Staying ahead with personal growth, and looking back on 18 months of podcasting

Our episode today is looking at some of the most important things that you can be doing when it comes to upskilling and improving as a marketer . We're looking at why training marketers to both your careers , to the wider team , and how you can train and upskill now that it's 2025 and we've all got our new year's resolutions rolling on .

In addition to that , we are being a little bit self-obsessed and looking back on the last 18 months of podcasting .

We are reflecting just on what we've learned from the last year and a half of running this podcast , the mistakes we've made and how you can learn from them if you're launching or running a podcast yourself , and we'll also look at what is potentially in the future for marketers of the universe . For now , though , let's jump straight into the topics .

Let's get on of the universe . For now , though , let's jump straight into the topics . Let's get on with the podcast . Our first session is called the Learning Edge Essential Skills for Modern Marketers . Leading this section is Nasha Nasera , so I will pass over to her to lead the way .

Yep , we're talking all things upskilling , why it's a total game changer for your career , and how to level up in the new year . New year , new you , and with me . I've got two fantastic guests with me today who may know a thing or two about upskilling .

First , we have Mark Bundle , the mastermind behind the email strategy here at Brew Digital , and Freya behind our fun and colorful social media planning . Welcome , both happy to have you here . Let's get straight into it . We've all heard this a gazillion times no matter where you're at in your career , training is essential .

Why do we place such emphasis on training , especially in marketing ? Why not just google things as we go and call it a day , mark fayette , what do you think ?

So I mean , there's largely different methods of training , or different ways of learning are visual doing and audio or grouping of the three . So I guess it's the best way of doing it is whichever way works for you . So me personally , I'm a visual learner , so I love a video or I love reading books and those are the best ways to get stuff into me .

But a lot of other people that's there are other ways they're going to probably prefer doing that .

But also , I think learning is so important because , as like marketers , a digital marketing world is changing and developing so much . But if you don't dedicate time to learning , you are just going gonna get lost in those sort of stagnant beliefs and you're not gonna be able to develop and keep up with what's happening thank you both .

You and freya work very , very closely and also you have a lot of accounts under you and I imagine it's not an easy task . Um , what are some ways of you , how you juggle your work and also how do you encourage your team , your colleagues , to develop ?

Oh no , it's fine . I have to take one little thing set your learning time and keep to it . Um sure , anything absolutely critical . If you don't find that time and a good block of time , you're not going to be able to commit to things . You're not going to be able to spend enough time learning .

I know you can do micro learning , you read short bursts and things , but generally you want to spend a little bit of time with something so you can kind of go over it and potentially repeat it . In terms of encouraging others to do the same again , that advice to block time is , I think , really key .

Um , fray will probably tell you I don't really reinforce her trying to learn anything , but then she's pretty good at doing it for her own back . That , I think , is probably an important message as well . It's as much as your manager or your director or whoever can encourage you to go and learn stuff . Learning is a central process . It is your learning .

You need to be in control of it . You know what's going to benefit you . So , unless you're told , go off and learn SQL because it's going to benefit your job role . If you're doing independent learning , you know what you want to learn and it's up to you to make time to do that .

So for my next question , since both of you have shared some great tips there , let's talk about balance in marketing , especially when it comes to social media . There's always something new to learn , some new tools out there , but there's also the need to master what we already know .

Is there a right mix between , like , picking up new skills , staying on trend , and enhancing existing ones ? Freya , could you tell me more about your experience and how you balance both ?

So when I first started at brew way way back last year , I did a training course that mark created and I refresh myself with that probably every three months , every two months sometimes , if I just want to sort of refresh and make sure I am doing everything correctly and sort of in the correct processes .

I will just go back and watch that initial training and I could probably recite it word for word now and Mark is actually updating it . So yeah , but it's really useful to just have that documented and I can go back and sort of confirm that I know what I know .

And then for sort of updating my skills , I love LinkedIn to like look for webinars and look for courses that might interest me or might benefit my job role . Um , I did one recently . I love the girls marketing . They're so great and they do loads of sort of either free courses or webinars that you can just go along .

And they the social media , are really good .

They talk about SEO and how to sort of set yourself up for 2025 and I think actively searching for stuff like that is so important when it comes to boosting your learning and , like Mark said , knowing what you want to learn like , you actively have to search for things to learn for if you're doing self-led learning thank you , Freya , yeah , for the tips , um ,

and your personal experience when it comes to the you know .

So I'm working on like being able to present myself in a more positive way , being able to interact with people more positively , having a more positive mindset , that kind of thing , because that's just as important as kind of the hard skills . It doesn't matter what you can do if you can't actually get that point across to people and be persuasive with it .

