to chatbots
• Emotion or Information? People buy and sell things online to other people
• Improve ROI: Measure and track customers’ loyalty, evangelism, engagement

Links:

• Warm Welcome
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from David Jay:

“Video can be personalized or it can just be personal. There’s kind of different directions you can go with it.”

“There's a lot of ways to use video in our business.”

“The first thing not to do is don’t think of it selfishly. Don’t think of it as a way to get what you want. Every sales and marketer, we’re guilty of this.”

“I think business is built on trust, and trust is built through relationships.”

Do you believe in the power of personal video in video outreach or do you remain skeptical? If a pitch for something isn’t interesting on its own, how will a video that takes longer to watch than reading a simple email grab your attention and sway your opinion?

Today’s guest is David Jay, founder of Warm Welcome, a personal video platform. Discover the value of video, how video can be used, and its full potential by making business communication that scales and creates personal conversations and human connections.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Use Cases: Supercharge outreach, make website welcoming, improve onboarding flows, lead generation, and sales
• Videos: Personalized versus personal - David describes the differences
• Do’s/Don’ts: How to make a video worth watching to solve someone’s problem
• Mindset: Business is built on trust, and trust is built through relationships
• Instant Video Connection: Talk to humans - nobody wants to talk to chatbots
• Emotion or Information? People buy and sell things online to other people
• Improve ROI: Measure and track customers’ loyalty, evangelism, engagement

Links:

• Warm Welcome
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from David Jay:

“Video can be personalized or it can just be personal. There’s kind of different directions you can go with it.”

“There's a lot of ways to use video in our business.”

“The first thing not to do is don’t think of it selfishly. Don’t think of it as a way to get what you want. Every sales and marketer, we’re guilty of this.”

“I think business is built on trust, and trust is built through relationships.”

Audience growth - whether in the context of social media followers, email list, podcast listeners, or YouTube subscribers - whatever the case may be, it's easy to believe that more is always better.

Today’s guest is Matt Johnson, author of MicroFamous: Become Famously Influential to the Right People. Also, Matt is the founder of a podcast PR agency, Pursuing Results, and host of the MicroFamous podcast. He talks about how to be micro-famous with the right people and learn to grow as an influencer within a given niche.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• MicroFamous: Be famously influential, but not to everyone, just the right people
• Focused Approach: Reorient strategy to grow smaller but better following
• Benefits: Expect to drive better results by attracting just the right people
• What People Want: To working with the #1 name that solve their problems
• Who’s the right person? Until you know, you don't know what content to create
• Audiences want clarity and focus; put content into the world without shouting
• Wave of the Future: Know who to talk to, identify correct niche to focus on
• Who are the right people? The most valuable, open-minded, and influential
• First or Only: Uncover clear, compelling idea that appeals to a given audience
• Three Stages of Influence: Get seen, get noticed, and get known
• Practice What You Preach: Share what you do, be featured, build name for self

Links:

• MicroFamous
• Pursuing Results
• MicroFamous Podcast
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Ryan Deiss at Traffic & Conversion
• Tim Ferriss
• Marc Benioff of Salesforce
• Tony Robbins
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Matt Johnson:

“When I go to an industry conference, it's full of my ideal people. I absolutely want everybody there to know who I am. That's really what it means to be MicroFamous.”

“If you're not number one, you're facing an uphill battle.”

“You want to be famously influential, but not to everyone, just to the exact right people.”

“The thing that generated sales was delivering the exact right content that the right people cared deeply about and it resonated with them.”

If you have a podcast, are you repurposing your content assets across other channels and formats? If not, then you are missing out on opportunities to reach potential listeners and customers. 

Today’s guest is Holly Pels, Vice President of Marketing at Casted – a podcast platform for B2B marketers. Holly talks about how and why marketers should turn their podcast into a content creation engine to drive return on investment (ROI).

