Ponderings From The Perch

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Matt Hayman, founder at Review Minder where he develops and executes on-line strategies to improve companies' online presence and clout. Matt understands not only the intricacies of this ever changing digital landscape, but he is also able to translate his knowledge into practical tips with true business benefit. Business owners are being inundated with tactics, multiple channels, a never ending string of review sites and in general there are lots of fads and shiny options available. In the face of this complexity, the importance of online reviews can get lost. Too much confusion surrounds how companies can use them as a powerful part of their marketing mix. Companies looking to improve their visibility on the web are wise to listen in on this casual and informative conversation. They tackle relevant questions like:How you you effectively grow positive reviews online and improve your company’s reputation? Wha

Curious about how Wonder Twin Powers activate?Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Kristin Luck, Growth Strategist, entrepreneur, Global Strategic Advisor and dynamic powerhouse behind Luck Collective. Kristin is busy traveling the world, serving clients across Asia Pacific, Europe, North America and speaking at multiple marketing research conferences and entrepreneurial events. In this podcast, she pauses to reflect on her journey toward consulting and multiple successes when the stakes have been quite high. Her firm, Luck Collective, is the go-to in the market research industry for growth hacking. As a consultant, she has a unique perspective from her many years of hands-on work. She founded two companies, help grow and sell three and she has held many jobs along they way. She worked as an analyst, in sales and marketing and product development departments, to name a few. These years of personal experience is the foundation to her tried and true methodo

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Gray MacKenzie, co-founder of Guava Box and DoInbound. Over the last 7 years, Gray has helped businesses grow efficiently by increasing revenue and reducing overhead. They take their combined expertise and tackle the deeper topic of bringing sales and marketing together in a comprehensive revenue strategy. They talk shop as mutual agency owners and discuss inbound in general. His day to day at Guava Box was helping companies create efficient customer acquisition systems to expand. That work led him to create DoInbound, a project and process management tool built specifically for agencies, in 2013.DoInbound helps agencies grow profit, improve client results, and increase team happiness while leveraging proven processes to reduce the typical chaos and inefficiency of agency life. He shares some of his most applicable lessons about leveraging processes to scale marketing and growth efforts. They created a strategy for gro

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with her long-time friend, Tony D'Amato, Senior Sponsorship & Experiential Marketing Leader with 3M's auto care business development unit. If you think that's quite a title wait until you hear about his travel schedule! Serving together on the board of Enlace for more than a decade, they bonded over their shared passion for poverty alleviation and community transformation in El Salvador. They've laughed, they've cried over many years whilst traveling the Pan American Highway. Tony works in the industrial auto care aftermarket division at 3M driving deeper customer experience with the brand throughout the country and across their entire footprint. He speaks specifically about his experience working with digital and physical influencers and how that is nuanced in his market due based on the generational differences. As an experienced event marketing expert he leads a team to personally activate at over 75 events

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Peter Levitan of Saatchi & Saatchi fame. Priscilla and Peter have been friends for years and love to catch up on all things marketing - especially when it comes to change in the agency world. Far beyond his global marketing agency fame, Peter also ran his own Portland agency and raised over $15 million for his two internet start-up companies. Not too shabby for a Ponderings from the Perch podcast guest, right? If you're a marketing agency owner, you won't want to miss this guy and his insight. Even if you are not an agency owner, but an entrepreneur, you'll appreciate his approach to helping companies codify what they are good at, how to understand how to consistently deliver and understand the benchmarks that should be watched for measures of success. Peter continues to consult with forward-thinking brands and agencies. He has even distilled his more than 2 decades of creating winning presentation strate

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Robyn Crane, Money & Business Growth Expert known for hosting the TV show, The Financial G-Spot, Radio Show, Let’s Talk Money and as a 4-Time #1 Best Selling Author. Robyn's a self-starter and totally authentic entrepreneur introduced to Priscilla through a mutual friend. Their straight-forward approach to sales and marketing is refreshing. They talk about the nonsense involved when people refer to as an "overnight success". Robyn also talks candidly about her experience and total commitment to her dream business and dream life. With a shift in mindset, she chartered her course to becoming an in-demand speaker and is open about her business ups and downs. Through thsi journey she discovered her passion is sharing her IMPLEMENTATION-based, not INFORMATION-based processes for financial freedom. This impressive guest has shared her blueprint for financial and relationship success on ABC, The Motley Fool, and Fox

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Paul Kortman, Digital Marketer, SEO expert and lead nomad of the Kortman family. He and his wife take Priscilla's favorite motto of "carve out the life you want to live" very seriously. He weaves expert marketing advice in with tails from the road on this episode.  As a self-proclaimed certified nerd he originally worked at an agency where he couldn't keep his mouth shut, saying they were doing SEO and PPC wrong. Ultimately, he built a successful internal digital advertising department within that agency and happily trained someone to take his place. Now he is the owner of Connex Social, a Digital Marketing agency specializing in increasing conversions and increasing quality traffic. Day in and day out, Paul accomplishes business objectives through solid strategy and on time tactics every time. He's living the freelancer dream and continues to work remotely while his family is totally engaged in this location-inde

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Rachael O'Meara, the author of Pause: Harnessing the Life-Changing Power of Giving Yourself a Break. Having first met at Emerging Women conference, these two had an immediate connection on the drive for living for their "why" instead of solely for the paycheck and glory. They both had been anxiously awaiting the release of this first book and deliver thought provoking conversation on finding meaning along the way to a successful career. To answer the age old question, you can have it all and it can be awesome, but it first must be #pausesome. Rachael expounds on some pretty powerful messages about how to incorporate mindfulness into an already pressing schedule. In fact, most oft the pauses she recommends are tiny habits with long-lasting benefits. First they discuss recognizing the signs that you desperately need a pause and then she offers simple tools to get yourself back into alignment with your values and your aut

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she chats with Tim Hughes, co-founder of Digital Leadership Associates and author of best-selling book, Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. They discuss a new mindset for social selling and effective ways to get fast responses selling by using social. The transformation he offers is not just about Social Selling, but providing a complete new way of working for sales and marketing teams. He also elaborates on the difference between buyers and changemakers. The book is relevant because of the reality that the digital landscape has changed buyers' habits. It is also increasingly difficult to reach them early enough in their decision-making processes. Additionally, developing relationships with decision makers through social networks has become a critical skill for the modern selling professional. Tim discusses how he was getting tired about the narrative surrounding social in relation to lead generation and prac

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she interviews Paul Connor of Emotive Analytics. Group. Together they consider the deeper human feelings behind our actions and how market research can handle measuring these emotional associations. This podcast is a great follow up to Priscilla Looks at Consumer Relationships with Brands, where Priscilla and Dan discussed these sometimes hidden forces which compel us toward or against a brand. In this episode, Paul reveals how marketers can measure for this qualitative reaction, quantitatively. A consumer researcher since 1982, Paul founded Emotive Analytics in 2004 after seeing that traditional consumer research was lacking a component to reveal WHY people do what they do. These deeply sub-conscious or even non-conscious emotional dynamics need to be understood to deliver the whole truth of insights about brands and their products or services. Paul used psychology and neuroscience to assess the role of emotions in our processi

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she interviews Ahava Liebtag of Aha Media Group. They discuss Priscilla's favorite topic, the "stunning discomfort of entrepreneurship". The hard work and passion for great writing is still driving both of them to lead creative teams. In terms of content that responds to the current needs of clients, Ahava talks about how consumers are actually zigging and zagging throughout their thought their interactions with brands. Because of the multiple ways people interact with content, she underlines the importance of starting with the end in mind before ever writing a word. Her group builds the user experience using layers of multiple questions because consumers don't interact with content in a linear fashion. They laugh about the notion that people are rational and simply plan accordingly. Ahava shares her entrepreneurial story about how she started the now powerful Aha Media Group. This boutique content consultancy delivers marketing

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she interviews Greg Shugar, serial entrepreneur and prolific writer. He, along with his wife Gina started Tie Bar in 2004 in true entrepreneurial fashion. They built the business from the ground up, starting alone in their basement with no employees. Over the next 9 years, they grew their brand and their business, employing 55 employees. Having sold the majority share to a private equity firm in 2013, Greg sheds a little light on his newest venture, Thread Experiment, the only brand in the world dedicated to the design of masculine bedding. They discuss what it truly means to disrupt the market and the opportunities that are out there when you develop the entrepreneurial mindset. Believe it or not, there was a day when going directly to e-commerce was just not done. They revisit his journey discussing the difference between obstacles in 2008 as opposed to the challenges we face now in 2017. He shares some of their best wins and most

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she talks with Author, global B2B Marketing Consultant and Keynote Speaker, Pam Didner. Pam is an expert creating global marketing strategies to guide a company's content marketing efforts and together they dig into the nitty gritty of effective content marketing for the Fortune 100 Senior Marketer. Most pressing in this world is the challenge of scaling content across not only multiple teams, but multiple languages and indeed, cultures. They discuss the real cost of content marketing (HINT: It's not free) and agree that measuring the effectiveness of content marketing is they only way to improve results and truly understand what is going on in the market.Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also download her FREE course - How To Build A Global Content Marketing Team or check out her book, Global Content Marketing. Want more info about the special world of B2B Marketing? Check out her guest blog, "5

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing along with Dan Leadbetter as they discuss consumer relationships with brands. What brands do you love? What brands do you hate? What brands do you love to hate? Interestingly many people don't consider that their lives are full of actual relationships with brands. They are tied into our family stories, our values, our conversations, daily routines and holiday traditions. No matter how much you think about it, we do develop actual relationship with brands throughout our lives. Priscilla reaches back to an older article she considers foundational regarding brand relationships and consumer behavior. This article can be found here: http://bit.ly/consumerrelationships if you want to go deeper. Priscilla loves Roku. Dan loves Zildjian. Also, in this episode they do not explain jazz. If you don't get it on your own, there's really nothing they can do. Any chance you feel like doing your good deed for the day and giving a 5

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing as she talks with author, prolific writer and marketing guru, Mitch Joel. As the President of Mirum, a global digital marketing agency operating in close to 20 countries, he has earned the right to direct huge brands as they navigate digital marketing. He talks openly about how the marketing industry must come to grips with how consumers adopt quickly to technology while agencies and brands tend to lag behind. Since Mitch is a prolific speaker to the likes of LEGO, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Twitter, Oracle, Nestle, Procter and Gamble, Unilever and more, his ideas have been put to the test. He breaks down complex strategies by focusing on three points on his "bull’s-eye" approach. Listen in for more of his musings on the nuance between the art and science of marketing. More than anything, Mitch believes in his work as craft and labors under the conviction that he simply wants to create things that are deeply meaningful to him. He writes,

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing along with Dan Leadbetter as they celebrate her St. Patty's Day birthday. As they are fellow-holiday birthday peeps (Dan having debuted on New Year's Eve) they talk about the joys and perils of a holiday birthday. What they can't wrap their minds around is the reality of actual St. Patrick's Day Birthday cards for sale. Seriously, individualized cards celebrating your birthday falling on this holiday. Hmmmm....To celebrate, Dan delivers another pop quiz in which Priscilla rants a bit about marketing pet peeves. Seeing as it is her birthday, and will be wearing a green wig all day, he lets her vent. Included in those questions are also some reflections on entrepreneurship and of course, her memory of the top three birthday presents she's ever received. They also wrap up highlights from her trip to London and she offers some travel and networking tips. Was this supposed to be a marketing podcast? You'd better complain to the authorit

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing and her special guest, Stoney deGeyter of Pole Position Marketing. He is the author of the very definitively titled book, The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! among others. Where others focus on search engine optimization (SEO) only for ranking results, his team goest beyond with a laser focus on total web presence optimiation for the sake of helping the visitor. Stoney elaborates on his process of writing his book. His journey of writing his own proprietary checklists for the work he did over the years. He uses his own book as a reminder to stay true to these fundamentals. Again, front and center to his advice and prolific blogging is his motivation to truly help his clients. Other books by Stoney deGeyter include:SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know about SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask)Keyword Research and Selection: The Definitive Guide to Gathering, Sorting, and Organizing Your Keywords into a High-Performance SEO Campai

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing and Robin Barr, Chief Inspiration Officer at Unleash Your Brilliance in this episode. As a Life Coach Robin works with high performing executives who feel as if they are "dying at their desks". She addresses the true suffering many experience when they are out of alignment with their own values and are frustrated with their own inability to alter behaviors or outcomes they so strongly desire to change. They discuss the role of stress in modern life (especially how that shows up for entrepreneurs) and the different ways males and females tend to deal with this foundational issue. Along with our normal stress, she discusses how we layer habits of "checking out" on top by either living more in the past, or fixating on the future. Robin is passionate about helping people expand and integrate their emotions and stay present in order to create a life they truly love regardless of thes stress they feel. Together they debunk popular misconcepti

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing along with Dan Leadbetter as they discuss her upcoming speaking engagement in London. As she heads out to speak to marketing researchers about the future of social media she focuses on what she continues to do to disrupt the market. She discusses how her book of business differs from most other agency owners she meets. Any given day the team could be working content about turbo engines, chiropractic care, sheet metal or autism solutions, just to name a few. This industry diversity requires her team to stay focused on process at all times. She also gets pretty vulnerable about how she has garnered a high rate of repeat customers. Priscilla believes this is because she has consistently respected client's marketing budgets and treated their money like her own. They also discuss some business development issues. She gets honest about how hard it is to strike a balance between dividing her time marketing her own company and completing w

Join Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird at Little Bird Marketing and Liz Van Patten, an accomplished qualitative researcher. Her experience discovering marketing insights for companies, advertising agencies, governments and industry groups for more than 25 years has honed her skills in marketing research. They discuss the difference between qualitative and qualitative research and how they fit into concept testing/development, understanding path-to-purchase and decision-making, new product development, positioning development, communications research, and social media listening. As an early adopter of online qualitative research methods, Liz is an acknowledged expert in the use of asynchronous approaches such as online discussion forums, insight communities, in-depth interviews, online diaries, mobile interviews, and as well as real-time methods including webcam and text based online focus groups.Liz's journey has run the gamut from handling focus groups with six year olds, to examining the effective