E191 – Making Your Own Career With Duane Forrester

A special thanks to Duane for hopping on and talking with the guys and sharing his wisdom. The episode digs into the growth of digital marketing, carving out your path, avoiding getting stuck in your career and much more.

What's Eating Duane Grape?

The alternative title was coined by Duane and really is how this episode came to be. The guys had planned to cover this in the coming months but when Duane went on a FB messenger rant to Dave it was easy for the guys to think - WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS NOW!

And that is what we did.

What Does Growth Look Like?

If you only know SEO, you can and will be stuck. Are you a T shaped marketer? If not you need to think beyond just Social, just Paid, just Email, just Technical SEO, just Organic Social, etc.

Are you worried about Core Web Vitals? Why are you suddenly caring now when you had a year? Why did you wait years to suddenly care about how fast your site is?

So you solve Site Speed. Do you think you will get a promotion? Will you get more head count? More budget? Did conversions increase? Did you drive more sales?

So you have something Deep for that T - now expand. Learn how the other teams work, the other marketing departments, the other departments and learn to work better with them and help them. If you want to move up, move beyond where you are - avoid Silos and get out there.

Leadership & Shout-outs

Some special shout-outs from the team during the show go to:

Cam BalzerSteve KrullRae HoffmanPJ FuscoBill Hartzer

Do You Know the ROI?

Pay attention to what is driving leads, sales, and revenue. You have to be focused on UX, bounce rate, revenue, sales, all things money.

As Duane says (paraphrased) - you can't throw that over the fence, you need to know what the impact of what you do is.

Intent & The User

If you take nothing else away from the episode take these things to do to help you move up in your career:

Worry about the user experienceWorry about the cost/revenue associated with projectsWorry about intent

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have you on another one of these business of digital podcast episodes. And today we definitely have a fun one for you deli Dave. Yes. So without further ado, I'm going to make you wait anymore.

We have a good friend of both of ours, Dwayne Forester. He is the vice president. Uh, industry insights with Yext and Dwayne, thank you so much for

Duane: [00:00:32] joining us. My friend, a gentlemen, always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thank you. So

Matt Siltala: [00:00:38] we decided it happens every time we do something like this, but we decided we should probably start recording because like the last 30 minutes that we've been talking about, we're like, Hey.

You know, most of that stuff would be good to have on our recording stuff. I want to jump into it. But, uh, before, before we do, uh, you know, I know I said that the whole VP of industry insights expert, if there's anything else that you want people to know about you, Dwayne, um, feel free to jump in and just let us know.

And then we'll just go from there.

Duane: [00:01:09] Okay. So look, I, you know, I, I'm not going to assume that that, uh, anyone recognizes my name. So I'll give you guys a quick rundown. Um, hopefully this will give you a bit of a backstory and some of the, what I'm about to talk about or rant about might have a little bit context.

Um, I, uh, uh, started my career in gambling way back when, uh, worked for a gambling site in Canada. Um, ended up with Microsoft after that wrote a couple of books. Um, I, uh, launched webmaster tools when I was with Microsoft at being, um, you know, help the team with schema.org, that kind of stuff. Um, you know, conference speaker, all of that background, um, ended up running an agency for a little while,