Ep 67: Certifications vs Real-World Experience, Analytics Evolution, and the Rise of Deep AI Traffic
Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!
Episode Summary
The episode kicks off with a reflection on the value of certifications, especially in fast-evolving careers like digital analytics. Alex emphasizes that certifications provide foundational knowledge but rarely prepare professionals for the deeper, more strategic challenges that unfold with experience. Dave echoes this, citing how AI certifications helped him understand emerging platforms, but true value came from experimentation and experience.
The conversation shifts into the evolution of analytics tools, from early-stage Google Analytics to advanced platforms like Power BI and Looker Studio. Alex outlines how data roles evolve from basic report-pulling to strategic storytelling, dashboard design, and executive-level influence. They stress that mastery of analytics involves both technical fluency and soft skills like design and narrative framing.
Dave and Alex dive deep into how privacy regulations and cookie limitations now skew data, with major gaps in visibility due to blocked tracking. They also explore the growing phenomenon of "deep traffic" — when AI chatbots or assistants serve information that bypasses traditional funnels, leading users to convert instantly without consuming any on-site content. This disrupts conventional marketing attribution models and requires a mindset shift.
A significant portion of the episode focuses on the ongoing transition from performance-based to brand-driven marketing. Dave argues that modern marketers must adapt to uncertain, less measurable environments, taking cues from pre-digital eras. They discuss how new content moats are no longer about scale but about consistency, authenticity, and being willing to do what others won't — such as regularly showing up for a podcast or building community.
The episode concludes with a motivational challenge: identify the platforms and formats you genuinely enjoy, and focus your energy there. Sustainable differentiation, they argue, comes from passion and persistence — not tactics alone.
Ep 67: Certifications vs. Real-World Experience, Analytics Evolution, and the Rise of Deep AI Traffic Podcast and Video Transcript
Dave Dougherty: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds. Alex and Dave are here today.
Certifications vs. Real World Experience
Dave Dougherty: And Alex, you had an interesting thought on certifications versus real-world experience. And if there's time, I think we'll talk about it. The new sales structure over LinkedIn, and where that's falling short, for how some of these new AI SaaS things are happening.
But so Alex, why don't you queue us up with your experiences in certifications?
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I had a rather around lightning conversation where if you teased out a difference. Which I don't think I've ever seen online, stated which got into the different stages of analytics, web analytics, and the change in style systems and skills as an individual.
Basically, advances in that career set.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: And basically it got down to was the first I was talking to, had some certifications, which was excellent in one particular area. That's great. But they weren't even aware of all these different changes and things that would basically advance them up that career ladder.
And as we started talking about it, realized that there basically is very little, that kind of. It gives you even awareness, even some visibility into basically that things are going to change as you enter this career, and that basically as you want to basically proceed and advance up through it, you're gonna have to learn new skills.
Considerably different and radically different skills to basically succeed in this career. And that was just a funny thing, was realizing that, and the more generic thought off of that was basically just certifications in general. They're great at giving you that an inch deep of a puddle kind of awareness, but if you think that's the entire world versus the ocean that's around you.
You're missing stuff. And also to realize how you survive in that ocean. Those are different skills. So it's it's just funny where I've taken a lot of certifications and I'm not down trotting them at any point, because it's a great way to get a wide base of information very quickly to get that kind of, first to touch beginner's knowledge into it.
But there is so much more that happens with years of experience within those careers and in those, platforms, systems, whatever job type, whatever it might be, that really gives you so much more respect for the understanding of the breadth of skills that actually will be relied on to succeed in this.
And it was just it really became interesting. I can, I'd be happy to also to recap it and talk through just some of the kind of changes in analytics that I saw in some of those skill sets, but, and what's your first take on like certifications and where they fit versus real world experience?
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I think for me, the certifications are great when you're starting out or you're just getting your head wrapped around an idea. Like for example, when AI first came out, it was like, oh man, I don't even know how to think about this. But I know I should do it, and I know I want to try to be ahead of however many people I can be.
