Humans of Martech

What’s up folks. This is part 2 of our deep dive into AI impacts on marketing jobs.In our last episode we introduced the topic and covered how fast AI could replace marketing jobs and what the transition might look like. It's not like our jobs are gonna vanish overnight, but the shift is happening faster than many of us realize. AI's no longer just a loosely backed buzzword; it's doing things today that we used to think were impossible. So, as marketers, we've gotta take this tech seriously.Next up, 2. Staying informed and keeping up with changes (today)3. Practical ways marketers can adapt for the AI-driven economy4. Find the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noiseOutlineHere are some of the topics for this second episode:Staying informed, who to follow, courses to check outIn person events and networkingExploring new sources of incomeHere’s today’s main takeaway: The impact of AI on the job market is difficult to predict in 5 years let alone 10. The only way to future proof your career and position yourself to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven economy is by staying informed and developing new skills. We’re going to double down on some of these in today’s episode.Commentary/question on shiny object syndrome vs being an early adopter.As a marketer, it’s our job to stay modern - it’s true of any job, but marketing is on the next levelWe self propel change and create our own reasons to change things up. We suffer a bit from herd mentality as well – I think we tend to rush the new trend, be it TikTok or ChatGPT and choose saturation instead of considerationI don’t think the value of being an early adopter is being “first;” rather, it’s giving yourself time to immerse yourself and begin to master the topicTo learn a topic, you simply can’t read 5 blog posts and master it; I firmly believe you need to get hands-on experienceShiny object - Try to make a buck, dispose of poor performer, invest in top performers; easily distracted by next objectEarly adopter - thoughtful approach to seeing new technology as part of wider trend; has playbook or process for learning and evaluating new tech, How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluentStaying up-to-date on the latest developments in AI and AGI is probably the top thing you can do as a marketer. Understanding capabilities as they are released or even pre-released. This allows you to get a leg up on others and see the potential impact on your company, industry and even job market as a whole. My goals would be to understand how AI works, its potential, and limitations. Most marketers don’t have a great grasp on this at all. Invest in learning about AI, ML, deep learning, and related tech. Ultimately try to arm yourself with knowledge to position yourself as a marketing expert in leveraging AI tools to drive revenue.I think you and are very similar in our approach to this: learn from smart people, and then jump in and experiment and get hands-on experience. Phil, your research process is always fire: who are the smart people you’re learning from? People and blogs to followThere’s waaay smarter people that are tracking this stuff. Not all of these have a marketing lens but they often cover marketing aspects. These are my favorite folks to follow.We’ll have links to all of their twitter accounts and their newsletters or podcasts in our show notes. Ed Gilhttps://twitter.com/eladgil https://blog.eladgil.com/ Ed is an awesome follow on Twitter, he’s an investor and advisor in some of the most well known tech companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe and others. He worked at Google and Twitter after his company Mixer Labs was acquired. Aside from AI he’s highly in touch with everything tech and startups. He doesn’t post super often but he has a solid blog and he’s the co-host of No Priors podcast that features long form chats with the leading engineers, researchers and founders in AI. Ben Tossell (tuh-sell)https://twitter.com/bentossellhttps://bensbites.co/ Ben’s the Founder and CEO of Makerpad, one of the top sites to learn and work on no-code tools. He currently works at Zapier, focusing on AI after they acquired Makerpad last year. Before that he led Community at Product Hunt and later AngelList when they acquired Product Hunt in 2016. He runs one of the most popular AI newsletters called Ben’s Bites, it’s easily been my favorite daily way to stay up-to-date with the latest AI happenings. Sarah Guohttps://twitter.com/saranormous https://linktr.ee/nopriors Sarah’s a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an early-stage VC firm specialized in AI startups. She made waves in SF during her time at Greylock, a top VC firm in the Valley, where she became their youngest general partner. She’s the other co-host of No Priors podcast alongside Ed Gil. She has an extensive network, and her close association with Andrew Ng (ing), the co-founder and leader of Google Brain, persuaded her that a "deep learning revolution was c

What’s up JT, good to chat again. When you aren’t podcasting or consulting, what are you reading or listening to these days?Yeah I’ve been BUSY. Bobiverse books, of course but also lots of Mario with my kids – haha, my downtime totally spent on guilty pleasures.Haha yeah you had a head start on Bobiverse but I overlapped you… that’s probably going to change soon for me… I don’t think I’ve announced this on the cast yet but my wife and I are on baby watch, first born arriving at any second now which s why we need to record a few episodes hahaI’ve actually been getting back into podcasts lately. Maybe I’ll plug a few of my favorites ahead of our next episodes. I’ve really been digging Making Sense of Martech lately. Juan Mendoza is the guy behind the podcast, he’s a friend of the show and he’s been doubling down on it, pumping out weekly episodes. If you want to go deep on some technical topics, in episode 37 he had the CEO of Hightouch Data on and he debates the merits of reverse ETL and they really unpack CDPs. Check it out.In the non marketing podcast world I’ve been taking a dive into the world of AI. No, not fluffy my top 10 ChatGPT prompts and buy my course type of content, way darker shit, like will marketing be replaced by AI in 10 or 20 years… sooner? My buddy Alex recommended The Ezra Klein Show. The episode is titled Freaked Out? We Really Can Prepare for A.I. On the show he has Kelsey Piper, a senior writer at Vox. She basically spends her time writing and being ahead of the curve covering advanced A.I.In that episode she says something like: “The AI community believes that we are 5-10 years away from systems that can do any job you can do remotely. Anything you can do on your computer.”Recently Goldman Sachs released a report saying AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs. A day later Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Wozniak and several other tech leaders wrote an open letter urging a pause in AI development, citing profound risks. So I went down a rabbit hole and it really prompted the next 4 episodesHow fast could AI change or replace marketing jobs?How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluentNavigating through AI in your marketing careerFind the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noiseSo basically1. How soon and how significantly will this impact my job2. How do I keep up with changes?3. Is it possible to adapt? How can I future-proof myself?4. How can I start right freaking now?!?Today we’re going to be starting with setting the scene and covering how fast shit is changing right now. Here are some of the topics for this first episode:AI isn’t new, especially for enterprise companies with lots of dataBut unlocking some of the potential for startups is going to be hugeWill all these advancements just make marketers better and more efficient?or will it actually push founders to go to market without a marketerMarketing will have massive changes because we primarily rely on the ability to understand and apply existing rules and processesWhat does ChatGPT have to say about all this?What if AI is one day actually able to replicate human creativity and emotional intelligence?We’ll talk about potential mass unemployment but the more likelihood of new job opportunitiesHow fast AI has disrupted other jobs alreadyHow AI might simply only ever replace the shitty parts of marketingHere’s today’s main takeaway: It's not like our jobs are gonna vanish overnight, but the shift is happening faster than many of us realize. AI's no longer just a loosely backed buzzword; it's doing things today that we used to think were impossible. So, as marketers, we've gotta take this tech seriously.Instead of asking if AI's gonna replace our roles in marketing, we should be talking about how quickly it could happen and what it'll look like if it does.A bunch of really smart marketers (and non marketers) out there are saying we need to hit the panic button. They're predicting that in just 5 to 10 years, we'll see a massive change affecting all sorts of remote jobs. Times are wild right now. So, fellow humans of martech, let's keep our eyes on the future and continuously evolve and adapt.JT I don’t want this episode to be fear mongering… I’d actually love to chat with people that are way smarter than us about AI and get both sides of the coin, those who believe AI could have a fundamental impact on marketing jobs and that AI is as important of a paradigm shift as the Internet was… people like Darmesh Shah, like Scott Brinker, and those who believe it will never completely happen and are still on the AI-skeptic side of things like Rand FishkinI think it's ok to be a bit uncertain or even afraid of what the future may hold with this new technology.As humans, we face an interesting dilemma -- we are capable of using and creating technology that don't fully comprehend ourselves. Our society is built on layers of abstractions -- you don't need to know how water purification or plumbing works to turn on your tap an

What’s up everyone today we’re talking about marketing roadmaps. Rodmaps are usually more common with tech product teams and they are also very common in the project management world. It’s about giving your team the big picture and helping everyone align on project goals. Anyone who’s been in marketing knows that this is something super useful that can be applied to this practice as well.Key takeaway: While it doesn’t always have to be set in stone, a roadmap helps your team stay accountable to certain tasks and deliverables but it’s also a focus weapon that arms you with the ability to say no to new requests. You work on priorities and capacity, you share it with other departments for feedback and it becomes marching orders. DefinitionOkay so how would you define a roadmap?Definition: A team roadmap is a visual overview showing what projects and tasks will be worked on and when.It usually includes objectives, milestones/tasks, deliverables, resources, and a timeline.A roadmap can serve as a reliable reference guide to help keep the team on track and share with other stakeholders your key projects and objectives. So how do you bring this to life?So I like to do this quarterly. Usually I have a backlog list of projects. This is made up of ideas and things that have popped up over time that we want to get to eventually. From the backlog, you want to try and assign a priority. This exercise can be wildly complex but it can be a simple ICE exercise (Impact, confidence, effort).One keep component as you score projects is company goals and OKRs. Defining the business goals and objectives that the marketing team will work to support. This is usually trickled down in some capacity from management. It might include goals related to increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or improving customer satisfaction.Then you look at capacity, how many hours of work does your team have this quarter, subtract meeting time and PTO. One thing I like to do here is keep a buffer of 15% time for unexpected urgent tasks that pop up.Then you can decide what stays in the backlog and what gets prioritized for the upcoming quarter.There’s a bunch of different tools you can use for roadmapping, whether it’s Jira, Asana, Trello, Notion or others, they all boil down to very similar functions.Start with a list of core projectsBreak up the projects into sub tasks and milestonesAssign task owners and deadlinesDescribe each task and highlight dependenciesToolsWhat are the best tools to developing a timeline for the initiatives and activities, including key milestones and deliverables.There are many different tools that organizations can use to develop a timeline for their marketing initiatives and activities, including key milestones and deliverables. Some common examples include:Project management software, such as Notion, Asana, Trello, or Microsoft Project, which can be used to create a visual representation of the timeline, track progress, and manage resources.Collaboration tools, such as Slack, Google Hangouts, or Microsoft Teams, which can be used to communicate with team members, share information, and collaborate on tasks.Gantt charts, which are graphical representations of the tasks and dependencies within a project. Gantt charts can be used to visualize the timeline, identify potential conflicts or bottlenecks, and adjust the schedule as needed.Spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, which can be used to create a tabular representation of the timeline, track progress, and perform calculations.Overall, the best tools for developing a timeline will depend on the specific needs and preferences of the organization. By using a combination of different tools, organizations can create a comprehensive and effective timeline that helps them plan and execute their marketing initiatives and activities.What’s your fav tool?Trello never fails. But I’ve become a big fan of Notion.Yes, Notion can be used for project management and roadmaps. It’s usually thought of as a company wiki or a place to write memos, but it’s so much more… and if it can also help you manage your projects… imagine combining all of that in one place.Many teams haveA company docs or wiki like ConfluenceThey have a project management tool like Asana or JiraAnd then they have a bunch of scattered docs in the form of google sheets, google docs, foldersThat usually includes a bunch of emails alsoBut imagine if you could have just 1 tool to rule all of these. At my startup we use Notion pretty heavily. Not every does this to a T, we do have some stragglers, but imagine a world whereCompany docs and memos are no longer emails or a various panoply of google docsProjects are managed in one spot and reference things in the same tool, no need for separate logins or extra credentialsAll in Notion.Notion is a versatile and customizable productivity tool.I use it personally but also at work, like I mentioned.But because of its versatility, Notion sometimes gets

What’s up everyone? Today is a bit of a follow-up on the previous episode about building dashboards, check that one out first if you haven’t already.Today we’re taking this a step further and talking about data models and the limits of building dashboards.Here’s a typical stance on dashboard design:It is best to focus on the ideal scenario, and worry about the practicalities of implementation later, Or “let the ops team worry about that” as they call it. Haha yeah… This approach may seem appealing at first, as it allows designers to imagine and create without constraints. However, as a marketing operations person, I’m not a fan of this.Here’s today’s main takeaway: I believe that understanding how a dashboard is powered, and having a sense of what is possible and what is not, is a crucial differentiator.Too often, I have seen dashboard projects built in a vacuum, disconnected from the reality of the data and the systems that support them. In these cases, valuable time and resources are wasted building an idealistic dashboard that cannot be implemented or used effectively.Today we’re going to be breaking down how you can level up your knowledge about data models or the capabilities and limitations of the data and the systems that support the dashboard, and designing solutions that are feasible and effective. By understanding these constraints, designers and marketers can create dashboards that are not only beautiful and engaging, but also practical and useful.I feel like this topic could get hairy pretty fast, so let's break down some definitions for the listeners. Da hell is a data model, let’s start there.What’s a data model?Data modeling is a way to organize and structure data from different sources in a consistent and useful way. It helps to make data more accessible and organized, so it can be easily analyzed and interpreted.Gimme a non marketing example, how would you explain this to your mom?Example: A simple example of a data model is a phone directory. The data model for a phone directory would include information such as the names and contact information of individuals, as well as the relationships between them (e.g. family members, colleagues, friends). By organizing this information in a consistent and structured way, the phone directory can be used to easily look up and contact individuals. This data model helps to make the information more accessible and useful.Okay what about a marketing example, that was too simple.I’ll go with my bread and butter, Email marketing example: One example of a data model for email marketing might include information about the email campaigns that have been sent to different segments of your audience. This data model might include details such as the subject lines, Type of content, Subject line keywordsMain call-to-action You would also have the results of the campaignsopen rates, click-through rates, conversion ratesBy organizing and structuring this information in a consistent and meaningful way, the data model can help the email marketing team track the performance of their campaigns and to identify areas for improvement. For example, the data model might show that certain subject lines or content types don’t generate as many opens as some emails but they perform better at driving clicks and conversions, and the email marketing team can use this information to optimize their future campaigns. So why should marketers care about this? It’s to prevent shiny object syndrome and understanding where the numbers are coming from but also give you the ability to customize your dashboard.Exactly. A data model is the first step in allowing you to have a dynamic/interactive dashboard. Describe an interactive dashboard in simple termsDescribe an interactive dashboard in simple terms for the listeners. It’s being able to interact with the charts and elements to analyze different parts of your dashboard, for example; filtering certain elements and changing date ranges. This is what sets them apart from reports. For me, I see it as a personal assistant of sorts. An interactive dashboard allows you to easily filter, slice, and drill down into the data, revealing insights and patterns that might otherwise be hidden. Unlike a static dashboard or report, which shows the same view for everyone, an interactive dashboard lets different users explore the data in their own unique ways.What’s a simple example that most folks would understand?Imagine a sales manager who needs to understand the performance of her team across different regions and product lines. With a static dashboard or report, she would see the same view for everyone, with no ability to filter or drill down into the data. But with an interactive dashboard, she can easily select the regions, the individual reps and product lines that she is interested in, and see the data that is most relevant to her. She can even save her custom views, and share them with her team, so they can all see the data in the way that is most us

What’s up everyone, today we’re taking a dive into the world of dashboard building.Startups may not always have the luxury of having a dedicated data analyst on staff, which means marketers may need to get more hands-on with data. Yeah I haven’t had the data analyst luxury in my career very often! In episode 38, we discussed marketing reporting and how you can use key reports to help highlight impact and find new opportunities. But we’re not talking about reports here right?That’s right, dashboards aren’t reports. They are living breathing snapshots of key areas you want to keep an eye on in your business.Yeah I think a lot of people don’t make that distinction and just assume reports = dashboards = chart. Where should marketers be starting? With charts?Scatter plots, bar charts, pie charts, maps, funnels, box plots… There’s a bunch of different chart types and visualizations at your disposal when you're designing your dashboard, but this isn’t where you should start.Here’s today’s main takeaway: When designing a dashboard, it's important to focus on the decisions you want to make, rather than just the metrics you want to track. Before building your dashboard, consider your audience and bring together the right people to answer key questions. This will help you create a prototype of your first version.Dashboard projects are close to both of our hearts. Both having worked for Klipfolio (a dashboard SaaS for startups and SMBs), we’ve spent a fair amount of time researching and writing about the internal dashboard building process.There’s obviously a critical collaboration piece to this that would be an initial starting point for anyone taking on a dashboard project. Yeah one thing we always said about building good dashboards is that it takes a village.So Phil, you’ve actually led the charge in this area at a few startups. What are some of the questions you should be asking as a marketer to get started?Questions before buildingThe first questions to tackle as a team are: What metrics would you look at on a regular basis to measure performance and determine areas for growth? What metrics do you care about the most?So ultimately, this depends entirely on your team goals and the top priority metrics we’ve selected as a group. These goals further inform how to prioritize views and metrics in our dashboard. What does this group of stakeholders look like when you’re starting to build things?Stakeholder groups:Main viewers: Who will be digesting or regularly looking at the dashboardMarketing Ops/Data Ops: What resources to you have to help you build the dashboardDesigner and point person: Who’s scoping out the dashboard and driving project management as well as designing the end dashboardAdmittedly, in startup land, you’ll likely be wearing all three hats. I know I have. But in bigger teams, you’re working with a lot more moving pieces. Yeah I’ve gotten a taste of both of these. Small teams and bigger teams. There’s advantages to both. But I think regardless, it’s important to get a lay of the land first.Yeah it might be helpful to walk through an example. You’ve been pretty deep in lifecycle marketing in your career. Maybe give us a real life example wearing a lifecycle hat. So Phil, you’re Director of lifecycle and you’re tasked with building out a lifecycle dashboard.Here’s a list of example questions to ask yourself and stakeholders Yeah I like the lifecycle example actually. It’s broad enough to touch most parts of marketing so I can use it as goal posts as we unpack some of this stuff.Your goal with these questions is to figure out what metrics we care about the most, getting a benchmark and establishing a goal for each of these metrics and how they have been trending over time.Current segment/vertical data we get on signups, are there specific segments we know we want to grow?Current lead scoring on signup events, are we scoring leads based on email and domain and any other data we might be collecting?What’s the current activation rates of signups after the first email, what’s our deliverability rate on the first email to signups?Are there specific lifecycle status labels that we are currently using, ie Content lead/subscriber > Signup > Active/published site > Upgraded. Do we currently have micro stages/do we care about this detail, ie in between signup and active we might have, installed theme, created a page and created a menu.Do we currently have the ability to attribute multi touch events for email engagements? Meaning, if a signup opens a pricing email on day 4 and they click the plans link and they buy 2 hours later, is that email getting $%?With all of this information on hand, or at least identifying areas of focus and priority metrics, you can then start scoping out the first prototype of the dashboard, intentionally with too much information, with the hopes of cutting things out in following iterations. Exactly. Next we can talk about metrics that flow in from those questions. What metrics

