Ethan Hays, General Manager at Moz, and STAT Analytics dives into the world of SEO. He shares his insights on simplifying SEO and the importance of democratising it within organisations, ensuring all stakeholders recognise its value.
Ethan compares the dynamics of startups and large enterprises, as well as the cultural differences between East and West Coast marketing landscapes. He also explores the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the need for integrating marketing and sales in today’s business environment.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Moz
Moz is a marketing analytics software company that provides tools and resources for search engine optimisation (SEO). The platform offers features like keyword research, link building, and site audits to help businesses improve their online visibility and search rankings. Moz is also known for its educational content, including blogs and guides that simplify SEO for users of all skill levels.
About Ethan
Originally studying sports medicine, Ethan discovered a passion for SEO and has built a successful career over the past two decades. Having held various roles in startups, enterprises and agencies, as well as founding his own agency, he is now the General Manager at Moz and STAT Search Analytics.
Time Stamps
00:04:54 – Ethan’s Career Journey: Startups to Agencies
00:08:33 – Cultural Differences: East Coast vs. West Coast
00:13:27 – The Misconceptions of SEO
00:16:30 – Democratizing SEO Within Organizations
00:18:08 – Moz’s Approach to Simplifying SEO
00:23:40 – The Impact of Generative AI on SEO
00:32:15 – The Evolving Role of CMOs
00:36:01 – Quick Marketing Advice from Ethan
00:37:27 – Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:40:16 – Contact Information
Quotes
“It shocks me… talking to executives at very large, sophisticated companies who to this day have not even approached SEO as a category. Like it’s too complex….” Ethan Hays General Manager at Moz and STAT Analytics.
“It [SEO] is the single most scalable source of high margin, high intent traffic.” Ethan Hays General Manager at Moz and STAT Analytics.
Follow Ethan:
Ethan Hays on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanhays/
Moz website: https://moz.com/
Moz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz/
STAT Analytics website: https://getstat.com/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Ethan Hays at Moz
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ethan Hays
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier.
Today, I’m joined by Ethan Hayes. Ethan is the General Manager for Moz and Stats Search Analytics. Welcome to the podcast, Ethan.
Ethan: Very glad to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Mike: So tell me about your career and how someone who studies sports medicine ends up in search.
Ethan: Yeah, you know, you would be shocked at the amount of times that I’ve heard that exact question. And, you know, it’s, it’s funny trying to think back and put together all the pieces, you know, I can come up with reasons. I can come up with rationales that the, the honest answer as to how I ended up in SEO is I just fell in love with it. I was working in the Bay Area, in the startup world, sort of just after the first internet bubble burst. And I happened into a job where managing networks of affiliate marketers was my job. the most successful affiliates were really good at organic search. And so I got curious about it. And the more I dug in, the more I found that was fascinating to me. And I just I fell in love and I’ve been in love ever since that I’ve been doing it professionally for, you know, 20 plus years. But I I think if I had to go back and say sort of what’s the what’s the connective tissue or the commonality between my interest in sports medicine and my interest in SEO, I would have to say that it’s probably that I have an obsession with complex systems that have a human face. So in the sports medicine world, there’s lots of very fundamental laboratory science you can do, right? You can spend your entire day in a white lab coat with a bunch of beakers in the chemistry lab doing various different kinds of chemical reactions. And to me, that was also so abstract that it never really caught my attention. But if you take that same study of chemical reactions and you put it in the context of this is how your body creates energy so you can do a vertical jump or something like that, suddenly it became alive and relatable and interesting to me. And I sort of found a similar thing in the field of SEO, where, of course, the everything behind the search interface, there’s so much technical complexity. You know, the original big data was Google trying to, you know, essentially store a copy of the Internet locally. There’s so much advance now, you know, with with machine learning and artificial intelligence, all the rest of it. But on its face, It’s a very human and understandable pursuit. It’s just a regular person like you and me going to the search box, typing in something and hoping to get an answer to their question. And so it was that mix of that complexity with that very sort of relatable human face that really drew me in.
Mike: That’s fascinating the way you link those two apparently quite different disciplines together. I mean, clearly your career’s in search. You’ve actually had quite a lot of different experiences. Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to talk about the industries you’ve worked in? And also I think you’ve worked both client side as well as working in agencies and even founded agencies. So tell me a little bit about the journey and what ultimately led you to end up at Moz.