Yeah. So let me go to Google Cloud. Let me go to, even these platforms where I'm like, man, I would think these of these as like heavy coder. Heavy web dev kind of environments, and that's not my world, right? That, but I still took those trainings because I'm like, I need to know how these work because, but that's also for me, I'm a high context kind of person, right?
So I want to know how does this work? How can we, work with it, or what are the limitations that we're gonna have to work against, all that kind of stuff that worked. Wonderfully for me because it, a, it took down the anxiety of the AI's gonna replace us all right?
Which was that first thing because it was, oh, actually no, this is how it's gonna probably play out and this is how it can slot in. But really. There are limitations. And then to your point, as I tried each new platform and each new thing it really was the, okay. No. This is really good at tasks, but getting through like multi-step high strategy things, it's not there yet.
Could it be? Absolutely. But right now, as of this recording, no, it's not there yet.
The Evolution of Analytics Tools
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, it was good for context, but to your point, even just thinking specifically in that, that analytics piece. Yeah. 10, 15 years ago, starting out with. Google Analytics and just a basic website thing.
Like the hardest thing to do is try to figure out how to get the website button click to track properly, because Google Tag Manager didn't come out yet. And then when Tag Manager did come out, I remember sitting there and having my brain melted because it was completely different. Way of thinking.
And I had to I had to just suffer through it and rebuild it to be like, okay, this is possible. This is how this is how this, 'cause coming off as a guitarist and a writer and then all of a sudden, all right, tag manager, what place your code here, come again. Yeah, exactly. And then now further down the road.
You get into Power bi, you get into Looker Studio, you get into Tableau and all these visualization kind of things. That, yeah, that's like for me, that's like tag manager on steroids. Just because you have to get all the data to work together and you have to visualize it correctly. But the key thing, and I think you might have mentioned this, is that storytelling aspect, right?
The analytics do tell you what had happened, but where I do feel a lot of people maybe this is a topic for another show, 'cause we could go super deep on this, but I feel people forget that the analytics are not forward looking. Backward looking. Yeah. It can tell you what happened, not what's likely to happen.
You look at, oh, our previous campaign did, 40% click through rate? Great. But now who knows what's gonna happen? It's a new campaign, it's a new time. Maybe your target audience just got food poisoning and added at an industry event, and nobody's on their devices. You just don't know.
And you can't use analytics as a crutch. But the power of it is that storytelling and, moving things forward that way.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, getting into it, that is some of those skillset changes. And the stages of advancement that I was seeing was basically as one stage is that early level reporting.
Which is almost like technical confidence to get into a tool more than other people or maybe just spending the time and attention toward it. And once you get into it, you can pull the default reports and stuff like that. That's great. You're the person who pulls the reports,
Dave Dougherty: right.
Alex Pokorny: That extends a little bit with more investigation kind of work.
When you start having that's weird data, or someone has a question, they look at it and says, why did that happen? Or something like that, and then you try to start diving into it deeper and then you start trying to find related things and custom reports and stuff like that. Now you're, you're moving up in skills definitely by not just pulling the default ones, but.
To your point about storytelling, there's a big step change from the person who pulls the reports to the individual who can make a presentation that's, stripped down in the core elements, the executive summary version of it, and can make a really strong, compelling argument that creates change in that organization.
That's a very different individual and very different impact to that org versus the person who just pulls the reports. And then, yeah, we got into it also about, dashboarding of creating custom dashboards, power Bi Looker Studio, you name it, Excel even, or PowerPoint. However you want to manually do it or automatically do it.
A big piece about that is interviewing is not only knowing the data, knowing kinda the limitations of those systems. Speaking of kinda your point about, certifications with ai, big piece is knowing some of those limitations 'cause it's think web analytics, there's always missing data. There always is.
It's never 100%. It's always sampling or missing some because of some reason. It could be technical cookies not loading. Who knows? But you're always missing some, and it always looks like a hundred percent, but it's a hundred percent of the reported visits. It's not a hundred percent of your visits.