Universal Analytics is sunsetting in July 2023, and its replacement, Google Analytics 4, isn’t exactly getting a warm reception. For digital marketers, SEOs, analysts, and basically anyone else who got used to GA3 over the past decade, it’s a bitter pill to swallow.Ok, I’ll confess: I’ve been a bit further behind on Google Analytics 4 than I wanted. Like many marketers, I struggle to balance martech innovation against the reality of my day-to-day life. I admit I had been procrastinating on learning GA4, but no more.I’ve spent the last few months going as deep as I can on GA4 and, by extension Google Tag Manager. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that GA4 is Google’s gift to digital marketing – I think it’s still an immature platform.I am going to tell you GA4 is getting a much worse rap that it deserves precisely because so many marketers have been deep in GA3/UA for so long. Changing habits is tough, and GA4 makes it more challenging because of a new interface, not too mention a completely different approach to web analytics. No big deal - you can learn all this in a Sunday afternoon, right?Yeah, that’s going to be tough.Today I’m going to give a procrastinator’s guide to GA4. If you’re expecting me to complain about GA3, this episode isn’t for you. We’ll mourn the loss of GA3, briefly, but then move on to making the most of this situation. I don’t think GA4 is all bad – actually, GA4 is pretty slick and I think if it weren’t for the contrast to its predecessor, many folks would be pretty happy with GA4. – – – Alright JT, it’s great to be back behind the mic. We’re starting off with a fun one here. I’ll admit I’ve been out of touch with top of funnel reporting and analytics for the last couple years so I’m excited to learn about GA4. There’s rightfully been a lot of noise since its release in October 2020… maybe we can start there actually, the Google decision. Google has basically said that they are making the switch from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in order to provide users with “more advanced tracking for digital marketers” But aside from new features like automated events, cross-device reporting and BQ support, there’s a lot more behind the decision to make the switch.Why is Google making the switch from UA to GA4?Needs attribution: Lawsuits in EU where UA used as evidencePrivacy regulationsEnd of 3rd party cookies, rise of first party cookiesSingle-page applicationsEvent-based measurementSo October 14, 2020: This was the date when Google officially announced GA4 and began rolling it out to users. What dates should marketers be aware about when it comes to the “forced switch from UA?”What are the important dates and why are they importantJuly 1, 2023, data collection stops. 6 months later, you won’t be able to access your dataYou’ve got 6 months to move to GA4 or another web analytics solution or you’ll be flying blind… You need a solution for your historic data (excel, bigquery, or API)Sounds like it’s time to put down that Netflix remote, grab a cup of coffee, and dive into the exciting world of GA4!It seems like such a big hurdle… JT, how can marketers start to learn GA4?How do I learn GA4There’s going to be a few layers to learning GA4. Let’s break it out into 2 roles:Web Developer, implementationDigital marketer or web analystFor web developers or implementers, GA4 can be installed directly on your website by inserting the code directly onto each page. This isn’t new. I think what is new is that GA4 is much more closely tied with Google Tag Manager. It is absolutely the recommended way to install and configure GA4. There’s a whole episode or series about Google Tag Manager we could do, but the short of it is that GTM gives you a huge toolset to do tons of cool stuff: event tracking, sending additional data through dataLayer, and modifying your implementation without having to directly modify your website.If you’re not already using GTM, GA4 should push you to start using it.For digital marketers and analysts, the task is about getting used to the new interface, migrating configuration settings from GA3, and making a habit of pulling reports from GA4. The big hurdle here is matching up the data from both tools – because I’ve never actually seen both tools give the same number.I think this is what people are most unprepared for: the new reporting paradigm and definitions. Things like users have modified definitions, in no small part because GA4 is better at tracking individual users and corrects known errors in GA3. However, whenever a disparity in the numbers arise, much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth ensues…So getting it installed and playing around with new features is one of the first things folks should be doing. Data history and collection is important.These new features are more powerful and are said to help you better understand and optimize your digital marketing efforts… JT, what are some of the new features that excite you the most compared to UA vs GA4?

Season 1 featured our first 50 episodes, 20 of which were guest episodes. In today’s episode we’re going to recap our key takeaways from each guest episode in season 1.Our first guest episode featured Lauren Sanborn, Director of RevOps at CallRail. She recently moved over to DataRobot, an AI cloud platform for Data Scientists. Aside from leaving us with several marketing and sales alignment tips, my favorite takeaway from Lauren was to not be so hard on yourself if you don’t know what you don’t want to do (for work). Her advice was to get out there and try different things so you can start to mark off what you don’t like. Eventually you’ll find something that you love.”Our next guest in episode 07 featured one of our most senior and perhaps most accomplished guest, Brian Leonard, former co-founder of TaskRabbit and now CEO of Grouparoo (recently acquired by Airbyte).Brian went pretty deep on the relationship with marketing and engineering and my favorite takeaway was that marketers and engineers shouldn’t think of themselves as doing completely different things inside a company. At the end of the day, both groups are there to move the needle on the business. So the best way to think of it is to come together to power the right stack.Instead of pitching to product, marketing needs this, pitch it as, the company needs this and this is how it will benefit everyone. For example, marketing attribution isn’t a marketing or a marketing ops thing. It’s a company thing.Next up was our boy Nick Donaldson in episode 10, fresh off a new consulting gig at Perkuto. Another marketer who’s moved on to another company, he’s now running Marketing Operations at Knak. Nick is wise beyond his years and my favorite takeaway from our chat with him was that the number 1 skill to succeed in marketing ops is curiosity. Early in your career Google and twitter are your best friends. There’s so many smart people that have been in your shoes and are nice enough to share those insights. Find them. Read them. Learn from them.So 10 episodes in and we already had a RevOps Director, a CEO and founder and a consultant. We also had a Professor. In episode 11 we were joined by friend of the show Jonathan Simon.This might have been controversial amongst his peers at the University but we’re happy to report he’s still in his current gig (lol). My favorite takeaway from our chat with Jonathan is that you don’t need a degree to have a successful and happy career in marketing anymore. More than anything, marketers need to be adaptable to changing tech and strive to be lifelong learners. He talked a lot about side hustles and starting something, in his course he actually gets all his students to start a blog and build something during their time there.Episode 17 featured Ottawa native Julie Beynon who leads analytics at Clearbit. Things got technical pretty fast but I think Julie did an awesome job introducing data warehousing and making it seem a lot less intimidating.My favorite takeaway was when she explained that a DWH doesn’t have row limits and isn’t limited by your laptop’s CPU. She loves a Google sheet as much as any data driven marketer, but at some point, startups need to upgrade from that clunkiness to a data warehouse solution.It’s been fun seeing the martech landscape shift from; APIs for everything and we integrate with all your tools to – we build on top of your data warehouse or we connect natively to Big Query.Keeping to the data theme, we had Steffen Heddebrandt in episode 19. Still almost a year later he’s trashing Google Analytics on LinkedIn (lol). He’s the co-founder of Dreamdata, an attribution solution for B2B startups and SMBs.Attribution still gets a bad rep, we heard Corey trash it in season 2, but Steffen has solved big pieces of this puzzle at his startup. My favorite takeaway from our convo was when he declared that when it comes to revenue attribution, GA is basically close to useless for B2B companies. Multi touch attribution software does sound like magic when you’ve tried to orchestrate it yourself, but give Dreamdata a spin if you’re still skeptical about it.Episode 25 featured Naomi Liu, Director of Global Marketing Ops at EFI. Naomi spends some of her time mentoring future marketing ops leaders and was hiring for an entry level marketer on her team at the time so we centered our conversation around how to ace your first marketing job.My favorite takeaway was when Naomi said that new marketers should be asking lots of questions. Be that annoying kid in the back seat asking all of the questions.Episode 27 featured friend of the show and local Ottawa social media maven Erin Blaskie. She recently made the switch from leading marketing at Fellow to go back to freelancing as a fractional CMO.My favorite takeaway was when we asked her how marketers should choose between the freelance route and working in house. She thinks everyone should try both. Throw out everyone else’s definition of success and make your own by tryin

Hey folks, today we’re joined by Ramli John, one of my favorite marketers and someone I’ve admired and followed on Twitter for many years.Ramli got his start in marketing at PepsiCo as a Marketing Systems Analyst where he stayed for 4 years. After a co-founding stint Ramli moved to Toronto where started his freelancing career as a SaaS growth consultant. Along the way he also worked at a few different companies including SkyVerge which exited to GoDaddy.He also spent a few years teaching as a Marketing Instructor at big name spots like RED Academy, Centennial College and CXL Institute.He started what’s widely known as one of the top marketing podcasts on the planet, Growth Marketing Today and he’s one of the inspirations of our podcast here.He went on to join Product-Led - The leading community for PLG Pros founded by Wes Bush the famous author of Product-Led Growth. During his time there Ramli wrote his own book with Wes. It hit shelves last year: Product-Led Onboarding. I’ve read it twice and it’s been a huge career growth lever for me.Now he’s landed in what seems to be the perfect role, Director of Content at one of the top no-code onboarding tools in Appcues.Damn what a resume, what a journey, Ramli it’s an honor to have you.Questions and topicsRamli there’s a bunch of jumping off points here, I want to get into the podcast, the book and also the new gig but I’d love to start with an early career question.Early career at Pepsi and startupYou did a 180 when you went from a massive 100k + enterprise at Pepsi to then co-founding a startup. How wild was the transition and what advice would you have for listeners in big companies thinking of starting something one day?Podcast growthYou did Growth Marketing today for 4 years, I remember you posting once about how long it took you before you finally started to gain big traction. What advice do you have for people creating content with a small audience, sometimes feeling like they are speaking into the void.Teacher questionRamli, you spent a few years teaching, first at RED academy, a tech and design school, then at CXL Institute in their Demand Gen mini degree and also at Centennial College teaching a 14-week course on web analytics. What gave you the itch to spend 3 years teaching and maybe talk about the process of designing a course from scratch and all the work involved there.On writing your first bookTalk to us about writing your first book and the difference between the process of writing a course vs a book. Obviously Wes was probably a big inspiration but was this something you’ve always wanted to do and will there be more books in the future?PQL vs. PAIListeners have probably heard of PQLs by now, Product Qualified Leads or criterias that tell you someone has experienced your product or gotten some mileage in it. In your book, Product-Led Onboarding, you talk a lot about PAI, Product Adoption Indicators. Can you unpack the difference between both of those for listeners? Key onboarding milestonesMany people will dumb down onboarding to just getting users to the ‘aha moment’ like it’s something that magically unlocks onboarding challenges. You actually break down the nuance here and coin 3 different moments of value: Perception, Experience and Adoption. Can you walk us through a practical example of this?Conversational bumpersIn your book, one of my favorite analogies is your bowling analogy and how you compare onboarding emails and SMS messages as conversational bumpers to help users get their first strike. Unpack this for our listeners.Appcues, 6 months inYou’re about half a year into Appcues leading the content team, teaching SaaS teams about onboarding and product adoption. When I saw you announce that I was like damn, that’s the ultimate fit, Ramli gets to go back to SaaS and he gets to keep pumping out content about onboarding. I’d love to hear how the journey has been so far but maybe start by telling us how this opportunity came about.Happiness questionRamli, you’ve got a ton of stuff going on, you’re a podcaster, an author, a frequent speaker, a soon to be dad and you’re leading a content team at one of the coolest SaaS in the world. One question we ask all our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you’re working on while staying happy? ---Ramli’s linksTwitter: https://twitter.com/ramlijohn LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramlijohn/LinkedIn posts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramlijohn/recent-activity/shares/ Product-Led Onboarding book: https://productled.com/book/onboarding/ Appcues: https://www.appcues.com/ Growth Marketing Today: https://growthtoday.fm/ ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created by SLB

What’s up everyone, today we’re diving into a fascinating conversation with Nick deWilde who’s leading an exciting web3 project.Nick’s an MBA graduate of Stanford University and a self described generalist who’s spent the majority of his career working with early stage startups He was the Managing Partner at Tradecraft, an education program that helped trained people for roles at fast growing startupsThis led him to lead product marketing at Guild, a company helping frontline workers earn debt-free degrees and credentialsShortly after having a baby, Nick then made the wild decision to leave his full time job and strap on a jetpack (fueled by early crypto investments) and go independent He worked part time at a venture firm incubating early business ideas alongside consulting for a few startupsHe writes an awesome career strategy newsletter called Junglegym and launched a talent collectiveHe also co-founded Invisible College, a school owned by the students that helps people learn, build and invest in web3.Nick, thanks so much for your time, really pumped to chat.Questions and topicsThere’s so many things I’d love to unpack today. I've become a huge fan of your newsletter and your work around career strategies, but I had to prioritize some of the topics today given the time we have together. I want to get into some web3 stuff as well but maybe we can start off by taking us back to 2021 when you were on paternity leave. Paternity leave makes you do wild thingsNick you wrote about stepping off a rocketship and strapping on a jetpack into web3. You did this 3 months after having a baby. Talk to us about this decision and what impact having your first child had on making a big career change.Nick’s Notes:Having a baby does funny things to your head. It limits the number of hours you can focus on work and reminds you that your time on earth is finite.The net result was both a decrease and increase in my career ambition. I no longer wanted to do things to impress a boss to move up at a company, but at the same time, I wanted to take a swing at something exciting. That led me to independence and stating Invisible CollegeZone of geniusOne of your guiding principles when you took the leap and went independent was to work in your zone of genius. For you that meant, creative ideation, crafting + executing a strategy and collaborating with people you admire.Walk us through this concept and how others might determine what their zone of genius might be?Nick’s Notes:Zone of Genius is a concept I got from a book called the 15 commitments of conscious leadership.Living in your zone of genius means that instead of choosing to spend your time living in your zone of incompetence, or compentence or even excellence, you are spending your hours working on things that you are truly great at and love doing.To find your zone of genius think about where you feel flow state, think about the skills you get compliments on, think about the hours of the day where you create the most value for others. When it’s time to leave your jobIn episode 48 last season we talked about when to quit your job. Being successful and happy in martech requires having a true north for your career. Sometimes, that means recognizing that your current workplace isn’t helping you advance your career.You built a chart that can tell someone when it’s time to leave their job. I’d love it if you could break that down for our listeners.Nick’s Notes:So imagine plotting all your skills on a 2x2 chart. On the top are all the things you like doing, on the bottom are all the things you don’t like doing. On the right is all the stuff you’re bad at. On the left is all the stuff you’re good at.Basically you want most of your work activities to be in the top left box – stuff you’re good at and like doing. These are things that are valuable for you and your employer. This should be at least 60% of your job. In the bottom right box is all the things you’re bad at and don’t like. This should be 0% of your job because neither you or your employer are benefitting. You’ll probably have some things that you’re good at but don’t like – these are skills you’re no longer enjoying learning. It’s basically taking one for the team.To make up for that, you should also get the opportunity to try out stuff that you aren’t good at but like doing.I think a good rule of thumb is 60% stuff you’re good at and like, 20% stuff you’re bad at and like and 20% stuff you’re good at and don’t like.If that gets drastically out of ballance you’re very likely to want to leave your job.The Great Online Game“We now live in a world in which, by typing things on your keyboard, or saying things into a microphone, you can marshall resources, support, and opportunities.” You reference this article written by Packy McCormick (the author of Not boring newsletter) many times in your work. Many of the folks I follow in web3 reference it as well. Talk to us about how this article lit a fire in you.Nick’s Notes:The Great

Today on the show we have a veteran of the SaaS marketing industry, we’re joined by Kamil Rextin. After moving from Islamabad, he worked in Karachi for 2 years at P&G and completed an MBA at Waterloo University. He got his start wearing many different hats like Growth, Demand Gen and Ops at early/mid stage SaaS companies in Montreal and Toronto including Breather, Pressly, Uberflip and CrowdRiff.In 2018, he took the entrepreneurial plunge and went out on his own and started an agency called 42Agency. 4 years later, Kamil’s agency counts more than 5+ full time team members providing demand gen, marketing ops and ABM services. He’s worked with top brands like ProfitWell, Hubdoc, Sproutsocial, Knak and many more scaling B2B saaS companies.Kamil’s a father, a founder, a podcaster, a community moderator, the author of the 42/ newsletter, a neurodivergent advocate… but most of his time is shamelessly spent on memes and hot takes on Twitter. Kamil – we’re pumped to chat with you today, thanks for taking the time.Questions and topicsKamil, I’ve dived into your twitter feed over the past year and there’s a ton of hot takes that we can dive into that I’d love longer than 280 character take on. Recently you did an AMA on the B2B marketing community on Twitter, I pegged you with a bunch of questions and wanted to let you expand on some of those – maybe we can start there.Running an agency vs in-houseFor guests that have gone the in-house and agency route, I love asking the pros and cons of both of them. You’re even more fascinating because not only did you do agency… you founded an agency from scratch and have been running it for more than 4 years now. What’s the biggest upside/downside of running an agency vs being an in-house marketer? What are some of your early learnings from starting your own agency?Future-proofed marketing skillsWhether they end up in-house or at an agency, if you were mentoring a fresh marketing grad, you said that you would recommend them to specialize in the technical side of marketing. Why do you think the quantitative side of marketing is where a lot of opportunity is?Technical marketingLet’s dive into that a bit more, I think people generously add technical marketing to their skillsets. What does it mean to you? Is it anything that has to do with reporting and integrations or using martech or is it more technical than that? Like how to manipulate data and build basic models or building a Data Warehouse?Analytics and Tracking in 2022From a quantitative marketing standpoint, the tracking analytics world is weird in 2022. The industry is moving away from session based tracking and with Apple and others making a big business out of privacy and with click based tracking only getting harder with cross browser tracking, what should marketers be relying on in 2022 and beyond? Is it incremental testing? Is it statistical models or ML?Martech buyer’s guide – Wirecutter for SaaSI actually discovered you 4 years ago when I stumbled upon some of your early martech buyer’s guide work. You were building the wirecutter for SaaS, I think the first one you did was on CMS, can’t remember how favoroubly you talked about WP (lol) but what happened to this project, are you going to pick it back up one day?https://twitter.com/kamilrextin/status/1338536972608999425 Dark socialSome influencers have denigrated tracking and attribution to the point where many recommend just ignoring it and trusting your gut. One of the main culprits of this is the rise of dark social. WTF is dark social, is it just a buzzword for offline referrals like in group chats or in Slack threads and forums, and do you buy into all of this hype? How much do you hate this term?SaaS companies should be a media company narrativeSticking to some of your hot twitter takes here, there’s a few more I’m excited to dive in with you. One of them is this idea that many influencers proliferate that SaaS companies should be a media company narrative. Why do you think this is bullshit?https://twitter.com/kamilrextin/status/1362544724813430786 Personal brandsAnother of my favorite twitter takes is your disdain for personal branding. A quick look at LinkedIn and Twitter reveals that building a personal brand has been dry humped to death. Every influencer is only an expert at self promotion. There’s a total lack of receipts and actual experience. It’s all about 24/7 self aggrandizement. Twitter screenshots on LinkedIn and nothing but dolphin claps and clicks. How do you really feel about building a personal brand?--Twitter