Ethan: Yeah. You know, Moz was really a part of my, my SEO journey from the very beginning. I got started in about 2003. Moz sort of popped up in about 2004. And just because of that coincidence of timing, I enjoyed the Moz community. I spent a lot of time there. And so, so Moz was part of my professional journey from the very early days, but. To your question, yes, lots of different industries, lots of different sort of professional environments that I’ve been in. I spent probably the first 12 years of my career working with technology startups in Silicon Valley. And I absolutely fell in love with the startup space, just the energy of it, getting a small team of people together to solve a hard problem. I love that energy, fell in love with the startup world. But then of course, life happens. I had to move from San Francisco to New York City. And when I moved to New York City, I got my start in the agency world for the first time, worked at a B2B marketing agency called Gyro. They were the largest independent B2B agency in the world at the time. They ended up getting sold to Dentsu later, but got to know the agency world a little bit and just the difference in business culture from the West Coast to the East Coast. It’s a very real thing, right? My joke at the time was that hopping on a plane and flying from San Francisco to New York City was like getting in a time machine going back about 10 years. It was just, it was such a different environment because this was, you know, it was about 2012 thereabouts. And I came from Silicon Valley, which is very, it’s very technology forward, very data forward. You’ve got little companies trying to take on big companies. And so if you have a breakout gross channel, like a search engine optimization, you’ve got the entire organizational line behind it and everybody’s pulling in the same direction. And then if you go to the East Coast and we at this B2B marketing agency, we had the very good fortune of being able to work with some very, very large clients, you know, Fortune 100, Fortune 10 in some cases. And the complete step change in the kinds of conversations that I was having was a bit hard to absorb at first, right? It went from, you know, what’s the most cutting edge thing that we can do with our technology to increase our SEO performance to sitting down with the chief marketing officer of a fortune 100 company. And their first question to me is, so what is digital? And I’m like, Oh boy, I’m going to have to backtrack a little bit. Right. So it was, it was a very eyeopening experience, but also very necessary because it points to the fact that it is so easy for folks, especially technology folks. we get attracted by puzzles, we get attracted by technology, we tend to go down rabbit holes. And the rest of the world doesn’t tend to do that. The rest of the world doesn’t have that same sort of obsessive interest. And so the ability to zoom out, to up level, to understand a very different business reality, a very different set of personalities and priorities and calibrate your pitch to meet them where they are. That was a very meaningful step in my career that was facilitated by having to have these conversations with just much larger, much, much more complex companies. And that has served me well to this day. I’ve continued to work in both sort of a mix of, of startups, but also I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the past. seven or eight years working in private equity and organizations like that and mergers and acquisitions. And so being able to see so many different aspects of the professional world and start to learn a little bit of their common language and their frameworks for understanding the world has been very beneficial to me. I’m a big advocate for broadening your horizons.
Mike: I love that idea of broadening your horizons. I also really enjoyed the description of the differences between the East and West Coast 10 years ago. You’ve also worked on agencies and on the client side, as well as for established companies and startups. Do you also see cultural differences there, or is it more geographical? I mean, where are the differences really occurring?
Ethan: I will say that there are, I think, very real differences in sort of basic mindset and posture towards life. You hear people talking about like, oh, the easygoing West coasters and the hard charging East coasters. And to me, there is actually a great deal of signal in that stereotype. I’ve seen it over and over and over again myself. But to me, that has not been the primary differentiator. The differences seem to be driven mostly by the scale of the company itself. Uh, which is to say in a lot of startup environments, you’re primarily working with companies that are, man, let’s say at a hundred people, maybe 150 people. And you kind of have that Dunbar’s number advantage going for you, where you can generally feel like, you know, most of the people and personalities and the names of folks. And then once you get into the large enterprise world, the scale just blows that out entirely. And you have to, because of the scale of the organization. the views of that organization necessarily become more abstract. So at the last holding company that I was at before, Ziff Davis, I reported directly to the CEO of that company and he had, I forget, 40 something agencies all around the world rolling up to him. His view of those businesses was a spreadsheet. It was your quarterly results. That’s what he looked at. That was the data that was presented to him. And the story of that company had to be presentable and understandable in a spreadsheet. That is a very different view of the world than when you’re in a small startup and you know everybody on a first name basis.
Mike: I think that’s very true. I mean, certainly at Napier, we have the benefit of being small. Everyone knows everyone else. You have those close personal relationships. So as you alluded to, you moved to Moz and then Moz now is part of Ziff Davis. Let’s talk about where you are today. And it’s interesting because you’re actually the first, if you like, repeat guest. So somebody we’ve had from a company where we’ve already had another guest. Inga Bubez was a great guest for us talking about SEO. I’m interested, what’s your role in Moz and what are you doing to help people with search and search engine optimization?
