Parting [ways after an amazing conference] is such sweet sorrow.

Your energy is high, your brain is full and you feel the love of other like-minded marketers. Sometimes however, it’s hard to keep that drive alive once the closing keynote has commenced and you resume your normal routine.

But what if instead of going about business as usual, you keep the momentum going?

Our team was very fortunate to participate in an event this week in our own backyard, the 2017 Digital Summit in Minneapolis. In addition to speaking, we had a large group of team members attend to gain new knowledge, created live blog coverage of the event, and hosted an attendee happy hour and dinner.

Not everyone can say that within 4 years, they went from being an individual contributor to the VP of a billion dollar company. McLean Donnelly can.

How did he do it? As someone with a design background, you might expect the answer was jaw-dropping designs. But that is only part of the magic. It is the well-paired designs with outstanding business cases that propelled Donnelly’s career forward. And, his ability to grow the talent he manages, the product he sells and the bottomline.

So, how did he get there? In his Digital Marketing Summit presentation on Tuesday, Donnelly shared what he learned through his MBA, adding “business IQ” to his repertoire of design skills. Here are the three areas he suggested you can grow in – with or without an MBA.

Have you ever heard a song in the morning, only to have it stubbornly stick in your head all day long, even though you don’t care for it?

Of course you have. It happens to all of us, and there’s a clear explanation for it.

“People remember things via audio signal better, longer, and stronger than when they see visually,” said Gabe Tartaglia in his presentation at Digital Summit Minneapolis: Engaging in a Connected World with the Power of Audio.

The field of neuroscience is increasingly measuring and shedding light on this phenomenon. Today’s marketer needs to be paying attention.

The Screenless Revolution

In his role as Vice President of National Vertical Sales for Pandora, Tartaglia has an inherent interest in this dynamic. And here’s why he believes it matter to all of us: “We are entering the age of voice.”

Creating content day in and day out is exhausting. Constantly coming up with creative ideas and pushing yourself to come up with things you’ve never thought of is incredibly hard. But luckily, TopRank Marketing’s Executive Content Chef, Ashley Zeckman, was in the kitchen to help us cook up strategies for content creation at Digital Summit Minneapolis.

To help set the stage for her session, Ashley asked: who is fried on content marketing? To no one’s surprise, nearly every marketer in the room raised their hands.

As Ashley shared, there are four reasons why content creation and strategy fries our brains:

• Consumers are overloaded
• Audiences are becoming more sophisticated and demanding
• Teams aren’t strategic with their content
• Brands can’t keep up with demand