070: She Leads Digital: Inspiring Stories of Women in Marketing (Best of Episode)

 

Danny Gavin Host

00:05

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. I’m your host, Danny Gavin, and together with industry leaders and marketing experts, we’ll explore the meeting point of mentorship and marketing. We’ll discover how these connections have affected careers, marketing strategies, and lives. Now, get ready to get human.

 Incredible women who are shaping the future of digital marketing. In this best-of-episode, you’ll hear powerful stories and testimonials from women who are not just thriving in this dynamic field but leading the charge. From inspiring and often unexpected career transitions to overcoming imposter syndrome, balancing expectations, and paving the way for the next generation. Through mentorship, these women are breaking barriers and redefining success in digital marketing. The experiences shared in these interviews remind us of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, the value of transferable skills, and how women’s unique perspectives drive innovation and growth in our industry. Join us as we highlight these memorable journeys and celebrate these trailblazing women who are solving problems, driving strategy, and making significant impacts in the world of digital marketing. 

Purna Virji Guest

01:28

I went up to high school in India, in Mumbai, where I’m from, so I studied my first degree is business and economics and finance and then I’m like, this thing is not lighting my bones on fire, and so this isn’t my passion, and I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. And so I moved over to the UK and then I studied journalism there and then I realized that I found my calling, because one of the things about me, as you can tell from my diverse career, is that I love to tell stories and I love to teach people, but I also like to touch and learn and work on different things. I don’t want to do the same thing for the rest of my life, like I’m not one of those people you’ll hire, and like ten years later she’ll be in the same job. I want to learn, grow, and diversify, so journalism was a great place for me to start. 

Sarah Presch Guest

02:19

I love how people think and how you can dive deep into why people do what they do and how it impacts society. Being a marketer is all about understanding what makes people tick and that kind of stuff. So I just had this click moment. I was like, oh my gosh, yes, this is what I want to do. 

Amalia Fowler Guest

02:37

There is this narrative. 

02:38

I think this really binary narrative in our field, where it’s like you have to get a degree or you shouldn’t get a degree, and honestly, it’s case by case, person by person. I teach in a marketing program. I’m a huge advocate for the connections that I set up for the students I work with. I am also sure I’ve hired people who have never taken a marketing class. So I think it’s much more about a person’s journey. But both paths have equal value in some way, and we don’t. We get into this narrative of like program good, program bad, not program good, not program bad, and I don’t think it helps us at all. 

Allie Danzinger Guest

03:12

But there can be success with an undergrad in marketing For me, in public relations, and when I went to school, I did not get much out of my classroom experience. 

03:24

I felt like I learned things that didn’t really seem applicable to the real world. So I decided early on, and definitely with the encouragement of my parents, for that first job to be an internship, a paid internship in the field that I wanted to go into, got a feel for, like, how people actually use PR in the real world, and I think that’s just kind of what led me to get a business minor then, led me to get that Spanish minor, because what I was learning in the PR classes just didn’t feel like enough. And I kept interning every semester after that and every summer in the industry I wanted to enter. So by the time I actually graduated and started my first job, not only did I have opportunities because I had work experience, but I was really really clear on what I wanted to do with that degree, what type of job I wanted to go into, and then I think that’s just all part of what led me to my path now. 

Emily Ryan Guest

04:19

A lot of marketing people were from theater, because I think a lot from that world translates to marketing. I know I could probably write, write ten reasons why my background in theater helped me as a marketer, even with stuff like this, like I, sometimes I’ll do like a webinar or speaking thing and I’m like, oh, I feel like I’m performing again, like I, I love it because it’s kind of like full circle, I’m getting to perform a little bit. You have to not worry so much about what people think of you and be creative. I mean, there’s so much creativity in marketing, which is why I’ve always been drawn to it, especially with email, because email design can be very technical, but it’s like theater. It’s very technical, but it’s also creative. 

Martha van Berkel Guest

05:03

I originally really wanted to do an MBA. I dreamed of becoming a general manager and wanted to work for a big company and run a whole department. And so part of that was like, oh, there are things I just don’t know right, there are things I can’t learn on the ground, things like accounting and finance. And it was actually working with a coach that was like, why do you want to do an MBA? As I dissected that, I figured out that I wanted to do an MBA because I believed that to be successful I had to have an MBA. And I figured out that that belief came as a result of my parents holding that belief. And then I just adopted it. And so I had this blocker that I couldn’t be successful until I did an MBA. And so I sort of had this blocker that I couldn’t be successful until I did an MBA. Things I was going to have to give up in my personal life and I did a lot of volunteer work at this time of my life I was like I’m not willing to give that really important piece up to do my MBA, and it’s a time thing. And then it was like, well, can I bash the belief that I can’t succeed without the MBA? And so I chose to bash that belief. 

06:06

And Cisco was quite happy because they didn’t have to pay for it at this point. And so I asked them for two things. I said, but I’d like to go to MIT and pay for all my travel if you pay for the course to do innovation strategy, because that’s what I did for Cisco then. And I thought this was really relevant, and I thought it would be, and I wanted the MIT name on my resume. I wanted to be able to market with that. 

06:25

The second thing I wanted was a job where I would get the opportunity to lead a broader team and manage a budget so I could get into the finances. And I got both. My learning from it was like asking yourself why on many of these things, and then you can sometimes break it down and get the better outcome. So then I got the opportunity. I got real-world experience doing it with mentors and people coaching me because it was like their success was tied to my success because I was on the job, and I got this relevant life experience at MIT. That was way more time manageable so I could continue to do the volunteer work that was really important to me. 

