Skip to content

How to find the time to learn with Elias Holm | Avidly Talks Growth & AI | Video podcast Ep 128

12 mins read

Marketing is a fast-paced field, and staying on top of the latest trends and strategies can feel like a full-time job. In the latest episode of Avidly Talks, Elias Holm dive into why continuous learning is so important for marketers.

In this episode you'll get practical tips on staying curious, understanding your audience, and balancing learning with the daily grind. 

Watch the episode below or listen on Spotify to learn how to stay ahead in marketing and how to find the time to learn:

 
Listen on Spotify

Takeaways from this episode:

  • Continuous learning is essential in the fast-paced marketing world.
  • Curiosity fuels the desire to learn and grow.
  • Understanding client needs is crucial for effective marketing strategies.
  • Many marketers overlook the true goals of consumers.
  • AI can complement human efforts in marketing.
  • Effective time management is key to balancing work and learning.
  • Engaging with colleagues can enhance learning opportunities.
  • Deep research into client motivations can lead to better strategies.
  • Marketers should strive to communicate clearly with their audience.
  • Being purposeful with learning time can lead to greater knowledge acquisition.



Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Avidly Talks and Elias Holm
02:50 The Importance of Continuous Learning
05:46 Curiosity as a Driving Force
09:05 Understanding Client Needs
12:12 Overlooked Aspects in Marketing
14:48 Strategies for Deeper Customer Insights
17:56 Staying Updated in a Rapidly Changing Field
21:10 Time Management for Learning
23:58 Conclusion and Key Takeaways
 
Full video transcript

Paul (00:01.507)
Welcome to Avidly Talks, a mostly marketing, sales and HubSpot Focus podcast. Each week we're diving into topics that help you do better in your work and we try to make you smile along the way. This week I'm joined by my colleague Elias Holm. He's a marketing strategist here at Avidly and easily hands down one of the most engaged, enthusiastic, passionate learners I've ever had the pleasure of working with. We have an internal Slack channel. Elias, if anybody's got some new tools, new AI software or ideas or... 

Paul (00:31.202)
Looking for volunteers, you're all over it. Thanks for coming on. 

Elias Holm (00:35.819)
Trace ball. 

Paul (00:37.006)
How's your week going? 

Elias Holm (00:39.831)
Actually really good Monday and a good start today as well. got the whole morning without any meetings and that's really uncommon for me. I guess you can relate. So I got to do really focused deep work and that was good because there was a lot of things on my plate that had to be done and sometimes it feels really good. Yeah, now I'm doing... 

Paul (00:52.36)
Hahaha 

Paul (01:04.332)
What kind of things? 

Elias Holm (01:12.063)
a lot of fundamental research on new clients. We have a lot of new clients coming in and from that we are creating the whole strategy for their inbound marketing efforts and content strategy and so on. So there's a lot of research and then you make the main strategy and from there you do more specific strategy efforts. 

Elias Holm (01:41.109)
Really interesting to get to know these new clients. 

Paul (01:44.313)
think that researching bit, can see why you're in enjoying that deep focus on the research stage of working with a client and all that seems to be something that's. 

Paul (01:55.541)
second nature, not even second nature, it's just the way you go about things. So let me dive in. I asked you to come on because like I say, you're a big, obviously a keen learner, you enjoy finding out new information. The learning channels on Slack be them about HubSpot, about marketing generally, the book club, AI, whatever it is, you're all over it. How do you find the time to always keep learning and keep working? 

Elias Holm (02:21.979)
Yeah. 

Elias Holm (02:26.793)
I work from this office a lot. So this is my home office. So I don't have a lot of colleagues most of the days. And our Slack channels is like a coffee machine for me. So I go there to just have a conversation and just trying to... 

Paul (02:29.07)
Wait, yep. 

Elias Holm (02:50.359)
dig into things that I think is interesting. And I think the most important thing for me to find the time to be a constant learner is to just stay really curious because then you can't help yourself. So if you find a way to be curious about the world and being 

Elias Holm (03:18.709)
motivated to learn new things, then you will find the time somehow. And I'm also fortunate to have an employer in Avidly, which really supports to have a constant personal development. Because Avidly can see that it's highly valuable to come in with all of this knowledge that you always need to 

Elias Holm (03:48.791)
because things are happening in such a rapid pace now. Everyone is saying that, but it's really, really true. 