Ethan: Yeah, you know, it is funny. So this year at Moz, we celebrated our 20th anniversary. So we had MozCon this summer and it was our big 20th anniversary celebration. And that felt wonderful, right? As a longtime member of the community, the fact that Moz has endured for 20 years, Not a lot of companies have a 20 year lifespan, right? So just celebrating that was fantastic. But I am really more focused on the next 20 years, of course. And I still, to this day, see the opportunity for SEO as being in relatively early innings. It shocks me to this day talking to executives at very large sophisticated companies who to this day have not even approached SEO as a category. Like, oh, it’s too complex. You’ve got to find some rock star, some guru, some ninja to help you understand the space. And it’s just, it’s too much for us. It’s too much. And that hurts me deep inside because I know it’s not true. I know it’s not true. The opportunity for SEO is absolutely massive for any company at scale that approaches it. It is the single most scalable source of high margin, high intent traffic that is broadly available to anyone with a website. That is true today. It was true 20 years ago. That reality has not changed. But unfortunately, The way that our industry has communicated with SEO broadly has continued to contribute to this, this mischaracterization of SEO is this like, you know, this black magic. One of my, one of my very early companies that I, that I worked with in the, in Silicon Valley, I founded the, the SEO and search focused product marketing practice at healthline.com. I was a tiny little company, 30 people when I started. It’s now a huge company. It got sold to Red Ventures for $190 million. They do 200 million visits a month. They’re a juggernaut. And the fact of the matter with SEO is that it gets sold in as something that is incredibly complex and incredibly technical and therefore regular folks can’t do it. You hear these kinds of names in the SEO industry like, oh, I’m an SEO guru or I’m an SEO rockstar. That to me is just absolute poison for the growth of the industry. Back at Healthline, I was trying to introduce SEO to the entire organization. They were a tiny startup. They were taking on WebMD, which was the 800-pound gorilla in the category. Here we are, we’re a tiny little team of 30 people, and we need to go out there and get as much traffic as we possibly can as quickly as we can. The CEO brought me in. He’s like, okay, I need you to give a presentation to our engineering team about SEO. And the first comment I got from my lead engineer was SEO is witchcraft. That was the start. Right. That was the starting point. And that represented, you know, his experience up to that point in his life. And I realized I was like, oh boy, I’ve got a lot of work to do. And a lot of that work is actually internal. It’s about educating the organization that you are a part of. up leveling that entire team so that they can see, oh, wait, this isn’t witchcraft. This is a series of repeatable steps that we could do. And if we do these repeatable steps, the products that we’re so excited about building, what should we go out and make more money for the company? And that reflects really positively on my team and my career prospects and my bonus at the end of the year. And it’s having those kinds of conversations that are ultimately about democratizing SEO within an organization. For me, overwhelmingly in my career, that is where I see value. That is where I deliver value. That’s where I’ve been able to deliver the biggest step changes in an organization’s SEO performance. It’s about being that rising tide that lifts all the boats, educating your coworkers, connecting the work that you’re asking them to do with things that are materially important to them. Most of the product managers that an SEO team has to, by definition, has to work in partnership with in order to build well-optimized products. That product and engineering team, they are driven by the P&L of that product. That product has financial expectations associated with it. If you can help them understand how this process that you’re bringing them along to help you with helps them drive better financial performance, increases their own career prospects, ends up being a gold star on their resume. When you can start drawing those kinds of connections in an organization, all of a sudden SEO becomes not just possible, but something that you have allies everywhere looking to help you. And I know that’s possible. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the SEO industry pushes pretty hard in the other direction. They push towards this idea of like the lone genius who has all of this magical knowledge and only this person can gift the organization with the precise recipe for success. That’s a load of nonsense in my experience.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think Mars from day one has pretty much been renowned as the organization trying to help ordinary people understand how to do SEO and probably trying to simplify it. I mean, do you have some examples of what you’re doing today that’s helping ordinary marketers actually contribute to SEO and get their web pages, their content ranking higher?