A hundred percent of the reported ones, the ones that happen to come through on the system after all those exceptions take place, but they look like it's a hundred percent. So it's again, that kind of misleading aspect of it. But knowing that information and knowing how to basically craft that story and do the kind of the storytelling and visual aspects of it.
Now you've got an entirely different skill set. You're talking about design. Soft skills and some technical skills. Because you've decided to basically template in this report, which means you've decided and picked the metrics and how you're going to filter segments, change those metrics.
You pick the order of them too, so that as the person reads through that report. It's a storytelling element. You might start with impressions or something that's a big fancy kind of ego rubbery number, but you get into something then that's actionable. That actually makes a difference and matters to the person too, right?
And trying to understand like, all the pieces that they need for that thing to actually be useful and worth the time that you're gonna invest in basically creating this thing. There's a lot of skills in there that are not just I know how to log into the system. Or I can pull a report. It is way beyond that at that stage.
And that's it. To your point, also about changing of tools. There's a number of different tools that basically start to switch in there too, of Google Analytics to Looker Studio or the Adobe Analytics versus Power BI kind of equivalents. You're switching systems as well, so lots of things to learn very quickly.
Yeah. To then be a very different person that org.
The Impact of Privacy Laws on Data Collection
Dave Dougherty: And the other thing too that comes into mind, speaking of the context piece of it, is just understanding the overall market that we're in. You know when you and I were pulling dashboards for our first jobs in the marketing agencies, side of things you, it was free for all on data. There was no conversation on privacy. It was, you visited my site, I get to see your, your click. But now with all the new privacy laws and the whatever else, to your point, it's the, of the people that allowed us to track with cookies. 30%. Could be This is the, this is what we see okay.
Cool. Now we're talking samples of samples. For our decision making, at what point do you go, me?
Alex Pokorny: And also, is that audience the same? Is the audience who allows all those cookies, are they the same, do they act the same as the individuals who don't? When you're creating this big assumption also that everybody is the same, the ones who do this action, the ones who don't do this action.
But that doesn't make sense.
Dave Dougherty: Actually, that brings up an interesting question. Maybe you know this, I have not looked into this at all since the AI bots can't they can kind, they can click on stuff. Would a visit it from an AI bot show up as traffic from a source that has allowed cookies or not?
Alex Pokorny: So would you even see it? Yeah. They have a referral tag. Most of 'em have a prebuilt referral tag. If you click on a link on Google Analytics, you'll see a UTM code that says Chat GBT.
So it gets pulled in. You can actually pull a referral report and see all the different AI bots and the traffic that they do, or ai, I shouldn't say AI bots, AI visits. AI bots would not be accepting cookies 'cause they can't download cookies. So they're your bot traffic versus AI sent visitors would show up as
Dave Dougherty: referral and they do have those takes.
Okay. So that's interesting 'cause almost all my conversations have been on the server side. Sure. Or on the
Alex Pokorny: bot, you're talking straight to chat GBT or something. Great. So then none of that shows up in analytics, right? No. No, it would show up in server logs if you were pulling your server logs because you'd see a bot access something and bot requested this and all the rest, that kind of stuff.
And actually that's a funny misnomer. I talked about that a little bit earlier, but just kinda reiterating it too, of how chat GPT pulls information. It doesn't have a giant index like Google does. It's not a saved copy of the internet that it's searching through a big database or a big. Oh, catalog instead it doing live searches.
So you can actually using the source of your chat, EBT or Gemini or whatever instance, you can actually see the different queries it goes out and uses. So it searches best CMS for enterprise and then it pulls in information and it'll do a bunch of different searches with a bunch of different keyword strings.
So it's still. Searching the internet like we are. But yeah, whether or not it shows up, no, it won't show up as a bot, it will once you start clicking on those links. Okay.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, these are all the nitty gritty things I know make for really bad radio, but are actually really interesting.
