The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Podcast

Explainer videos can quickly demystify complex ideas, engage your audience, and improve your SEO. What goes into an effective explainer video? Find out here!

Creating a content marketing plan seems like a colossal project, but here's how you can create a one-month plan in just 30 minutes…or your next pizza is free!

Marketing a B2B company online is different than marketing a B2C company. Discover the tactics, platforms, and strategy that will help you generate leads and sales.

Discover how to market controversial products like cannabis or CBD online…what works and what you can get away with.

Discover the 7 core elements that dictate where you show up on Google, and tips on how to improve each one.

Google Discover can help you reach new audiences, but you're going to need to optimize your content and website to get in there. Here's how.

If you're selling product, you can't ignore Amazon. Discover how to optimize your listings, run ads, and sell more stuff.

If you're looking to increase engagement and get viewers on social to "stop the scroll", then video is where you need to be focusing your marketing efforts. According to Lauren Schwartz of The Loft 325, any experience level can create videos, and all you need is a smartphone and to follow a few of her simple suggestions for creating eye-catching creatives that make your product stand out online.

Pinterest has undergone a few major changes lately, and the word on the street is, quality over quantity will get you favored these days. Pinterest expert and friend of the show, Alisa Meredith, stopped by to give us the low down on all the recent changes happening at Pinterest affecting marketers, including explaining why curating boards is a thing of the past, and why 'idea pins' might just be your new best friend.

If you're frustrated with low sales and can't seem to figure out why, Bear Wade has the answer for you. Many times the problem lies in either not having a designated marketing plan or having one that's not in the right order.

When it comes to paid ads, the old saying still holds true, "don't put the cart before the horse." Simply put, the most important thing to remember is to make sure that customer journey and sales funnel are dialed in and ready to go, before you start putting money into it.

Do you want to know what makes your audience tick? How to persuade them to take action? Today we'll be diving into some recent research into human psychology and provide some specific examples how you can leverage this information in your own digital marketing.

Stuffing keywords and STILL not seeing results worthy of your effort? Declared the "SEO rockstar" by the American Marketing Association, SEO expert Dmitrii Kustov shares his top 4 ingredients for SEO Success to start packing a punch WITHOUT a crazy budget.

Whether you're starting from scratch or your email list has gone dormant, Teresa Heath-Wareing knows the best way to build it up and fill it with your ideal customers. Discover proven methods for attracting and converting your audience through email.

How do you get to the first page of Google? No, it's not practice. It's content. You need to have the highest quality content that answers your ideal customer's biggest challenges. But how do you know if your content is of high enough quality? Travis McKnight, a senior content strategist at Portent, is here to share the proven strategies he uses with his own clients to help them rank higher and create meaningful content that consistently delivers a clear and polished experience for users.

If you want to stand out online it all starts with your brand and your branding. If your branding is boring then your ability to attract the right type of clients and generate leads is going to be hampered. Learn how to walk away from your boring branding.

Your customers and prospects buy--or don't buy--for reasons they themselves don't always understand. In this episode, we speak with behavioral economics consultant Melina Palmer.

Discover the five step process to create videos that will engage your audience. Krista Mashore walks us through the process of creating videos for the pre-funnel engagement. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/405

Whether you call it the "buyer's journey" or the "sales funnel", the messaging for each stage needs to be appropriate. Discover what type of messaging and ads work for awareness, consideration, and decision. Brendan Hughes of Optily shares with us what works and what doesn't, and how to attribute your sales to the right message and the right channel.

