Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah. I’m here with Ameet Luhar today. We’re gonna be discussing what we here at WebMechanix refer to as a “T-shaped marketer” meaning someone who is broadly capable across many areas of marketing and has one or more areas they are deeply knowledgeable in, hence the T-shape.

Transcript:

[Ameet Luhar] We’re under pressure, we have challenges, we have goals that we are trying to achieve, but that make us no different from anyone else we’re working with or working for.

[Arsham Mirshah] Hey! Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah. I’m joined by none other than Ameet.

– Ameet Luhar. Yeah you take it over! Go ahead, you do it.

– Okay, sorry to steal your thunder, man. Yeah, you know better than me. Go for it, go for it.

– I’ll just leave, it’s okay. I don’t need to be here, I’m just messing with you.

– I need the host! I’m gonna start dancing, or what am I gonna do?

– Ameet, Ameet, lot of respect for this guy. He is an account director here but he started off in the trenches of digital marketing. Actually, you did our academy.

– That’s right! That’s where I got started.

– That’s where you got started, and that’s very applicable to this episode because we are gonna be talking about.

– T-shaping.

– T-shaping!

– The importance of T-shaping, how to build a better agency with t-shaping.

– And I would say, how to build a better agency, how to build a better marketing team, or how to be a better marketer yourself.

– Exactly. It’s all about becoming an expert in one particular area, really honing your craft there, but using that to develop an understanding of other disciplines, other channels, things that are gonna help make you as productive as possible professionally, and with the folks you’re collaborating with everyday.

– So let’s do this. So what we’re talking about here is a concept called the t-shaped marketer. This concept very broadly is, imagine a T, there’s a horizontal line at the top and then a vertical line at the bottom, and they connect, whatever. So the horizontal line at the top, what is that representative of to you?

– Yeah, so what that means to me is having, as I mentioned before that fundamental understanding of other practice areas related to your organization or your business–

– So giving communities practice areas. I like to say marketing channels.

– Yeah, so in the marketing world, for me that means, I came in and was a paid media expert. So Google Ads, social ads, that was really my bread and butter. But I need to understand how that interplays with SEO, with conversion on a website.

– With email.

– With development tracking, analytics that goes back to closed loop, down funnel, bottom line business revenue types of results.

– Got it.

– It’s a combination of understanding paid media but knowing how all those other areas are coming back into play to make a business run every single day.

– No, I love it, I love it. So Ameet comes in, does our academy, and during the academy, we touched on all these different, what to us as an agency would be a service line, but in digital marketing, you call it a discipline, or in marketing, you might call it a channel, right? So in our world, search engine optimization, email marketing, paid media, marketing automation, conversion rate optimization, these are all different channels,

Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah. I’m here with Nick Winikoff today. We’re gonna be talking about voice search, and all the implications of AI and voice. It’s coming to a household near you. Actually, you already have it in your pocket, most likely, if you have an Android or iPhone.

Transcript:

– [Nick] To maintain our goal of being the marketers that we can be, we have to take in this new technology because it’s gonna be on us before we know it, and,

– [Arsham] Already is.

– [Nick] Yeah, it already is.

– [Arsham] Already is.

– [Nick] That’s what I’m telling you, 2019 is the year of voice.

– Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah. Here with Nick Winikoff today. We’re gonna be talking about voice search, and all the implications of AI and voice. It’s coming to a household near you. Actually you already have it in your pocket, most likely, if you have, you know, an Android or an iPhone.

– Any phone, really.

– Really any phone. You’re talking to Siri, you’re talking to Google, right. So you already got the AI, you’re already doing voice commands, and it’s comin’. It’s, you know, maybe the next frontier. What would you say, Nick?

– I think that people are going to start having to forget mobile, because 2019 and 2020 are gonna be the years of voice.

– Okay. You know, I’ll add to that. I think that, you know how like today everyone’s familiar with the keyboard? And they know how to type, and they took typing classes, right. The QWERTY keyboard.

– Yea.

– For some, there’s another keyboard, some people don’t know about. I don’t even know about it, but there is. I think that voice, or AI, otherwise, is gonna be the new keyboard. Like, you’re gonna have to know how to talk to your AI to get it to do the things that you want it to do. Whether that’s buy a product, or text a friend, or what have you. It’s funny watching my dad try to interact with Siri. Sometimes he can’t get it to do what he wants it to do, and I’m like. “Ah, no, you have to say this word” “and this one,” you know how I was saying. Because I’ve been practicing the keyboard.

– Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

– But anyways, we’re, you know, Web Mechanix, we’re a marketing agency, you’re a strategist here, you’re helping clients kind of be on the forefront, on the bleeding edge of these new technologies coming out, voicers being one of them. I know you’ve done a ton of research. So, what are the implications?

– The implications are essentially happening to optimize for this stuff.

– Yeah.

– People make decisions based off of their own preferences.

– Right.

– And if you’re not meeting those preferences, you know, they’re gonna find somebody who will. And they’re gonna, I mean, it’s so easy to go from one place to the other on the internet.

– Sure. Information’s ubiquitous.

– Yeah, exactly. You know, they have the 80/20 rule where, you know, 20% of the sites get 80% of the traffic and if you’re not competitive, you know, it’s so easy to go from you know, Walmart.com to Amazon.com.

– Sure.

– So I think that making sure that your customer experience and your user experience is very, or, your customer experience and user experience is, has to be, fair.

– Optimize for a voice.

Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah. I’m here with Shlomo Trachtenberg. We’re gonna be talking about work-life balance.

Transcript:

– [Voiceover] If you don’t have the mental shift to deal, to have a work life balance in your brain, then having the work life balance of freedom, to take off wherever you wanna go wherever you want is not worth anything.- [Voiceover] It’s not worth any case.

– Hello, welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m you’re host Arsham Mirshah and I’m with Shlomo Trachtenberg today. Tried.

– You got it.

– Thank you.

– Not easy but you got it.

– This is more than marketing Shlomo. We talk about marketing on this podcast definitely but today true to the name, I wanna talk about, we wanna talk about work life balance. I think in marketing, marketing can be a stressful field especially when you’re doing direct response, especially in an agency setting but even in house you have deadlines that you gotta hit, so marketing can be a stressful field to work in.

– Very stressful.

– There’s a lot of different trades, so to speak. You have your technical folks, you have your creative folks, you have the copywriters, you got the guys pressing the button, the gals doing that so there’s a lot going on, a lot to manage just to get a campaign of the ground.

– Off the ground right.

– I wanna start with your story Shlomo because I think it plays right into that right.

– Yeah totally.

– We’ve known each other for what, six years.

– Yeah probably around six years.

– And how did we meet?

– I was working in real estate management, was not loving that so much and wanted to make a transition and saw that you guys had this academy going. At that time I knew that the internet marketing field was a growing space and I knew I wanted to get into it and I loved the idea of measurability of seeing your actions and the measurability of what comes back. At that time you guys were running the academy. I decided I was gonna go for it. I applied, I got a call from Luke and I got Luke said okay dude, the assignment I got in, okay I’ve started the academy and that launched my career into digital marketing. At that time I was doing, that was the digital marketing and the academy I believe was three days a week.

– Yeah for three months.

– For three months which was awesome, you’re learning basically top to bottom, all the different trades on marketing and at that time SEO was the hot bank so we were doing a lot of focus on that. SEO, PPC that was really cool and then at the same time as I was doing the academy I was also doing, I got an internship for the other two days a week working for a company called Brand Launcher which is a–

– You worked with Jon Goldman?

– Yeah I worked with Jon Goldman.

– I didn’t know that. How cool.

– I worked there Jon Goldman, wonderful male.

– That’s awesome.

– During that time I was learning digital marketing three days a week but I was also learning overall branding and positioning, story telling the other two days a week so I was able to pull that full circle of digital with the actual messaging part.

– That’s super cool.

– Which was really cool. Brand Launcher, that’s what they do. I was working with them doing that two days a week, working with you guys–

– You were immersed in digital marketing and learning.

– Digital marketing yeah.

Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m looking forward to this one.

I’m your host Arsham Mirshah. I’m here with Will Chou today. True to the name of More Than Marketing, we’ll talk about some marketing stuff but Will here, I got a lot of respect for him. He’s a young, hungry guy, and he’s into success and personal development. We’ll talk about how to get your foot in the door in the digital marketing industry and how to use personal development to succeed.

Transcript:

– [Will] Successful people do things differently than unsuccessful people. There’s usually patterns that they follow that unsuccessful people don’t. You can study the successful people

– [Arsham] Yeah.

– [Will] and figure out what they’re doing differently

– [Arsham] Yeah.

– [Will] and improve that category of your life.

– Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. Looking forward to this one. I’m your host Arsham Mirshah here with Will Chou today. And looking forward to it because true to the name of More Than Marketing we’ll talk about some marketing stuff but Will here, I got a lot of respect for him. He’s a young hungry guy and he’s into success and personal development. Personal development I think is the best. Am I putting it right?

– Yes, yes.

– Personal development.

– That’s what I’m saying. Yeah.