So , yeah , that's my focus , I think , is the the soft skills and the the perception of self how about you , freya ?

whether it boosts our engagement or whether it doesn't , and just spend more time looking over our Instagram because that Instagram is literally like my child . I love that thing and seeing where I can truly optimize it with all these skills that I've learned since being a pro .

What are some of your favorite learning resources that they could check out if you were to give your top three ?

Most places will have um like sounding boards or forums or kind of communities um that you can learn an awful lot from again . Just going back to hubspot , as an example , they have the sprocket community .

It's not led by them at all , but it's just loads and loads of hubs for people kind of coming together to chat , learn , discuss problems , and then you know what I'm going to say . I'm proper old fashion tier , but you cannot be a library . Um , books are still really great place to go to learn stuff .

Um , there are still books being written on all the kind of contemporary problems and issues and trainings um . So yeah , especially if you're a visual learner , don't neglect your local library I love that you cannot be a library .

They're really good and we actually have so much stuff on our resource hub now , like we've built it out so well . It's got so much stuff . It's resource hub now , like we've built it out so well , it's got so much stuff .

It's really lots of interesting documents as well , and I love sort of learning about our team on there as well , because some of the people I don't work that close with they have profiles on there , which is so cool .

But I definitely say , yeah , keep an eye out on LinkedIn and keep an eye out on Udemy , especially if you're looking for sort of social media trends and stuff . So many 2025 updates have come out and they're really useful places to be .

You had so many great takeaways on why training isn't just a nice to have but also an absolute must . Whether it's picking up new skills , sharpening old ones or just figuring out where to start , the key is to keep on learning and have that discipline . So go sign up for that course , watch that YouTube tutorial webinars or just start experimenting .

Your future self will thank you .

Hopefully there are things for you to learn from what we have done in the last 18 months . If you do find it too much , keep on listening , because by the end it's less cringy With me . To talk about the last 18 months is our content marketing manager , Tom Innes . Tom is the most important part of this podcast .

He is involved in creating the content , in editing the content and keeping me in line when I talk a load of rubbish . So , Tom , are you excited about talking about our last 18 months ?

But as somebody that joined late to the podcast party at Brew , I just thought it'd be really interesting to start off with how this podcast came about . Why did you start it ? Did you have any objectives at the time ?

We had a very big client we work very closely with , who we deliver performance reports to across the main digital marketing channels , and we were trying to think of ways to actually encourage more engagement with that reporting .

I think sometimes when working for an agency , if you've got a client that doesn't engage massively , then it can be really challenging to make sure they're listening to the learnings . So , to make sure they're listening to the learnings and applying them and actually taking time to listen to what was going on .

What we found when we did that was it was really helping grow our confidence as marketers to present externally and to present and talk , and it also helped cement knowledge inside ourselves of that we actually knew what we were talking about .

I know that sounds quite silly , but I think many people in marketing and many industries suffer from imposter syndrome and actually getting out and talking and putting your words into the world can really help with that . But to cut my very , very long story short .

We kind of turned it into a podcast and then realized , actually , that this podcast could become a content machine for growing the Brew website , improving our SEO performance , and those were the main objectives from the start . It wasn't about bringing more people to listen to the podcast . Obviously , that's great , we want people to listen to it .

Great , we want people to listen to it .

It's quite a creative approach to something that is quite dry as well . And , yeah , tying back into that learnings . It's always useful to be able to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise , but when you're working remotely , being able to just share ideas , it advances your ability passively as well .

Just that sharing of ideas and challenges of opinion , because it can be quite easy to sit in a bubble , especially when you're on your own all day .

Having that kind of back and forth interrupting people like I just interrupted you , Carry , on what you were saying .

You're getting , you know , 10 , 20 listens per episode , but then it suddenly starts growing as people start finding the content and and that's what we've seen and it's been massive in validating that people enjoy this content and because we've kind of validated to that , it definitely has taken on a life of its own .

So , yes , it still feeds our resource hub and our social content , but actually it's now a piece of standalone content that that people look for and people reach out to us about fairly often .

So , from you know those first early episodes , which were quite crowded , to where we are now , um , there's been a lot of changes to structure and format . Could you just talk through some of those changes and the rationale behind them , like , why did we make those changes ? What did we learn to then require those changes ?

You said you feel like a bit of an imposter to the podcast . This is where you held steliris in the right direction because , tom , you came in and listened to it and and gave so many good opinions and , um , so many constructive bits of feedback that allowed us to go okay , let's make these changes .

Let's do this little change now for this next episode , and I think we've seen , as we've released more and more episodes , that topics are getting tighter post edit . We've seen that we are getting a and more episodes that topics are getting tighter post-edit .