Our guest today is Emma Paajanen (Payanen). She’s currently based in Boston but was born and raised in a small town in Finland. She got her start in marketing at a Helsinki-based agency as a Comms specialist before moving to big tech at a cyber security company called F-Secure and also spending a year in internal comms at Nokia. Emma also had a freelancing stint while she was on parental leave from F-Secure where she later went on to lead Marketing Operations. Today she’s inventing new and powerful ways to engage with customers as VP of Marketing at Aiven, an open source data startup turned Unicorn, headquartered in Helsinki with hubs all over the world like Berlin, Boston, Paris, Toronto, some employees even work in a mountainside van. Emma thanks for your time, we’re excited to chat with you today!Topics and questionsBoomerang-ingYou worked at Ellun Kanat in 2010 then went to F-Secure for 2.5 years but you decided to go back to Ellun Kanat in 2014. After a tour of duty at Nokia, you also decided to go back to F-Secure in 2016.You and Jon have this in common – Talk to us about your experience being a boomerang, working at a company, leaving and gaining experience elsewhere, and going back to that company. You did that twice.Your time at F-Secure CorpYou spent over 3 years at F-Secure, working in 4 different roles, from Senior Marketing Manager of cyber security consulting to B2B Digital and content to then becoming Marketing Director and finally Marketing Operations Director.Looking back, what were some of the things you think that helped you move up from manager to Director? Walk us through your role as Director of MOPs at an almost 2k employee software company?Marketing exec roleSo now you’re VP of marketing at Aiven. You’re on the exec team. For the listeners who think they want to be an exec one day, talk to us about the difference of the day to day at Aiven vs earlier roles at F-Secure?Growing from series BYou joined Aiven in April 2020, a few months after their series B round. How big was the marketing team when you joined and how big is the team today?Startup turned $2 billion companyWith their latest round of funding, Aiven is valued at 2+ billion. What do you think makes up the DNA of a great marketing leader at a Billion dollar company vs an up-and-coming startup.Marketing a technical product to a technical audienceAiven offers technologies as managed services, that offering includes services and sometimes technical support is an add-on. Talk to us about marketing a technical product and service to a technical audience. Open sourceAs I understand it, Aiven helps companies leverage open source data technologies on a public cloud platform. Being at WP, Open-source is close to my heart. Talk to us about the transformative period that the open-source community is currently experiencing. (Many IT vendors that originated as open-source developers are starting to place restrictions on their own software licenses—decisions that might be shortsighted and driven by profits.) Content marketing is simply marketingA few years ago, you said that in 10 yrs, #contentmarketing will just be #marketing. Walk us through what you mean by that and do you think that content marketing is at the core of a marketing strategy?Going beyond the brandEmma, you’ve said that you’re passionate about going beyond the brand. What is brand marketing to you and what does it mean to go beyond branding? The importance of marketing experience and values over just the brand name. Happiness questionYou’re a working mom, you’re an executive at a Billon+ valued company leading a big team with big goals. One question we ask all our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you’re working on while staying happy?--Emma Paajanen, VP of Marketing at Aiven LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmapaajanen/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/emmapaaj ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created by SLB

What’s up everyone – today on the show we’re joined by exceptional martech mastermind: Dave Rigotti. He’s the co-founder & CEO of Inflection.io, a marketing technology startup focused on helping companies with product-led growth.Before building his own company, Dave has had a fascinating career in marketing. He got his start at Microsoft working on the Bing marketing team just as the search engine was launched. He quickly discovered his love for growth and B2B marketing.Hen then spent half a decade at Bizible, a marketing attribution platform where he worked his way up to VP of Marketing – and was part of the successful exit to MarketoHe spent a year at Marketo running ABM and demand gen before they were famously acquired by AdobeAt Adobe, Dave was Director of Account Based Marketing focused on Marketo and Magento productsLast year, while working on Inflection, he also launched the ProductLed.Marketing community which has more than 700 members and is continuing to grow.Dave, we’re excited to have you on the show – thanks for taking the time. Questions we asked Dave:What is Product-Led Marketing or Product-Led Growth?What’s the substance of PLG? What’s the difference between PLG and customer led growth?How is PLG different from all the buzzwords that hit marketing over the years?People in tech love to find new ways of avoiding calling marketing marketing. Growth hacking, conversational marketing, community led growth and now product led growth… What do you say to all the folks who claim this is just another buzzword that will fade?How is PLG different from freemium and why does this instigate such brutal Twitter wars?Traditional: generate leads and serve sales.PLG: using your product as part of your GTM. More customer centric.Jon isn’t active on social but I’ve witnessed my fair share of PLG debates on twitter.What do you say to folks who claim PLG has been around for decades (appcues, mailchimp) and that it’s simply a repackaging of freemium and free trial models… that its the old marketing playbook for the SMB segment? Where does a PLG model make sense? Can this be done with enterprise software that requires integration and onboarding support?How do you shift to a PLG strategy when you’re selling a B2B to enterprise and you require 1-2 weeks of integration and setup before end users can get a glimpse of the product in action.Do you think some B2B buyers prefer the sales led model? Sometimes I don’t always have 14-30 days to pork around in a product and figure out on my own if this will meet my company needs… sometimes I need someone to show me around and tell me how itll solve my problemsWe can skip the MQL vs PQL debate, but how do you define a PQL when your product is constantly changing?Product usage data is the holy grail of data for PLG marketers. How do you see teams forming their marketing strategy around product usage, activation, and engagement?How is PLG a whole new game?You wrote an awesome piece for OpenView Partners that PLG is a whole new game for marketers. Can you walk us through what this new game looks like? What do you say when you hear the phrase PLG is just a product that sells itself? What are marketers in PLG companies doing differently to accelerate growth and revenue? How will PLG influence marketing technology over the next 10 years? What are your big predictions? Shifting gears, Dave, you've worked at some of the most recognizable marketing technology companies on the planet. Not only have you held senior roles in those companies, but you’ve been on the inside of two major acquisitions. Give us a sense of your career story and how you ended up as a co-founder and CEO in this space?What differences do you see working at enterprises versus running a startup? What lessons do you apply to your own startup, and what things do you try to do differently?Dave, you’re a super busy guy. You’re a dad, a husband, a startup founder, and community leader – one question we ask all our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you’re working on while staying happy?--Dave RigottiTwitter - LinkedInProduct-led marketing communityInflection.io✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created by SLB

What’s up folks, today on the show we are joined by Adriana Gil Miner.Born and raised in Venezuela, she’s a 20+ year marketing exec who got her start as a data analyst and went on to work at American Express. She then worked with some of the top brands in the world after moving into PR and digital strategy at Weber Shandwick, an A-list agency according to Ad-ageAdriana then ended up going through a wild growth ride leading Brand marketing at Tableau– a well known analytics platform. Today, she’s CMO at Iterable, one of the top customer-led marketing automation platforms on the planet.Adriana, it’s a pleasure to be chatting today, thanks so much for your time.In-house marketing vs agencyYou’ve had a fascinating career bouncing from agency to in-house roles. Agency for 2 yearsIn-house for 5 years at AmexFreelance for 2 yearsBack to agency for 5 years at two different firmsBut along the way you got the in-house itch again and joined Tableau where you ran Brand marketing for 6.5 years. And you’ve been in-house ever since, getting the CMO gig at Qumulo and now Iterable. Talk to us about what you loved and hated most about in-house vs agency and why you ultimately settled on in-house.Follow-up: At what point in your journey did you decide you wanted to be a CMO? Was there ever a point where you considered staying IC and focusing on data vs leadership and people management?How ‘hands-on’ do marketing leaders need to be in the product they sell?Jon and I are no strangers to the world of BI having both spent parts of our career at an SMB focused dashboard tool in Klipfolio. As the SVP of Brand Marketing at Tableau, how close were you to the product and how skilled would you say you had to be in data analysis? CMO of 2030 -- what should they be working on today? Storytelling, data and technologyYou’ve said in several places that you love bringing together the art of storytelling, technology, and marketing. Talk about some of your most memorable breakthrough campaigns that exemplify this idea bridging story, tech and marketing. The power of storytellingLet’s dive a bit deeper into that. Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways for humans to learn. The best content and brand marketers know this and use it to persuade the rational and the emotional brain. How can marketers get better at storytelling? How can we make stories more relatable – practically, how can stories be more real, vulnerable when you’re selling a B2B tech product?Spotting up and coming marketing superstarsYou’ve written about having a lot of pride in discovering and nurturing up-and-coming marketer rockstars. Walk us through your approach for discovering some of these future rockstars and what are some of the early signs and qualities you look for.Customer advocacy and community marketingSomething that was a big part of your time at Tableau was prioritizing community marketing. Walk us through some of the benefits that this can have on brand growth and customer advocacy opportunities. The relationship between how we use marketing technology and community? Why is community such an integral part of successful B2B products? Branding gets a bad rep“I don’t believe in brand marketing. If you build a good product and people love it, they will share it.” I’ve heard too many technical CEOs say this. What do you say to a business leader that doesn’t believe in brand marketing and how would you respond to that if – as CMO – your CEO walked in a room and told you that? Follow-up do you think there’s anything marketers can do to change a founders mind if they don’t believe in branding? Do you think founders and CEOs need to create the brand so that marketers can drive the brand?Branding vs positioning vs GMT vs demand genMarketers get a bad rep for all the buzzwords we throw around but don’t all agree on what we mean when we say them:BrandingPositioningGo to marketDemand generationFor professionals who are supposed to be good at communication, we don’t do a good job at making ourselves understood. Walk us through your definitions and how we might better align with how we use them?Future of marketingThere was a viral tweet on the future of marketing last week that I thought was interesting and would love your take on. This is from George Mack, “Don't try to create great content. Instead, try to create Red Pills (dramatically transformed perspectives) that groups are thinking about but nobody is talking about.” How can marketers create more Red Pills? Being in the marketing automation space for a bit now, what do you think are some of these perspectives that need to be transformed?LatinX women in techYou’ve written bravely and powerfully about your experience as a Latina immigrant and shared your thoughts on the Caucasian male narrative that dominates much of the world. Talk about your change in mindset when it comes to the importance and power of checking that box despite not always feeling like you fit the stereotype people often have.Time management /stayin

What’s up everyone, on the show today we have one of the planet’s leading search engine marketers. We’re joined by Mike King. He’s the founder and CEO of iPullRank, an awarding-winning SEO agency. In 2020 he was named Search Marketer of the Year by Search Engine Land, and has been a Global Associate for Moz for more than 10 years. He’s been on the cutting edge of technical SEO his entire career, and he’s currently working on an upcoming book, the science of SEO: Decoding Search Engine Algorithms.He’s a confident introvert and proud Philly native, but these days he pulls rank in a cabana in South Beach, wearing Nike Air Max 1s, and listening to Snoh Aalegra. Mike’s also a Dad, a freestyle rapper, and a highly-engaging keynote speaker. Mike, it’s great to have you on the show – thanks so much for your time.Career path to starting your own agencyYou got your start as a webmaster working for Microsoft in 1996. Since then, you have worked in-house in numerous different SEO roles. Eventually, however, you founded iPullRank, an award winning agency. What prompted you to start your own agency? You started iPullRank 8 years ago, today your team is 15+ full time people. You’ve said that you love your team, but not in the “we’re a family” kind of way but rather in the "I respect these people and I want us all to win together" way. Talk to us about the kind of agency you built and what sets you apart?The art of an SEO auditI remember a few years ago when we worked with you and you and your team presented us with what I can only call an epic SEO audit. One thing that impressed me the most was that everything you outlined was practical and had clear implementation.Audits get a bit of a bad wrap. I’ve seen a few reports passed off as SEO audits which are effectively S.E.M.Rush or Ahrefs audits with a logo replacement.What should all SEOs be thinking about when they start a client audit? What’s the secret sauce of a great SEO audit.SEO is the testing we did along the wayA theme in your approach to SEO is testing rather than relying on the data provided by Google or other tools. Everyone is familiar with A/B testing things like landing pages and subject lines.What does testing in the SEO context look like? Can you give our listeners a primer?To code or not to code?I’ve been learning to code for a few years now. While I haven’t found too many practical applications to coding in my day job, I’ve personally found it fun to learn and gratifying to speak more at eye-level with devsYou have a strong background in coding. Do you think it’s an important or even an essential skill for modern marketers? What advice do you have for folks thinking about learning to code? The end of Universal AnalyticsThe one constant in SEO land is change. Though the end of Universal Analytics seems to be hitting everyone a bit different. What’s your take on this shift to Google Analytics 4? How are people preparing? Are people prepared?Future-proofing for SEOAlgorithm changes and updates are effectively part of the SEOs daily regimen. The only constant is change. How do you future-proof your website/brand against future updates? Is there a technology solution such as adopting modern frameworks like React and Gatsby with a headless CMS or is it by acquiring a certain set of skills as a contributor to be proactive (when possible) and reactive (when needed)? Top SEOs of 2032 In 2020 you were named Search Marketer of the Year by Search Engine Land. First, congrats on the accomplishment! Second, I’d like to get your perspective on the future of SEO and what it’ll take to be named Search Marketer of the Year in 2030?What skills will the top SEOs have in 10 years? If you were starting today, where would you invest in yourself?Technical SEO & Modern Digital MarketingIn 2016 you wrote a piece for the Moz blog on the technical SEO renaissance. You cover a lot of ground in that piece, but reading it now, it holds up incredibly well. Some of what you wrote verges on the prophetic, particularly when you think about Core Web Vitals and the importance of page speed and user experience.Modern SEO feels remarkably similar to developing a SaaS application – web teams need to focus on UX, performance, utility and, of course, content. If you were to write that piece today, what would your call to action be? Science of SEO BookYou’ve got a book coming out next year titled the “The Science of SEO: Decoding Search Engine Algorithms”What inspired you to write this book? What do you hope SEOs will get out of this book?Happiness, balance, successThe first line in your Twitter bio is dedicated to your daughters and you’re a firm believer in family over everything. You run a multi million dollar digital marketing agency, work with some of the top brands on the planet, regularly speak at conferences, you’re writing a book, and rapping on the side…How do you find balance in your life? What does happiness and success look like to Mike King? ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCo

What’s up folks, today on the show we are joined by India WatersBased in Atlanta Georgia, she’s a community management expert with a deep appreciation for startups. She got her start running community at Memoir, a NY-based startup that built a photo sharing app. The startup eventually pivoted to focus on photo sharing for the wedding industry and was later acquired by The Knot – one of the biggest wedding brands. India currently leads growth and technology partnerships at MessageGears, a customer marketing platform for enterprise customers. India thanks for taking some time to chat with us today!Early startup daysWalk us through some of the early days at Memoir, I read that you got 2 rounds of funding which included prominent investors. You spent 4.5 years there and I’m sure things changed quickly and often.The importance of trying new thingsBefore landing at Memoir – You graduated from UGA in the middle of a recession with not very many jobs available. Walk us through some of the earliest jobs you did and what advice you’d have for folks in similar positions today.Constantly changing strategies in startupsSo that eventually brought to startup land – Phil and I are no strangers to working for startups and needing to consider pivots and changing strategies. What lessons do you have when it comes to adapting to frequent strategy changes?Target customersYou first started working at Memoir which was an app for consumers and was probably hard to segment as it could be used by anyone. Then the company (Veri) refocused to pivot the app for the wedding industry which led to the acquisition. Now you’re at a tech company selling marketing software to marketers. Talk about how different it is to sell a product with product market fit or a more focused target customer?Community-led growthSome of your earliest focus areas were community growth. What did community-led growth look like 10 years ago vs today?Working up to different roles at a bigger companyYou’ve been at MessageGears now for a little over 4 years and you’ve held 4 different roles there. Starting with Market research analyst and biz dev to Growth manager, to senior growth manager and now Associate Director of Tech partnerships. Oftentimes folks will leave a company to get a promotion but your the perfect example of working up at the same company. Talk us through some of the ways you were able to get promoted and yeah walk us through that journey a bit.MessageGears – on premise vs SaaSLet’s talk about the product for a bit. You’re one of the 300+ names that show up on G2’s grid of marketing automation software but you describe yourselves differently. ‘the first and only customer marketing platform that connects directly to our customer’s enterprise data warehouse.’ Talk us through that, the first and only platform that connects directly to your DW On premise software vs SaaS and cloud based tools Connecting and using DW data vs (API) operating on a copy of your dataMessageGears vs Pardot and MarketoI noticed in one of your job openings that MessageGears actually uses Pardot to send marketing campaign emails?Work with Demand Generation team to execute lead generation, nurture and conversion programs in Pardot.What’s the difference between Mg and Pardot and why doesn’t MG use MG?Baby podcastYou started a new podcast with a colleague from MessageGears, tell us more about that!Time management /staying happyOne question we ask all our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you’re working on while staying happy?--India’s twitter: https://twitter.com/indialandwaters India’s LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/india-waters/ ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created by SLB

