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 anything else is public speaking.  Majeed Mogharreban is a professional speaker, world traveler, and founder of ExpertSpeaker.com. Speaking professionally for 10 years, Majeed has worked with the United Nations, Fairtrade, celebrities, politicians, Olympic medal winners, CEOs, and top entrepreneurs to give speeches and tell stories that change the world.  He is the author of the international best-seller  "Expert Speaker: 5 Steps To Grow Your Business With Public Speaking" He is the highest-rated trainer in the world at Learning Tree International. Majeed resides in Quebec, Canada.  

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?   While this isn't a how-to on making a podcast, instead it aims to help you answer whether a podcast should be part of your marketing mix. We'll talk about: Who makes a good podcast host and what makes a good theme for a show. What podcasting has in common with PR How to get a podcast discovered by your audience.  Promotional options, from sponsored ads inserted into shows…to shows which are entirely paid promotion.   I brought someone on who sees podcasts from multiple perspectives; from the standpoint of a marketer and as a podcast host herself. Sherrilynne Starkie is an award-winning digital communications consultant with more than 20 years experience working with private and public sector clients in Canada, Britain and the USA. She has an international reputation as a social media innovator, is a prolific blogger and podcaster and is an active community volunteer. Her new podcast 50 Women Over 50 is a passion project in which she is interviewing women past their 50th birthday to learn how they see the world, what lessons they’ve learned and what advice they have for us all.      

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 motive and act in concert.” We can apply this to society as a whole, and to smaller communities like: countries & ethnic groups, service clubs, businesses, User groups, Client forums. All are undeniably powerful.   Communities can defuse customer problems, encourage some to become brand ambassadors and provide a means of word-of-mouth marketing like no other channel can. What does it take to grow and keep a community? Our guest will help us answer that. Throughout his career, Paul Bradley has done the posting and moderating that you have to commit to if you are going to form an online community.  Paul has been building communities that connect and educate professionals across myriad industries for the last decade-plus. He has been part of Social Media Pulse (SMP) – a community of practice for social media industry professionals. He also launched and ran the community program at Agorapulse. Having moved to the education sector, he currently serves as Vice President for Kaplan Community.

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 production agency in 2010 and has made over 1,200 videos produced for every business objective. We';ll hear from him answers on this and other questions to know about planning, producing, and distributing videos.  Join me as we talk to  Robert Weiss.

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 bring up details about how that athlete signed with the shoe company, the battling that went on between that brand and other companies to win the athlete's endorsement.  Clearly when people buy shoes for exercising or training for something, they aren't just going after ergonomics.    This back-story on the brand's struggles matters to them, as if they'll only wear a brand that works as hard as they do in staying fit or competing in sports.  This bond clearly applies to shoes, but it obviously reaches to many other types of brands too.  It's good for products to have a strong brand message and proof-points of their value, but the true winners are those that connect their story to the customers' internal values, or that give the customer a transformational experience.  Today I'm talking with someone who works with what he calls  'meaningful'  brands, producing their media creative in a way that resonates with buyers. Fittingly, the name of his London-based boutique agency is 'Way' My  guest is a public speaker, an ultra marathon-runner, podcaster, skydiver and minimalist.  In 2021, he released the book we're talking about today: "Not Another Pair of Shoes" Let's talk with Alexander Novicov.

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-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless" We know we must try to embed our brand's personality into our writing - my last episode featured an expert talking about that. But that's not all we can do.  We've got to change the way we talk about ourselves, to cut through people's cynicism. If we're ever going to be believed by our prospective buyers, we've got to own what customers say in reviews of our products or services, and make claims about ourselves that duly represent what they could experience by buying from us.  Though noble, pulling this off sounds like a ton of work. But the premise of the book I'm covering today is that it's doable, if you make it part of your normal marketing workflow.  The book which came out in 2022 is called,  "Prove It." It's the second book by Melanie Deziel, whose first book was "The Content Fuel Framework" She is an award-winning speaker and content creator. She has worked at various media companies, including The New York Times and Time Inc. In addition to her professional experience, Melanie has also taught courses on content marketing and digital marketing at universities such as Fairleigh Dickinson, Syracuse, and the City University of New York. 

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 ‘measured magic’, and was ranked 2021 number one Creative Agency in the world by industry publication BestAds - the first time awarded to an Australian agency. Leading Australian publication Mumbrella also lists Thinkerbell as Full Service, Creative, and PR 2021 Agency of the Year (the only time an agency has ever won all three titles in one year). Adam is one of Australia’s leading consumer psychologists, a brand strategist and an authority on behavioural economics. He’s the author of The Advertising Effect: How to change behaviour (Oxford) and Stop Listening to the Customer: Try hearing your brand instead (Wiley). No stranger to the TV screen of Australia, Adam is a regular panelist on the Gruen Transfer, 7's Sunrise, and 10's The Project. As the creator of the idea behind the WARC World Innovation prize (2013), and winner of the rare Cannes Gold Lion and Gold Effie double, Adam has won at all of the world's major advertising shows. He created the successful board game The Analyst (translated into four languages), space; an unconference where 'ideas meet influence’, and the social cause agency DOA (Decade of Action). Adam also co-hosts Black T-Shirts, a podcast that delivers XXL creativity for marketers. An unstoppable force in the Australian advertising landscape, Adam's hands delegate the keys to embrace evidence-based creativity – whether to buy, perform or change - through cognitive behavioural psychology, hardcore creativity and a deep understanding of behavioural economics.  

Regardless of when you're hearing this, it's safe to say that you're running into content generated by AI. There is a lot of good brought by chat tools, but there's one thing we want coming through in our content - that is to sound human. What engages people is content with personality, content that evokes a response. And that's what today's guest will break down for us. When Alison Ver Halen found herself between jobs, her roommate's dad, who was an attorney, offered to give her things to do around his office until she got back on her feet. One of the things he needed was someone to write blog posts for his law firm. He knew she had a strong writing background, so he offered her the gig, and she was more than happy to get paid to write. After six months, he told her she had brought in $75,000 worth of business for his law firm, just from the blog posts she was writing for him. After a while, she started writing for an associate of his, and then for some friends of hers. She did get another day job, but she kept writing on the side, and her client list kept growing until she knew she couldn't do both any more, so she quit the day job to devote herself to writing full time, and she's never looked back. She heads a Chicago-based agency called AV Writing services, in which she produces content for clients, with the help of her dog, Bobbi.

Today we'll talk about automated marketing data pipelines for reporting and even activation. If that last sentence didn't make total sense to you, don't worry, our guest is going to tell us why we need it and how we can set out implementing it.  The place where Noah Learner got his start was on the island of Nantucket.  It's around 20km (15 mi) long, which is small enough that most visitors leave their cars on the mainland, come across on the ferry and rent a bike.  Noah's journey started with a job at one of the island's bike rental shops. Over the next decade as he rose to become the company's GM, he became convinced of the power of SEO for driving traffic.  He relocated to Colorado, at various points he worked in corporate SEO roles and worked out on his own. He even mashed up skills from his past to serve businesses in the pedal-powered rental market, calling it 'bike shop SEO.' In the past 4-5 years he's built cutting edge SEO tools using cloud technology and has shared how to deploy them by speaking at MozCon, SearchLove and LocalU and in the agencyautomators.com community which he cofounded. he's just taken on a new role  that has tool-building  baked into his mandate, as Director of Innovation for Sterling Sky.  When not at work, he loves doing typical Colorado things like fly fishing and skiing, along with family-friendly activities like hiking and camping where their two dogs can tag along.