We've seen that we are getting a bit more detailed , we're getting more in-depth in these topics , and I think that's really important , because so much of what happens now in the marketing world , in the whole world , really is we spend our time repeating headlines , and what we don't want this to be is a podcast that lacks depth and only repeats the latest headlines

that people are seeing on linkedin no , absolutely I'm .

I think , like marketing , you're speaking to humans and humans are inherently just messy and complicated , and I think not everything goes perfectly . And being able to acknowledge that as well as we have so many times in this podcast , though , I leave in anyway . So what have we got coming up for 2025 ? How is this podcast going to evolve over the coming year ?

I think that's really important in making sure that we're sharing knowledge that is not necessarily directly attached to Brew . I think that's really important because people don't want to hear about Brew right now Like you're here to learn . We're not here to sell you stuff at this point . That's how marketing works , right .

So that's one thing , and that's going to allow us to share shorter snippets . It's going to allow us to create longer pieces of content that can actually be shared . On top of that , we're really looking at how we can expand our panel . So we're very lucky with wind brew that we have a lot of experts across digital marketing , development and design .

Plus , we have access to people within the adaptivist group as well who are our , our parent company . But what we want to do is actually look outside of of those circles and start bringing in some voices from the wider marketing world maybe even some of those linkedin bros for you to have a a kind of online duel with delightful .

They don't necessarily have to be marketing , although obviously that would be useful for our audience , but what do you tend to listen to that you want to draw attention to ?

So what is said on a podcast is great for free speech . So we're here discussing whatever we want , but if we look at zuckerberg's recent announcement and I'm sure we've got a piece coming up about that , I'd even , you know , put my hat on it . That is all about losing that regulation of the content right and having less kind of fact checking .

But there's no fact checking that goes on in in podcasts . So , and interestingly when I so , I spoke last year on a podcast for the drum that was sponsored by spotify that was talking around how podcasters tend to be the most influential influences .

So I think there is a lot of space in podcasting for free speech and I think , with X being more open , with Meta's channel being being more open , I think there might be a move into those channels with these big opinions . That was , that was a big tangent .

You mentioned , meta has already decided to start walking back all of their content moderation and is leaving it up to the user .

X has already dropped that in favor of community notes and in all instances I think we've seen products get worse as a result of that and I wish I'd had this thought myself , but I will attribute it to nilai patel , the editor-in-chief of the verge , who's always said that in social media instances , moderation is actually the product , choosing the places where the

moderation meets your needs and your um tolerance for , like , horrendous content . And I think we will probably see the same start to happen in podcasts as well . I mean , we've seen little elements of that . Apple and other podcast players removed , for instance , alex Jones's podcast , infowars , in the aftermath of his Sandy Hook podcast .

So there's little bits of regulation there .

conversations having on that podcast , um , and that's . This is going to be a point where actually I'm going to bring this back to podcasts that I listen to . We've gone full circle . I've never listened to the diary of a ceo podcast , so that's the first one , so that's not on my recommended list .

What I do really enjoy listening to is , uh , exposure ninja , they're agency , I think in the Midlands they do a really good podcast called the Digital Marketing Podcast , and on top of that , the Marketing Society's podcast is always interesting .

They have a little bit more of an environmental view on things , or , sorry , environmental angle to the podcast , which is always really interesting , and they often bring in marketers who are doing really good work when it comes to improving environmentalism .

Outside of that , uh , over the last year I've listened to a couple of parenting podcasts , um , that I won't talk about here , but that's definitely helped with my transition from not a dad to being a dad , and also I've always been a big fan of the no Such Thing as a Fish podcast and going all the way back to when we first launched this one .

Actually that kind of research a topic , discuss the topic . Research a topic , discuss the topic . The influence of how we run this podcast came from no Such Thing as a Fish .

It's all right , you've not got a beard , oh I got a book on linkedin oh I have nowhere to go with this , so I'm gonna just say thank you so much for indulging us , dear listener , and thank you , hayden , also for coming in and talking about what we're trying to achieve with this podcast .

And yeah , hopefully everybody feels that we are at least providing value from an education point of view and , if not , it's entertaining .

If you see that we are this disorganized mess , leave this podcast knowing that every single business that you go into as an employee or working with clients that we are this disorganized mess . Leave this podcast knowing that every single business that you go into as an employee or working with clients or as an agency are kind of a little bit of a mess .

And that's just the world . We're all just doing our best . If you enjoyed what was on this podcast , please do recommend to a friend or a colleague . We love making this content and love that people share it . Beyond that , thank you to our brew team for all of their research on the podcast and we will see you on the next one .

I've been Hayden and these guys are the marketers of the universe . Are you excited about editing that shit show of a internet Always .