Batli Joselevitz Guest

06:59

I really, really focused on getting experience outside of the classroom. My major was journalism. Even in that major, I had to go out in the world, be curious, explore, and be very observant of what was happening around me, ask questions, interview people, and talk to strangers. I did a series on my own with photography where I would just go up to strangers, ask them a few questions, and take their photos. So that really got me out in the world and just being curious. 

Adele Beiny Guest

07:28

Both my parents are academics. My mother went to Harvard before women even went there. When I tell people that, they’re surprised because you think if you come from academic parents, it’s wild that I wouldn’t go to school. I mean to go on to university. My mother was actually the one who told me not to go to school. She said that you have the gift of gab. You have a great personality, you’re a natural-born networker. You’ll do better just going out in the world. And I actually didn’t do great in a formal educational setting sitting in a classroom learning. I didn’t do my best, I didn’t thrive. I liked getting my hands dirty, so it was kind of a no-brainer for me. How do I feel about it today? I think I’m doing better than many of my friends who went to university. I think the society we’re in now, whether we like it or not, really needs you to have a degree in some capacity. I think I eked through, but I would tell young people today to go to college. 

Sicily Dickenson Guest

08:25

I was the first generation of graduates to go through UT, where we had actual digital editors, and we weren’t splicing film with razor blades. 

08:36

So I bring this up because it actually is. Most of the reason I ended up in marketing is that I had to learn to use Avid. That’s what we were using at the time. It was a very complicated software program, and then, you know, making a film at that time was very technical, in that you had to understand codes and compressions and all kinds of video algorithms, and so I had to learn all that to make my films and projects. And so that led me to understand computers, probably in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to at my films and projects.  But I was so indoctrinated with that kind of project that it led me to be able to do all kinds of things online, which really paved the way for me to get opportunities in my career in digital marketing, as digital marketing started to sort of turn the tables on traditional marketing. 

Tracy Murray Guest

09:27

So I know this may be a bit of a controversial opinion, but the older I get and the more that I do and see, the more I tend to lean on college, especially when a graduate degree isn’t as cracked up as it used to be, unless, of course, you’re going into that. Specific doctors should probably go to medical school, but I definitely think again, there’s just so much knowledge there that you can find it outside of a classroom, and a perfect example is Odeo. I mean, you pack so much into that course that they would be learning in college for a fraction of the time and price without having to say okay, if I really want to change careers, I need to give up the next four years and go back to school. 

Akvile Defazio Guest

10:28

I actually went to school for physical therapy. I wanted to do graphic design when I was younger but, being immigrants, my parents persuaded me to go to medicine. It was a pure field. There would always be opportunities to work and make a good living and not. We moved with about $5 in our pocket, trying to escape the Cold War. So we didn’t have anything. So I don’t want to disappoint my parents I wanted to go into medicine and be like oh you know, maybe I could do design as a hobby someday. 

10:55

So I went to school for pre-med and then realized it really wasn’t for me, and I moved into physical therapy because I had a knee injury. So, I went to PT myself, and I really enjoyed working with people and helping others. I felt like that was a much better fit than maybe being in the ER, where there was high stress and no sleep. I acquired my bachelor of science degree in exercise science, and then I tried to get into PT grad school to get my doctorate. I tried for three years but did not get in, even though I was a straight-A student. I even had one A, and they’re like you should redo it to get an A plus. And I was like this is my future, this is my money, that I have to repay these school loans. 

11:33

So, I made the difficult decision to tell my parents I wasn’t going to pursue it anymore. 

11:37

Plus, it helped to have a college advisor tell me just blatantly she’s like I think you might want to explore other career opportunities, and I think that that’s. 

11:45

I needed somebody to give me permission to take that step for myself. So I decided to dive into marketing because when I was working at PT clinics as an aide and learning about it, trying to get into PT school, there were some marketing opportunities at the clinics and I was just so interested in them that I jumped all over them and I thought that that could be a much better fit for me creatively and also to still help people in a different capacity. I ended up doing one year of my MBA, thinking that that was the route I needed to get into marketing because I had no education in marketing. But, after one year of my MBA program, I realized it was very expensive and only two marketing courses were in a three-year program. This was accounting and finance. I was like, oh you know, I’m going to just bet on myself and really learn everything I can, and I fought for a few internships, and that’s how it all started. 

Navah Hopkins Guest

12:34

When I was in the third grade, I decided I would be an English teacher, and from third grade until college, that would be. I’m going to be an English teacher. But as I was going through my program, I went to SUNY Binghamton; I realized two really critical things. The education system would set me up to be poor and ineffective because there are so many constraints on teachers. There are so many roadblocks to being able to actually support students in a really meaningful, scalable way, and, combined with other factors, I ended up actually taking a medical withdrawal, did a full course load, and my family was living in Florida at the time at FAU, and realized you know what I need to rethink things kind of. And I had a meaningful conversation with a relative who told me Nava, what are you doing? You are denying the core of who you are. You were meant to be in marketing. You have both profound empathy and a just-go-get-them attitude, and you’re denying what would serve you best and where you can make the most impact. 