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• How and why marketers shouldn’t struggle to make the most of their assets
• How to turn things around to better distribute podcast content
• Benefits of sharing and repurposing podcast assets across platforms/channels
• Why marketers should pay attention to podcasting as a channel to use right now
• Experts at everything? Marketers are expert storytellers, not always SMEs
• Marketers fail to maximize assets by creating silos, producing one-off episodes
• Missed Opportunity: Plan to repurpose richer, better, and engaging content
• Repurpose/Repromote: Makes things easier, engaging, saves time, offers insight
• Getting Started:
  • Embed player on blog and website
  • Create certain amount of evergreen social assets
  • Schedule blog posts to highlight podcast content
  • Pull key information rather than listening to full episode

Links:

• Holly Pels on LinkedIn
• Casted
• OpenView
• Lumavate
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Holly Pels:

“Podcasting is a channel that is very authentic. It’s two people having a conversation versus what a brand necessarily wants you to hear.”

“Content planning is really important when it comes to podcasting, but this is much richer, better, engaging content than anything.”

“Traffic is great but conversion is better.”

“If it seems to be resonating with our audience, we want to make sure that we’re giving them more.”

Old school press releases never get much hype. Usually, they are not interesting to write or read. Smart marketers and PR professionals know that well-written press releases are crucial to land press coverage and influencer relationships that build brand awareness and establish companies as the authority in their niche.

Today’s guest is Mickie Kennedy from eReleases, a press release distribution company. Mickie discusses how to get press releases right to get coverage from even the biggest media outlets.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why have press releases as part of a successful marketing strategy? Leverage
• Strategic/Smart: Craft your news/announcements to do well with press releases
• Same Message: Safe press releases or contrarian quotes are reasons for failure
• Justify Expense: Press releases take time and money to reach their full potential
• People respond to surveys/polls; include odd questions to be picked up by press
• Newsworthy Criteria: When’s the right time to write and send a press release?
• Industry Coverage: Local media is most accessible and easiest media to get
• Improve Odds: Share press release with many people for implied endorsements
• Positive impact? Press releases are worst marketing tool to measure ROI metrics

Links:

• Mickie Kennedy on LinkedIn
• eReleases
• Free Master Class: How to Build a PR Campaign Designed to Get Massive Media Coverage
• Shark Tank Show
• SurveyMonkey
• Google Forms
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Mickie Kennedy:

“That leverage, you just can’t capture elsewhere in marketing. That’s the fun thing that you sit back and watch. When it works, it works well.”

“If you can be strategic with what you’re announcing and sort of craft your own news, you can really get out there and do really well with press releases.”

“I love working with startups. About a third of the people that go on Shark Tank use eReleases to announce their segment coming up when it airs.”

“Press releases are the worst marketing tool because it’s hard as heck to measure the ROI.”

Brands are churning out more content now than ever before. Even though companies are paying more money to create more content to compete in a more crowded space, sometimes content falls flat and does not perform. The content doesn’t build business or drive results, rankings, or traffic. Is it time to prioritize quality over quantity?

Today’s guest is Gaetano DiNardi from Nextiva, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software company. Gaetano talks about what can go wrong from publishing too much content without a strategy. He discusses how to balance content quality with content quantity based on personal and professional experience.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Marketing Mistakes: Brands can’t buy ads to become a famous brand
• Common Content Problems:
  • Companies don’t think about distribution
  • Lacks subject matter expertise and authoritativeness
• Compounding Effects: Time, money, and effort spent on quantity over quality
• Content Cleanup: Audit current content to create new optimized, quality content
• Content Considerations:
  • Is the content good or not?
  • Does the content produce leads and signups?
  • Does the content educate and inform audiences?
  • Is content measured to evaluate effectiveness and engagement?
• Content Creation Process and Less is More Strategy:
  • Search Google for every topic before producing content
  • Compare rankings to create better quality, higher relevance, more value
  • Develop cornerstone pillars of content and associated pages to get results

Links:

• Gaetano DiNardi on LinkedIn
• Nextiva
• Monday.com
• Backlinko
• Rand Fishkin
• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Ahrefs
• Gong
• NerdWallet
• Single Grain
• Leveling Up by Eric Siu
• Marketing Examples
• Saltbae
• Dave Ramsey
• John Barrows
• Peter Schiff
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Gaetano DiNardi:

“Companies don’t think about distribution. They just produce.”