Maybe you think you're not funny. Or that your offering doesn't lend itself well to humor. Well, in this episode we're going to try and bust those myths and explain why and how to use humor in your marketing. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/403

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing is back, and we're breaking down The Ultimate Marketing Engine! This is a fresh take on marketing and business that you won't want to miss! https://www.theagentsofchange.com/402

Everybody has access to data, it's all around you. You're probably sitting on it and don't realize it. With the internet, there's data everywhere, so it's just a matter of going out and finding it and using it. Data mining allows businesses to collect a pile of not only interesting but very useful data, that can be used to help with growth as well as helping to determine what is and isn't working with their current products and/or marketing strategies. This data can be very useful when it comes to finding patterns, changes, or anomalies that you may not have been aware of but can use to your advantage. Janelle Hailey explains what tools she uses at Olika to find this important data, and how she's used it to help the brand and products align with what their mission represents, and how they're giving their customers what they want by better understanding their behavior.

What makes you remarkable? What makes your company remarkable? If you're not sure, in this episode I'll share with you my Remarkability Formula; a process to help you uncover what's remarkable in your own business. You'll learn about the four lenses, Find, Focus, Fashion, and Frame.

If you're not getting the results you expected out of your Facebook Ads, this is the episode for you. From identifying objectives to organizing Ad Sets, this episode has it all! Expect to get immediate improvements after listening to what Lowell Brown has to share. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/399

Developing a personal brand isn't just for thought leaders and influencers. Everyone, especially owners, entrepreneurs, and marketers, can benefit from developing a personal brand. In this episode, Mike Kim breaks down the how's and why's of building your own personal brand. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/398

Social media marketing isn't just about "chasing the algorithm." With that approach you'll always be one step behind. Instead, understanding what motivates people and what engages them is the first step to your success. Learn more from marketing expert Stephanie Scheller in this episode. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/397

Stories move people to action. They change the world. But what if you're not a "born storyteller?" In this episode, Tamsen Webster shares a structured approach to storytelling that will have you spinning better stories in no time. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/396

Google Posts are a powerful way to drive traffic to your website or landing page. In today's episode we'll chat with Google Post expert Greg Gifford on how to leverage the different types of posts, optimize your images or video, and generate leads and sales for your business. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/395

All customers want and expect certain things from the businesses they conduct business with, good service, efficiency and friendliness, just for starters. But what else can you, as a product or service provider, do to make sure you stand out from your competition? In other words, what makes you remarkable? We the help of Forrest Dombrow, we dig into what businesses can do to differentiate themselves form their competition. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/394

Like an aging car, as it gets older, you start adding things to it to keep it fresh. The same can be said for Google Analytics. Google has rolled out Google Analytics 4 as the future gold standard when it comes to measuring your brand, including clicks, views, etc. On today's episode, our friend Chris Mercer returns to the show to tell us what every marketer needs to know about the new GA4, how it differs from Google Universal, and how it will change the way you're measuring your marketing efforts.

We've heard this enough that it's a permanent script running through our heads, "Content is king." But how can we keep things fresh and interesting and engaging to our audience so it's not the same old stale blog posts that we're pumping out week after week? Luckily for us, Shaina Weisinger from Repurpose Home, is here to share her strategies and ideas for repurposing content in a thoughtful, creative, and strategic way. Including her "7 by 7" method that she promises will help get you a year's worth of content to share.

If your goal is to get more customers – and really, who isn't trying to do that – then you need to be discoverable. Search is digital, even if you run a brick and mortar shop. Your customers are first going to go online to look for you, so the pressure is on you to make sure they can find you. The place to start is with your Google My Business account. Google is the ultimate at search referral, and your GMB account will help you get top results, improve your SEO, and provide access to analytics that will help you fine tune your paid search strategy. GMB expert Ben Fisher is here to help us navigate the constantly changing Google, as well as run through the do's and don't's of GMB, so we can hopefully avoid risking a suspended account!

In the world of marketing, we're constantly planning, coordinating, managing, and measuring all of our campaigns, which includes many repetitive tasks performed across multiple channels. Thankfully, there are a plethora of all too eager tools out there designed specifically to help you automate most of these tasks. No doubt we're all using a few here and there to help us get a leg up and increase productivity. But what areas are best when it comes to taking advantage of these shortcuts, and which are better left to human touch? As Editor-in-Chief at Neilpatel.com, Kelsey Jones joins us today to give the lowdown on which tools she and her fellow staff are using to automate their systems and processes, and which tasks she still completes the old fashioned way.