Paul (04:00.953)
this year does well this summer in particular feels we're just at the we're just coming out of summer but this summer in 2024 you have you felt that change and you talked about in by marketing strategies a moment ago it feels like the game has changed this summer do you agree 

Elias Holm (04:04.395)
Yeah. 

Elias Holm (04:19.105)
Yeah, and I've been thinking about it a lot. think probably it changed earlier, but it was just more obvious now. And also now, of course, with generative AI, the game has changed a lot. And we have to find our place of what we do and how we contribute. 

Elias Holm (04:47.497)
It's also changed in the market for us as consultants because a lot of companies that we work with are more mature now in how they do content marketing and in-bar marketing and on the sales side as well. So they need other kinds of services from us as an agency. 

Paul (05:11.291)
When going back to your tip about staying curious, when everybody mentions how things have changed this morning, I always get sucked into it, but you said something really interesting about staying curious. Have you always been that way and do you take that habit everywhere? Are you like curious about, I don't know, music or other things outside of work? 

Elias Holm (05:35.959)
probably not everywhere, in a lot of fields, yes. 

Elias Holm (05:46.576)
It is something that makes my life more interesting, but it's also difficult sometimes because sometimes you just have to do things without digging too deep. But for everything in life that you encounter, you can always go into the rabbit hole and just dig deeper and deeper. 

Paul (06:14.509)
when you're in 

Paul (06:15.035)
research mode. Sorry, go on. 

Elias Holm (06:17.013)
Yeah, no, I just, I just realized I think fairly early on in my life, I realized that 

Elias Holm (06:26.921)
As long as I'm interested and motivated in something, it's easy to learn about a subject. if I'm not motivated, it's really tough. I can see that with my kids as well. My son doesn't care to learn left and right, but he can learn about... 

Elias Holm (06:55.509)
elliptical solar systems or whatever, as long as he is motivated, I can highly relate to that. 

Paul (07:03.726)
Yeah, nice. Marketing obviously motivates you. 

Elias Holm (07:07.115)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I don't think it's like actually marketing, probably. 

Elias Holm (07:18.455)
communication between people and people not, my biggest interest I think in my work is how people don't understand each other and how we can try to make them understand each other at least a little bit. So that is like my main objective in my work. 

Paul (07:39.114)
explain that in a marketing context. 

Elias Holm (07:41.095)
Yeah 

Elias Holm (07:41.633)


Elias Holm (07:45.865)
A lot of times I think we generally think that people understand each other and that we speak the same language and that words means the same thing to everyone and that we have the same interests and same motivations. And it's really easy for any company to think from inside out and you think about what you are producing and the kind of service that you deliver and that everyone would understand. 

Elias Holm (08:15.585)
where you are sort of like, you know, the said model that you have been thinking about it for a really long time. And then you're trying to communicate it. And you think that everyone is starting at the same page. So that a lot of what you do as a strategist to trying to see how you can communicate to the customers where they are at the moment. 

Elias Holm (08:45.943)
So just being really curious about who our clients and customers are and where they are right now and how we should communicate to them is a driving factor but also a big part of what I do in my job. 

Paul (09:05.327)
So you've been doing that for a new client this morning and trying to find that, suppose you're getting yourself up to speed with a new client as well and as well where their customers head is at. I presume that's what you've been trying to do this morning. How do you go about that? What is it sort of, are you interviewing customers customers? Are you doing desk research? What kind of things are you doing to get up to speed and understand where the customer's head is at? 

Elias Holm (09:09.015)
Yeah. 

Elias Holm (09:19.531)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Elias Holm (09:32.287)
It depends a little bit on the amount of time that we have to do this kind of research. So if you don't have a lot of time, it's more focused on just interviewing our customer and doing desk research and then confirm with our customer if they find that these insights are. 

Elias Holm (10:00.565)
valid and we take it from there. If you have more time, we will do more interviews with their clients and do more industry research, reading up on any public papers and so on. And then we can do other more extensive research to reach out to a broader audience to see what the drivers are for these audiences and so it depends how much we can do. 

Elias Holm (10:30.303)
It's always interesting, of course, when you can go more in depth and really trying to find what drives them in the end. And that is also interesting because as consumers, we usually don't know what the true motivations are. We think that we are in 

Elias Holm (10:58.593)
the market to buy new shoes, but we are actually in the market to be like by our peers or whatever. So trying to get one step beyond and see the true motivations is something that is very interesting and also 

Paul (11:07.958)
Yeah. 