The great resignation phenomena has taken over mainstream media, but what does it really mean? Is it simply a buzzword for saying, more people than ever are sticking to remote work and not going back to the office? Or does it actually mean that more people are taking the leap and leaving bad workplaces, and toxic jobs? Let’s call it the great realization or the great awakening. COVID and the pandemic didn’t just open up the eyes of CEOs and managers to remote work, more importantly, it awakened a class of workers who’ve been sucking it up in a bad job thinking it was normal and that things aren’t better anywhere else. But these people are awake now. And better jobs and companies do exist. Here’s todays main takeaway: Hustle culture is dying. You deserve better pay, more flexible hours, less meetings, better benefits and better leadership.Last season in episode 048, we told you when to quit your job. In today’s episode, we’ll walk you through a simple playbook for finding a good job, with a company you love.JT are you ready?—The importance of networking in finding a job and how this doesn’t mean what it used to.Most leaders are looking for known quantities, and want a reference from within their circleDo good work at your current company, be someone others want to work with, complete your tasks on time – people will recommend youNetworking isn’t becoming an influencer; it’s getting to know the communityProvide value, and you will get value in return—I’m part of several marketing communities, one I’ve heard great things about and just recently joined is ALL IN, a free Slack community for in-house marketers created by Brendan Hufford, the guy behind SEO for the rest of us.One of the coolest channels is the #career channel where you can post questions about specific challenges. Recently a fellow member posted about having a hard time finding a new role. He mentioned applying to a bunch of places but not hearing back from any of them.I helped some of my former students in this exact situation and I’ve boiled it down to a simple blueprint for this episode. —LOL - I'm incredibly anti-social. I'm not part of any community -- I stay in touch with past colleagues;I will reach out to folks in community to do mind-shares -- that has resulted in most of my consulting opportunities.—Alright I’ll share the blueprint in it’s simple form and then I’ll go in depth on each step… you’ll see it’s pretty simple but it’s been super powerful for me in my career.Keep a nice list of companies you'd love to work forFind the hiring managers on LinkedIn and follow them (not the same as req connection)Add links to each HM’s activity feed in your list and check it out twice a week or more oftenLike their posts, reply to them when you think you can add valueKeep an eye on job postings they shareBefore you apply, reach out to the hiring manager and ask if they can answer questions asyncSend them thoughtful questions about how to stand out and what makes a great candidateCrush the application process—I like the advice on having a companies you’d love to work for. I imagine this requires a bit of soul searching on what you want out of your own career. How did you figure that out? And what does that list of companies look like for you? –Yeah I’m not super active on social in terms of spitting stuff out, but I’m what you could call a doom scroller… I read too much. So I’m fairly in tune with new companies or companies that are standing out. When I discover one of these companies, I add them to my list.Before getting a gig at WordPress, some of the companies I was actively keeping an eye on we’reZapierNotionBufferAhrefsAppcuesConvertkitCustomerioIterable1passwordVidyardBrazeGrammerly… —How do you come up with the list?—It’s a mix between the folks they attract, their products, their size and also that they’re fully remote. Everyone’s list should be a bit different whether you prefer big companies or small or fintech vs martech. –Alright, so you gotta list of dream companies, whats next?–Step 2 is finding their linkedin pages and figuring out who are the hiring managers on that team. So if you’re a marketer, look for the VPs and the director of marketing or growth or whatever you’re into.The key thing here is don’t just flat out cold ask for a connection request. Some of these folks are super friendly and they'll accept. But you don’t have a relationship yet so you’re better offer clicking on the “follow button”.Once you’re on their profile, scroll down to the activities section and click on See all activity, then hit Posts. That’s a direct feed to everything they post on LinkedIn. Grab that URL and add it to your spreadsheet next to the company name and the hiring manager’s name.As an extra step, you can search twitter to see if they are active on there too.–Up to you how often you want to do this but you can skip this stpe if you’re on LinkedIn everyday, chances are you’ll catch their posts anyway but in the spirit of digital minimalism, carve

What’s up everyone! Today on the show we’ve got one of my favorite email marketers and arguably the funniest marketing twitter account to follow, we’re joined by Samar Owais. She’s a top Email pro and female entrepreneur based in Karachi, Pakistan. She designs email strategies and writes email copy for SaaS & eCommerce clients with a simple goal: increase conversions and reduce churn.She isn’t your average consultant though. Samar is a model of courage and heart, known for being fiercely independent, doing excellent work, caring about results and always telling the truth. She’s worked with big brands like Drip, Pinterest and Hubspot, as well as solopreneurs like Paul Jarvis, Fix my churn, Copyhackers and a growing list of smaller Ecomm businesses. She runs an awesome email newsletter where she picks email fights and questions the status quo of how things are typically done in the email world. She also runs an ecomm bootcamp to help folks become email pros.Samar, we’re grateful to have you on the show.Pivot from content marketing to emailI have a lot of friends who started in email and ended up moving into content, sounds like you did the opposite. Give us the long story :)Discounts and emailsSomething I’ve learned from you is how to think about discounts in email. Discounts get a bad rep because they eat away at your profits, bargain brand perception, attract shoppers that are deal-focused and avoids addressing actual issues. Do you ever make exceptions to your no discount rules like bundled discounts in dtc or shipping delays… How to email marketing - without using discounts, especially when your sales team is requesting them or you’re starting a role where it’s just business as usual?Email approachAside from no (or as little as possible discounts) you’ve shared your simple strategy for email marketing also consists of extra focus on CX and open to experimentation. I’d love for you to expand on that a bit:https://twitter.com/samarowais/status/1486534280725602305 Email should be owned by everyone at the companyYou’ve said this before on a few podcasts, how do you operationalize that in bigger teams with growing opinions?Growing traffic that’ll convert into email subsOne of my favorite tweets of yours is when you claim too many folks obsess about growing an email list vs growing traffic that will convert into email subs. What’s the difference and what advice do you have for early marketers responsible for email and lead gen.https://twitter.com/samarowais/status/1487200305515274245?s=20&t=nZYTI902PZupV-xvupvH7g Ecomm email bootcampI love your ecomm email bootcamp landing page. “This is not a get rich quick scheme” and “I don’t teach anything inside this course that you can’t eventually learn and figure out on your own.” This is a very humble way of saying, “yo I’ve been doing this for 10+ years and I’ve crammed hundreds if not thousands of hours of experience and research into a digestible course so I can save you a shit ton of time.”Talk to us about your process for building an email course from scratch, how do you decide what’s important enough given the limited amount of content you can cover?follow-up:You tweeted about some of the email challenges as part of your bootcamp/workshop. One thing you said was being so proud seeing some of your students emerge as email strategist. What are early signs that tell you someone has “it”https://twitter.com/samarowais/status/1489243917476192266 Saas bootcamp course one day?I loved your tweet about maybe creating a similar email bootcamp for Saas but it would be a deep dive into pouring over customer research until you find the real problem and then figuring out how to fix it with email.In all seriousness, many SaaS are completely blind to this and we don’t have to talk about the importance of understanding your customers but ‘how do you fix things’ with email, can you give us some practical examples?https://twitter.com/samarowais/status/1483513135499780097 Email newsletter platformsYour email teardown newsletter is powered by Converkit, but I know you’ve been in a bunch of other platforms. Talk to us about your favorites and what makes a great email automation tool.Who you don’t work with.I love that on your site you have a section about who you don’t work with. “I’m not the email strategist and copywriter for you if you’re a tobacco, gambling, alcohol, or an arms and ammunition company.” What advice do you have for early freelancers that don’t want to work with specific companies but are afraid of being that bold this early?Girl educ...

What’s up everyone! Today we have a super special guest on the show, this interview is more than 12 months in the making – You probably already follow him on Twitter – I’ve personally learned a bunch from him and know you’re going to get a lot of value from our conversation today. Today we’re joined by Corey Haines.He’s a full time creator and the former head of Growth at Baremetrics. These days he keeps busy with many different things. He runs a weekly newsletter, And a growing marketing community, He also manages multiple podcasts, he wrote a few SaaS marketing courses, he built-sold-and bought back a marketing jobboard and he’s a startup marketing consultant/advisor. Most importantly, Corey’s all-round great dude with a world class beard.Corey, we’re grateful to have you on the show – thanks for taking the time.September 2020, you quit your job at Baremetrics to become a full time creator. You wrote about this and described it like you strapped on a spacesuit, launched into space and your plan is to figure out where you want to go from there. How has the journey been 1.5 years later? Do you know where you’re going yet?Yeah. Oh, man. The last year has been a whirlwind. I guess it's almost been like a year and a half now since I left. The North Star guiding goal has been to get into SaaS myself, start a SaaS company, maybe even a couple of products, and just have a small portfolio of bets and multiple things going on at once and see where they all kind of take me. I knew that doing that with a full time job is pretty hard, especially when I didn't want to step on your toes at Bearmetrics since we sold other SaaS startups. So I didn't want to build something that ended up competing with one of our customers. So I just kind of knew, like, that wasn't really an option for me. I didn't want to get another job and then start working on those side projects as well. But also, I wasn't really even close to building anything quite yet anyways. But I just wanted to kind of pull the trigger and jump and strap onto the rocketship, get into space. And then I could figure out where I was going from there. And on a personal level, very, very challenging. And like a lot of learning on hey, here's how to manage cash flow for all the different kinds of feasts and family cycles of freelancing and consulting. And just like knowing where to kind of find money and all the different revenue streams that you have when you're on your own, you don't have a paycheck really coming through the door. From a time management perspective, I've really learned how to be super ruthless with my time. I would say for the first four or five months I imagined once I left, I was like, I'm going to be free. I have so much time, I'm just going to get so much done. All these things are on my list. And then I didn't get anything done for like four months. I was like, what is happening? And because I had so many different meetings, so many admin things. I was busy doing emails, I was trying to chip away at small things here and there, but I was never really moving the ball forward in any one direction. And so I learned to be really ruthless. Now I do most of my meetings, like 95% of my meetings on Wednesdays. The rest of the week is completely wide open and I set what I want to get done, and I get those things done. And sometimes I work late, sometimes I work early. But you have to be really ruthless. It's been a great learning experience because really through the startups that I've worked for, consulting, advising, freelancing. Now I’m basically the marketing lead for Savvy Cal as well. So that's kind of helped bring back some stability in my life. And I see them all as just kind of practice rounds and getting in the reps and sets for learning how to build and grow a SaaS startup for when I want to do that for myself and for my own, especially the last year and a half, it's been like an invaluable learning lesson. Bootstrapping SaaS is really hard. You have to put yourself in the right position. Honestly, I wouldn't say that going the VC route is easier because I think raising money is really, really hard and it's a grind. And once you're on that track, there's a lot of expectations and it's a whole different game. But in the early days, it's easier because you have money, you pay yourself a paycheck. You hire the people to work with you. Bootstrapping is not easy. And so I would count this last year and a half as a part of my bootstrapping journey for building SaaS because it's all the work you have to do in order to be able to be financially stable, to put your time on something else completely without your whole world kind of exploding and going broke or, like, maxing out your credit cards. So I'm doing the best that I can, but I think I’m doing a pretty okay job so far. Multiple eggs in different basketsOne thing I want to ask about – you kind of mention the various different projects you're working on, like the idea of having multiple eggs in d

What’s up folks – we’ve been away for a while but we’re back and in full swing for season 2 with even better content than season 1.Today we’re going to tease some of our early season 2 episodes and catch you up on what we’ve been up to since our break.JT, in August of last year, your world changed in two huge ways. Your wife gave birth to twin boys Felix and Clyde.You might hear them in the background of a few episodes as we usually coincide with feeding time.Man – a huge family of 6 now, 2 girls, 2 boys… are things starting to settle down a bit now having crossed the 6 month mark?As a hopeful parent one day myself, I have many questions, the first is: with your twin boys, did you ever mix up which baby was which and just went with it? Is it true that even in identical twins, belly buttons are always different and the best way to tell them apart?Walk me through the routine of managing a tsunami of children. When does Jon go to bed, between all the diaper changes, do you get any time for yourself, are you still finding yourself able to get up super early?You’ve said to me that having a 4th baby is like being handed a baby while you’re already treading water… Do you still agree that going from 0-1 is the biggest transition?Tell the listeners about your freaking sauna and how it’s changed your life LOLSo after your parental leave – you took back the helm of leading Klipfolio’s marketing team. What’s exciting you the most about what the team is cooking up over there these days?Phil, you started at Automattic / WordPress.com in June last summer, you’re coming up on 10ish months now. Having only ever worked in startups before, how’s it been adapting to a 2,000+ person org?It’s been pretty wild honestly. Automattic is like a mini Berkshire Hathaway – a holding company of sorts that houses many different products and brands under one roof. I have colleagues that work on Woo Commerce (the open source Shopify), Tumblr (Taylor Swift’s favorite social media platform), and some that work with me on WordPress.com. But we also have WordPress VIP, JetPack, Long Reads, Simplenote and during my early days there we acquired PocketCasts (the best podcast app) and DayOne (a journaling app that I’ve been using for many years).So wpcom isn’t a 2,000 person company, we’re like 400 but yeah biggest marketing team I’ve ever been part of for sure. Biggest transition period for me was less about working with a bigger team and more about working asynchronously across multiple different teams. We use a tool called P2, its an open source collaboration app built on Gutenberg/WP and it’s how we mainly communicate with each other.Aside from a few HR emails, I don’t think I’ve ever had an email from a colleague. Everything is on P2 or on Slack. We do have some synchronous zoom calls, but any key decisions is always posted back on P2.Missed a week because of a vacation, you don’t need to have a colleague catch you up in a meeting, you have a nice list of unread P2 posts and you’re right back into it.It honestly feels like a different world… but I think it’s where the world is moving.What excites you the most about working at WP almost hitting the 1 year mark.I’ve sharpened my growth experimentation skills and my email copywriting skills but I find the product fascinating. I got to take a tiny part in rolling out FSE, WordPress’ big 5.9 update which came with some huge changes to the product. It’s already been downloaded by 60M sites across the world and it’s been really fun tagging along and seeing the next lineup of changes.So with all the stuff going on, we definitely leaned on guest episodes to start season 2 and we’ve got some big names, some folks are huge on twitter, some folks are c level in big tech, some are up and coming super stars, you know us, we've got a nice mix of folks with wide ranging topics and opinions.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

HUGE thank you to all of our awesome guests. In celebration of our 50th episode, we're rounding up all the answers to the most important question we asked every single one of our guests: what advice do they have on how they've managed to balance everything life throws at them and how they stay happy and sane at work.This is our 50th episode. Most of our episodes were actually just the two of us, jamming on a topic. Sometimes we went deep in a technical topic like email deliverability or lifecycle. Sometimes we talked about the people skills, working in tech, working remote. 15 of our 50 episodes had guest interviews. We showcased martech folks from different roles and seniority levels. But for each of our guests, we finished by asking the same question: What advice do you have on how to balance everything life throws at you and how do you stay happy and sane at work?Our guests share their answers back to back, time stamps below:02:00 - Lauren Sanborn (05: Happiness at the intersection of sales & marketing)"Happiness is all about your perspective, 25% your situation and 75% how you look at it." 05:22 - Brian Leonard (07: Be friends with engineering with open source Martech)"The secret of autonomy and purpose is to work on something that is important. Find a way to write your own job description so that it lines up with your purpose and mastery."06:16 - Nick Donaldson (10: Curiosity, learning & success in your MOPs career)"Prioritize your family and your friends. Turn off notifications outside work hours and dedicate time to doing things you enjoy." 07:40 - Jonathan Simon (11: Do you still need a degree to have success in marketing?)"It’s hard. Exercise and mental health is incredibly important. Pick up hobbies, do what makes you happy, find time for yourself." 11:02 - Julie Beynon (17: Making marketing analytics not intimidating)"You have to be proactive. You’re the only person that owns your happiness. If you’re not happy, you need to fix it, not someone else."13:10 - Steffen Hedebrandt (19: Reaching B2B attribution nirvana)"Having a kid makes you become really good at prioritizing. I ask myself, does this make me happy or does this correlate with more revenue yes or no?" 14:40 - Naomi Liu (25: How to ace your first marketing job)"Tech is my love language, and I get a lot of satisfaction using it to solve other peoples problems both in my personal life and business."15:08 - Melissa Ledesma (26: Melissa Ledesma: Women of Martech)"I encourage you to step away and talk to your friends about your job. They will not understand a word of what you’re saying, and let them show you their own excitement and absorb that. There’s so much more for us to be invigorated by if we take a moment to remember what we’re actually doing." 16:45 - Erin Blaskie (27: Startup marketing, in-house vs freelance)"Ditch everyone else’s definition of success. Nobody cares that you drive a BMW and it likely won’t amount to additional happiness. Focus on what would make you feel successful as a person and don’t be afraid of having a non linear path." 19:11 - Shannon McCluskey (37: Searching for remote martech pros)"Ever since I’ve become a mom I’ve been learning by necessity and actively keeping my working hours 9-5. Remote work is always around the corner but it’s important to get that distance to make sure you connect with family."20:37 - Pierce Ujjainwalla (39: Creativity in marketing is under attack)"I never work past 5. I never work on the weekends. I attribute happiness to pleasure and challenges. Pleasure is golfing and skiing and I find a lot of challenge in my work but also some hobbies. Lawn care gives me a mental break. Digging out weeds is very relaxing." 22:33 - Manuela Barcenas (41: From first marketer to team manager)"To stay balanced and happy, find activities that make you feel good, block time in your calendar for specific tasks and get into journaling."24:38 - Roxanne Pepin (44: Startups and the ability to learn RevOps)"Having a separate space in your house for where you work. Being able to “leave” and not have to bring your work with you in other places of your house. Oh and take Slack off your phone!"26:54 - Danica Bateman (46: A day in the life of a Marketing Automation Manager)"Surround yourself with positive people. People that are invested in your success and want to see you grow and thrive." 27:48 - Vladlena Mitskaniouk (47: Grow your marketing career one data mystery at a time)"Acknowledge that things came in waves. When the clam is there, really embrace those moments. Don’t always try and push yourself through every moment. Book vacation well ahead of time and check out. Book time for your lunch, book time for your workouts, book time in the morning to do a checkin with yourself. No one else is going to save that time for you. "✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Half of all podcasts have fewer than 14 episodes. When we started Humans of Martech, we were determined not to become a statistic.As we near the end of our first season and approach our 50th episode, we wanted to give you a peek behind the curtain to see how we think about this show.For us, at least, the idea of hitting 50 episodes is a big milestone -- and anyone thinking of starting their own shows -- whether it’s a personal project or for your company -- needs to be prepared to put in some work.Let’s dive in!Show thesis & missionWhy is your show worth your audience’s timeWhy is it worth your timeYou have to be motivated to do this week after weekEquipmentQuality is important; get a good set upMic; A cardioid (heart shaped) polar range eliminates unwanted background noise from behind and the sides, making this an affordable mic that's suited for podcastingAudio-Technica 20 SERIES AT2005USB Cardioid Dynamic Microphone amazon linkI read a lot about mics and tested a few out, I don’t recommend the Blue Yeti mic despite so many podcast guides recommend it. You will suffer from something called proximity effect. The Blue Yeti is a Condenser Mic, not a dynamic mic. Condenser mics will pick up sounds a mile away, and there are indeed valid concerns around air conditioners running etc.Get a pop filter, practice how to mindfully not blow air in the mic when you pronounce Ss and Ps and Ts.Zoom — but also tried riverside. Riverside was amazing quality, but too amazing. We needed to clean up too much of the audio because it highlighted too many imperfections for my taste. Zoom gets the job done, make sure in your settings you boost audio input from everyone, you don’t reduce too much background noise and that you record separate audio files for each participant. Editing -- Garageband for the win. I usually clean up the audio files in Audacity, I have a few plugins that clean up some audio, especially when we have a guest that comes on recording from their laptop mic. DistributionTransistor.fm to auto distribute and host everything for usAnchor, soundcloud also optionsApple PodcastsSpotifyPocket CastsGoogle PodcastsA lot scrape Apple thoughApple isn’t a great service when publishing, any edits take a while to update the RSS, best to publish earlyStyle of showWe love having guests on but only about 40% of our episodes are run by a guestWe worked a lot on the show formatresearching and writing episodesone person as subject matter expert, one person as hostThe lost episodes5 or 6 episodes that were recorded and on Phil’s computerTook a while for us to get our groove. even the early episodes of this season we notice a big improvementPromotionThe part of the show we invest the least amount into. Our mission is to help marketers be happy & successful — we believe in that mission and that over time the show will build an audience by providing valueWe did experiment with a few things:Mailchimp listTwitter and LinkedIn posts weeklyHeadliner and audiogramsOwler for translationsIndividual episode artworkCohost vs solo: it’s really nice to have a cohost when interviewing guests — get a moment to think as you go; if there’s an awkward pause as you think of your next question the host comes in. Advice if you’re starting a podcast for your business or on your own:- Develop a strong thesis -- it’s the beating heart of the show and will keep you motivated in the long run