Just what is the secret to creating great content? This is something every marketer wishes they knew the answer to. What it does not mean is to create insane amounts of content and throw it up on every platform possible – quantity does not equal quality in this equation. If you're a technology, digital, and social media expert like today's guest Will Francis, you will start adopting a more practical approach when it comes to your content marketing. Remember, you don't need to be on every platform to get traction on your content – and you shouldn't. Less content with higher quality to it can still earn you loads of eyeballs. And don't forget to get creative in your repurposing efforts! In today's episode, our guest will give you practical advice and some great actionable tips to turn your marketing content into leads and sales.

When most people think of search, what immediately comes to mind for most advertisers and marketers is usually Google. But don't dismiss the power of Microsoft's Bing. What many don't realize is that Microsoft actually gets much farther reach than they think, thanks to Microsoft powering a plethora of other search engines as well (AOL, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc). Microsoft ads and strategy expert at Big Click Co., Lisa Raehsler, is here to remind us not to forget the power of Microsoft search, with over 13 billion global searches, including being a leader in the voice search realm. This episode is all about what you're missing out on by not utilizing Microsoft ads.

As marketers, we all wish we had that magic crystal ball that could tell us exactly what out clients want. Well, there is a way we can put ourselves in our customer's shoes by zeroing in on their emotional needs. Because the truth is, most people buy based on emotion over logic. Today's guest, Wes McDowell, helps small businesses do exactly that by incorporating psychology into their websites. Find out how using certain wording can encourage a sale to go one way versus another, and how honing in on a few areas can really make all the difference.

In this current world of social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, we've all no doubt seen the influencer marketing boom hit like a ton of bricks. Celebrities, and even once unknowns, are thrust into celebrity courtesy of their ability to influence their large group of followers, are called upon by brands and companies to collaborate to market products and services. But Jason Falls, digital strategist, and author of Winfluence, cautions us to ask ourselves, do you just want people posting about you, or do you want them to influence an audience? There is a difference, and today we're going to learn all about influencer marketing versus influence marketing.

Every digital marketer could lecture you for days on the importance of SEO and why your business absolutely needs it in order to succeed in the online search game. But what they also should be stressing, is how to prove the ROI of SEO. Because after all, how can you improve on something - or even know it's working - if you aren't measuring it? SEO consultant, Roger Bryan, helps us understand different marketing techniques and opportunities, with a focus on the data. The numbers don't lie and they tell a great story, you just have to learn how to listen to them and take action accordingly.

How do you know if you have a content gap on your website? How can you find and fix what isn't actually there? In this week's episode, Alex Valencia shares with us how you can do a competitive analysis to uncover what content is missing from your website and keeping you from generating more leads online.

It's no secret that more and more people are using their mobile devices to access the web on a daily basis, outnumbering those using desktops. Google has recognized this, and in order to ensure the very best user experience, it is taking a "mobile-first" approach to indexing websites. From an SEO perspective, what's the difference in optimizing for desktop versus mobile? What does it take to rank at the top of the Google search these days, and how important is mobile to that? We posed all of these questions and more to Cindy Krum, CEO & founder of MobileMoxie, where she's been optimizing for mobile even before the iPhone was a thing. She'll update up on all the changes and what you need to be doing for yourself and your clients.

It seems like once one platform adds a new feature, the others all rush to create a similar one, making them all that much more similar to each other. But after seeing an article discussing how one company boosted their traffic by over 500% using the new Google Web Story feature, I obviously had to check it out. So we went directly to the source, the author of the blog post – and the creator of the Web Story in question – Andrea Volpini. In this episode, Andrea breaks down how Google's Web Story feature is different than the other Stories you see from Instagram, Facebook, etc., and how you can put on your Director's hat and create "trailers" for your other written content, such as blog posts.