Elias Holm (11:22.091)
where I come in and deliver a real value. And now that we are in the era of AI, we have to be even more human and trying to do the things that the AI can't do. And then we use the AI to do all the things that the AI is better to do. 

Paul (11:42.543)
We'll come back to how you stay on top of AI probably in couple of minutes. Thinking about your customers that you work with, you speak to a lot of different businesses. What are the things that in-house marketing teams sort of commonly overlook when it comes to doing what you just described in terms of understanding what their customers actually trying to achieve? 

Elias Holm (12:12.681)
And I think that the... 

Elias Holm (12:16.535)
most common thing that they overlook is to understand the consumer's goals. You tend to look at your product and see often just the features of your product. If you're a little bit more mature, you will look at the benefits of your product and the way that your features will benefit the customers in their everyday life. 

Elias Holm (12:46.017)
But looking at the goal, what are they trying to attain? Say for instance you have a car. You don't have a car because you want to have a high speed vehicle. You have a car because you want to be able to transport yourself from A to Z. But actually you maybe don't even just want to 

Elias Holm (13:15.511)
travel between these points, what you actually want to do is be able to meet up with your friends or whatever. So understanding that you can deliver content in a totally different way. So I think that that is the most overlooked thing. And it's easy to go there because we are in an era of performance marketing where 

Elias Holm (13:43.755)
you measure each ad by itself. So it's difficult sometimes to take one step out of that and look at the holistic view and see what are we actually solving for our customers. 

Paul (14:01.359)
If you've got any sort of tips to help people, in-house teams sort of take it to that next level of, it's like the jobs to be done theory, it? It sounds like you're describing. How can you, as an in-house marketer, or salesperson, or business leader, get to that second level? Not just the features of your product, not just the benefits, what's that second level? How do you unlock it? How do you find it out? 

Elias Holm (14:14.654)
Yeah. 

Elias Holm (14:31.351)
That is actually one way you can use the AI. So you can set the AI. 

Elias Holm (14:38.739)
can use a regular chatbot like chatdb and set it up in a way that it will 

Elias Holm (14:49.057)
challenge you in your thoughts and you can also ask it to act as one of your consumers and then you have a conversation and trying to just challenge yourself coming one step further down what is it actually solving for and the most important thing of course a lot of companies say that we are consumer centric, we're customer centric. 

Elias Holm (15:18.551)
But how often do you actually talk with your customers? I think CEOs should just go out and sit with their customers. And our HubSpot is doing this. They invite customers to all of the bigger managers meetings. They have a customer that is challenging them during the manager meetings. More companies should. 

Elias Holm (15:47.157)
be truly customer centric and it will hurt a little bit but that's the whole point. 

Paul (15:56.441)
That's where the nuggets come from as well, isn't it? What's, I'm interested, what's your background from before this? Are you from like a content? Is it paid advertising? Are you from your creative or marketing strategy? What's your route into where you are now? 

Elias Holm (16:13.367)
I started wider in communication. actually studied rhetoric a long time ago and I worked in communication in non-profit sector as my first job after the rhetoric studies and I drifted in towards digital marketing but more from the perspective of 

Elias Holm (16:42.571)
communication planning and who are we addressing and what are the problems that we're trying to solve for the Amazon. And then I focus more on 

Elias Holm (16:57.653)
strategic marketing. I've also worked quite a lot operational in HubSpot, but I always try to think about what is this actually solving for. So if I set up a nurturing workflow in HubSpot, I was also thinking about why are we doing this and what does it actually mean and how is it associated to our content strategy and so on. 

Elias Holm (17:27.347)
said have a bit of a technical background in HubSpot but I'm not the developer and it's obviously communication. The tools is interesting but to me they are always just a way to get to the strategy that we set up in the first place. 

Paul (17:50.64)
When you were talking then it made me think around 

Paul (17:56.367)
tools that are always getting released with HubSpot but also in our field anyway in sort of marketing and technology space. You've talked about things moving quickly. HubSpot as a tool moves quickly. There were 200 updates released last month at inbound. How do you give some advice? How do you stay on top of these things? I know you're naturally curious but describe your habits for absorbing these things. 