Whether you’ve got something lined up or you need a fresh start, quitting your job is a huge life decision, -- in today’s episode, we’ll cover signs to look out for that might be telling you it’s time to move on from your current role. Being successful and happy in martech requires having a true north for your career. Sometimes, that means recognizing that your current workplace isn’t helping you advance your career. It could be you’re not happy with your work culture or work for a bad manager; or, it could be that it’s time to move on to acquire the skills needed to reach the next level.Alright JT, I feel like this episode has been a long time in the making. We teased about it in the trailer, it’s something most people do a few times in their career; handing in that two weeks notice. But leaving a job isn’t always about leaving a bad workplace or boss. Sometimes you work for someone awesome at a great company, but it’s time to move on for your own progress. No one gets to decide that for you. You call the shots in your career. Leaving a job should be objective: Make a list of pros and cons when comparing two positions. What factors matter most to you? What are your goals? Knowing when to quit your job is about having a sense of your north star for your career. Having a north star for your careerFreedom with your careerHave red linesCareer mission statement For me, there’s many ways you can make this more complex for this but in its simplest form, the north star of your career is your vision for fulfilling 3 things: 1- Passion and meaning, something that motivates and energizes you2- Sustainable income, cover costs comfortably, save for futureAnd 3- can be pursued in balance with your personal life, something that allows you to spend time with family, build strong relationships and good health. That’s it, it’s a simple formula. It’s more guide posts. Early in your career, the 2nd factor is less important and usually the 3rd factor is less busy so you can double down on the first factor and discover your work passion and meaning. It’s okay to change your North star Career plans are meant to be flexible. My favorite part about the north star metaphor for career purposes is that the North star actually changes and it isn’t exactly north. The current north star is Polaris, but because the Earth’s axis shifts every several thousand years, different stars will serve as north stars. But also, the North Star isn’t exactly north. Polaris is the closest star to true north, and is "close enough" for most basic navigation purposes- So your career north Star can change and it doesn’t have to be super specific. Like our sailing ancestors, when we are lost at sea, it’s meant to guide us. We can always look up to the sky to reorient ourselves and get back on course. Example:Years 1-5, no salary objective. Only objective: trying shit out.Years 4-6, company objective; work with top talent in cityYears 5-7, find a niche or dive into leadership GoalsAdvice: Have specific career goals every year or two, reset them. Maybe you joined a company as a marketing specialist with the goal of learning everything you can about their tech stack to one day become a marketing automation manager. That could be with that company, or another.Tell your boss about your goals, help them help youNever say no to a coffee, especially early onMoonlight/freelanceKeep a solid LinkedIn profile, keep an eye on jobsWhat does it mean to ‘hit’ your ceilingWhat does it mean to hit your ceiling and how do you know you’ve hit it? Is it when you staying in your comfort zone too often. “I learned everything I could” but did you? Is that even possible?Your career needs new stimuli:Growth requires stimulation. If you’re not getting enough in your current environment, it can feel like you’re stalling outNo mentor at your current workplace. This is why you sometimes see a chain reaction when a senior leader leaves Signs it’s time to quitAt what point did you realize it was time to quit? What are the sure signs it’s time to leave a job?Unsupportive coworkers / boss, when your boss/coworker doesn't like you.When you hate going to work, get the Sunday scaries.When you bring that stress home. You feel unhappy at home because of work. When it impacts your health.Your role no longer supports your long-term career ambitionsYou want to work with a different industryYou want to work with a mentor or a team that can level you upYou just “feel” it’s time for a changeYou found an exciting opportunityCareer or role switchSometimes, you just can’t get the opportunity at your current company.If your dream is to be an Marketing Analytics pro, but your company doesn’t invest in the tools you want to advance your careerHow to quit your jobThis is an unsung part of the process. I think that leaving in a respectful manner is incredibly important, and sometimes it’s hard, especially if you’re emotionally invested in the company (negatively or positively)You can determine exactly how but

Hey everyone, today on the show we are joined by Vladlena Mitskaniouk, Director of Digital Marketing at Snyk. Born in Moldova, raised in Ottawa, she’s a communications grad who’s spent her decade plus career carving a craft in digital marketing and marketing analytics. She got her start at a real estate agency where she learned content marketing before working at MD Financial where she became Digital Marketing Manager and started getting really deep into tracking, analytics, marketing operations and advertising. Vladlena then transitioned to the tech industry where she led a Global marketing analytics and digital marketing team at Trend Micro. She’s now a year into her role as Director of Digital Marketing at Snyk — a security company for cloud native apps on a mission to make the world a safer place with more secure software. Vladlena thanks so much for chatting with us today!Here are the questions we asked Vladlena!Learning about your audienceVladlena, you’ve marketed to consumers in the real estate industry, physicians in the finance industry, Chief information officers in the cybersecurity industry and now developers in the cloud native application industry. Talk to us about your process for learning about your audience and your users when you start a new role?Starting out as a directorTalk us through joining a marketing team at a director level on a remote team. For our listeners, what does that process look like and what are the first 90 days like?BuzzwordsDigital marketing, analytics, operations -- how interchangeable are these to you? What skills are transferable and what skills are net new?Ops and analyticsWhat should all marketers learn about operations and analytics?Demand for technical marketersIMO - The demand for specialized, technical marketers has never been higher. For folks looking to go that path, what advice do you have? How do you get the skills required?Roles at SnykTalk to us about some of the open role(s) on your team, I counted 10 open reqs in the marketing department at Snyk! Continuous learningA quick look at your goodreads profile shows your love of non fiction books (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't and Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics) -- You recently posted about being one of the first LinkedIn Ads certified--what’s the value of certifications from your perspective and maybe talk about how you handle continuous education?Last questionWe always end by asking our guests what tips they have for maintaining a healthy and balanced life?--Vladlena on LinkedIn and twitter.Snyk's site and open jobs.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

She’s a product of Dalhousie University where she studied Commerce with a major in Marketing Management and completed 3 Coop work terms: first with Excel HR, Syntax strategic and finally Canada Post. Those internships landed her a marketing strategist position at Versature, now net2phone Canada, a local cloud business phone service provider.She’s spent almost 3 years there and has been through a big acquisition. She’ll probably agree that in her time there one of her biggest projects was a big re-branding to net2phone. Danica was promoted last year to Marketing Automation manager where she holds the keys to Salesforce Pardot, one of the biggest marketing automation platforms on the market. She’s certified by SEMRush, Hubspot and Google and she’s also a lights-out brilliant copywriter. Danica, thanks for logging out of pardot for a bit and chatting with us!Here are the questions we asked Danica: Marketers like to make fun of formal business degrees because of how far removed they are from the practical world? What are things that can be self taught that were useful in your first role that you didn’t learn in your degree? What are things you are super thankful you picked up? Walk us through a day in the life, what’s your typical schedule look like? What are some of your favorite projects so far? What advice do you have for marketers looking to transition into marketing automation? How have you invested in your personal development? What do you wish you had known before starting a career in marketing? You joined your company in an entry level role and last year you were promoted to MA manager. Walk us through things you think helped you get promoted and gain trust among your peers? We always end by asking our guests what ti-s they have for maintaining a healthy and balanced life?--Follow Danica on LinkedInnet2phone Canada✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

The marketing landscape is vast, the landscape of doom has as many vendors as their are stars in our galaxy. The T-shaped marketer model is good for folks early in their career — perhaps. I think it’s too regimented, formulaic, and encourages marketers all to acquire the same set of skills — albeit with your own unique depth. I propose a marketing constellation. Bare with me. Like our ancestors staring up the night’s sky, you can use your imagination to come up with your own constellation. Maybe your skillset is an archer or a bull or maybe it’s a lion. Maybe depending on the season of your career, you have a different perspective. So what is the T-Shaped model?Horizontal line at the top - those are your skills. Vertical line that extends down from categories at the top — that’s your depth of skill. I first learned of the T-shape model from an article Brian Balfour wrote in 2014 where he describes a learning path for growth marketers and encourages them to see career progression shaped like a T with 3 levels. Base knowledge: non-marketing specific, a base layer to build from, think behavioral psychology, analytics, positioning, design and ux, storytelling, research… Marketing foundation: marketing specific concepts that are used across channels, think experimentation, graphic design, copywriting, funnel marketing, HTML, customer experience. Channel expertise: where most marketers eventually need to make some choices. Channels are ways you can reach an audience. They are ever changing and emerging, think FB ads, social, Seo, content, email, partnerships, product marketing... So the recommendation is that you get as much breadth in the first two levels as possible to get a nice foundation. When it comes to the 3rd level, this is where the vertical bar starts. You still want some kind of baseline across channels, but most marketers eventually become skilled at a smaller number of those channels and a deep expertise means a vertical T. Brian’s model is focused mainly on growth and customer acquisition. Marketing isn’t just about reaching your audiences so to apply this to a more general marketing path, Buffer took a stab at it too. Where is the model useful? I find it super useful when discussing hires with non-marketing folks — explaining that this is the general skills I’m looking for in a new candidate. So why does JT get cranky about it? It pigeon holes marketers and over simplifies skillsets. It represents regimented thinking and I don’t like that. I think it’s an outdated model that doesn’t exactly benefit marketers. I admit, part of this is I can’t put my finger on it. I’m actually a fan of the t-shape if presented in the right light. But I do admit it’s a very simplified version of your potential areas of focus. What I like about the model is that it encourages early marketers to get a solid foundation and base knowledge before necessarily worrying about specializing in a channel. What does it mean to be a t-shaped marketer? It means they have a solid foundation of concepts and channels but they are experts in one or a few channels. But it doesn’t mean you need to strive for a T. You can be a Y or a W or an M. you’re career could take you in many different paths.Okay so why a marketing constellation? Because you can’t be grouchy and complain about something without suggesting an alternative! It’s an understanding that — like the stars in the night sky — the potential skills you can acquire are varied and spread out. It requires imagination and storytelling to weave those skills together to create a representation of your skills. I also think it’s more likely to represent the potential depth and specialization of each area. Marketing automation isn’t just one skill. It could be: LifecycleLead scoringProject managementLead managementEmail operations and deliverabilityTechnical integrationsAnd you may be more skilled in one area of operations than another. ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Today we are joined by Roxanne Pepin, she’s currently based out of Spain but works for Rewind-- an Ottawa based startup as a Revenue Operations Specialist. She manages all the tech that powers Rewind’s sales, marketing and success teams. Before carving a niche in operations, Roxanne wore many digital marketing hats working for an SEO agency then a tech company. She’s actually a computer science drop out turned writing grad where she also spent time in content marketing. More than just a fixer or a troubleshooter, she’s a convergent thinker. Roxanne is described by her peers as a poised and knowledgeable Salesforce admin and a Hubspot platform whiz with a knack for bridging departments together. Her journey growing into a role at one of the coolest companies in Ottawa is deeply rooted in mastery and pragmatic problem solving. Roxanne, we’re pumped to finally have you on -- thanks for taking the time and chatting with us. Is being a digital nomad really as good as it looks? Yes, maybe even better. lolRemote commsYou’re servicing a team of what 40+ marketing and sales teammates? How do you effectively communicate and collaborate with your team remotely from your spain office? Honestly, a lot of my role is answering emails and messages, but I find that being six hours ahead and having my mornings free because my team isn’t online yet allows me to hunker down without distractions and get stuff done. Then when people start to come online I have time to focus on them, hop on calls or zoom meetings, and dedicate that time to them. Everyone knows my schedule, they know that I’m only online until noon their time so they book meetings or slack message me during that time. As long as we communicate our schedules everything works. I try to both remain flexible if there’s something that needs to be done, but also stick to my working hours so that I don’t just have my face buried in my computer at all hours. It helps to have people on your team that you trust to do a good job and that you can direct others towards as well. How to say noOne of my favorite quotes from a presentation you gave to my students this year while describing your role and journey was:“everything is doable, but it doesn’t mean you should do it” lolMaybe walk us through some of the stories behind that mantra and why it might be helpful for other marketers when it comes to prioritization and concentration.Honestly, I’ve seen too many intermediary platform connections fail. I try to weigh how valuable an automation or a connection will be against how many connections and tools it requires. If you’re trying to eliminate three clicks from a process but I need to connect four different platforms to make that happen, I’ll likely say no because the odds of one of those connections failing is high and then we need to do damage control which will take a lot more time than your three clicks, you know? One thing that I’ve also learned is that everyone thinks everything they ask for is super important. And sometimes these things are only very important until they forget about them two days later. I once spent a few days connecting things and configuring things, working with a platform’s support team to get a couple reports combined that came from different sources that had very different ways of presenting data because it was vital that we combined these two numbers, but then when it was all said and done, no one cared or used the new report. Sometimes if I’m questioning the importance of someone’s ask, I like to let it stew for a couple of days just to determine if it’s really as important now as it was two days ago.I’ve also come across some things where it was like… “hey can do you automate this repetitive task” OR “can you set up a notification for this thing that happens a lot, I need to know when it happens”. Then a few weeks later I get the “hey, can you turn this off, it’s really annoying” message. TrainingAs someone who works in Ops, you don’t always get the chance to play on the front lines and do customer facing stuff. You often need to also focus on your teammates.Walk us through how big of a role training and facilitation comes into play in your day to day?Honestly, it’s in my best interest to make sure my team knows how to use the tools at their disposal. What good is it to me to set up processes and tools if people don’t know how to use them? Then we end up paying for things we don’t need. The other thing is that a big part of ops is to make things as efficient as possible for those customer-facing teams. In the end if I make their jobs easier, they can do more of what they’re meant to do and that leads to more revenue and more growth which is the goal we’re all working towards. No barriers Something I struggled with when I was in an Ops role was that I didn’t always get to pick projects, I didn’t always get a say in strategy. So if you could remove all barriers and constraints, what project or idea would you love to tackle or be known for solving.

What’s up everyone, this is part 2 of our two part episode on email deliverability and getting into the primary tab in Gmail.If you haven’t yet, start with last week’s episode where we covered 2 crucial classification factors according to Google. The content in your email and how users interact with your emails. Here’s today’s main takeaway: Most email marketers understand that email domain and IP reputation play a critical role in your ability to land in the inbox. But most email marketers will admit they are easily spooked by all the accompanying fancy authentication acronyms. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, they just mean allowing Gmail and other email clients to verify you as the sender. We’ll break those and many more email deliverability tips right now.Today’s episode will cover things you can do that would help with other email clients, not just Gmail. We’ll cover sender reputation, authentication as well as tactics in your automation tool to improve deliverability. 3. Sender repWe know for sure that factors that influence the spam folder are also factors in the inbox vs promos tab, that’s who the email is from. There’s an IP behind the sender, but there’s a domain behind the IP.Domain reputation vs sender ip reputation. There’s two main types of email reputation that can affect your sending: 1) IP Reputation and 2) Domain Reputation. Both reputation scores are calculated separately but as you’ll see as we unpack things, both scores are closely related as your sending ip is mapped to your domain.Mailgun has a dope article on this https://www.mailgun.com/blog/domain-ip-reputation-gmail-care-more-about/ Mailgun claims that things like domain age, how the domain identifies across the web and whether it identifies with entertainment, advertising or finance industries can all impact your domain reputation. They believe domain reputation ultimately matters more to Google.Other suspected factors by rejoiner.comDomain reputation / Past behavior of the senderIf you’ve been sending heaving promo/spam offers through email to hundreds of thousands of people for x years, you’re bound to have a mountain of recipients that marked you as spam. So just because a subscriber is new, it doesn’t mean you start fresh. A lot of senders actually have a ton of baggage from previous sends. Google is quite clear about this: When messages from your domain are reported as spam, future messages are more likely to be delivered to the spam folder. Over time, many spam reports can lower your domain’s reputation.Gmail best practicesGoogle provides a list of best practices for sending to gmail users, it’s not overly helpful but it has some valuable tips. Aside from the obvious, don’t impersonate another company, don’t test phishing scams and make sure your domain is marked as safe, here’s 3 things Google recommends:Authentication: Allow Gmail to verify the sender by setting up reverse DNS (domain name). This means pointing your email sending IP addresses to your company domain. Small number of sending IPs: Google recommends you stick to just 1 sending IP. They add that if you must send from multiple IPs, use different IP addresses for different types of messages. Ie; one IP for blog, subscriber emails, one for important product updates, one for upsell and promo. I often hear email marketers say that if you are getting stuck in the promo tab, just start a fresh new sending IP. The problem there is that this is a short term benefit. If you don’t make changes to your domain, that new IP is still authenticated to the same source with the same baggage. I have heard anecdotely that using separate sending IPs for customers vs leads greatly helps. But I know companies that don’t use this well and still have solid metrics. Different senders: Along the same lines, Google encourages you to use a different ‘from sender’s for different types of emails and that you don't mix different types of content in the same emails. Ie, your purchase confirmation/new customer onboarding flow should be sent by [email protected] and never include subscriber or promotional content. Your promotional emails should be sent from [email protected]. So stick to as little sending IPs as possible, but switch up your sender for different types of emails. Domain authenticationThere’s different ways of setting up authentication for your sending IPs with Gmail. The process will be slightly different depending on your hosting provider and your ESP. There’s currently 3 main authentication methods to prevent email spoofing; aka spammers from sending emails that appear to be from your domain:SPF record (sender policy framework)DKIM keys (DomainKeys Identified Mail) DMARC record (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)SPFPublish an SPF record for your domain. AKA Pointer (PTR) record. Every SPF has a single TXT file that specifies servers and domains that are allowed to send on behalf of your domain. You do this by uploading your updated TXT file on your domain provider s