13:51

So I transferred to Emerson, where, funnily enough, there was an amazing PR professor, John Boroszak, who gave us all an assignment to go out and find mentors. The skill of cultivating mentorship really stuck with me beyond all the other marketing stuff. That kind of just stayed with me and helped me be a bit more ahead of my peers in age because I could just have these conversations and it took away the fear of, well, this person’s a CEO, or this person’s a C-level executive. People are people; if you talk to people in honor of what they want and why they want it, they tend to want to help others. So that transition between my relative kind of saying, like Nav, what are you doing, like go into marketing, and that professor who basically gave us an assignment of we had to go cultivate mentorships were two really critical moments in my education that then set me up for success in my career. 

Allie Danzinger Guest

14:52

So I started freelancing. This was in 2008. There was no one doing social media. The opportunity she gave me at the company I kind of alluded to was when I started the company’s social media department. I was 23 years old and had no idea what I was doing, and she granted me this opportunity and trusted me to do it. It gave me, you know, I know, we don’t know what social media is, but you can go to any conference, take anyone to lunch or coffee, buy any book, or do whatever you need to do. Let’s build out a social media department. So I did that, and I was going to conferences ultimately like speaking on panels back in 2008, before people really knew what social media was, and so, with that, I started getting some freelance opportunities and started kind of building a name for myself, especially in the real estate community around social media. And so I got all these really great freelance opportunities and then was faced with the decision. I’ve used up all my sick vacation days. There was no hybrid work environment or anything like that then, so I had to decide whether to stop doing freelance work or quit my job. See if I’m really the type of person who will wake up and hustle. So, I took a little test for a month in New York to see if I could really handle it without a full-time job. And I could. 

16:10

I woke up even earlier when it was for my own work, continuing to build up more freelance gigs until ultimately I had to hire people. And then I had four contractors at my house, and my boyfriend now has been walking around like who are all these people? I think it’s time for you to get an office. I then got an office and then hired a first full-time employee, and they started asking about benefits and direct deposits. I’m like, oh, I guess we need to legitimize this a little bit. From there, it was 2010 when I hired that first employee, and 2009 when I moved down to Houston and really set up shop with Integrate. The rest is history. We then really kept growing from there, and with any service-based business, it’s like you get more clients, so then you hire more people, so then you get a bigger office, so then you have to get more clients, and then you have to hire more people, and then you have to get a bigger office. And it’s this like a hamster wheel of growth that I loved. 

Danny Gavin Host

17:05

So I can only imagine how tense that must be for someone coming into the industry fresh from another discipline. How do you, or how did you, counter those thoughts in your own mind? 

Tracy Murray Guest

17:15

It definitely was a thing. It still is a thing. Anytime I take on something new, there’s a little part of me, like you know, after we get off the call I’m like yep. As soon as the Zoom goes away, that’s like okay, do I know how to do this? What do I do? So I think there’s always a part of that that stays with you and I think that is good. We need a little bit of that so we don’t run away with reckless abandon and make crazy changes or something like that. 

17:46

But one of the things that helped,  well, there’s two. The first is finding an accountability or support person who has either done what you’ve done or is also going through it, that you can lean on each other or that can help you kind of step away and realize you do have the capabilities. And then the second, I would say is actually a piece of advice that I got from a past coworker and that was, if the imposter syndrome gets really bad, it’s to sit down and just write everything in a bolded list of where you’ve come from, from where you started in the past, whether it’s the year, is this a new change you’ve made? And when you look back on that list, it’s like, wow, I actually did a lot, I can do a lot. And it’s about calming that ego voice in your head, because, at the end of the day, that voice is just trying to keep you safe. So it’s not so much battling it as working through it. 

Shelly Fagin Guest

18:57

I probably spent way too much time in my career struggling it out all on my own. I’m really like one of those people. I feel bad putting people out asking for help, so I usually don’t. I also, I think, was in a bubble for the first big chunk of my career where, because I was a mom of four, I worked independently. I couldn’t swing or justify budgets to send myself to expensive conferences. I was in a small town for quite a while before we moved to Houston, so we didn’t really have other people in my area who were doing what I was doing, so I struggled all alone for a really long time. I think had I opened up and had more mentors, I probably would have seen my career progress a lot quicker. 

Vicky Charleston Guest

19:50

I wasn’t aware of how much I didn’t know about digital marketing until I started working with you Danny, and it was such a great learning experience. I mean, I started off on the wrong foot. When I was building those graphics, it was like, no, you can’t do this, I can’t do that, and we have to do A-B testing. I’m like let me pivot to the left or to the right. Right, because I don’t know what I’m doing. It was enough to make me want to learn more, and I thought it could be an advantage in my career moving forward if I knew more about digital marketing, because that’s the future, right. 

20:25

So you emailed me or I don’t know if it’s part of a mass email, I don’t know or I talked to you it was after I left Houston Public Media and I think we were having a conversation. We talked and you said that you were starting this academy and I said, oh, that sounds interesting. I’m not doing anything right now, but looking for, and since it piqued my curiosity, I knew there was so much for me to learn and I knew you and I trusted you right, so that’s why I took the leap. I just said, why not? You know what’s the worst that can happen. I can learn something and I can use it in my career moving forward, and it has helped me so much. 

Batli Joselevitz Guest

21:07

Don’t be afraid just to start and just try, because you don’t know where it would lead. You won’t know until you try If you like it, if you don’t like it, so that you can carve that path to things you do love doing. Having an open mind and just being curious allows you to have that openness and be willing to try these different routes, whether it’s SEO, paid search, or any other area of digital marketing.