Paul (18:25.783)
your colleagues around you on slack, where do you go and learn? it podcasts, YouTube, books? What are your learning habits that people can take from? Because I can't put across enough how much you're clearly learning and absorbing things all the time. So tell us, share how you do it. What are your tips? 

Elias Holm (18:45.207)
Maybe you can share with me, Paul, if you come up with solution on how to stay up to date with everything happening with HubSpot. just so, so, so much going on. Of course, both you and me are really fortunate to work in Avidly and have all these colleagues that are constantly up to date with what's happening in this space. So I get a lot of. 

Paul (18:48.865)
You 

Elias Holm (19:14.515)
insights from all of our colleagues of course. 

Paul (19:18.393)
That's a good point actually. When you say that I do think about it. Often you're asking to be shown something. I think that's a great way for people to... more people should do that. 

Elias Holm (19:31.904)
Yeah, there's always someone else who has thought about it more than you have. And that's also, of course, 

Paul (19:35.564)
Yeah, absolutely. 

Elias Holm (19:41.771)
the way we go about using just searching the internet for the answer or talking to a chatbot or whatever. But what I do to stay up to date is I'm quite deliberate with my time. I think that comes down to having two kids and a full-time job and to be quite deliberate on your time. So it may seem like I'm 

Elias Holm (20:10.423)
in our Slack channels a lot, but I actually have quite condensed time when I'm looking in all of these communication channels, my email and Slack channels and team channels or whatever. So I set defined times. I usually look at our Slack channels in the morning and at lunch, and then I check my emails in the morning. 

Elias Holm (20:37.139)
And then the rest of the time I'm trying to get my work done. 

Elias Holm (20:42.359)
the other thing that I do is, I'm trying to find spaces where during my day, where it's not taking any time for the many thing else to do this learning. So for instance, I love podcasts because I can listen to because when I'm something else, so when I'm doing the laundry or I'm working out or whatever, 

Elias Holm (21:10.391)
I can listen to podcasts and it's quite easy for me at least in my schedule to fit that into my daily routines. If I would need to take half an hour each day to be really focused on the learning that I do, it would probably be quite difficult to get it in there. The last thing is that 

Elias Holm (21:38.783)
I think it was my dad who taught me that you should read each night because it's such a good way to fall asleep. And so I'm a constant reader, but I read like, I don't know, two to four pages each evening. It's not a lot, but over the years it gets quite a lot. And you can start thinking about something and then you wake up and like... 

Paul (21:53.708)
Yeah. 

Elias Holm (22:10.177)
was interesting and is that some inputs that you have constantly. I think just find times during the day where it's easy to get it in. can, I don't know if you have read atomic habits. Yeah, yeah, good, good. that's right, Paul. 

Paul (22:28.972)
I've read the blinkist version. know, do you know the, yeah, yeah, I find that's my way of getting more reading in. 

Elias Holm (22:39.927)
But it talks about like stacking your habits to something else. like, if you want to learn to have a better balance, like when you're your teeth, practice to stand on one leg. Whenever you take the laundry, listen to podcasts or whatever. 

Elias Holm (23:07.241)
something that you do during the day and you just connect the new habits to that thing that you're already doing. But mostly I think I would come back to just stay curious because if you are truly curious you will find the time somehow. 

Paul (23:29.295)
Brilliant. And then that is so important because everything's moving so quickly. I think people feel like they haven't got the time. But if you have that curious mindset, manage your time. Allocate time to learning as well. Like, be purposeful with it is what I'm taking away from what you're describing. like, it's when you said you go into communication mode with your colleagues, asking questions, looking at tools in your... 

Paul (23:58.871)
newsletters that are in your email inbox, then switch to work. I think you've really given me a good tip there because what I fall into the trap of is trying to do both, trying to dip in and out of both and you end up doing a bit of neither. 

Elias Holm (24:14.167)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Paul (24:15.833)
So I'm going to take that tip away. Thank you very much, Eli. the way to stay on top of all of this is to organize your time and be purposeful. And I love that underlying be curious. So important. 

Paul (24:30.988)
If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a comment and a five star review. Plus hit the follow button not to miss future episodes. Thank you very much Elias. I'll let you get back to your new client and doing what you do best, researching. 

Elias Holm (24:45.623)
Thanks, Paul. Take care.