In 2013, Google rolled out “A new inbox that puts you back in control” that allowed Gmail users to split incoming emails into different tabs. Today, 1 in 5 users enable the promos tab. It’s got a bad reputation: The promotions tab. Companies that send marketing emails are still trying to find ways out of the promos tab and into the primary tab. Here’s today’s main takeaway:Most companies should accept that their marketing emails are destined for the promos tab in Gmail. Instead they should focus on standing out from all the other newsletters. --and consider themselves lucky they aren’t in the spam folder. But there is good news. If your business is willing to radically change their HTML heavy templated email strategy in favor of a personal 1-1 text based strategy, brands can find a way into the primary tab.To get there, you need to get past two gates:The first gate is the spam filter and your reputation scores, the second gate is the category filter in Gmail and all the different signals that help classify incoming emails.In this two part episode we’ll walk you through the best ways to get past both of those gates.Gmail filter classification factorshttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gmail/how-gmail-sorts-your-email-based-on-your-preferences Google has said that Gmail’s classification system is pretty complex. It uses machine learning to choose which tab to put an email based on a bunch of factors.We’ll cover 4 main buckets over two episodes:1. Email content What’s in the emails, html, links, content types2. Personal actions Gmail says the most important factor in determining where an email lands in your inbox is your personal actions and preferences from that sender. 3. Sender rep The first factor they list is who the email is from. We’ll cover domain and IP reputation as well as authentication.4. Other things in your ESP that could help you reach the inbox1. Email contentThe default tabs/categoriesGmail has 5 default tabs/categories. They provide loose definitions for both, but the titles are pretty self explanatory. Primary, social, promos, updates and forums. Still though, businesses sending marketing emails will be asking how they can bypass the promos tab and get into the primary tab.Instead, businesses should accept that they live in the promos tab and they need to stand out from other newsletters and other onboarding emails. From the little bit we know about how Gmail classifies tabs, we can conclude that emails that land in the primary tab are:From people you know, not businessesNot from social network sites or forumsNot marketing or promotional based, not newsletters or CTA emailsNot notifications or updates or billsThat being said. There is room for marketing emails, or emails from brands in your primary inbox tab, if you treat that content from a brand like it was someone you knew and frequently communicated with. How? Use as little HTML as possible. Write like a person to a person. Instead of sending your email from [email protected], they send it from Brad. An actual person on their growth team.It doesn’t have a fancy HTML template with a bunch of images. It’s straight up, it’s funny, it’s helpful. It’s almost as if, despite working for a brand, this email came from someone you know.That’s how you get in the primary tab. Get your users to interact with your email.What are other content elements to keep in mind?We’ve talked about this one before, most gmail users treat email as a personal medium. Google knows if you’re sending an email with the words “discount” or “promotion” or if your html/image to text ratio is way too heavy html you’re destined for the promos tab, and without a major overhaul in your email strategy, you’re staying in that tab. Google recommends the obvious like, follow internet format standards, follow HTML standards, make sure users know where they’ll go when they click links, sender info should be clear, subject should be relevant, etc… But one thing lots overlook is how Gmail treats dynamic content/hidden content in emails.Don’t use HTML and CSS to hide content in your messages. Hiding content might cause messages to be marked as spam.Many ESPs offer “dynamic” or “personalized” content, meaning you can change the message based on the recipient. Sometimes ESP are simply using CSS and HTML to hide parts of a message.2. Personal actions Past behaviour of the recipientIf you haven’t opened someone’s newsletter for a while or you never clicked in an emailVs if you opened the first 3 emails and clicked on each and replied to 2 or you added the sender to your list of contacts Huge difference in signals to Gmail.Spam filter: Add to contact listThere’s really just 1 tip listed by Google currently on how to help prevent valid messages from being marked as spam or going to the promos tab:Messages that have a From address in the recipient’s Contacts list are less likely to be marked as spam. -> encourage new subscribers to add you as a contact in Gmail. Make it easy for

What’s up everyone, today on the show we are joined by another local favorite marketer, Manuel Bárcenas.She’s a personal growth enthusiast and a startup marketer on a mission to help managers & their teams work better together. By the age of 18, Manuela had lived in three different countries: Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. In 2014, she decided it was time for a new challenge and moved to Canada. She’s a journalism and communications graduate of Carleton here in Ottawa. She caught the startup marketing bug pretty early interning with Startup Canada right out of school and then working as a community developer at Carleton University. In 2018, Manuela was marketing hire #1 at Fellow.app one of the hottest startups in Ottawa. She’s been living the startup marketing life for nearly 3 years.At Fellow, she helped launch the successful Supermanagers podcast, she runs a huge newsletter (Manager TLDR newsletter) and self taught Hubspot and Google Analytics and much more.Manuela is a rising star and a must follow on marketing Twitter, she tweets about mindset, marketing and management. Manuela, thanks so much for coming on the show.Early journeyWhen you started at Fellow as the first marketer, did you have any idea what you’d be doing? Bring us back in time to your first couple months at Fellow.What was/did you have a 'calling moment' for marketing tech / marketingWhat was your biggest hurdle(s) as a 1 person marketing team and how did you adjust as the team grewWhen you look at the t-shaped marketer today, where do you see your specialty and how that’s evolved in the last 3 yearsMarketing tech Your journey learning Hubspot and other tools The newsletter and the podcast. Talk to us about the engine behind the scenes and the growth of both of these huge projectsMiscTalk us through your journey of writing and learning about management and then becoming a manager yourself and now leading a teamWhat advice do you have for early marketers that want to become managers?We always end by asking how you balance everything in your life and how do you stay happy :)Some awesome tweets from Manuela:https://twitter.com/ManuelaBarcenas/status/1337155886545039362 https://twitter.com/ManuelaBarcenas/status/1395077830250225664 --Manuela on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuelabarcenas/ Manuela on Twitter: https://twitter.com/manuelabarcenas Fellow.app: https://fellow.app/Supermanagers Podcast: https://fellow.app/supermanagers/Fellow blog: https://fellow.app/blog/Manager TL;DR Newsletter: https://fellow.app/newsletter/✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Experimentation lives at the center of growth marketing and it’s one of the best ways to explain how marketing combines art and science. Too much of today’s marketing is about attribution and data and reporting. We know that’s part of experimentation obviously, tracking lift on certain metrics. But the art side is really the idea generation part of experimentation. Trying things that not a lot of other folks are doing, going against the grain, trying crazy ideas. Isn't that what marketing is all about? Today’s main takeaway is: The most important part of designing experiments isn’t to have a single metric in mind or a rock solid hypothesis. It’s to create a knowledge base of insights from past experiments that everyone on your team can learn from. That’s what we’re calling sustainable experimentation.Sangram Vajre talks about 3 kinds of superpowers in marketing leaders:The doer; They make sure the world is running today in the best way possible. They get stuff done. People count on them to be operational.The driver; They can push projects through and assist with the process of securing buy-in from internal – and sometimes external – stakeholders.The dreamer; They are forward-thinkers who can help shake things up and come up with new suggestions. They spend time imagining the world we want to live in, the future. Bunch of ideas, but not always ability to focus and move those along.I’m wholeheartedly a dreamer. I spend my time digesting information, taking notes of cool ideas and keeping a swipe file of things to try.I don’t see growth marketers as scientists experimenting in a lab… I think of us as early adopters. We’ve talked about channel fatigue before and how eventually marketers ruin every new strategy and everything has diminishing returns.That’s why experimenting with new channels, new ideas is so so important.How to design an experimentGoal/objectiveAssumptions, supporting dataHypothesisImplementationReportingFirst things first, what’s your goal? When designing an experiment, I prefer having a single metric in mind, while still monitoring secondary metrics as well. For example, here’s an objective:Double the conversion rate of free trials to paid in the first 30 days from 2% to 4%.Next up is the hypothesis.Assumptions that back up your hypothesesBefore throwing out your hypothesis, it’s important to give as much context and supporting data for your hypothesis. For our free trial conversion rate objective for example, it’s important to have a complete understanding of user needs. In the free trial part of the funnel, users are still in the discover and try phase of their experience with your product.So in your hypothesis doc you could you can share supporting data that shows free trial users are more likely to convert to paid users if they have successfully experienced a series of key moments of delight. Hypothesis exampleFree trial signups who are segmented by activity and receive trigger based onboarding series–specific to what they’ve completed in the product–are more likely to achieve a series of moments of delight and are thus more likely to convert to paid than users who receive the current onboarding series.Implementation Each experiment should have a dependent variable (conversion rate of free trials to paid), and an independent variable (the onboarding email series). I also encourage folks to take a cohort approach to implementation. We split half the audience into a control group and a test group. The control group would continue to receive the current onboarding email series and the test group would be part of the experiment.In our example, we would split all signups into a test group and control group. The control group receives the current time based emails and our test group receives the new trigger behaviour emails in our experiment, and we compare conversion rates as well as monitor other metrics like product behaviours.Sharing insights across your teamI’ve used VWO in my past and love how they use some cool collaboration features.You can log observations from past experiments or data you’ve uncovered in other tools and log them into VWO. Eventually you could have a miny filterable db of observations that folks on your team can prioritize or sift through.These observations lead to hypotheses which are also a unique object in VWO. Before launching an experiment you need to first create a hypothesis, then link it to your experiment. After your experiment has run its course, the last object in VWO is Learnings, or insights. This is building a knowledge base of learnings from tests you’ve run so everyone is in the know.When you think of ideas in your company they all come and are stored in different places, word docs, project management backlogs, emails… VWO adds a bit of structure to everything that touches experimentation.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Hey everyone, today we are joined by one of the greatest minds in Marketing automation-- Pierce Ujjainwalla. Pierce started his career in lead gen at Cognos and IBM, working in some of the largest Salesforce and Eloqua instances in the world. He then spent a few years in startups leading teams that implemented instances of Marketo. Pierce has become a 4X Marketo champion and one of the first original champions, he’s also a frequent speaker at the annual Marketo Summit. In 2013, he founded RevenuePulse, known today as one of the top Marketo agencies in the world. He’s also the founder and CEO of Knak, an enterprise no-code email and landing page creation platform for marketers. He’s recently also become a podcast host, launching the Unsubscribed podcast. He lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife and 2 kids. Fierce Pierce, it’s an honor to have you on the Humans of martech!--Here's what we covered:Creation of Knak -- what problem did you see in the market?Email design -- is it truly the most difficult coding challenge? Why is it so hard to solve? How is Knak’s approach to email difference and so compelling?Is no code the future of marketing? How can marketers prepare for this future? Creativity in marketing and how it is currently under attack?Email and landing page templates, and why they are dead? Drink your own champagne day at Knak. Unsubscribed podcastTalk to us about your process for booking guests on your show and your journey to becoming the Joe Rogan of Marketing podcasts. Knak pagesEarlier this year the team stepped out of just email land and entered the world of CRO and landing page building. Walk us through that big change in GTM strategy and how the new product adoption has gone so far?Knak released its annual email benchmarksTalk to us about the process of building that research and what we’re some of the coolest insights?HTML in emailsOne of the longest standing debates in email marketing is HTML vs plain text. With huge research studies done by Hubspot promoting less HTML in your emails and tools like convertkit that (used to anyway) have a strong stance against html templates.Knak is a no-code email builder. Are most of your customers designing heavy html emails and do you disagree with the stance of going plain text over html?Last questionPierce, you’re a founder and CEO, you run two companies, you’re a prominent martech figure but you’re also an avid traveller, you ski, golf, play hockey--you’re a lawn care nut and you have two amazing kids…How do you find a balance between everything going in your life and how do you remain happy?--Pierce on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pujjainwalla/Pierce on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketing_101✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Data, data everywhere! If this conjures up the green vertical parade of binary numbers from the Matrix, you’re not alone in being confused. You might be thinking -- I didn’t sign up for this! You didn’t go to school for statistical analysis, so what makes you qualified to produce a marketing report? There’s a lot that makes you qualified to produce reports, even if you don’t feel like an expert. Marketers, particularly in smaller companies, need to learn enough to be dangerous. The main takeaway for this episode: you need to incorporate reporting into your skillset, and it’s not as scary as you think.IntroWe both have a background working at an analytics companySo much hype around data over the years, whether it’s big or smallIt can be super intimidating thinking you need to be responsible for reporting, and it’s way too easy to overcomplicate thingsThe difference between analytics and reportingThe terms are used interchangeably so often that it’s hard to really understand the difference.I think that one way to think about reporting and analytics -- for reporting, you’ll almost always have a clear understanding on what you need to report on.Analytics, you’ll likely be exploring data and not always sure what you’ll find. This is where having a data analyst is useful -- they can look at a data set and tell you if an insight is relevant or meaningful. Performance and exploration. That’s how I see the difference between reporting and analytics. Most startups don’t have time to prioritize either. But in the venture backed startup world, comes a bit more process and a board of directors that ask for monthly/quarterly reporting updates. A really nice sweet spot for learning to become dangerous is a bootstrapped startup that doesn’t have a big data team or requirements for long tedious reporting processes. But regardless of the environment that you’re in, marketers need to learn these skills if for nothing else -- to be able to show their worth, their impact on key metrics. Every marketer needs some reporting skillsWhere the heck do you start with this skillset?Confusion of reporting and analytics has marketers overengineering solutions to some simple problems. No, you don’t need to learn R and statistical analysis to be effective at reportingThink of analytics as exploring data for unknown insights and buried treasure. We can think of reporting as being accountable for the things you get paid to do.Start there. All my marketing reporting comes back to the question: is what I’m doing making a difference? Reporting on anything else is purely intellectual.So this sounds simple right? Show your impact… Reality is that different marketers will have access to different tools and metrics. But as soon as you start talking about marketing reporting, you quickly get to attribution and then multi touch points and you get lost really easy in all the noise and options of reporting.How do you get to what’s important?This is the ultimate question, and where you as a marketer are incredibly importantThe absolute best data analysts on the planet are the best because they can tie all that data and insight back to business strategyYou need to be able to answer business questions with your reportingYou should start simple. The marketing funnel is the ideal starting point for understanding marketing reporting. Map each stage of the funnel to a marketing metric and then start to fill in the data.For example, Awareness is the total sum of impressions across advertising and social media and interest is all web sessions.Boom - you’re already starting to get somewhere. This is how nearly every marketer structures their reporting and strategy. Start at the top of the funnel and work your way to revenue.Yeah we had a full series on lifecycle, starting at episode 12, check that out. You don’t need to be able to report on end to end multi attribution from the start. Small steps. Conversion rates from one stage of the funnel to the next is an awesome starting point. Even just focusing on one slice of the funnel.Lifecycle reportingWe both know that getting to revenue data isn’t always that easySales and marketing systems often come loaded with data issues or caveats around the processImpressions and sessions are easy to get -- log in to Google Analytics, your digital ads platforms, etc, and throw those numbers togetherThings can get hairy when you start working with contacts, deals, and new customersThis is where lifecycle is so key. You need a set of common definitions to even start getting to reporting nirvana. If you and sales don’t agree on what constitutes an MQL, it’s going to be hard to be successful creating good reports. The lifecycle series goes super deep into how to set all this up.Lifecycle reporting is probably one of the most useful ways to report on marketing data. This is definitely high level reporting and should map to your strategy quite nicely. As you progress through each stage, you get a series of conversion rates and base

Shannon McCluskey is an analytical marketing leader at the top of her game counting 10+ years of martech experience with amazing SaaS companies.She works out of Vancouver but is originally from Ottawa, she’s got a Bcom from the UofO and a masters in digital technology from university of Waterloo.She got her early start in marketing and UX at Fluidware, an Ottawa based startup with the same founders that are now behind Fellow.appFluidware was later acquired by SurveyMonkey where Shannon went on to spend almost 3 years in marketing ops where she worked with some of the top Marketo experts in the world.She went on to run the remote Ops team at an HR SaaS called Visier for almost 4 years.Shannon is currently Marketing Ops Manager at Clio - a distributed cloud-based legal tech company and she’s building an awesome team with interesting open roles right now.She’s certified by Marketo, Salesforce and Demandbase. She’s spoken at top marketing conferences like the martech conference in San Jose.Shannon-- thanks for taking the time to chat with us today!- Your journey from Ottawa startup to Survey Monkey > Visier and now Clio - What's Clio and what does your team do, how do you market to lawyers - How a remote company of 600 people is run, how your MOPs team is run - What advice do you have for aspiring MOPs professionals? How do you know this path is right for you?- Are you getting lots of applications, what are your thoughts on the supply and demand of martech talen right now?- Describe the current role / pitch the opportunity on your team- Give us an example a project someone on your team would own, like a campaign a nurture, a data hygiene program or a compliance program - In the posting, the JT is specialist, but looking at the exp and the skills required, you’re considering both early marketers willing to learn at the same time as a more seasoned IC with MKTO + SFDC experience. How do you balance that, how do you pick?- The stack you're building with- You lead a team, you're a frequent speaker and a constant learner, you also have a busy personal life, you’re a mom working from home, how do you balance everything you have going on in your life to stay happy. --Shannon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonmccluskeyThe Marketing Operations Specialist posting: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio/jobs/3142437 All job openings on Clio: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Hey everyone, this is part 3 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.In the last 2 episodes, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit and we also covered the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics. In today’s episode, we’ll cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with, we’ll take a nice deep dive in behaviour-triggered emails.So you’ve dived into the user’s world, you’ve gone through all the emails and suggested improvements on the first emails and how to avoid selling too early. Now you want to figure out what you should suggest in terms of improvements.What are some of the highest impact experiments you’ve led? One spot I like to start is inactive users. When it comes to reactivating users, B2C can be very similar to B2B. B2C calls them abandoned cart emails, and they don’t have to be treated too differently in SaaS B2B, but it’s easy to do this wrong.Re-activating dormant usersBy day 3-4 of your onboarding sequence, it makes total sense to sell but probably only to users who have gotten started. 50-70% of free users have either left the product or are kicking the tires on several other options. We call these dormant or inactive users. They check you out really fast and give up. The majority of these are users you will never convert in the first place.But amongst this group of inactive users there's plenty who would convert if they get invited back into the product. The approach needs to be creative and helpful. We need to delight these inactive users, not sell them.The angle should rather be showcasing similar customers who have completed similar jobs to be done.Triggered-based behaviour emailsMost onboarding series are not tied to what users have completed so far in the product, it’s 100% time-based and not outcome-driven and assumes all users are ready to buy 15 minutes into their journey. Outcome driven trigger-based emails (instead of time), based on what users have completed and not completed in the product.Here’s how I’ve approached implementing this as an experiment:I would suggest starting with 3 main cohorts of users: DiscoverGetting startedUpgradeMost series push users quickly past steps 1 and 2 and hammers step 3 for many emails to follow. (1) DiscoverThe first activity cohort (Discover) is all about getting users to their first unit of value. For Convertkit, that might be importing your subscribers from Mailchimp, or maybe creating their first form. This is all about getting users to a quick win, browse all the different signup form options and connect it to your site. Instead of waiting 15 minutes before the next email, a triggered email could send after sign up form creation congratulating the user on connecting Convertkit to their site, reminding them how easy it is to swap forms and pushing them to the next cohort of users.If users who signup become inactive and are not able to create a signup form or do anything else after 15 minutes, it’s safe to assume we’ve lost these folks and instead of pushing them a discount or a promotion, we should be teasing them about existing customer signup pages, focusing on that first win. We need to re-activate these users before we worry about selling to them. Coordinate with the product team here for best results. What is the typical time to conversion event. Also, it is worth thinking about consequences and complexity of moving to an activated track or not.(2) Getting startedUsers enter the second activity cohort/group as soon as they complete their first unit of value. The stage is all about convincing users the product is the ideal solution and pushes them through the rest of the getting started steps. This is where email onboarding can help drive stickiness of the product by building/introducing habit-forming principles.Over time, this section can grow with multiple onboarding steps, but we could start with two simple steps like creating their first email draft or their email footer settings. (3) Upgrade to paid planNow that users have had a chance to try out the product and see parts of their brand in the product, we can start nudging them to upgrade benefits and features. Okay so all 3 of those could be lists in your automation tool. Smart lists or dynamic lists, they update as soon as someone completes an action in the product. Yeah so let’s illustrate this. We have our 5 lists right?SignupsImported subscribersCreated a formConnected form to siteCreated broadcast draftUser signs up, they get a confirmation email. As soon as they click that, send the Welcome email. So far, no segmentation.Next wait step triggers when the user enters our second list, the getting started list. This is when users have imported their subscribers in Convertkit. So we can wait until the user enters our second list, as soon as they do, they get a congratulatory email pushing