When it comes to navigating the world of SEO, it's an everchanging landscape. There are definitely some hard and fast rules that everybody follows, and then you have a few people making their own mark and creatively stepping outside the box. One of those innovators is Areej Abuali, who we talked to in this episode. She offered some new and exciting insight and ideas into addressing SEO issues for our clients as well as our own businesses. She also looks into the crystal ball with us and shares her thoughts on the future of search, including up and coming new search engines, and its effect on the almighty "Google ranking".

When it comes to inspiring others to dig deep to find their passions and turn them into success, John Lee Dumas - the Entrepreneur on Fire - is the luminary that immediately comes to mind. JLD is constantly finding ways to inspire entrepreneurs, and his latest passion is no different. We talk to JLD today about his latest book, and how he's using that to embolden others who might be stuck on their path to success and financial freedom.

Whenever a platform releases a new app or feature, we go straight to the experts to learn more. When we heard that Instagram rolled out their new Guides feature, we called on our good friend and Instagram "It Girl", Jenn Herman, from Jenn's Trends, to help get us in the know. Jenn shared with us that this is Instagram's way of allowing users to post longer-form content and filled us in on the latest news and tips on how to utilize this new feature perfectly for B2B marketing.

Curious about this new Clubhouse platform, we decided to dig a bit deeper into it and find out just what it was all about and why so many business professionals – and well-known names - were flocking to it. We reached out to Mike Stelzner, from Social Media Examiner, to get his take on this since he's always ahead of the curve. And he did not disappoint. In this episode, Mike gives us the quick and dirty lowdown about what Clubhouse is, how it works, who's hanging out there, and the many ways you can be leveraging the platform for your business.

We often discuss the importance of email marketing on this podcast, and this episode is no different. There is no other platform that allows you to own your continually curated list, and no fear that it could all disappear tomorrow if Facebook or any other platform you use to market on suddenly disappeared. That email list of yours is still there, and it's still your property. We spoke with Jenna Tiffany of Let's Talk Strategy, who also is an evangelist of email marketing. She got us excited about some new email marketing trends to look out for this year, and clued us in on some of her tired and true tips – including building and keeping your list clean -that continue to help propel her client's businesses forward.

What metrics are your company looking at to gauge your performance - and that of your clients - when it comes to marketing? How could you do a better job marketing, measuring and reporting those results? The answers, according to Dustin Clark of Element Three, lies in your marketing value chain. By using this strategy, you'll be able to not only see your bottomline, but explain exactly how and why you got there.

Have you noticed that your blog traffic is dropping off? Or that certain posts aren't bringing in as much traffic as they used to? Perhaps you've been blogging since 2005 and you've got a lot of blog content that's no longer relevant. If any of th

As marketers and business people, we've all struggled with outreach and figuring out how to start that initial relationship. Should we go email or try for an introduction? We certainly don't want to come off as too salesy or overstep our bounds. But at the same time, you need to remember that taking a one size fits all approach is a recipe for failure. If you want to be successful in your outreach efforts, follow the advice of Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro, find a way that is novel and unusual, and always put the focus on them and not yourself. Make sure you're offering value to them, backed up by research. In other words, do your homework and put in the effort, as opposed to just asking for a favor. You'll find you'll have much greater success.

This past year has been hard for networking, especially those that rely on that and referrals for their own business's survival. So how can you continue to network when you can go out there and plan meetups with large groups? Well, you take it 2D! Christel Wintel is a professional networker that hasn't let the pandemic stop her, as she has managed to successfully continue her referral group's regular networking meetings thanks to Zoom and a little creativity. By following a few simple rules with a positive attitude and a willingness to dive into something a little bit different, you can still benefit from networking in the current world we're living in.