Alex Pokorny: You spoke about limitations with ai. That's the same thing here is basically is all these surface numbers look like magic.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: And they never are. But it's a question of, why aren't they? And you need that expert to help you learn what are the exceptions that are going on here?
What's the data that I'm missing?
What's the part of the story that I'm not seeing and but not being told.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: And it takes a lot of experience to know all those weird little reasons, like we used to always talk about the individuals who know didn't allow JavaScript to load because cookies were being loaded via that, and then they just weren't in analytics.
So we lost, it was a guess, maybe 5%, who knows? Of traffic. But speaking of only seeing 30% if you're in Germany or the uk, your numbers are pretty trash because they click no all the time and they block, or there's browsers that auto block. Some parts of Firefox, but also definitely like duck go or any of the privacy ones, automatically deny cookies and tracking.
You don't see that traffic at all. So chunks of traffic that are missing. And they're on your site, they're interacting, they're still doing shopping carts, they're still buying stuff. It's not like they're not customers. They're still reaching out, they're filling out forms, all the rest of that kind of stuff.
They just have a privacy mindset that's a little bit of a different, or a system that's denying it on their behalf. Yeah.
AI Traffic and Marketing Strategies
Alex Pokorny: There, there's a funny, there's a couple of funny studies that would come out about ai. Traffic and how it's weird traffic. Sometimes called deep traffic or something like that, because basically it's on, let's say you're on chat, GPT, you're figuring out the best CMS for your enterprise, or whatever that example was.
You run through a bunch of different options. You ask, get a bunch of questions, it gives you a bunch of information. You get all this kind of stuff, and you get down to it. You're like, yeah, that's the one. You click on it and you go basically straight into the sales page and suddenly contact. That is so weird from an analytics perspective because you had someone who just popped outta nowhere, consumed zero content and then now wants to buy, and you're like but what happened to my funnel?
You's free my blog post.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I'm Okay. So I'm in the middle of building a presentation around this actually. Okay. And, so everybody subscribe to the Pathways newsletter 'cause I'm gonna do a bunch of drafts of my thoughts in the newsletter here. So what I'm arguing, or the main thesis of it is that we are in the messy transition between performance based marketing and brand marketing.
Yes. And how everything that's old. Is new again. And because when you sit and you talk to people and they're like, oh my God, how do I do, how do I do influencer marketing and how do I do, social media? 'cause now I'm gonna have to do social media, but do I have to hire people?
And it's okay, let's start off with what you're already doing. Yeah. Are you going to trade shows? Yes. Can you give someone at said trade show? Who would otherwise be standing around and waiting for somebody to come talk to them at the booth, give them an iPhone and a battery pack and send them around the center, do some live recording, set up, do some behind the scenes, shots of how you're setting up the booth, right?
Make it a thing that you're there, not just. Showing up and having whatever conversations you can and, whatever else. Like a visible, it's, yeah, it's just like little tweaks like that. On the flip side of it though, is we now have, and this is a thesis that I've brought up a number of times here, so I'm gonna continue to do it until somebody can, prove me wrong.
We have generations of workers, of marketers who have been brought up that they can track everything. Yes. And that most of their decision making is de-risked to the point where, okay, cool. I'm comfortable because I can recommend this and know that I'm gonna be like 80% correct. Yeah. Then your bonus and your ability to move up the ladder will all be dependent on whether or not you estimated the performance of your campaigns correctly.
Whereas now, to your point with the deep traffic, that's no different than what it was in the eighties before internet. The phone rang, you said hi. I'm interested in this. Cool. Tell me about yourself. Yep. This is not that different. We've been doing it before, right? But the problem is you actually have to have some confidence.
You have to have the ability to accept risk. And understand that things might blow up on you. And that's a completely different mindset, a completely different leadership style than all of the people that have been elevated and come up in the last 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. Now,
Alex Pokorny: I, I had this conversation earlier with my team yesterday.