Allie Danzinger Guest

21:33

We were always hiring people right out of colleges.At least four times a year, I would speak at different universities in front of communications classes and majors, to acquire them as talent for either our internship programs or just in hiring entry level. So I’ve always been passionate about that and seen the gaps, understood that like you know how to do a press release but you don’t know how to take notes in a meeting, because the notes in a meeting and the way that you have the actionable deliverables after a meeting is really different than the actionable deliverables after a class and like how you then use your notes from that meeting to study for the test. And so I have always grappled with that skills gap and worked to train our interns and entry-level employees on those things and understood what that gap really looks like and understanding what they’re going to come in with knowing and what we’re going to have to teach them. 

Adele Beiny Guest

22:28

I would say that selling was my greatest teacher in what I’m doing now, because great marketing requires you to put yourself in the mind of the person who’s absorbing what you’re marketing. In order to know and feel and internalize what your audience is thinking or feeling or might want to think and feel, you have to know people, and the best way to learn people is try and sell. 

Danny Gavin Host

22:58

Are you leveraging your past experience or education in PT at all to help you? 

Tracy Murray Guest

23:00

Definitely on a lot of the management side, like problem solving, developing systems and processes and all of those skills, but then one of the big things of running such a big team is really learning how to take people and develop them. I heard a great quote the other day from a woman who runs an agency named Tiffany Sauter, and she was talking about leading leaders and I think that was a big thing. That translated over from what I used to do to what I do now and that goes back to a great point for those people who are nervous about transferring skills is there’s so much that they are likely doing in their day or week now that, yeah, they may not look exactly the same, they may not be those same tasks, but the skills, the way they’re working with people, slide right into a marketing career. 

Shelly Fagin Guest

24:04

So, I started teaching myself how to code and buying these old books. Honestly, back then, there weren’t many places online to learn how to do this. I taught myself from a book HTML a little bit of CSS, got frustrated, and started playing around with different CMSs that were around at the time. Then I naturally was more of well, if we build something, how do we get it to rank? How do we drive traffic? And that’s when I stumbled across SEO. It was a couple years into my journey and became instantly captured and fascinated and then knew that I was cheaping out and or cheating out, so to speak, in the way I was going about building websites. And then I really really learned the value of hand coding and understanding how to code and code right and that was a pivotal changing point in my career and was able to learn both simultaneously. 

25:05

So I was more in my ADD true self. I was constantly coming up with a million ideas and building out a site for this and building out a site for that, and it was just all about hands-on doing stuff. I think when Twitter came around I finally started to find bloggers, people who in the industry were writing about their experiences and sharing and that’s when it was just like turning on the water faucet of learning everything and inspiring wild wild west early days of search. 

Tracy Murray Guest

25:40

I really leaned into those soft skills. So in my corporate job I did a lot of hiring and I can tell you almost unanimously hires will say we can teach the hard skills. It is much harder to teach those soft skills and to teach that personality and that fit soft skills and make sure you at least touch upon that in the interviews and really kind of let your personality come through. And then I of course made those comparisons. I’ve talked a few times about those transferring skills and like this is what I did there and here’s how I think it would translate to working with you. And then the third piece is that I really talked about too that I would be a fast learner. I am driven, and  I want to make this succeed. I will figure out how to do all the things on my own and on my own time. 

Navah Hopkins Guest

26:50

I took the money I had earned and started a failed nonprofit startup called Angel Ed. I started with my then-boyfriend, now husband, whose goal was to make education as debt-free and employable as possible through mentorship and scholarships. But the catch was I didn’t have an MBA. I didn’t really understand how many mistakes I was making when we set this nonprofit up, and so I ended up getting a quasi MBA in the process of failing with that startup, because I learned all of what not to do the mechanics of investment, the mechanics of how to structure a corp, how to think about your operations, how to think about tech debt, how to think about all these things there was like jobs where I had to knock on doors, like I was door to door with the machine, like that movie with Will Smith, like the pursuit of happiness, like hauling things, trying to get time with doctors, trying to just get five minutes with them. 

Adele Beiny Guest

27:53

I was terrified. You have to overcome some fear. You have a very short amount of time to deliver a very important message, and that message is I want your dollars in this case, but with marketing it’s I want your eyeballs. I need your attention, I need your time, I need you to care. 

Sicily Dickenson Guest

28:08 

Yeah, being exposed to women doctors, medical professionals, people buying real estate, people buying homes, right? You have to really tap into what they care about because 

otherwise, they don’t care. I mean, I’ll never forget my Allergan training Big Pharma with them what’s in it for me? They were like, if you have 30 seconds to get this point across to your audience, what’s in it for me? Seconds to get this point across to your audience? Lik,e what’s in it for me? And so, with everything I post and everything I do, I think, what’s in it for them? And if I can’t answer that question, the content gets scrapped. It doesn’t have to be deep, by the way. The whiff doesn’t have to be like oh it’s life-changing. Sometimes, if you’re talking head but you’re entertaining, entertaining is important enough. What’s in it for them? They’re entertained. That’s very valuable. 

Sarah Presch Guest

28:53

You know, in the workplace it’s quite a big buzzword at the moment the laws that people talk about. 

28:57

Oh, we need to be a psychologically safe workplace. 

29:01

The problem is that people don’t quite understand how it’s done, or they see it as more of a tick-the-box exercise. 