“Most content actually lacks expertise, authoritativeness, and it doesn’t always seem like it’s coming from a subject matter expert because oftentimes, it’s not.”

“All this quantity, you have to keep maintaining it, and you have to keep it up to date.”

“These are assets that never die. They live forever if they are good quality.”

The marketing industry is full of talented people who come from all kinds of educational and professional backgrounds. If you want to get into the industry, but you don’t have a directly relevant college degree or previous work experience, how do you break into marketing to succeed?

Today’s guest is Melissa Berrios from Melissa Berrios Consulting and Virtualmente Libre, where she helps consult six- and seven-figure entrepreneurs on how to grow their brands and audiences. Before being a marketing consultant, Melissa spent 13 years as a project engineer.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Unplanned Accident: How Melissa pivoted from engineering to marketing
• Corporate Roles: Engineers who climb the corporate ladder lose creativity
• Creative Outlets: Melissa got bit by the online world bug and started blogging
• Content Creation: How to run, manage, market, and promote blogs
• Decision Time: Severe depression forced Melissa to take time off and not return
• What can I do? Continue to blog and help clients grow blogs, brands, businesses
• Education: Melissa taught and coached herself marketing to coach clients
• Mindset and Skillset: Engineers are problem-solvers and figure things out
• Customer Service Skills: Marketers need to understand people, as well
• Feel like an imposter? If you are passionate about something, start to pivot

Links:

• Melissa Berrios Consulting
• Melissa Berrios on LinkedIn
• Unstoppable by Kelly Roach
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Melissa Berrios:

“I’ve always been a very creative person growing up and even when I was in engineering school, I was involved in a lot of the arts.”

“Working in engineering is something, it could be really a creative job, which it’s fine. But as you climb the corporate ladder and you climb into more of a management role, more of a corporate role, you lose that creativity aspect of engineering.”

“I was creating a lot of content, so content creation was very strong. I became very strong at it just because blogging required me to edit video, create graphics, and do all that stuff. I became really passionate about it.”

“If you really want to pivot and do something that you are really passionate about, you need to start.”

Traditional public relations (PR) is still one of the most powerful and cost-effective tactics that brands use to get attention and build a business. It may not be the latest and greatest shiny object to chase after, but it is a proven and time-tested option.

Today’s guest is Megan Bennett, CEO of Light Years Ahead. She focuses on managing clients and exceeding their expectations. Megan has helped all kinds of clients get press coverage and measure effectiveness connected to sales and revenue.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why do PR and media relations still matter? Best bang for marketing buck
• Why should you invest in such tactics? Puts product, brand, message into media
• Challenges: Self-promoting companies and cutting through competition clutter
• Affiliate Program: Incentivize the media to cover your brand, make a commission
• How do you find writers/editors who care? Stay in touch and stay current
• PR Promise: Megan can't guarantee ROI, but can guarantee brand awareness
• Case Study: How KC Cattle Company’s Wigya hot dog broke the Internet
• Don't have money to hire PR agency? Know your audience, subscribe to service
• Next Thing To Do: Write a really good email pitch with compelling subject line
• Maturing Media Relations: Reach Out and don’t take ‘no’ for an answer
• Scrubbing Lists: Target right reporters/editors by beat, geography - Google them
• Be persistent, not annoying or repeatedly pester people who aren’t a good target
• Keep pushing and sending pitches for more coverage from relevant targets
• How to write a pitch: Identify story and angle, then tailor it to your media contact
• PR Pressure: If hiring an agency, consider chemistry and feeling comfortable

Links:

• Megan Bennett on LinkedIn
• Light Years Ahead
• KC Cattle Company
• Wagyu Bacon Cheeseburger Bratwursts Have Arrived, and They're a Revelation
• Muck Rack
• Meltwater
• Cision
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Megan Bennett:

“Once you get one good media hit, it helps to build brand awareness, so that consumers know about you.”

“You have to find a way to make your brand stand out from the rest when you're telling a story to the media.”

“Keep shopping around until you find people that you feel are really going to be passionate about your brand and want to help grow with you, not just take your money.”

“Find ways to spread the word because that’s what’s going to give your brand the credibility to move forward is the public relations and the media reviews.”