Humans of Martech

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 system from scratch. You’d just plug into Zuora or Stripe. No-code is about reusing components that solve common problems so you can focus your development efforts on your secret sauce. I get a sense sometimes from marketers that we mix this up — no-code isn’t anti-code! You need code to build to build these tools.Developers don’t worry about no-code taking their jobs — in fact, most I’ve talked to love them because they can focus on writing dope code instead of solving redundant problems. Is marketing hijacking a development trend? Marketing loves technology. The CMOs budget has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, and this trend continues. The rise of Revenue Operations puts a mission behind all this software — and imbues those operational activities with a mission — to enable revenue generation.These twin trends supercharge marketing when it comes to getting exposed to new products and technologies. Naturally, marketing has picked up on the no-code trend and the question is whether this really applies. Is marketing hijacking a development trend? This is an interesting question. As someone who has dedicated a lot of time to learning to code, at first I felt that — yes, marketing is borrowing a buzz word so we could fit in with the cool kids at the lunch table. I’ve been digging in a lot deeper on this, though, and I’ve refined my perspective. I believe the no-code trend absolutely applies to marketing. The future of no-codeMartech is definitely heading into the no-code waters. I don’t think it’s a transformative force per se, but rather a rapid evolution of applications to make those jobs to be done easier, faster, and better. I don’t think folks working near marketing need to be worried -- marketers want to spin up a landing page with a form almost as fast as they want to tear it down and rebuild it. I think the benefit of no-code to experts who support marketers is they’ll work on more interesting, nuanced projects. Don’t build a landing page -- let’s build a custom product page or home page.I do think one potential downfall is that quality may drop in some areas. You can’t replace a great graphic designer with Canva -- the skills required to do this work are still important and are the difference between an Apple-esque brand and your friend’s yoga studio. But that’s the point -- it allows all of us the opportunity to build and sell our stuff on the internet. Even advanced no-code martech will still r...

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 selectors to crawl your websiteThe other way to do this is to look at forms within your system and pull them out that way -- only works if you know all the systems at playYou’re giving me PTSD. Enough about marketing automation and let’s talk about the website.JT, I know you spend a lot of time in SEO land -- from talking with you I know you’re really big on updating existing content instead of just creating new content. Walk us through the advantages of that.Years ago I ran an experiment where I started updating existing content to see if I could improve traffic and rankings. What I found is that I could consistently move pages from 2nd page and beyond to the first page => this gave something like a 200-400% lift on conversions.SEO is like gardening. You don’t just toss a bunch of seeds in the ground and expect them to grow. You need to tend them and nurture them in order for them to growWhat about when the garden is overrun with weeds and the last gardener has skipped town?Resist the temptation to clearcut! There are often very valuable plants in that garden. As an SEO, you need to get good at determining which pieces of content are distractions and which pieces of content are really valuableUse search console’s GA plug-in to see conversion rates and trafficWhat types of problems do you see when trying to clear out the garden?Outdated messaging, positioningLanguageTrends that have diedJT, is there really value in updating and managing all this content? We live in such a transactional society, it’s almost always easier to create new.Heck yes it’s easier to start from scratch. I resist that temptation all the time -- it’s hard to look at a web page that is ranking on second page, figure out why it ranks, and how to preserve it’s ranking.There is a ton of value in this, however. I’ve seen first-hand how often a simple update can yield a big result. It’s way easier to improve the performance of a 2nd page asset than get a new asset all the way to 2nd page.I feel like it’s a skillset that you really need to work on. In my own career as a consultant and in-house marketer, I’ve almost always seen or been a part of website migration projects. I think this...

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 opinions. I will say this: my goal is to provide the kind of advice I wish I got when I was starting out. Or, if you’re more senior, to provide a unique perspective... I have young kids at home -- I sleep like shit :)Alright, let’s drop a list of some of the legit people you’re following and learning from right now:Marketing celebretieshttps://twitter.com/randfish https://twitter.com/Julianhttps://twitter.com/aleyda https://twitter.com/andrewchenhttps://twitter.com/Backlinko https://twitter.com/jackbutcher https://twitter.com/avinash https://twitter.com/hnshah Badass marketershttps://twitter.com/crestodina https://twitter.com/thatbberg https://twitter.com/TaliaGw https://twitter.com/davegerhardthttps://twitter.com/timsoulo https://twitter.com/leelasrin https://twitter.com/Patticus https://twitter.com/guillaumecabane https://twitter.com/KyleTibbitts https://twitter.com/JoelKlettke https://twitter.com/ClaireSuellen https://twitter.com/JHTScherck https://twitter.com/benjihyam https://twitter.com/matthewbarbyhttps://twitter.com/smgrieserhttps://twitter.com/harrydryhttps://twitter.com/RamliJohn...

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