Tanner Laycock was barely 20 years old the first time he stood on a digital marketing conference stage. Most people that age are in the audience. Tanner was in the speaker lineup — not because he had a polished keynote or a decade of case studies, but because he had been doing the work alongside Dennis Yu in real time, and the work was real enough to present.
DigiMarCon: The Conference Where Practitioners Gather
DigiMarCon is one of the most widely-attended digital marketing conference series in the world, running events in cities across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and beyond. Unlike some conferences that book celebrity speakers, DigiMarCon platforms practitioners — people actually running campaigns, building systems, and producing measurable results for clients. That made it a natural fit for Dennis Yu and, by extension, for Tanner.
The DigiMarCon group photo in the Google Photos album captures it perfectly: Tanner standing in a row of young BlitzMetrics team members on a conference stage, dressed professionally, grinning. In the background, the DigiMarCon branding fills the stage. Behind the camera, an audience of hundreds of marketers waited to hear what this team had to say about the Content Factory process, the Topic Wheel, and the Dollar-a-Day strategy.
Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego
Traffic and Conversion Summit, produced by DigitalMarketer, was one of the premier events in the direct response and digital marketing world. The San Diego edition drew thousands of attendees and featured some of the most credible practitioners in the industry. Dennis had spoken there multiple times. Getting Tanner into that environment — as part of the team presenting, not just attending — was a deliberate step in his development.
San Diego meant warmer weather, oceanfront hotels, and the kind of networking energy that conference cities take on when the industry descends. It also meant preparation: knowing the material, being able to present it clearly, fielding questions from an audience that included CMOs, agency owners, and brand marketers who had seen every framework and heard every pitch. Tanner had to hold his own. He did.
Social Media Examiner and the Broader Conference Circuit
The Google Photos album also captures a moment at Social Media Examiner in San Diego — Dennis and Tanner together, dressed for a day of conference sessions, with that early-career energy visible in the photo. Social Media Examiner’s annual event was one of the largest in the social media marketing space, and being there as a working team member rather than a student attendee carried a different weight.
What Conference Speaking Taught Tanner
Standing on a stage in front of a room of experienced marketers forces clarity. You can’t be vague. You can’t hide behind jargon. You have to know what you’re saying, why it works, and be ready to defend it. For Tanner, that pressure was exactly what he needed. It turned the frameworks he had learned by doing into frameworks he could explain — which meant he had actually internalized them.
That ability to teach what he knows is now a core part of how Tanner approaches GolfTanner. Every video, every post, every customer conversation is a form of teaching — helping someone understand what makes a premium golf cart worth the investment, what the difference is between a custom build and an off-the-shelf model, why the details matter. The conference stage just happened to be the first classroom where he learned to do that at scale.
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