Saying that basically that a lot of the mass market advertising and marketing that we've relied upon in the past, yeah. Isn't really gonna work. The numbers aren't there. If you look at click through rates, there's a click-through rate study from Will Reynolds that and his agency that basically showed that for paid or organic, whenever an AI overview shows up, or even if it doesn't show up, your click through rates from the last year ago to today are either a half or a quarter of what they used to be.
Dave Dougherty: Right,
Alex Pokorny: so I'll say that again. Doing SEO or paid search a year ago versus today, you can expect a half to a quarter of the traffic you used to get.
And that doesn't matter if an AI overview shows up or not. It simply means less people are clicking. So now if you have a half to a quarter. Of what you used to rely on and you were all in on, oh, I've got a tiny bit of budget. I'll throw another 5K toward my monthly spend on paid search, or no, we're gonna bump up SEO.
Again, our budgets got slashed. I guess it's SEO time, which my gosh, the number of times that's been the case. We don't have any money. Hey, blog post. Yep. It's oh really?
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Guys, we should have been doing this from the get go. Thank you. Yeah, I know.
Long-Term Strategy vs. Short-Term Results
Dave Dougherty: That's a funny thing because
Alex Pokorny: we need a long-term strategy or we need a, short-term results, let's apply a long-term strategy.
Okay? Okay. What? No. No. That means you are, reaping the results of a long-term strategy that you've been doing. That's not the same. But to your point, you're not talking about spending much money on advertising. You're talking about people taking out their cell phone and recording themselves at the show that they're already at,
Dave Dougherty: and the money that you would be spending is to promote the content you've already created, right?
Yeah. It's the Facebook post boosting and the, YouTube thing.
Expanding Digital Footprint
Dave Dougherty: You're trying to expand your reach of the content you've already created
Alex Pokorny: and that that's what it gets down to is basically is this concept more of a digital footprint, right? Where basically is you are in all of these channels, and that's the same kinda realization that we came to as well, was basically is that social media really needs to be tied in.
As basically just like one of the other channels. Like organic traffic from paid organic traffic from SEO organic traffic from social media, right? You have paid traffic from paid search. You have paid traffic from social media too. All of those need to be tied more closely together instead of being sectioned off and siloed the way they have been, right?
Because the numbers across the board are not good, right? And to create enough traffic to create a funnel. To create a, customer journey, however you wanna do it, to create sales means more effort in more places. And to your point, a different shift in thinking. Like it was so easy before to have a budget of last year plus 10%.
Yep. That's my new estimate for this year. Just gonna do more of the same. More of the same. I'm gonna switch things up maybe a little bit. I'll experiments it a little bit on TikTok maybe. But let's be honest, I'm gonna ba basically push it all into Google, right? And it's and I. I also think about like back when the TV show Mad Men came out and the reaction that it made in the marketing community.
Because it's so funny because it was a whole bunch of performance marketers who were like being faced with a show that had nothing to do with their career, right? And it was like, oh yeah, we're these, yeah. Let's drink some cocktails. Like we're, still coming up with giant new, campaign ideas.
It's no, you're not, you're coming up with keyword lists based on volume numbers.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: That's not even
Dave Dougherty: close to being the same Yeah. Kind of mindset. No you're the nerds that weren't invited to the cocktail party. That's what that is
Alex Pokorny: Exactly. You're the guy who was still at the office when everybody else left.
Dave Dougherty: But the more interesting thing, and I'm gonna be at least for me because, I like to think big macro organizational level. Yeah.
Adapting KPIs and Marketing Metrics
Dave Dougherty: Is how quickly organizations are going to adapt their KPIs. Yeah. And how marketers are actually measured. Because if we're gonna be in this really gnarly place where leadership still thinks that we can track things, via clicks and click through rates and form submissions, it's gonna be some lean years for people with a high variable comp.
Yeah. On the one hand it's, I'm excited because I like creating content. I like pr, I like events. I. So cool. Let's do it. I know that is horrible for a lot of other people who are just like, no, I don't want to travel. I don't wanna see thousand people. I don't.
Alex Pokorny: There's also the, I mean we've talked about before, about a moat that applies here as well.