Ethan: Yeah, so one of the things that is that is very, very interesting to me that came out of the recent Google API leaked documents. Of course, there is a ton of technical depth and arcane stuff. And again, I think the industry at large sort of lionizes people who dive the deepest into all the technical arcana. And that’s interesting. I’m glad those folks are out there. I’m glad they’re doing what they do. But I think from my perspective, I have the humility in working with complex systems to realize that messing with one little part of a complex system doesn’t mean you’re just changing that one little part. It has cascading effects, right? I tend to want to zoom out and look for sort of large themes and larger levers that are available to us. And a couple of the things that came out of that where Moz has a long history in the marketplace of creating data products that are helpful to working SEOs, right? One aspect of the SEO world is big data and very big data, right? Moz has one of the best link indexes, you know, on the entire internet. I think we have 45 trillion URLs somewhere in there. Other providers may say, oh, we have 46 trillion URLs. OK, great. The point to me is not the number of URLs in your index. It’s are you able to look at that massive set of data and look at the ecosystem that it applies to? and abstract out of that something that is simple and easy to understand and can actually be used by SEOs in their day-to-day work to help guide them in helpful directions. And so one of the examples of that, you know, Moz came out with our metric domain authority a long time ago in 2006. He was in response to a very visible and noticeable fact for anybody who spends any amount of time in a particular industry or a particular keyword space. And you will see over time that there are big, powerful domains in that particular space. And it just seems like the rules are applied to them differently some. They just don’t get hit as hard by updates. They seem to have a little bit more latitude in the things that they can do. And so Moz created Domain Authority to point to this invisible thing that we could see in the field. Very promptly, Google, of course, came out and began denouncing it. And in sometimes very, very specific terms, we do not use domain authority. We don’t have anything that’s like a domain authority signal that we use in ranking in any way, shape or form. And then the Google API documents came out and we can now confirm Google does not use domain authority. Their metric is called site authority. It’s like when I look at things like that, to me, that is an example of Moz taking all of this complexity, these trillions of links and abstracting out something that is simple and helpful for working SEOs. Similarly, just about a year ago, we launched a metric called brand authority because now we are seeing another dynamic in the search engine results. And that is that sites with a strong brand seem to be treated very differently than sites that do not have a strong brand. And this is actually something that Google has talked about quite openly for a very long time. One of the quotes that sticks out in my mind, this was back in 2008, Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google at that time, said, brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. I was like, wow. It’s rare that you get really clear, honest communication from a very senior professional in a very large company. And I thought that was just very clear and the honesty of it appealed to me, always stuck in my head. And so now as we’re seeing that dynamic coming to life and brands do in fact appear to be being treated differently, we created this brand authority metric And we are now seeing inside the Google API leak documents that Google does in fact care very much how your brand does or doesn’t show up as a brand inside search. This is especially seems to be especially related to how they evaluate sites for being impacted or not impacted by big algorithms like Panda. So That is yet another example in that same vein. And of course, as the Moz product continues to evolve, we’re looking to use AI to help summarize some of these key features. Again, forget about the absolutely gigantic loads of data that we have to process to get to it. What is actionable for a working SEO when they’re looking at a domain in a new field or looking at their client’s domain, right? The client just hired them. It’s like, hey, do an audit of our website. We’re using AI to summarize the primary topics and secondary topics that are most associated with that domain. That is helpful to me as a working SEO professional when I’m looking at a new client’s domain, when I’m looking at a competitor’s domain. And now we see from the Google API leaks. Google cares very deeply about the topicality of your website to the extent that they have this metric called state radius, where they essentially, this gets very nasty. They create a vector embedding of the primary topic of your site, and then they measure what they call the site radius. So from that central topic that is most associated with your website’s content, Every new piece of content that you launch, they literally measure the distance between that core topic and this new thing that you’re talking about. So if you have a client, for example, and you know, most of their content is about pet care or whatever it is, and all of a sudden you see them starting to talk about a bunch of cryptocurrency related stuff on their, their editorial calendar, you’re now in a position to sit down and say, Hey, let’s talk about your content strategy as it relates to your core user base. Here’s a very specific reason that you may not want to start wandering off topics so much. And so that is a sort of a summary of the way that we at Monaz are looking at this. It’s not about the size of the data itself. It’s about simplifying it. It’s about extracting the insight and the signal out of it that helps make sense of all the complexity for our customers.
Mike: I love that. And I’m sure customers are going to be very happy. They don’t have to understand metrics like site radius, particularly if they’re not SEO specialists. I think looking forward, one of the things a lot of people, both SEO specialists, as well as non-specialist marketers like myself, we’re all a little worried about generative AI search results and what’s happening there. So on the page of search engines, they’re trying to give you the answer that really you want to give by routing people to your own page on your website. So how do you see this impacting SEO in the future?
