- In this video, I am interviewing Trevor Fox
and ask him how he became a technical marketer.
All and more coming up right after this.
(upbeat techno music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video
of measureschool.com where we teach you
the data driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian and on this channel,
we do marketing tech reviews, tutorials,
and the occasional interview, just like this one.
So if you haven't yet, consider subscribing.
Now this week, I had the chance to talk to Trevor Fox,
who is a technical marketer, and really knowledgeable
in everything Google Analytics, AppScript,
and a bunch of other techniques out there
that I don't even know how to describe.
But it was really interesting finding out
what was Trevor's journey to go from somebody
who had just started a little blog
to somebody who is now helping clients
with technical marketing solutions,
and what he has learned along the way.
Now, if you wanna find out more about Trevor
and all his projects, but also the links
that he mentions in this interview,
then check out our description below
where we're gonna have more stuff for you to check out.
Alright, now we've got lots to cover,
so let's get into the interview.
Alright, Trevor Fox, welcome to the show.
- Thanks, it's really cool to be here.
Congratulations on all the growth you've had so far.
It's pretty interesting to watch you grow from the start.
- Thank you very much.
So I wanna start out, we are talking today
about technical marketing,
and before you became a technical marketer,
you probably first jumped into marketing itself.
So take us through your journey.
How did you start out in digital marketing,
and what was your journey from the beginning?
- Yeah, it's a little bit of a weird question.
So when I was in high school,
I thought I was gonna do landscape architecture.
I ended up playing baseball in college,
so I learned very quickly that I wouldn't have the time
to do landscape architecture and baseball in college,
so I had to do communications.
And after college, I was kind of like,
well, what am I'm gonna do with the communications degree.
Meanwhile, I ended up getting an opportunity
to play professionally for three years,
and meanwhile, while I was playing, I started a blog,
and I kind of discovered this crazy thing
called Google Analytics.
And I was like, wow, there's a ton of insight in here,
and I can see kind of how,
so many people across the world
are interacting with me,
and that kind of just starts the magic
of the internet and the web for me.
And so when I return without any experience
that my friends, my friends have three years
of work experience, and I have zero,
and I'm like, well, how do I get into this?
And then I got kind of a really low-level job
at a web development agency,
not doing development but doing marketing
and I learned that, oh my gosh,
I can actually track some interaction
on a website with JavaScript and I was like
I need to know JavaScript immediately.
And that is like, it wasn't HTML,
it wasn't, ya know, anything else.
It was how can I interact with a page with JavaScript,
And also learn at the time, oh wow,
JavaScript also allows me to do custom macros
and things in Google AppScripts.
So, I was like, it's kind of the tip of the iceberg.
There's a lot here and it's just there for the taking.
So that I kind of found that just to be
a really quick way to kind of move up the ladder
in terms of capabilities.
- So when you started out your blog,
what was your blog about and did you build it yourself?
Was it on a website builder?
What did you learn while you were building a website?
And did you do any marketing for your little project?
- Well, I'll be honest with you,
so I started, I started on Squarespace,
and in hindsight it was probably good to get going.
I'll also be honest, I was probably guilty
of thinking too much that if you build it, they will come.
I remember my first post was,
I was pretty happy with the look and feel of the website.
I, obviously, I didn't do much.
It was What is Facebook Basic Information?
Just because, ya know, when you sign up for something,
login with Facebook, it asks you for your basic information.
I was like, hmm, is there a lot more to this?
Then I saw one hit a week, two hits a week.
So, it's kind of like you learn really quickly about SEO
when you're first-hand drawing it.
And to see the impact of whoa, my first link.
What does that have, what impact does that have?
And then being a little bit more mindful
about keyword targeting and things like that.
So then, it starts to pick up.
But then, yeah, I moved to Wordpress.
Now, a few years later, I can run a pHp to get anything done
that I need to on the Wordpress site.
- I'm just pressing on this because
it's really interesting how many people started out
with kind of a sandbox,
with something small that they could grow,
and tinker around with it and make a lot of mistakes, right?
If you go into the technical marketing field,
you have a lot of background of like,
how does a website work, how does it actually,
how can I build links and make SEO work?
And then go into these other fields.
All right, so how did you discover,
because people or marketers sometimes think
that they don't have to learn any kind of technical skills.
How did you discover this,
that you wanted to learn JavaScript
and that you were actually kind of having fun
learning it and then putting it into action?
- Well, I think there's a couple things there.
Self-sufficiency, where I would want to track
a certain call-to-action on a website,
and I was working with a lot of hotel clients.
This is critical, when you're doing PPC for hotel clients.
If I had to pull a developer off the project
that they're responsible for they kind of hate me
because they have to take a lot of time to do it,
and they don't, ya know, it's not this really easy process.
Then it wasn't too long before
Google Tag Manager came along.
That was like the wild, wild, west days
of Google Tag Manager,
so we were all kind of hacking it together.
We've all gotten a little bit better now.
But yeah, so just being able to do it on my own.
It just obviously feels really good,
and it's also just a really effective way
to get things done.
The second part, why did I enjoy learning it?
I think the one thing that's really cool
about learning programming is the rapid feedback loop.
If you're, there's no other thing where you can be like,
oh, I'm learning about Agile and I have to learn
this huge system and all these processes.
But I can't actually know how they work
until I actually do them.
Whereas programming, you can just type in some commands
and see the output that they have,
and so you can learn really, really quickly.