29:08

That’s especially what I’m noticing with people in neurodivergence and SEO, that you have all of these companies that are talking about how we’re inclusive, how we’re a psychologically safe company, but in reality, for the people who need it, like the autistic employees, the disabled employees, the people from, you know, ethnic minorities and stuff like that it’s actually not the case. So you need some kind of framework when you’re going in and coming up with all of these different phrases and actually getting people involved from these different communities. Because if you say apologies to the middle-aged white men out there, but if you’re a middle-aged white man and you come in and create these processes without speaking to women, without speaking to people of color, without speaking to disabled people, you’re not going to have any idea of kind of the struggles that they’re facing, because, like me, I would not be able to. You know, I should not be creating stuff or policies for people of color because I haven’t walked in their shoes. I don’t know what it’s like. 

Emily Ryan Guest

30:04

I never thought I could have a business of my own from home making a good living. So whenever I see another, specifically moms, I get what it’s like: you want to be home with your little baby that you just had. And that was the reason I started my business because I had a six-month-old and I was going into work my job for 10 hours a day and I had a babysitter with my child all day and I would get home and have an hour with my son. I was like this is awful, this is horrible, this is not good. So when I see other moms that are like I’m so miserable in my job and I’ve been blown away with how many women are in this situation, I get so many DMs on Instagram that are like any ideas how I can start doing similar to what you’re doing, to the point where I’m like should I make a course because it’s just so possible. 

31:02

If you have any skills on a computer, you can easily start a business from home and make substantial income. And the key is, the reason I love moms is because they want it bad enough. If you want to have a business from home, you have to want it bad. You can’t just be like, oh I want to try this side hustle. You have to want to get up and make money each day. And yeah, over the years there’s been quite a handful of women who come to me and I say you know what? I’m happy to send you If we get any leads that aren’t a good fit. I’ll send you a lead and I can help walk you through the first steps of like what do you send them? You send a contract, you send the estimate, the intro call, if you want me to sit in with you on it, because nothing brings me more joy than seeing another woman be able to work from home and have flexibility. 

Akvile Defazio Guest

31:48

I won Toastmaster of the Year 2017. I don’t know if this will be on video, but I have it here on my desk, and I have always had terrible stage fright. 

31:57

I have performed since I was a child. My mother, my grandmother, my aunt, they’re all classically trained professional pianists. So I grew up playing on stage. I would just black out, I don’t know. I would do the song and I would get up and I have no idea what happened. And then same thing kind of progressed through my youth. I took one public speaking class in high school, two in college, and still I would black out and I would just shake and sweat and I would not be present. 

32:22

So I realized when I launched my business eight years ago that I need to confidently convey what I can do to help other people, my experience, my worth, and what my rates are, without any hesitation. And I knew that most of like all of my industry friends are public speakers and I was just like hanging out here, what are you going to go up and speak? And it was always like ah, no, no, no. So I decided to invest in myself and a friend of mine, Debbie. She invited me to go to a Toastmasters meeting and I pushed off for years because I was intimidated and I went and she’s like there’s no obligation to speak, you just go and meet at a Panera tuesday mornings for an hour. You pay $50 every six months, which was just the best value from that first meeting. There’s different exercises that you do and there’s planned prepared speeches based on this curriculum so you can progress through it and learn how to give different types of speeches. And there’s business ones for presentations and sales pitches. I was like, if I need to succeed as a business owner, I need to communicate concisely, effectively, and with confidence. Right, no one’s going to do business with me if I’m just like. 

33:32

So my first meeting I had to speak for 60 seconds about any topic. They’re just they’re called table topics and I said 29 ums in one minute. I was so nervous. It took me seven months and I got to zero, and every time he said ah or um or any filler word, they would ring a bell. I had one condition. I promised myself, I was like, okay, I’m not going to miss a single meeting. And for one year I did not miss a single meeting and it was just once a week. And they nominated me Toastmaster of the Year and I became the club president and I put it on Twitter hey, I’d like to start speaking at conferences. Is there anyone that’s prepping a show for next year that’s looking for speakers? Maybe somebody that’s a novice, and I got invited for my first event to Salt Lake City to go speak at the Adobe campus at SLC SEM. At the time I didn’t know until the day of that I was the keynote speaker. 

Danny Gavin Host

34:23

Oh, my God. 

Akvile Defazio Guest

34:24

And I was like, okay, put on your big girl pants, I’m here, let’s just do this. I’ve been prepping for a year, and I did it. That really just brought other opportunities, and I am now fully present when I speak, and I enjoy it. 

Adele Beiny Guest

34:37

I still get nervous, don’t get me wrong. But I am present, and that’s the biggest thing that I’m very proud of. We’re not doing anyone a service if we’re just constantly just saying niceties. I actually just heard about this study yesterday. It’s like loosely connected, but this is the longest study of following children from like toddlers up. They followed them for about 70 years, and overall, the people who believed that everything would be fine, like high in the sky. They died, on average, several years earlier because they didn’t take care. They didn’t; they weren’t mindful, right? We don’t do anyone a service by just being like everything’s wonderful all the time In the same way. I have this responsibility, and I’m trying to build this brand of authenticity. So sometimes that will look like snarkiness, sometimes that will be sassy, and sometimes it will be positive, kind, and a warm mentor. But we’re also multi-dimensional people, and I honestly think this is where I think a lot. 