Yeah. I was on a demo call recently with a vendor who was saying like, oh, yeah, we can now have one person to blog refreshes, not new blog creation even. Because yeah, you can do that. Of course you can't. Right? But at scale now, you can have one person spend an hour and they could refresh 50 different blog posts and it'll automatically update to your CMS.
What that meant was basically the moat that was creating content and interesting blog posts and all the rest of that stuff is gone.
So that, that's the other kind of piece that there of just and programmatic did some damage to paid search and definitely to display. Not a ton, because there was enough, basically enough market that was left that it didn't hit everything.
But in some markets I'm sure it really hurt things, but it changes the way that you have to act then instead of being like my, the thing that's tough for me is gonna be tough for everybody else is creating content. Oh, that's no longer true. So you need to find that new thing that is tough for your competitors to do that you can do or that you're willing to do.
And throwing out a bunch of blog posts is no longer it.
Dave Dougherty: Well,
Alex Pokorny: doing it smart might be a difference. There might be some, still some. Something there, but I, yeah. I find myself
Dave Dougherty: on the fence with that one
Alex Pokorny: where I feel like there's gonna be something new, like a newer medium that's basically has some kind of moat to it that makes it more difficult for everybody just to do in giant volume.
Which allows you then to have a chance to do it better than somebody else.
Dave Dougherty: So this is where us doing this has been. It's a bright spot in each one of my weeks. Okay. Mushy thing over with two. You deal with your emotions so well, Dave. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
The Evolution of Content Creation
Dave Dougherty: The interesting thing for me is, as someone who started at, with blogging and creating those modes Yeah.
Fully recognize that a lot of the content that I cut my teeth on and started my career with is gone. The what is, who is, how is, those kinds of blog posts. Yep. The, those are table stakes now. Yep. Doing this podcast has been interesting because I'm not creating podcast blog posts off of the podcast transcripts.
I am literally copying and pasting the blo, the transcripts from the podcast and putting 'em onto the website, right? Even with that, what we see in our Google search console. Whatever else is that we're ranking for some pretty interesting keywords that I would imagine would be really hard to rank for now.
Are we converting anything? No, we're not selling anything. We're just coming together, having a conversation and having some fun. So Cool. The. Flip side of it though is all of the things that I have seen as a gain from doing this are all of those soft skills. Intangible, can't track it, right? Yep. I am getting more in my day job because people are seeing content on LinkedIn featuring us.
Talking about topics. So now people are coming to me and wanting to discuss things, which is great because when I was trying to do the internal politicking, I was smacking my face against, all these brick walls. And then, so it's led to some interesting opportunities, being able to do some guest speaking, being able to do some different events all of those sorts of intangibles that are building things long term.
But it also becomes a credibility piece. Hey, I've had a podcast with some friends for three years. We have shown up and done it for three years.
Alex Pokorny: What was it after like 10 episodes we were in the top 90th percentile because something like that, almost all podcasts don't make it to 10 episodes.
And for doing it for a year, I think we hit like the 95th or 98th percentile or some crazy thing of there's only a couple that last a year. So sticking with something too, honestly, that is a moat in a way as well. And creating content I think is, and I shouldn't say that creating content itself is completely diluted.
I should correct that. It is consistently doing it and actually doing it is a difference from your competitors. And if that is a point of differentiation, then it is a moat. If it isn't a point of differentiation from your competitors, then it isn't, right. The ability there to create the content, like the resource request on that, basically has lessened a lot,
Dave Dougherty: right?
And then I had an interesting experience this week with a coworker that was really good reminder of other people's experiences with your content is not yours. That's true. That's true. So I'm sitting and I'm outlining this presentation that I have to put together for next week. Yep. And so I'm just out and people are walking by sobbing talking.
And I started talking to this this woman, you and I both ignore her and she's, and she just threw away this line of, oh, you're always doing cool stuff. I see what you have on LinkedIn. That was interesting to me because for me it's just man, I'm just I'm doing what I like to do, but I don't think it's all that cool.