Ethan: Yeah, I mean, that is certainly an extremely hot topic. You know, at the moment, I think that the world is having generative AI shoved down our throats a little bit, because I believe If I look back over the last two years, to me, one of the most important developments in sort of what I’ve come to call the LLM wars, right, because you have these factions and they’re, you know, they’re these guys against the other guys and everybody’s, everybody’s very combative. One of the first shots fired in the LLM wars was back in February of 2003. And that was when Satya Nadella came out in that interview and promised to make Google dance, right? I’m going to make them dance. And that came across to me very weird. It was almost like a, like a schoolyard deer, right? But that sort of set the tone. It let Google know. Bing is going to be all in on this generative AI stuff. They’re going to push it as hard as they can. And they’re specifically doing it to take share from Google because in Satya’s math, every single point of search share they take away from Google is worth a billion dollars to them as a business, right? That was one of the opening shots in the LLM wars. And ever since then, to me, Google has basically been on the back foot. They’ve had LLM technology for years and years and years. Why didn’t they, why didn’t they launch it ahead of OpenAI? Well, for perhaps to me, the most understandable reason possible, which is that unleashing large language models in an environment like search creates a heidel wave. of LLM spam that Google is going to have to fight. That is the nature of the technology. Sundar Pichai actually had a quote to that effect. He’s like, oh yeah, anytime you have a massive new technology release like AI, it’s going to affect the search ecosystem. And this one’s a bit different. This one is just very focused on the meat and potatoes of the search industry, which is words on a page. And so to me, everything that has happened in the LLM war since then has basically been Google on their back foot. trying to number one, mitigate the obvious negative effects that LLM driven content would have on the search comments. But then also now that they have been dragged into the war, they must make it look like it was a strategic decision. Right. And so now all Google talks about is AI this, AI that. Oh, it’s so wonderful. You know, their last earnings called, you know, Sundar is talking about, Oh, our users love AI overviews and it’s better and better and better. That may be true in the aggregate. From my perspective, I don’t know. I talked to everyday folks. I’m really curious about their reactions to things like, you know, large language models, every regular person that I’ve seen that I’ve shown a large language model to, to kind of like They’re like, Oh, so it just makes up a bunch of words. Yeah, pretty much. Like you could do it in clever ways. I can, you know, tell it to make it, you know, uh, you know, made it right as a sonnet or, you know, make it a, you know, whatever. People don’t seem very excited about it. Right. I don’t think there has been a, you know, a killer app, certainly a consumer facing killer app in the space of LLMs yet. And so Google is going to continue representing that they love generative AI and everybody loves generative AI and they’re going to give it to everybody. And I think in the background, you are going to see Google do what they should do as a business, which is focus on the business itself and how this new technology does or doesn’t add to that business. So, for example, in, I think it was in May, right after they did sort of the big public release of AI Overviews, one guy was tracking the prevalence of AI Overviews based on the value of the AdWords market associated with that query. And what he found was that after the big AI Overviews public release, The prevalence of AI overviews in keyword markets where the average cost per click was $5 or more went down by 98%. Because of course it did, right? It’s going to steal attention. It’s going to steal clicks away from the money-making engine of Google. And so they’re not going to make, they’re not going to make a press release about that. But I think that if you are a careful observer of the search comments, I think you’re going to see more and more of that. AI overviews are going to continue to feature, and especially in informational queries, the more you get towards transactional and commercial stuff, I think the less of it you’re going to see over time.
Mike: Well, that’s probably good news. Hopefully there’s less for us to worry about than we all think. Another thing that’s changed, I think this is really something that goes back to your description of the East Coast, West Coast differences, is that CMOs and marketing executives have really changed, and particularly the role of the CMOs changed quite dramatically in the last decade. So how do you see it going forward, Ethan?