And that's, I mean that's just super fun too.
You're learning and having fun at the same time.
- Cool.
So, when you dove into JavaScript,
or the other languages that you've learned,
what was your process like?
Did you go through tutorials?
Did you have a mentor that helped you out
and reviewed your code or did you work alongside
any kind of professional developers
and learned, picked up that stuff really quickly?
- That's a really great question.
I (chuckles), I didn't have a girlfriend.
I lived by myself.
And (laughs) every spare minute I had
I was dedicated to Codecademy, which is a great platform
for learning because it allows that rapid feedback loop.
Then, naturally when you can learn
to speak the language of developers
you can start to grab, I mean get a lot
of their knowledge really quickly.
So I kind of, anybody who I, and I still do.
Anybody I strike up a conversation with,
it just happens to be a developer,
and the conversation just turns
into an hour long conversation.
So just meetups, just friends of friends.
Any time you find somebody that is pretty technical,
they're, generally like you and I, are interested
in having conversations that are about technical things.
I've also found, obviously, one thing about the community
that is so cool that, like GitHub.
People are just giving stuff away for free.
People are really, really, interested
in sharing knowledge, which I think is super cool.
So, I guess the question, the thing is,
find people that know stuff and don't be afraid to ask.
- And did you, I mean, for me at least,
when I'm trying make leaps forward in my technical knowledge
I try to pick a project that I can complete, right?
I saw that you on your website have great projects as well.
How did that impact?
And how do actually come up with a project,
then say, okay, I'm going to do this many for free
because you're not selling it on your website, right?
- [Trevor] Yeah. I think...
Oh man, I come up with more projects (laughs)
that I can complete in a lifetime.
I don't know.
I think it's just,
anytime you have a problem,
and you recognize that there is something underlying,
whether that can be solved with a database
or a little boat scripting, it's like,
there's a project there for you.
And I've never been, I've always been like,
oh here's a problem, it can definitely be solved.
So I guess the toughest thing for me
is actually just seeing it to completion.
Because I'll do, I'll start it and then be like,
okay, well this can be done.
But to actually publish it is another thing.
So, I'm kind of constantly learning how to be more effective
and more efficient with my time on that.
- The stuff that you have built,
and I think we all have these moments
when we build stuff, we are pretty proud of ourselves,
what was one thing that you were proudest of?
Where you said, "Man, I made this work,
"and it might not be the greatest software of all times,
"but I worked really hard on this,
"and I made it work, and now it works, and I can do this."
- Yeah, oh man.
I think the real answer to this, which is super pathetic,
is the first time I, probably, honestly,
the first time I made something that worked
was Google AppScript to make a given cell red.
(laughter) That's it.
And I was like, oh, crap, this is real.
This is that excitement that you get
when you start programming
and it's this super mundane thing,
but then every time you go forward
and you do another project,
would be like make a Twitter bot, actually make a website,
I just made, because of all the fake news stuff,
I made a website that allows you to make your own
fake news and then post it online.
Like it has the little Facebook box that says like,
Germany is Voted Number One Country or something like that
and you can share it with all your friends.
I thought that was super fun.
I guess each time you make a little bit bigger project,
you still get that super validating experience.
- So you picked up a lot of technical skills,
but there's a lot of marketing skills
with your clients probably,
as well as working on real-time projects.
Take us through, what does a typical project look like?
And how can you use your technical marketing skills
to bring results to your clients?
- Yeah totally.
One client I was working with,
e-commerce client has male and female clothes,
and they had a problem where they weren't really certain
about the gender of the people on their email list.
They do have the name, last name,
and email for each customer.
And there's a free API, I forget the name of the API,
you can put it in the comments below,
but it just gives you a,
it takes a name and the country that's associated with
that person and gives you the probability
that this name is either male or female.
So when you can,
that's a pretty massive difference, especially for clothing.
You never want to send a guy something
about women's clothing or vice versa.
Okay 99% of the time you don't wanna do that, right?
So if you can be a little bit smarter, and allow that,
and this is a free API, so just adding that data
into your database to be just a little bit more intelligent
about your targeting, that can have a massive effect.
- Absolutely.
Yeah, that's really a great example.
That's it from my side.
I guess, here's your chance to,
where can people find out more about you
and what are you up to, and where can I find you?
- Okay cool, yeah.
My name is Trevor Fox and my website is trevorfox.com.
I write about anything I find interesting in terms of tech.
And then I do, which is on basically technical marketing.
I have a blog called GoogleAppsScripting
that is just getting off the ground.
If you wanna learn basically how
to create solutions for yourself,
mostly with using Google AppsScript
to network things together,
that's what I write about with that one.
And then I have a medium channel
that I'm trying to get going
that is more the like the philosophical side
of how data plays into our lives.
And that's again where I published
that app that you can post your own fake news thing.
Those are all my plugs.
(laughing)
- Great.
Okay, thank you Trevor and have a good day.
- Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.
(upbeat techno music)
- All right, so there you have it.
This is Trevor's journey into technical marketing.
Pretty interesting, right?
Well, there is more to this interview,
we actually had to cut it a little bit short.
So I you wanna see more, the full interview
where we dive more into tools and techniques that he uses,
then head over to techmarketer.io/trevorfox
where we are gonna give you the full interview
to watch over there.
And if you enjoy this video,
then we are probably going to do another video soon enough.
So hit that subscribe button right over there,
and we'll bring you new videos every Wednesday.
My name is Julian, until next time.