35:39

Just quickly taking it back to marketing, yeah, sometimes, for me, this is where I think some marketers drop the ball a little bit. They become so hyper-focused around one topic or their one niche, and I know people say to niche down and that it is important, but at the same time, we don’t feel like seeing, doing, or eating the same thing every day. So why would you only want to see one type of content, right? Like we’re flexible, malleable beings, we don’t only like you know. So when I see a yoga studio, like only ever posting yoga schedule class, I’m like, let’s get a little diverse here. There’s other stuff, let’s bring in wellness, breath work, mindfulness, and all sorts of things that sort of still boost your brand and help you kind of be who you are in the space, but without being so one-dimensional. 

Danny Gavin Host

36:26

You know, some people think that if you’re creative, you can’t get into the technical. But I actually think those two things are married so well. Right, like, you know the creative and the analytical work so well. 

Vicky Charleston Guest

36:39

It’s two sides of the brain, and if I had not taken your course or been involved in it at all, I would never have known anything about it. I never would have known that I had the ability to think on that level. It was so natural to me that writing Google ads was pretty. I mean, it was a time of discovery, Danny. It really was. I thought, wow, okay, maybe I can make a real career change. I have to start at the bottom, right, but that’s okay if I really want to make the change.  It just opened so many doors for me in my head; right now, I didn’t even know the term schema. If you asked me about scheme anything, I would think of the rhyme or scheme of a poem. That’s totally different, but not, yeah, I just never knew that I had the ability. And then here’s the thing, though. Here’s the thing when I think about it now: when you say that when I first started college, I was actually a math major.  

Danny Gavin Host

37:44

Not surprising!

Vicky Charleston Guest

37:45 

I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. But I’d reached a level that I didn’t understand. And so I said, well, I know art; I can become a designer, right?  But it makes sense now and I just thought about that now. Those were the things that most intrigued me and most surprised me.

Sarah Presch Guest

38:03

This is probably one of the most ADHD ideas that Jack and I came up with. We were at Brighton SEO; you can see this is becoming a common theme. We were at Brighton SEO, and we were thinking there’s all sorts of communities in SEO, but there’s no space for neurodivergent folk like like us. 

38:22

So we’re like, let’s make one in true ADHD fashion. We set up a Google form, made a LinkedIn page, and went live. We were thinking that maybe one or two people would sign up, and then we’d be like, yay, we have, and that would be it. But it’s kind of grown, and now we have well over 200 members. I think there are about 30 different countries around the world. 

38:44

Now we’ve provided opportunities for people to go to conferences, to do training courses and stuff, because unfortunately, using autism as a statistic, I can’t remember off the top of my head, if it, I think, is 73% of autistic adults are unemployed, even though they want to be employed. Unemployment: I see that within the neurodivergent community and SEO. You’ve got all of these talented SEOs, but for falls that aren’t their own, interviewing processes are not set up for them. So we’ve done interview training courses, as a four-week course and stuff like that. Training courses are not so accessible, and if you’re unemployed, you can’t afford to pay, you know, $1,000 for a training course and stuff like that. So it’s just trying to break down those obstacles and just help neurodivergent SEOs, you know, do their best in their career. 

Danny Gavin Host

39:35

Can you share a bit about what consulting looks like versus running campaigns and implementing the fact that you do both? I feel like you’ve got wonderful insight. 

Akvile Defazio Guest

39:39

I feel like if you are the service provider, I feel like it’s good to do both. So then, that way, you are at work, and you know if there are new features or anything happening. You’re able to more effectively communicate that to the client instead of saying, oh, you know, let me, I’m not sure, let me look into it, which is fine to say. Sometimes, I don’t know every answer. I’ll have to do some research. But I’m also managing accounts. I love doing that. 

40:04

I know that typically, people who run agencies hand that off, but we’re intentionally small. But sidebar being in that practice gives me the knowledge and experience to quickly and effectively convey that information to consulting clients when I feel like if I didn’t do that, I would have to go off other information. A lot of people who do consult some get to the point where they might not be in the practice of running ads themselves. But I feel like that’s so crucial to providing education or training to a certain client. If you’re greener, you may want to spend some time actually running campaigns and learning how the platforms behave because you can pick up on algorithmic changes and be better informed. Whereas if you start consulting you may not have enough experience to help somebody truly to the capacity they might need. 

Danny Gavin Host

40:54

So, assuming your company doesn’t make any big splashes for, like, you know, going political or social, how do you make your brand more than just acceptable in the grand scheme of things? 

Sicily Dickinson Guest

41:04

I think you have to provide expertise that benefits the customer, which can come in many ways. But it’s the most important ingredient in the brand and could look like many things. For e, example, at Sun and Ski, it can look like if I come in and I’m looking for a new pair of skis, I want to talk to somebody who can find out what level of skier I am, know my height and weight, know where I’m going to ski, know what I’m going to ski and help me find the right equipment and also then help find the right deal for me. So, what else will I need with these skis? What kind of services will I need? And just really getting me prepared for my full adventure, not just the store transaction but you have those kinds of people or online experiences that allow people to research and learn those things, you become more valuable than just a retailer, which builds likability. 

42:10

These moments of truth when something terrible happens and how you respond to a customer or a potential customer in light of that moment of truth can be your hero moment, or you will never have this customer again. 

42:25

So I think those moments of truth are really interesting. I’ve been reading a lot recently because, as we all know, marketing budgets are getting slashed and slashed. You have to get more with less, more with less.  We were trying to invest in the whole experience and how. Now, CMOs need to think about their most significant pieces of experience and invest in them because they need more money to do the whole thing. But if everything goes well at that moment of truth, they’ll have that customer for life, so they use new terms. But it’s the same thing. It’s the moment of truth and those aha moments where a customer will feel like you went above and beyond or didn’t do what you were supposed to. Those mean everything to people now; those relationships last a long time. 

Danny Gavin Host

43:19

But are there people who actually come up to you and say hey, Purna, can you be my mentor? 

Purna Virji Guest

43:23

Sometimes, it is an official question. Sometimes, it’s just close friendships, and that’s what I found. We’ll both ask each other for advice, which is funny. There are sometimes people who are so humble that they will be like, oh, Purna mentors me. And I’m like, no, are you kidding me? Like I learned just as much from you. So people like Navah Hopkins, for example, like I love Navah, she’s been on your show before, and she’s so great. And then there are tons of people. Like, I don’t know how comfortable people are to be named. Of course there are, and we’re all peers, we’re all learning. 

43:54

Like if something comes easy to me doesn’t mean it’ll come easy to you. Or like the things that you do, Danny, that was just so obvious. And you’re like who would pay money for this? And I’m like, no, I would, because I actually don’t know this. So come help me. And so find those and ask questions I think that’s also my journalism background is like, hey, how do you approach it? I’m like I am struggling with this and what else can I do? And that seeking out that feedback good and bad is really important too. 

Allie Danzinger Guest

44:25

I always tell people who work for me or people who don’t work for me think about when time flies by. And when time flies by, you’re in your flow and that’s exactly what you should do and you should build a career around the time of your day. That time flies by. And those calls with the young professionals as I was coaching them 30 minutes an hour it would feel like two minutes. Or if I’m looking at someone’s resume, I can get lost in the moment and help them build their brand story in the same way that you do in marketing, to help them position themselves for the right role. So all of that is really when the light bulbs started going off. But then, in the fall of 2020, I got on Zoom with 10 young professionals as what we now call our pilot. 

45:10

But, at the time I didn’t really know it was a pilot coaching them through their internships, and so I spent four hours with these young professionals on nights and weekends I was still running the agency and then about 30 minutes with each business just understanding like what are the gaps, what do you wish your interns knew? And from there like really started to see, like okay, there’s a massive problem out there and there’s no solutions. We need to solve this. Skills gap. 

Navah Hopkins Guest

45:37

What we basically talked about is what sparks joy, what are the things that bring you the most joy, and you could see how pained she was in this other role and how excited she was by the prospect of this other thing, and the other piece to it was giving her the talk, because I think everyone needs to have the talk of. The only difference between people who are up on a stage or winning awards is that they pitch. That’s it. That is the long and short of it. The amount of intellect, charisma, usefulness, all of it is. There is nothing separating someone in the audience from the stage other than the pitch. 

46:17

Now, it is true, there are certain people who have done enough speaking that they’ll be asked to go, regardless of pitching. But I’ll also point out that there’s a certain point where some speakers relinquish their technical chops in order to be more strategically useful or more of a brand, and they’ll have other people kind of do the work. What I love about this particular person, Nick, is that she will never, ever relinquish her technical chops. She is honed by the thrill of advancing the industry and I think she is one of the brightest stars to grace the digital marketing stage. I just I love her to pieces. 

Akvile Defazio Guest

46:58

I was working in-house, doing marketing and advertising for a few companies, but I felt like I had hit a point where I could no longer grow in that company. I was burnt out. I didn’t get to. I had the responsibilities but not the authority, even though technically, by role and title and how long I had been there, I felt like I should have had more. But I got to a point where I didn’t enjoy waking up during the week to go to work, and I yearned for the weekend. I’m like this is not the life I want to live. And I saw how much more freedom my friends had, especially Pam, since I’d known her in a closer capacity at that point of working for yourself. 

47:34

I had never worked at an agency, so I felt like I did myself a disservice. They’re always working in-house, and I had a huge learning curve. But I finally reached out to her. I actually wanted to 9 months prior to actually reaching out to her and I could talk to her about anything, but I kept putting off asking her if I could just shadow her for a day, as she does her agency work and works with multiple you know multiple brands. But I was like, oh, I don’t want to waste her time and I should have given her the opportunity to tell me no, uh, or whatever that answer would have been. 

48:03

But I waited until I really couldn’t work in house anymore. So I finally sent an email, kind of um, when I was upset about something, and I was like hey can something. And I was like hey, can I shadow you for a day? And she wrote back almost immediately and said I’ll do you one better, I’ll give you half my clients, I’ll teach you everything I know. And she had about 10 years more of experience than I did at that point and she’s like you’ll give me half of my time back because I’m stretched thin, I’m a little burned out, I’ve taken on too much work and I’d like to start a different business in a different industry, so you would give me my time back. 

48:35

So it worked out really well and she taught me so much and built up that confidence in me to talk to brands, to do sales calls, to learn about common questions that clients ask and to respond with confidence, because I knew the responses. But I wasn’t used to working in that capacity and having those conversations before, to where I had to sell myself, and it was just an invaluable gift that she gave me. She gave me my livelihood, she gave me a lot of freedoms, working for myself and building my own business and, yeah, it worked out great for both of us, I think, and we’re still really good she’s one of my best friends, so anyone who I see as a high potential, so people who are delivering or going above and beyond. 