Hey everyone, this is part 2 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.In the last episode, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit. In today’s episode, we’ll cover the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics. Next week, our last episode of the series will cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with.Alright JT, let’s get to it. There’s three crucial things I want to make sure we cover today as part of any email audit.A theme that you’ll hear throughout today’s episode is timing your emails around your user’s journey, and not selling too early or to users that aren’t ready to buy. But let's start with the confirmation email and the welcome email. Regardless of what you're auditing, those will be part of the starting journey for all new users right?Confirmation emailDepending on the scope of your audit you need to decide if you’re going to audit individual emails or more high level improvements. I prefer the former. I go email by email, not starting with the Welcome email but the confirmation email. That’s really the first email touch point. We want to maximise the chances that this email reaches the inbox. To do that we want to keep it short and simple with a single CTA, confirm your email. We don’t want too many images or text or links. We need this to land in the inbox and get through most spam filters.Such a balance of beautiful design and impact versus sneaking past email filters. Too much HTML gets caught.Welcome emailWe had a full episode dedicated to really making this email stand out, and that’s the core goal of this email. Everyone expects it. Most companies have a huge fancy HTML template with heavy brand and a bunch of helpful resources and links to get started.The danger with overloading users too soonSomething that lives rent free in my brain when I think email onboarding is Val Geisler’s dinner party strategy. When you host people over for a dinner party--be it a backyard BBQ or a fancy social event, the evening itself has many tracks. You welcome guests, Take their coats, introduce them to othersYou take their drinks order and show them to a seatthere’s the appetizer round, a main course, side dishes, and dessert, and then you invite them back. If the Welcome email has 10+ links to tutorials and courses and help articles, it’s almost like your guest’s arrive to your house for the dinner party and before they can take their coats off you shove the main course sprinkled with dessert in their face. I like this dinner guest analogy a lot. I think it's also a lot about coordinating with product. Combined, you set the ambience. The smell of food, the setting, the dress code -- email needs to blend in to the decorum. Seeing how the product<>email experience jive is a big opportunity.Instead of overwhelming users with links, Welcome emails are great starting points to train users to open the next emails. This can be done with storytelling and standing out. We should be training users to open our next email and pushing them to 1 specific moment of delight back in the product. Consider a stronger CTA to push users to finish their onboarding. They could try "Add your first subscriber" or "build your first landing page" instead of "Log in".There's an opportunity to tell the Convertkit story instead of just welcoming them to the family. Users starting an email tool are also trialing competitors. So they are getting similar emails. Selling too earlyEarly in the journey we want to nudge users to complete steps in the product that nudge them to moments of delight and getting value from the product. You don’t want to turn off users and start selling to everyone, especially not users that haven’t done much in the product yet. The best way to get users to upgrade to a paid plan is to let them try the product and reach success. Instead of talking about the benefits of upgrading to a paid plan right away, we should be telling users how and why Convertkit is their best choice.We want to be delighting the user and making sure they are accomplishing tasks in the product. Working on the user's timeline rather than asking them to upgrade right away. Mindlessly forcing people through a user journey is bad. The idea that you need to be everything to everyone is equally bad. Segmentation is key, behaviour based triggered emails are also key. That’s actually part 3/3 of our series. We covered what to do before the audit in part 1, part 2 was the actual audit and the most important aspects of the first two emails in your sequence and part 3 next week is what you should be suggesting as part of improvements. We’ll specifically be touching on segmentation and behaviour based triggered emails. Chat then.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Educational series, product onboarding, upsell sequences… regardless of where you look in your funnel, there’s marketing emails to be audited. Like any investigation, an email audit combines thorough observations, deductive reasoning and extra points for style and bold decisions. Our hope with this 3 part series is that you can add another feather in your detective hat. Whether you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service or you’re in-house and you want to level up your company’s email game. We’re going to cover research and questions you should ask yourself before the audit, what to look for in your actual audit, tips, tactics and finally what improvements to suggest and experiment with.Today’s main takeaway is:Users have ideal paths to discovering your product or service, understand these moments deeply and use email to guide users along this path. Alright JT, email onboarding is close to my heart, I’ve built many of these in-house but I’ve also had the pleasure of consulting and auditing the onboarding series for a few SaaS and tech companies.It’s fascinating to get to see all the different ways you can welcome users to your product via email.Before we talk about what order to tackle things, let’s talk about great email onboarding.What’s great onboarding?Great email onboarding consists of guiding/helping users through a series of “aha” moments as they interact with your brand and product. Users receive units of value for each step as they gain confidence in the product’s ability to complete their jobs to be done. In a product-led company, this should be corroborated by the product/ux team. What wow moments exist in the ideal path, and use email to guide them along this path.Data is part 1, story is part 2 and where marketing shines. What are some examples of aha moments?Aha moments exampleI’ve been thinking through what an “aha” series of steps might look like for a free Convertkit user:A close friend recommends Convertkit as the ideal place to start for my newsletterI have a quick read through backlinko’s guide to convertkit and get a real good sense of what the product can doI’m able to quickly signup and import my subscribers from MailchimpI’m able to build my first signup form and connect it to my WP siteI watch a 20 minute video tutorial on intro to advanced automations in Pro plansI successfully connect my signup form to my WP siteWhat email onboarding should and should not beUltimately, great email onboarding convinces users to stick around and boosts overall engagement and retention.Email onboarding should be used to:Tell the company’s storyAnswer questions/objectionsDemonstrate how the product solves user’s pain Nudge users to specific common conversion actionsShow the art of the possibleTie what the user has done in their accountEmail onboarding should not be used to:Get everyone to buy immediately Send the same call to actionSeem cold and impersonalAn extension of your brand and productCoordinate with product experience to be integrated with itDoesn’t trip over the feet of product-based emails or sales emailsBuild trust/rapportBe referenceable down the line when user needs info, point of contact, etcUnderstanding your customers and usersBefore diving into any email audit, it’s important to get into your users’ headspace. Obviously this differs whether you're leading this audit in-house or as a consultant. Often when you are contracting, you won’t have a ton of customer research data available to you. In spite of customer research/interviews and jobs to be done insights, here’s a few places to spend a bit of time reading:Review sites on G2, capterraTutorials on getting started with the product from the communitySearching on twitter @company threadsThese spots really give me a sense of the language used and what problems are being solved as well the steps users need to take to be able to “hire” the company for a specific job. Gimme some JBTD examples with something like Covnertkit?Jobs to be done exampleUsers signup for Convertkit probably because they want to grow their personal brands, sites and businesses. Not because they want an email marketing tool. Some of the common themes and jobs that were highlighted throughout reviews and tutorials were:How to build an email listSend automated email remindersSell services/contact or products/ecommerceBuild a personal brand, start an audience, build a web presenceThe predominant themes and categories of use cases were:Artists, designers, filmmakers, photographersAthletes, coaches, influencersMarketers, bloggers, podcasters, makersYoutubers, streamers, musiciansDiving deep into a few tutorials highlighted a few prerequisites for hitting what are likely common conversion actions or moments of delight in the early web building journey:Having a subscriber baseHaving a form connected to your site to accept new subsShare a link to your new landing page on socialSend a broadcast email to subsUnderstanding the customer pain point precisely th

Back to office, staying fully remote, flexible hybrid setup. Global pandemics gave millions of knowledge workers the taste of remote work. And a lot of them are never going back.A global distributed workforce means access to untapped talent but it also means time zone and synchronous meeting challenges. Getting everyone from your local Toronto office to show up to the same meeting at 10am EST is pretty easy. Running the same meeting with a team spread across 5 time zones makes this much more challenging. Especially if you want to promote autonomous and flexible work schedules.The solution isn’t less meetings or hybrid meetings. The solution is asynchronous communication.In today’s episode we’re going to cover what async means exactly, being able to say “I’ll get that done on my own time”. We’ll dispel some of the misconceptions and dive into the stages of transformation towards autonomy. Hopefully you’ll be better positioned to encourage async in your day to day, whether you're in-house or freelance adapting now is key for leading any teams in the future.IntroHundreds of companies declared themselves remote first and digital first last year. A lot of them are massive corporations too. This transition will be excruciatingly slow and painful for big orgs. These orgs are studying companies who have been doing this for decades. Remote work isn’t new for everyone. Convertkit, Close, Basecamp (60+ actually much lower with recent policy changes), Helpscout, Clearbit, Buffer, Doist (100+) and Zapier is 500 people, remote-first all smaller, very little funding, innovators in the remote space.There’s also the bigger teams too.Automattic, the people behind WordPress are 1,000+ global distributed team and have been from the early days. InVision is fully remote, 1000+, GitHub is 3,000+.Something all of these distributed work pioneers talk about is over-communication in the written form, but specifically, asynchronous communication. In the world of most marketers, and knowledge workers for that matter, very little of your day to day tasks are emergencies, or require immediate action.The nature of async can be summed with a short sentence: I’ll get to that as soon as I get the chance, or on my own time. Async is sending a message and having a common understanding that an immediate response is not expected. Email is usually async. You send it and you expect an answer in a day or 2 or more. Recipient opens that email on their time and responds when they get the chance. Synchronous communication is sending a message and the recipient needs to process and respond in real time immediately. In a meeting with your team on Zoom, you say something, your team members receive and respond right away.When you take the time to think about it, most of what you do in your job could be done with a 1-way written update sent to a single person or a group of people, who can respond as soon as they get the chance. Obviously there’s times when there’s emergencies, or sometimes the nature of your work requires real time collaboration like live support teams or front line sales reps, and there’s different ways of tackling those situations than async.ExamplesInstead of saying: hey do you have 15mins to chat today About this project?Async is saying: here’s two questions I have regarding the last update you made on this project. Instead of saying: here’s an invite to a meeting where I’m going to walk you through a project update and I’m mostly going to be doing the talking, everyone will be seeing this for the first time and I’ll be asking for your attention for 1 hour and immediate feedback.Async is saying: here’s a short summary of a project update followed by a detailed overview of a problem I’m having and specific questions I’d like guidance on. Here’s what I’ve done so far, here’s when I need an answer by.BenefitsDeep work / flow stateA huge % of your workforce is introverted and perform better when they’ve had the chance to think before they are asked to give a response and give more space for flow/deep work.Tons of research shows that increasing response times allows people time to reflect and remove emotion from the equation thus making better decisions. Human centered way of workingAs one CEO, Sudeesh Nair, of ThoughtSpot, very active on Twitter about async, one of my fav quotes from him is: “…the ability to let people in whenever they want to work, however long they want to work in a day…that’s what asynchronous is about. If you think that way, you have to make more intentional changes in the work process, collaboration process, to enable every one of those people to come into the workforce.”Productive night owlsMany people are night owls. We’re all wired differently to be our most creative and intellectual during specific parts of the day, commonly, early morning and night.This is derived from chronotypes, our preferred sleeping patterns. But imagine forcing a pure night owl to work 9am to 5pm. And then giving this same person the abilit

We're going to argue two main points: First, no-code is absolutely the future for marketing and that it opens up exciting possibilities (aka, democratizes digital marketing)Second, what really qualifies as a no-code tool is much more narrow and potentially useful than you might find elsewhere on the internetIs marketing hijacking another development trend and bending it to our own purposes? Is this an attempt to fit in with the cool kids by being part of a trend?Is the future of Martech no-code? Has it always been no-code?What does no-code really mean?Have you ever been half way through building something, a new campaign, a landing page you’re really excited about... but you hit a technical hiccup. “Oooh, might need a script for that” or “Damn, if only I could code”. As marketers, we’ve all felt this roadblock. We had a full episode dedicated to this-- episode #24: why marketers should learn to code. No-code is not using that excuse. Can’t code? Don’t know how to build scripts? No problem, there’s a no-code solution for that. Is Canva a no-code tool? Did you use code to create images in Photoshop or Illustrator? This is what tripped me up in the beginning — but Canva is one of the hottest tools today and it’s absolutely considered in the same breath as other no-code tools. While your typical definition of no-code would look at the ability to create software applications with a user interface, I’d argue that marketing’s use of no-code is a bit looser. I’d define a no-code solution as one that lowers the barrier entry to the point that you only need to use a user interface to complete your objective. No way am I going into photoshop - someone tried to teach me photoshop before and it was terrible. I’m not layering stuff — but Canva, I can get something good enough in minutes. These are pretty murky waters for us to be wading into — but such is this fascinating trend. So there's a cool difference between tools to build products and tools to sell products and run companies.no-code building / app development no-code martech / selling productsSometimes the tool to sell a product like a podcast (promoting or ads), might also be the product in some case, like us, not monetizing, just creating content. Example, Convertkit is no-code email marketing tool, unless you know css/html and you can totally customize things behind the scenes. Is Convertkit a no-code tool to sell a product/martech or is it building a product? Convertkit is is more than just an email marketing tool, it’s what newsletter creators use to build an audience and connect with fans, it’s an email designer, a landing page builder, a form builder and they are just diving into ecommerce. Isn’t every marketing tool a no-code tool? I’ve been using Marketo or HubSpot my entire career - turns out I’ve been using no-code tools my entire. But before I start congratulating myself on being on the cutting edge of this trend, I think it’s important we really sharpen our focus here. No code isn’t about using user-interfaces to accomplish a job — I think in the marketing context it’s about breaking the dependency on technical experts as well as subject matter experts. The idea of Canva as a graphic design tool may drive some designers crazy — but it’s borne out of a marketer’s need to get good enough now and not perfection later. I love this idea of breaking the dependency on technical and subject matter experts. This has been fascinating to watch in the indie maker community. Some call this the creator economy. Think there’s a lot of newsletters and podcasts already? Think again. Worldwide pandemics have accelerated remote work but they also motivated millions of people to become creators. More and more writers, teachers, film makers, photographers, artists all go DTC-- direct to consumer. Categories:Workflow automation — tools like Zapier allow you to configure automation without knowing any python or how to connect to APIsWeb development — tools like Wordpress or Webflow allow folks to create websites without getting mired in CSS or JavaScriptAnalytics — create reports and dashboards without being an analyst or having to fight with APIs — cough cough KlipfolioThe no-code category needs to be narrower to be relevant. I see lists all the time saying that tools like Slack or HubSpot are no-code. They are awesome tools — but no marketer is coding databases and setting up scripts to send our instant messages or emails — no developer either for that matter. Instead, to be relevant, no code martech tools need to replace or substitute the need for technical or subject matter expertise. Is no-code anti-code?The no-code movement is borrowed from development and is most certainly not anti-code. In fact, the no-code movement could be said to be pro-code! In development land, the idea of no code is to remove redundant and repetitive tasks from the coding process. For example, if you’re application requires online payment, you don’t want to get bogged down coding an payment s

Who built this? Why did they build this? What was the purpose of this?Sometimes, marketing can look a lot like archaeology. Unearthing ancient relics, reverse engineering them, and trying to understand how they were used by your ancestors. Like an ape discovering a tool for the first time, you look at them with a mix of bewilderment and awe. I didn’t know we were so advanced back in --- 2011.You’ve discovered a marketing artifact, and the internet is full of them. Form submits that go to legacy email automation systems, blog posts written before the last ice age, and strategies for a trend that went extinct long ago.As marketers, we need to be experts at carefully extracting these artifacts, evaluating their worth, and deciding whether to revitalize them or put them in a museum.Honestly, you’ll encounter this more in your career than you’d probably like, so we’re going to chat about how to work with marketing artifactsIn the world of tech startups, a lot of marketers only last a 12-18 months before they move on to their next position. They make a bunch of content, then move on, someone comes in to fill their role. This type of inheritance is super common in all areas of marketing. Why is this a problem?No one joining a marketing company wants to inherit someone else’s mess. It’s like renting an AirBnB and finding the dishwasher is still full of dirty dishes. At least, that’s the perception.The problem is that marketers love to create net new content. We’ve been programmed to think content is king -- and have responded by creating mountains and mountains of content. Most of us in marketing come from some form of content creation background -- it’s literally our instinct.Nothing sucks the wind out of a new job like cleaning up someone else’s mess. It’s easy for the content side to sweep things under the rug. But for tech systems, it’s way harder to clean up.You get this perception that tool X sucks or tool Y sucks. I know you’re deeper in the ops area -- how often do you hear a new CMO or VP start looking to migrate off of marketo or hubspot or whatever?Yea very often. Senior leaders come in with the tools they are familiar with and demand a migration in the next year hahaI’ve had the experience of building on a fresh underutilized instance of PardotConfiguring and managing the Marketo beast you gave me the keys for at Klipfolio. Funny enough, now that you’re back at Klipfolio, you were stuck uncovering some of the webs I tangled.I’ve also had the migration side of this as well, while I was migrating out of Hubspot, you were migrating to Hubspot.Martech artifacts are everywhere! The maretch landscape of doom is growing everyday, and each of these vendors can easily be a failed trial. If it’s a free product, then you could be using it forever. One thing that really gets me is how underutilized existing software is before we start asking for budget for the next thing. I was the type of kid who had to finish each portion on my plate before I moved on to the next thing -- I’d eat my broccoli, then my potatoes, then my chicken.In marketing automation especially, you get players like Marketo / HubSpot that have so many features available out of the box. These features sometimes, however, aren’t as powerful as you can get from other tools. I noticed this with web personalization and forms.Hubspot has a blog CMS, they have email automation, they have forms, they have a CRM… they have something for everyone… That’s a really great way to make a mediocre tool. Everything is average to please the average user. We use 4 tools instead of Hubspot and they all give us features and powers that hubspot alone cannot.We moved our blog to Ghost which has a beautiful UX and writing experience for my content team and they were pumped to get out of the clunky HS CMSWe moved email automation to Customer.io, honestly my favorite email workflow building tool. Super intuitive and fast. I’m a huge fan of convertflow for forms, DriftRock a UK startup is also doing cool things with forms. No one wants to use a crappy tool.And obviously we use Close for our CRM. These 4 tools cost us less than hubspot alone cost us.Totally. Also, we all like shiny objects:I think the key is to identify areas where you want to bring in a new tool. Check your toolset out, and see if they have a version of that feature.Run a test or experiment, and validate your approach.Speaking of forms, what about the web form that submits to nowhere?When I migrated out of hubspot forms, Close had like 200+ ebook and gated content forms that I needed to re-create and map to a download link and a resource.Lots of companies don’t manage this well. Yeah, customer’s hate this -- it’s right up there with online chat that doesn’t connect with a live agent.This happens so often -- it’s not even funnyIt’s actually really hard to find things like form embeds on a website.I use a tool called screaming frog which has a custom extraction tool which allows you to specify different selec