– Like yeah. ‘Cause success can be defined in so many different ways.

– Absolutely yes.

– Will’s into this personal development thing. He reads a ton. He’s always coming up with good suggestions not just for the agency here, WebMechanix agency. But for me as a CEO he’ll be like hey, I read this book and I want to give you my 15 minute synopsis of it. And I love that. I think that’s super cool ’cause I think of myself as open-minded. So I appreciate someone like you coming in and saying hey, will you listen to me? And then hopefully you appreciate that I’m like yes.

– For sure, sure.

– You know? So–

– Yeah.

– So, Will, what do you do here at WebMechanix? Explain to the people.

– Yeah so when I first came on WebMechanix I was working client side and helping other clients succeed. I was known as the SEO guy. So that was my main focus. And I also helped support them in other areas like Facebook ads and AdWords and so forth. And then–

– Before WebMechanix we somehow, I guess you applied to us or we found you or something like that. You were doing something, your own site? Still are obviously.

– Mm-hmm. Yes.

– your own kind of experience right?

– Yeah so I was really into digital marketing as a hobby. So I had my own site, I bought some really expensive courses, followed Gary Vaynerchuk.

– All the other people you’re aware of that you may have heard of. Tim Schmoyer, Neil Patel, Bryan Dean. And it was more of like a hobby. And I actually majored in biology so–

– Hey me too.

– It was a-

– Oh.

– I didn’t really even consider it. Yeah you were like a bio?

– Bioinformatics.

– Bioinformatics that’s awesome.

– And com-side but ’cause they go together, yeah.

– Yeah but I didn’t really even consider it as like a possible career. It was just like maybe this would be really fun to do and potentially turn into a career. But it was like way off in the distance and yeah long story short I kinda lucked out and found this place. And it’s a lot more fun than I would have had doing research at some pharmacy.

– That’s what I say,

Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah, and I’m joined today with Derek Cavaliero, the senior director of engineering. Today, we’re talking about what is Google Tag Manager (GTM), the benefits of it, and how to use it to master MarTech.

?

Transcript:

– It’s a service provided by Google for Google Tag Managers.

– Google Tag Managers, yeah.

– And it lets you be able to control when your tracking code fires, what tracking code fires, and be able to see even in cases like who did what and when.

– Welcome back to another episode of More Than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah, and I’m joined today by, with, with, by? With Derek. With Derek Cavalliero. Derek is, I’m not one for titles, but senior director of engineering, let’s say.

– Sounds good,

– The point is, yeah. The point is, he’s been doing this a while. He’s a web developer, but what’s unique about him is that, first and foremost, I have a soft spot in my heart for you, and I think you know that already. Because he’s our most tenured team member here at webmechanix. He’s been with us for eight years. For context, we’ve been in business for almost 10. Right, so, us less than 10, him more than eight, so it’s, and what that means, though, what that means for his skillset, is that at one point, he was the only developer outside of me, at webmechanix, so that means that all the landing page, all the sites that we did, all the tracking, which we’re gonna talk about tracking today, all that went through Derek, so not only did he get a PhD in…

-A PhD, you’re too kind.

– Street PhD, not official.

– Don’t fact-check that one.

– Don’t fact-check that, right, well done. From, not only does he have his, well yeah, I’m saying

– well, but right not

– His PhD in web development, but also, he’s been seeing the intersection of web development and web marketing.

– Right

– Right? So that’s very unique because I would say like, the average web developer out there is just that, a web developer, and that’s fine, it’s all well and good. A lot of respect, but when you have marketers who are trying to gather data, fire tags, we’ll talk about that in a second, you need to understand, I think web developers, would you say this is true, that they need to understand how their work impacts the marketing, right?

– Yeah, and I think that there’s, back eight years ago, the idea of martech, if you will, or marketing tech, was kind of like not a thing, there were silos of like okay, here’s developers, and here’s marketing professionals and you have to interact with each other, but that’s about all you have, so. It’s growing over the years

– Now, now, right.

– I mean, obviously there’s so many tools out there that you can’t even put them on one sheet of paper in ten point font, it’d run over and over and over again.

– Right, that’s not possible.

– So yeah, it’s been a unique experience being able to learn all that stuff. And I learned most of the tracking stuff from this guy here, he’s the best.

– I’ll take a high five for that.

– So he taught me all the fundamentals that I needed to know and we feed off each other, so

– I just, I personally think that that intersection, cause that’s me too, right? I’m a comp sci, but then now I’m in this marketing field, so you and I are very much alike kind of in that sense that we know how development impacts marketing, so let’s talk about that.