Martha van Berkel Guest

49:19

I spend extra time with, and part of that is sometimes to answer questions around why, like if they want to dig deeper into sort of why we’re doing a certain strategy or so forth, and then it’s also time for me to understand really what energizes them and what drains them. Actually, another great takeaway from my CEO camp was one of the speakers who runs a bit of a larger organization than us said that he has just over 100 employees and he’s like I call every one of my employees once a quarter. I was like that’s a lot of people and he was like, yeah, but you know what? I connect with them and I learned things about how I can make their lives better and what the organization can do better by just setting that time aside and being open to listening, and so that’s like while I’ve done skip levels with our high potentials, now I’m actually going to do a skip level with the whole company. So we’re about 30 people and so once a quarter I will now have 30 minutes with everyone and the questions are the same what’s energizing you, what’s draining you. What do I need to know? What do I need to hear? 

50:19

I see that as reverse mentoring, so I see that as an opportunity for the employees, should they have the confidence and should they trust that I’m sitting in growth mindset. They get to tell me what needs to change or what is working, that they get to tell me what needs to change or what is working. The right person wants to hear your opinion and the right person wants to hear how they can do better and how the company can improve. And I think I maybe got lucky that I found those people at Cisco that cared about their company and their results and so forth, and so they wanted to hear my opinion on it. And I had to be data-driven, have examples, be prepared, but I see that as sort of like a cool way for any organization, any leader even to kind of put you around and listen. 

Purna Virji Guest

51:08

The whole point of sharing an idea is so that people can actually implement it and act on it. I would feel so much joy if some you know, when people come to me and be like, oh, you know the thing you had in this chapter, I tried it and it worked really well. I’m like that’s what I want to see, and I know how I learn, or how adults learn in studying, is that, yes, you get the theory and you get the strategy, but then it’s always missing that. Okay, so then what’s my first step or what’s the next thing that I can go do? And that’s always been my approach and how I present, even when I’m keynoting, which is meant to be more high level, I’m always like three things you can do, because I find that I value that a lot and so that’s just my style and I found. 

51:49

So that was the one thing, and the second thing was also it just goes back to mentoring and Takiyah Burt, who is the LinkedIn ads blog editor-in-chief, and she in her review I think this made me cry because it was literally what I wanted to do and I didn’t know anyone realized she was like, oh, reading this book is like listening to you know, a kind, warm mentor, and she used the word mentor. I’m like, ah, this is so lovely, because that’s something like come with me, like you know, I feel your pain, I’ve walked in your shoes, I’ve been in your position and let me, you know, come along with me, like, let’s go do this, let’s act on it together, and I’ll share exactly what I did it, because I don’t you know, to quote what’s a TikTok like I don’t gatekeep, there’s no gatekeeping here. 

Shelly Fagin Guest

52:34

It actually opened back up when we moved back to Houston from the Midwest. There was a really great local search industry group happening in Houston, another really great one in Dallas. I just started going to some of the events and making connections locally kind of was a pivotal part. Change in like my career trajectory and path, to be quite honest. 

Navah Hopkins Guest

53:01

So the Pacers Association is probably one of the most meaningful aggregates of paid media not just Google, but paid media professionals and part of the reason why it’s so powerful is that the ad networks are at the table, just as agencies and softwares and general practitioners. 

53:20

So we had, for example, and Ask Me Anything with Ginny Marvin, who’s the product liaison for Google, and she is so giving of her time. She is so loving with her time, and people are able to get a lot more transparency out of her. The other thing I’ll say about the Pacers Association is that it is definitely a labor of love, but every single one of us always bring really meaningful content. So when people attend our stuff, they’re often very surprised of this was free, this was free. It’s like well, part of the reason that it’s free is we have our amazing sponsors and go to the Patriot Association you can check out all of our sponsors there and they enable us to give all that content. The other reason is that we founded it to be an empowerment, enablement group for all practitioners that you don’t feel kind of, you’re left alone. 

Akvile Defazio Guest

54:21

What do you love about guiding the next generation? It’s exciting to see what they’re into and learning, because I didn’t have those opportunities. So I get to see, you know, I get to learn from them indirectly, of you know how I can apply my learnings of just interacting with them and what they’re learning at school to what we’re doing at work, to maybe younger generations, but also just seeing eager, curious minds that are younger and thinking about how I was at that point and you could tell that they’re really wanting to get into this field. Still, you just might have questions, looking for guidance or internships and providing them the real world experience of like here’s what it’s like to work in this. Is this something you want to do? Is there something about it that is holding you back? Maybe you’re hesitant to pursue this? 

55:03

So I feel like I teach some of these classes. I have other friend professors like you, and they’ll bring me in for the end of the year, which is the end of December. They’ll bring me in for a guest lecture or ask me anything about marketing classes and then a few of them. I encourage them afterward to reach out to me on LinkedIn or social channels or to email me if they have questions, and often times, I’ll get a handful of them that will reach back after, and I’ll help them through to graduation and getting their first internship or maybe their first full-time job in marketing. It’s just really it’s fulfilling to see them accomplish these things on their own but be able to give them resources and tools and some of my experiences to make maybe it easier on them to not run into some of the same hurdles that I did. 

Danny Gavin Host

55:49

Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast. Be sure to check us out online at https://optidge.com/tdmm/ and at thedmmentor on Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts for more marketing mentor magic. See you next time.