Why I Love Marketing (Quick Voice Note From Dave)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far, we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more. All right.

Hey, I'm recording something different. It's Dave, by the way. I'm out for a hike today. It's 94 degrees in Vermont. I'm just doing a little, a little hike. And it's oftentimes where I do my best thinking because I'm not thinking about anything. And I just was thinking about kind of what, what's going on in marketing and AI and everything. And I started to just try to like, drill down to what is it about the job of marketing that I actually like, you know, like what, what, what draws me to it. And this is the simplest, like, story and analogy that I have. It's like, it doesn't matter if it's like, you know, we're kind of working B2B or software or whatever industry you're in, right? But it's like the challenge of like, hey, the Local school is having a, is having an event. And the event is on, you know, Tuesday, July 12th. And it's your job to like, come up with a name for the event, come up for a reason that you're doing the event, come up with all the promotion for it, the flyers, the logo, and then that feeling of like, on the day of the event, you're a little bit nervous, but then there's buzz and everybody shows up and they have an amazing time. It's that feeling. And even dating back to like, I don't know, think about being a kid or in high school and college, you're trying to get people together. You're like, oh, so and so's having a party. Okay, got this person, this person's going to come and this person's going to come and then everybody shows up. And that's the fun of it. So that's what, that's what drew me. That's what drew me to like, that's what I realized. That's what I like about this job. And I hope that because of what's possible with like AI tools, not that I think it's going to replace everybody's job, but I'm more bullish on the fact that it makes each person in marketing more of like a full stack marketer with the ability to use more tools without needing to know how to like truly design or develop. And I know there's going to be designers and developers who are going to be able to do it better maybe right now, but I think there's like, there's just a whole layer of efficiency and stuff that I can do as a marketer on my own that I don't need a huge team for. So that's the role of marketing. That's what's fun. Not the internal meetings and the arguments about attribution and the credit and the how do we measure this or that. It's just like the, hey, we want to have, we want to, we want to have a party. We want to have this event to, you know, we want to have, do a fundraiser for the, for the town and we do it and your work. Got a bunch of people there and they had an amazing time and it was successful for the town. That's how I think about it. So anyway, that's my quick little antidote for my hike today. If you're listening to this, I just want to say hi. If you're listening to this Exit 5 podcast, find me on LinkedIn. Dave Gearhart. Send me a message or connect with me there or just send us a note hiive.com and be like, yeah, I heard your little mini episode in the woods. And that is also why I love marketing. Marketing. See ya.

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