Jon and I are both pretty busy dudes. Jon a father, he works for Klipfolio, he’s a podcaster, he’s a consultant, he’s learning to code and he manages a community of marketers. Despite all that, JT still finds time to unearth the best UFO threads on Reddit and the dankest GME meme stocks. Phil is a husband and dog father (lolz)I work for Close, I’m a podcaster, I teach a post grad marketing certificate, I mentor local marketers, and I’m an avid member of several marketing communitiesDespite all that, I still find time to run a fantasy hockey league and binge all the best TV shows on Netflix.So how do we do it while staying happy and healthy (for the most part).Alright, I want to start by breaking down our weekly schedules by putting everything into 6 priority buckets:Family and friendsHealthLearningWorkChoresEscapism and hobbiesBeing productive and having an effective routine gives you room to fit things from all 6 buckets into your week.Sunday nights are for time blocking I like to plan my week on Sunday nights, that’s where I finish blocking time in my calendar. Might be controversial because of weekend but sometimes I have too many work things going on in my head before bed on Sunday, so planning my week before going to sleep is a great way to put my mind at ease.Go through the list of priorities, break them up into 1-2 tasks and block time in my calendar for it. As much as I can, I like to theme my weeks with 1 big thing I want to do. What’s my #1 focus.Key here is not over blocking. Leave some flex in there to move things around as things pop up during the week.Daily walks with my dogI split between 3 modes, 1 is podcast, 2 is music, 3 is just silence.Monday nights1 hour of shitty TV if I’ve worked on the cast.Tuesday and Thursday nightsTuesdays and Thursdays are usually blocked for reading. My wife is part of a book club and is an avid reader, so we try our ebay to turn the TV off on Tuesdays and open a book.I alternate between a book on Tuesday and on Thursday I learn something, right now learning Segment.js but have plans for SQL and deeper API.Wednesday nightsI usually plan a friends or family zoom call on Wed nights, I usually have no meeting Wednesdays so I’m happy to get some social time in the second half of the day.Something we want to try is everyone picking the same recipe, we open Zoom and watch each other chaotically build a recipe and eat together.Sometimes I’ll host a Zoom with friends and we watch a bunch of hockey games over screenshare.Friday nightsMost Friday nights are reserved for my wife, we’ll usually order in and watch TV or a documentary. ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

What is the most important skill for an SEO? Technical, content, analytics, project management?Use google search to start - really look at results, what’s being displayed, what Google is automatically serving up => your job here is to intuit what Google thinks your users want.SEO is extremely competitive. I remember back when we worked together our competitors seemed to be running your playbook at the same time, and it made things tough. What’s your advice for competitive SEO? Look at the structure of the top few results on Google — What on-page elements are they using? What can you glean from the information architecture? I know you’ve tried or used most of the tools out there. For our listeners on a shoestring budget -- what do you recommend for analytics and reporting? Google Search Console and Google Analytics => This is a great feature and I’m shocked at how few people actually take the time to set this up. So many quick tips -Set a filter to see things on second page. Sort to see top converting pages (tsk tsk set up goal tracking). Sort to see CTRs. Drill down into pages to see keywords. What about technical SEO? Everyone talks about it, but it’s I don’t think many people know how to improve this area of SEO. Google Page insights. Enter your site and see how it performs on mobile device. It gives a great print out of action items - such as sizing images, painting content before things load up. Lighthouse: Chrome developer tools and gives you a super technical review of your site.How do SEOs on a budget prepare for the future of search? Voice Search and Voice Utility. Mobile is king of SEO, and Voice is the next generation of search (still up for debate). If you ask Alexa or Siri or Google for an answer, voice search is at play. Structure your content for voice and you’ll be rewarded.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

In this episode, we’re going to talk about the best ways to integrate influencers into your marketing education. First, I want to cover the pressure on new marketers to create a brand or become an influencer. This is bullshit. It’s completely unproductive and puts undue pressure on you to post, publish, etc. Take that time and practice your craft. But what about networking? YES! Great way to build your brand :)How have you used influencers in your growth as a marketer?I’ve followed quite a few, but mostly it’s been through reading articles and doing research. Read a book! They need to be peer reviewed. I follow influencers for their smart content. I know you talk about graduating influencers -- what do you mean by that? I want to be super clear: I have nothing against any influencer. They’re brave enough and bold enough to put themselves in the public, and share their wisdom. I truly respect everyone and their talents. If it sounds like I’m throwing shade, then please know I’m being genuine! Take Neal Patel - Digital marketer, SEO - He’s done a ton of work for the community, and is particularly valuable for folks at the start of their career. As an SEO, 12 years ago I started reading some of his blogs, and ended up, moving over to the Moz blog where I started to learn more from a class of advanced SEOs like Rand Fishkin, Cyrus Shepherd, Dr. Pete, etc. I don’t read about writing good SEO content anymore — I read things like The Definitive Guide to JavaScript SEO (2021 Edition). Obviously a massive Rand fan. I still remember reading his letter. It’s one of those saas marketing moments right? Where were you when you found out Rand was leaving Moz?I feel like the guy embodies integrity and morality in marketing. In the early days of Klipfolio, you guys built out dashboard templates and you had one with Rand. How was that?At Klipfolio we worked on an SEO dashboard Rand Fishkin described in one of his whiteboard videos. I’m a huge Rand Fishkin fan -- he’s a genuine, smart dude, and watching & reading his content makes me happy. Anyway, we built this dashboard for him, and then reached out. He was still CEO of Mox at the time, so he was super, super busy. We ended getting him to review the dashboard and promoting it out on social.Why should you follow influencers? I’d say to round out your perspective and education. Don’t just blindly follow anyone and expect results. If you find someone entertaining or witty or whatever, follow them. I’m not your mom! It’s funny, I don’t actually see myself following influencers so much as just following smart people. I also really check whether the people I follow already confirm existing biases - it’s super helpful to find people who have different opinions or perspectives. It’s really easy to swim the same direction as everyone else -- look to people who do the opposite and then follow them. I like what you said there “smart people” not influencers. What’s the difference between a fluffy influencer and a legit smart influencer? The difference lies in the content. Dig deep. The fluffy influencer is just repeating the same things that are already shared at nauseum, that’s if they’re not talking about themselves. Real experts focus on their field, not themselves. They are opinionated, they drive real discussion, they share valuable practical things. They back up what they say, they work in the craft, they are super deep. They aren’t afraid of saying I don’t know. But it’s tricky. It’s super easy for someone to have a legit social presence and appearance, but once you hire them or work with them you quickly uncover whether they can back up all those tweets. How do you spot a smart influencer vs a false idol? Instead of saying, wow, Rand is so cool, I want to be like Rand and do what he does. You should be saying, wow what Rand said is fascinating, he's really made me rethink my take on mobile vs desktop, mobile didn’t kill desktop, it just took up all our free time. There’s something super fascinating about a lot of influencer relationships. I know you’re trying to be nice and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. We just saw a prominent influencer/podcaster get called out for some pretty shady practices. Yes, and you see this all the time. Pay me a bit of money and I’ll give you 15 minutes of advice or whatever. It could totally be worth it. I question the value. I think that you’re better off forming your own opinion and working through challenges with information available. I see this a lot on platforms like Product Hunt, where getting an influencer to hunt your product is like the number one factor in being successful. I disagree - I think having a great product customers love is more important. But it doesn’t change the transactional nature of influencer life. We have a podcast. Are we influencers? How do you sleep at night JT?Yes, the irony is not lost on me! I think that we have to recognize that we do influence folks -- we put content on the internet, and with it our

Today we are joined by the powerful Erin Blaskie. Erin is currently a fractional CMO advising startups and scaleups, currently working with Jamieson Law, Ridgebase, Heirlume and Staffy. Before going back to freelance, Erin spent 4 years leading marketing teams at Fellow, a SaaS platform for meeting productivity as well as L-SPARK, a SaaS accelerator. But Erin’s start in marketing goes further than that. in 2004 she launched a virtual assistant business (one of the firsts) and later pivoted that to a marketing agency where she worked with brands like Disney, Microsoft, Ford, she’s worked with Hollywood actors, authors and speakers helping them craft their brands. She runs a no fluff-tactical newsletter with 10k+ subscribers, she has a huge Twitter audience topping 36k.She’s a TEDx speaker, her writting’s been featured in Forbes, entrepreneur, adweek and the wall street journal.She’s also a post grad intructor, an entrepreneur mentor and a mental health advocate. Holly shit, Erin, how do you find time to appear on podcasts with all the stuff you have going on haha?Here are the questions our listeners submitted!FreelancingWhat do you wish someone would have prepared you for before starting your digital marketing career?I would especially love to learn her tips on setting expectations and boundaries with clients in her freelance/agency work. Do you feel like you’re more sales than marketer? Do you spend more hours working freelance? more than startup?All things being equal, do you think that as a freelancer, you can learn faster? more clients, more projects, more breadth of problems and tools.Startup in-houseCurious what Erin would say about which marketing roles/functions are better to hire in-house versus hiring freelance.What are some of the biggest tactical marketing mistakes you see startups make? I say tactical because I think the de facto answer is based on not having a strategy in place. What are the best marketing strategies for early stage companies when budgets are sparse?Show notesCheck out Erin's site.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

Today's episode features a call-to-action for our listeners: take a few moments, check out Women of Martech, and share it with someone you think could benefit. We're joined by Melissa Ledesma, Executive Director of Women of Martech. Here's an overview of her bio: Melissa Ledesma Director Of Content & Comms at DMS (Digital Media Solutions), a leading global ad-tech enabled performance advertising companyShe's also Executive Director of Women of MartechBefore the ad world, she spent several years in real estate, mortgage and entertainment playing different PR/event, email marketing roles.she works out of New Jersey and spends a good chunk of her time giving back, recently being named to the Board of Directors of her local Boys and Girls Clubs to enrich education and training of at risk children and teensWomen of Martech's mission is concrete and actionable: to raise the profile of the women and their achievements in the world of Martech. Melissa walks us through how the Women of Martech community is helping women at all stages of their career to reach that next level. From member spotlights and insider resources to connecting with a vast network of 800+ martech pros, this community is like a superpower for your career.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

Naomi is Director, Global Marketing Operations at EFI, a 3,000+ person tech company in the printing industry. She’s based in Vancouver but she’s been working remotely long before it was cool. She has 12+ years of experience leading high-performing global B2B demand generation teams. Before EFI she ran Marketing Ops at Sophos a cybersecurity enterprise company. Naomi is also one of the founding members of “MO-Pros”, the biggest Slack community for marketing Ops pros and recently launched a platform/site. She’s been interviewed by prominent podcasts for her efforts spearheading a large scale enterprise migration to Marketo. David Lewis, the godfather of marketing ops podcasts says that Naomi is in his top 10 marketing ops people he’s ever worked with. Noami dives into the 3 things that stand out in most marketing operations profesionals: ask a lot of questions and think outside the boxability to explain complex technical concept to non tech peoplemulti task skills, sometimes the sky is fallingMost marketing job postings should be read as a guideline and not taken as a prescription. The most important thing to demonstrate is your ability to learn something. When Naomi is hiring on her team she’s looking for a balance between:- technical chops- cultural fitIn the interview process, it's key to get to chat with people from other business units to assess that cultural fit. Take home assignments are not super common for entry level roles, you can get a ton from how someone answers a question. Naomi values curiosity, looking for data opinions. How do you test that in an interview, what attributes shine?The attribute that allows you to suceed is you have to be curious and always ask why. You have to be willing to break things down and rebuild it better fast and stronger. Open ended questions get interesting conversations. Let candidates explain problem solving. Look for condidates that demonstrate personal bias recognition. What's it like being a Director level MOPs at an enterprise company?Aside from lots of meetings (lol), understand where business partners want to go, can our current tech stack support those goals. Tech adoption, get everyone to use Marketo to most potential.How can people who want to stay in the IC path develop a long term career growth?Naomi sets up her team with subject matter experts. Things change too fast, having experts on specific pieces, web, email, data, so they can stay on top of those areas and bring it back to the team and educate the rest, share knowledge.Here are key elements of Naomi's onboarding strategy: Marketo university 1-1s with key stakeholders Viydyard videos for short training Make sure person is plugged in and fits in Training the data model, week by weekWhat should marketers do in their first job: always asking questions how can we do this better or not why do we do this this wayIf you're interested in marketing tech and you aren't a member of The MOPros community, you can signup here.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

Ever get stuck waiting on a dev to update a small piece of code to fix a form/email/webpage? How about the confidence that comes from speaking at eye-level with development? Marketers have so much to gain from learning even a baseline of code. In this episode, JT is going to make the case on why you should learn some code, and I’m going to introduce you to a new community focused on helping marketers learn to code. Dude, you are always talking to me about coding. Share with our listeners your own journey.What is unique about marketers wanting to learn how to code?How hard is it to learn coding?It’s going to take time to learn to code. How do you stay motivated over the long-haul? Detach learning to code form your career -- make it a side-hobby with no implications on your jobDevil’s advocate: why not just spin up a webflow website or some other no-code option? I know you’re itching to introduce it: tell our listeners about the community.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career.Sonya Gankina, listener and recent University of Ottawa graduate joins the show as our fourth and final #topmartechprospect.Sonya's question for us: Do you think there is still a place for Don Draper-style verbal presentations in the 2021 remote marketing world? I'm mildly ashamed to adminit I've watched all 92 Mad Men episodes at least twice. This is my favorite scene out of all the episodes. The Kodak carousel is the perfect example of how to tell a compelling story. Your average marketer would've described the new Kodak product as a NEW revolutionary slide projector. You can take a TON of pictures and put them into slides and you can share them with a room of people.But instead, Don took a different approach."This device is not a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It takes us to a place we ache to go again. It lets us travel around and around and back home again, a place we know we are loved."The full clip is worth the watch to get the full emotional punches.--Show notes:Reach out to Sonya on LinkedIn for a coffee or to connect You can visit Sonya's website and check out her digital marketing services and creative portfolio--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. Milan Fatoric, listener and recent University of Ottawa graduate joins the show as our third featured #topmartechprospect.Milan's question for us: What are the top 3 things you would tell every marketing student or recent grad to STOP doing?Here's some of the takeaways:1. Stop chasing a salary, chase interesting problems to solve, the money will follow2. Stop trying to establish yourself as an expert right out of school, instead, get a job and a side hustle and build credibility. Let others call you an expert.3. Stop relying on job boards to get a job you really want, instead, reach out to and hangout with people that are in jobs you want. --Show notes:Reach out to Milan on LinkedIn for a coffee or to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milanfatoric/--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. Augustine Karczmarczyk, listener and University of Ottawa student joins the show as our second featured #topmartechprospect.Augustine's question for us: When it comes to building a personal brand, how can one balance publicity and privacy? Can you be credible while concealed, or is being out in the open something you simply must embrace until you’ve established a presence?Check out the episode for JT's full rant on why you don't need to be an influencer. --This is next part is from Augustine: Hey, thanks for being one of six people in the world to look at podcast show notes! You’re probably a librarian or simply here by mistake – but EITHER way, I’m glad you’re reading this. I must have been too starstruck during our recording to mention that I welcome LinkedIn connections here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/augustinek/ If you want to talk timber frames, off-grid housing, or a freelance project, please reach out! If you haven’t heard yet, I’m a “top martech prospect” sooo, you might want to act fast! ;) I also can’t pass up the chance to put my personal website https://augustinek.com on here too for a sweet SEO backlink boost. Look out “Saint Augustine of Hippo” – I’ve got your ranking in my sights. All the best & talk soon!--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. Justin Silver, listener and University of Ottawa student joins the show as our first featured #topmartechprospect.Justin's question for us: What does your “starter pack” for digital marketers” look like?Check out the meme we used to answer this question.Posting on Reddit: “how do I get a job without experience?”. Don’t post this question on social. Want experience? Market yourself. Build a website. Build a social media audience.Last minute changes. Despite a documented process, there’s always a last minute campaing request to hit quota. You just have to embrace it. Email is fast, but use it wisely. Manager in your title. Everyone is a marketing manager these days. Marketing has it’s own milatiristic understanding of rank. Marketers love to invent titles for themselves. You need to realise that titles are secondary to the things you build. Friendly reminders. Are you really running a marketing operations project if you aren’t sending weekly “friendly reminders” to people who have missed deadlines?ABM. Email everyone in the company, with the same unpersonnalized email, non stop. Don’t. Do. This. Fire extinguisher. Carve out some firefighting time on your calendar if you’re in MOPs. Things break. Things suddenly become priorities. Looking at the martech landscape and thinking “I need one of each”. FOMO in martech is a real thing. I’m not using x or y and I’m missing out. Digital marketing isn’t about having all of the tech. It’s about using your tech to the most that you can. Pocket talk translator for integrating tools together. Your CRM calls them leads, your marketing automation tool calls them people, your analytics tool calls them users. Translation required. Gotta get on . Bernie Mitts expired in what? 2 days? You don’t have to be an early adopter for everything. Loading screens for days. Whether it’s a big Marketo insteance or a long time frame report in GA, marketers battle with slow reports every day. You shouldn’t need a gaming PC to run your automation software.--Show notes:Justin's LinkedIn Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/justin-silver-14b393108Justin's site: https://bit.ly/3cCSMPkConference mentioned: Legacy conference.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus