Professional athletes are some of the highest paid brand influencers in the world.... whether it’s Lebron James unveiling his newest pair of shoes or Tom Brady drinking from a Gatorade bottle during a game. A lot of these brand partnerships are decided for them by the league. However, some of these partnerships are decided by the equipment managers, members of the team in charge of selecting the best equipment for each player to use.

Just in time for the NBA playoffs, this episode of J&See: Views on Marketing features a special guest: Steve Pankow, Assistant Equipment Manager for the Chicago Bulls. Steve and Meg break down how he chooses equipment for the players and what the Chicago Bulls look for in a brand partnership.  And of course, make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a compelling interview like this once a month.

When building a website, companies have always been focused on creating a “user-friendly” interface. Online shoppers should be able to navigate around your website and make a purchase with ease. However, sometimes companies forget the biggest user of their website… Google. By controlling search engine results, they are the one who ultimately decide which websites get traffic. Long story short, if Google is happy, you’ll be happy.

On this episode of the J&See  Views on Marketing, we dive further into the world of SEO with the founder of Huckabuy, Geoff Atkinson. Meg and Geoff break down the basics of SEO and why Google plays a part in everything. Read on for some of the highlights of their conversation. And of course, make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a interview like this once a month.

Some college students choose to spend their time at a university creating something of their own… such as a new business. With scholarships and grants, plenty of work space, and your choice of partners, college can be the perfect time to test out a new idea. As schools caught on, programs were created to help students build their own businesses and attract investors.   

One such program is the iVenture Accelerator at the University of Illinois. The iVenture team, lead by program director Manu Edakara, has helped their students raise over 17 million dollars since its start back in 2015. On this episode, Manu and Meg Goodman discuss the importance of programs like his on college campuses, the marketing behind a successful start-up and how situations like the pandemic can affect business. Read on for some of the highlights of their conversation. And of course, make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a compelling interview like this once a month.

The customer buying journey involves getting clicks on your ads, guiding customers through your website, and completing a sale. You can have all the online traffic in the world but one tiny technical error can halt that journey in its tracks. Making sure your website functions properly and running your ads efficiently is the goal of conversion rate optimization, or CRO. On this episode of J&See, Meg Goodman talks CRO with Kurt Philip, founder of Convertica. Kurt and his team of experts identify issues with existing websites and provide support to increase traffic and click-through rates. Kurt and Meg also discuss running a remote company and the future of online businesses. Read on for some of the highlights of their conversation. And of course, make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a compelling interview like this once a month.

Whether you are a small hardware store in the Midwest or a corporation based in LA, brand positioning matters. Where you show up in the search results matters. The type of customer reviews you are generating matters. What people are saying about you online helps to define your brand. Recognizing that is the first step to smart online marketing.

 Marketing and sales teams have the same goal: sell. But too often, they're not on the same page. The content created by the marketing team doesn't always align with the type of conversation the sales team wants to have with a potential customer. And this disconnect holds companies back. 

The solution is called “Togetherness,” a concept created by alignment expert Jeff Davis.

Marketing and communications are in a rapid pace of ongoing transformation. The ability to track media, channel, and device consumption has never been greater. Marketers can now track and identify consumers across some offline and nearly all online behavior. They key to all of this? Marketing data. The immense amount of data available to marketers is growing more and more useful in the digital age. As marketing decisions become more complex and with shorter horizons, big data and other analytics capabilities become faster, more efficient, and more affordable for small businesses as well as enterprises. To help marketers make use of the data at their fingertips, we have broken down the various types of marketing data and how each can help your business.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been in use since the late 1990s. Although always a fascinating topic, it never amounted to much more than discussion. Today, we are in the midst of the AI boom. So why now? The short answer is the exponential growth of cheap, fast, scalable and interconnected computing and storage in the cloud. The horsepower and data to efficiently run AI algorithms is now with reach of everyone.

AI has been embedded across almost every product category in marketing technology. Most big data platforms, such as IBM Watson, are simple general-purpose technologies being harnessed in the service of marketing. It’s much more interesting to look at products like Equals 3 which leverages Watson behind the scenes to deliver marketing research, customer segmentation and media planning services. Products like these can help marketers create multichannel campaigns specifically tailored to their target audience by using data collection. Knowing what exactly artificial intelligence can offer is important. Here is a list of ten tools that AI can offer digital marketers to help automate and improve their marketing strategies.

Marketing has changed immensely over the last decade. Primarily, customers now expect to interact with brands the same way across different channels. This poses a problem for the traditional marketer targeting a single channel. Marketers need to adapt and refocus their aim on a specific audience but across ALL channels. From websites to in-store visits to mobile apps, customers want to have the same experience of that company across the board. So how do you change? Going from one channel to multiple has to be hard, right? Actually, it’s an easier adjustment than you think. Here are 10 skills that can help make your transition simple.

That’s a wrap! Season one of the J&See: Views on Marketing podcast has officially come to close. Since its inception in May, the podcast has grown into something bigger than we could have imagined. The goal was to get listeners to see how everyone is a marketer in some way or another. To do this, we searched for experts across all industries to show how companies and individuals employ very different — and useful — marketing strategies. Take a look at our season one line-up below — and subscribe so you're one of the first to hear season two.