Ethan: Well, I think the story, especially the chief marketing officer’s role over the last 10 years, CMOs have been challenged. And by that, I mean, as of, I think this was maybe five years ago, so this may have changed, but directionally, I believe it’s accurate. As of about five years ago, CMOs were the role with the shortest average tenure in the C-suite. Right. They get, they get booted out of the sea sleep for one reason or another, more than other, uh, chief, you know, chief executives do. And, and I believe that the reason for that is very straightforward. It is that marketing leaders are now expected to be revenue leaders back in the day, different rules, right? Different rules, marketing. in some organizations, especially very large organizations was just looked at as a cost center, right? It’s like, Oh, we got to go out there. We got to spend the money. And everybody’s heard the quote, Oh, we spend, you know, a hundred percent of our marketing budget, 50% of its wasted. Don’t know which 50%. Ha ha ha. Well, that leads to the instability that we’re seeing in the career path of a lot of CMOs. I have known that the classic tension that I see in large organizations is actually between the CMO and the chief sales officer who start smashing up head to head saying, well, the sales leader will say, hey, you give me that same million dollars you just gave to the CMO. I’m going to buy four Ferraris for our four biggest clients and I’m going to drive another $20 million in sales. What are you going to do? Right. Like they see exaggerated. Right. But you literally have those kinds of conversations in very large organizations. And so there has weirdly been a very, very consistent tension between marketing and sales. And I think that the future is pointing towards much more integration between those roles because in a properly functioning high-performance sales and marketing organization, those two functions fit together like hand in glove. They have to. They have to, right? You have to have good communication across those functions. You have to have, in some cases, service level agreements negotiated between those functions such that when marketing generates their marketing qualified leads, they are sent to a place in the sales, in the sales team where they know to look for them. And there is a specific expectation that those leads will be serviced in somewhere between five minutes and 30 minutes or maybe a day on the outside. But creating those structured partnerships such that that entire machine marketing, which is tasked with generating that sales pipeline, And then sales, which is taking that pipeline and turning it into close one revenue. You need to, you need that entire machine to flow smoothly. And that is the direction that I am seeing more and more organizations go. Marketing leaders are now expected to be revenue leaders.
Mike: You’ve given us some great insights and been incredibly generous with your time, Ethan. But before we go, we like to ask people a couple of quick questions. So the first one is, what’s the best bit of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
Ethan: The best bit of marketing advice I’ve ever been given? It’s probably the simplest one. Talk to your customers. Talk to your customers. Like read feedback from your customer service folks, sit down with them, talk with your customer service folks, ask them how real human beings interact, what their problems are, what their pain points are, what their friction is, what they love about the product. But even that is secondhand. Actually set up a customer development process in your company where you are talking with real people on a regular basis. consolidating those insights and pushing them back out into other parts of the organization. There is nothing that is a replacement for literally talking with your customers, understanding how your product does or doesn’t deliver value in their lives.
Mike: That’s great. I think it’s really, really important. The other question we ask our guests is really for the listeners who are embarking on their careers. So what would be your advice if you’re talking to someone who maybe just graduated and was thinking of entering marketing as their career?
Ethan: Wow. Well, you know, I say one of the, one of the things that is becoming available now as the, the, you know, the internet, especially in all the tools related to the internet are maturing. Is that it used to be back in the day that in a lot of cases, in order to get valuable professional experience, you had to be part of a company for somebody had to hire you. And she had this weird chicken and the egg thing, right? I certainly had that coming out of college with a sports medicine degree, which is completely illegible to anybody in the corporate world. They couldn’t care any less about it. And so trying to get my foot in the door at all, I figured out a way. And that was how I was able to start building those successes and stories that laddered up into my career. That was necessary 25 years ago. Today, You don’t need that. You don’t need permission. You don’t need someone choosing you and saying, yes, we’re hiring you for XYZ role to go out there and do marketing. Some of the most interesting and compelling folks are solopreneurs, they’re freelancers. They have found a particular part of the world that fascinates them and they develop their marketing skills in order to in essentially in order to service their own natural fascination with a particular thing. That is a wonderful thing that the Internet has made possible that was never possible before. Got a colleague of mine years back who was, he was a talented web developer, but he wanted to, he wanted to do more. He wanted to build his career in marketing. The thing that he really loved doing was he was a music producer. He loved creating beats for hip hop. I was like, what you should do is create a course on how to create beats and then go out there and talk to people in the community and market that course and get your name out there. And that’s exactly what he did. And he has a fantastic business today because he learned marketing as a way of connecting with people in an area that he was already passionately interested about. Any person, whether you’ve gone to college or not gone to college, you have that ability today, thanks to the internet. And that is an absolute game changer for what you can do.
Mike: That’s amazing advice, Ethan. Thank you. Thank you again for your time and all your amazing insights. If anyone’s listening to this, they’d like to get in contact or find out more about Moz and Stat, what would be the best place for them to go?
Ethan: Oh, sure. Of course. Our websites are the obvious point, Moz.com and GetStat.com. On Twitter, if you would like to connect with me, I’m at Ethan Hayes, that’s E-T-H-A-N-H-A-Y-S, and my DMs are open. I’d love to hear from you.
Mike: Thank you, Ethan. That’s perfect. And thanks for being a guest on the Marketing B2B Technology Podcast.
Ethan: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