'cause I'm the one doing it.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. You know how the sausage is made, like this is,
Dave Dougherty: yeah. And what's that Charlie? Is it Charlie Chaplin that said, I don't want to be a part of a club that would have me as a member?
Alex Pokorny: It was Groucho Marks, but
Dave Dougherty: Groucho Marks. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, but man, I feel that.
I feel that. Yep. Yep. So it's just it's a good reminder of it is all the above. Yeah. Because if you, because we don't have the analytics, and this is where I'm thinking out loud, so you know. Yeah, go for it. Everybody. Do your own thinking.
Finding Your Unique Marketing Approach
Dave Dougherty: If I'm creating content on topics that I want to be known for and that I have fun talking about, thinking about researching, not only does that help with actually continuing to do it and to show up and to, have that, but over time you'll be able to get that influence, get that thought leadership stance, get that, get all of those things that people think they want by doing something quick and the silver bullets of whatever else. Yeah. Whereas,
yeah, I don't know. I think that's where the motivation just hits for me, is I enjoy the process, I want to keep doing it, so I'm gonna do it. And as people find that content, whether that's, podcasting, YouTube, social media, if they then come to the website, which interestingly enough, I've done enough, like in-person informational interviews lately, every single one of 'em has says, yeah, I did a little bit of like internet stalking before I met you.
You seem legit. It wasn't just, oh, my professor told me I should talk to you. It's the Okay, my professor told me to talk to you. Oh, wow. He actually knows thing. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an all the above, back to the marketing mix, it's just at the personal level and not the organizational level.
It's both.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And that might be. Part of the key too, of finding what that new thing is is finding that thing that you're comfortable with, the thing that you enjoy or you get some excitement from, and just pushing harder into that and doing it more than others because your personalities could be different, right?
Than the marketer who's working for your competitor. So if you enjoy making vlogs, awesome. You're probably gonna do it way better and way more of 'em, and stick with it a lot longer than a competitor who just read like a listicle that said, Hey, number seven was create more flogs. Hey, we should do one.
And they do one poorly because it's their first one and they're learning and then they stop. That is a difference. Just having that individual in your company or org that has a desire to. Who loves event marketing. There are some people who love it, some people who hate it.
A lot of people are pretty indifferent to it. Same thing with social media, same thing with everything else. Every other format too.
Dave Dougherty: See, I like traveling. I like going to Yeah. Events. So long as I don't have to stand in the booth and just wait. That's tough. If I can walk around.
And, interact with some people that way and then duck out for a cup of coffee when I want to. That's enjoyable. Or giving the presentations on the stages. I like that. But yeah, and I know that puts me in a weird category of people. Yeah. Where it's just oh, do you wanna do three days in Chicago?
Yeah, I do. All right, cool. How about Atlanta? Cool. Let's do it. Okay. How about Kentucky, eh? Yeah, let's do it. Kentucky's. All right. Yeah, Louisville's. All right. Yeah. So anyway so there you go. Find
Alex Pokorny: something you enjoy. Stick with it. Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Make a
Alex Pokorny: difference that
Dave Dougherty: way. Absolutely. Which to our other point.
That's always been the recommendation. It's just more important.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Point of differentiation I think is big. Speaking of like that mass market aspect. Doing all the channels isn't possible. Doing a couple of them well is definitely possible. Trying to identify where those opportunities are.
Take some skill and expertise. And then. Doing it well and sticking with it. Take some personality. There's a lot of different elements there that are going to be points of differentiation.
Dave Dougherty: Okay.
Challenge: Identify Your Preferred Channels
Dave Dougherty: So there's your challenge, everybody, if you've made it this far. Thank you. Your challenge for the next two weeks is to map out what are the things you actually enjoy doing.
What are the channels you actually like engaging with? And then. Making a plan for that. Thank you as always subscribe, share, that helps us even three years in, helps us grow and get more more people into the conversation and reach out. Any episode ideas, any comments, feedback, personal experiences with these things?
Let us know. We would love to from you.
