Author: Christine Zirnheld
Generative AI, third-party cookie deprecation (eventually), Google algorithm updates, broadening match types—digital marketing moves fast. To stay ahead and satisfy clients, your team must embrace ongoing learning and new skills.
Without a culture of continuous education, your agency risks falling behind.
In this article, I’ll delve into the training methods digital marketing agencies can explore to foster perpetual learning among employees, highlighting its crucial role in agency success, including:
What does an “education-first” culture look like for marketing agencies?
Your employees don’t need an MBA to grow their skills and become better marketers. In fact, at Cypress North, the agency where I work, we no longer require a bachelor’s degree from potential hires. We’ve found that the best education is what we learn from each other and real-life client experiences.
However, that doesn’t mean you should work on client projects for 40 hours a week. When we only focus on client work, we miss out on opportunities to diversify our skills and learn strategies for new verticals.
So, what does continuous learning look like at an agency? It requires breaking your teams out of siloed client groups to come together, collaborate, and share learnings. Our agency has various types of “training” that occur every day. These can look like hands-on working sessions or more formal training seminars. We’ll dive into the complete list of our weekly trainings later in this article.
The benefits: How education improves your agency as a business and as an employer
Education is an investment in the future. It may seem like a sacrifice to take hours away from client work right now, but over the long haul, an education-first culture at your agency means:
Lower cost and more flexible teams
Long-term client success
Employee retention, growth, and fulfillment
Training content that promotes agency authority
Lower cost and more flexible teams
As your agency grows, you’ll need to decide whether to hire more experienced or greener digital marketers to join your team. Professionals with longer resumes bring valuable experience, but you’ll also pay more upfront for senior-level employees. And, you won’t know if they’ll work with the same values and strategies as your agency requires until they’re already part of the team.
Hiring less-experienced applicants requires a smaller initial investment than seasoned marketers. Another benefit is that you can design the perfect team for your agency, focusing on the skills and knowledge most helpful to your clients.
However, because these greener marketers have less experience, they’ll have less hands-on knowledge to apply to client accounts.
To enjoy the benefits of growing a team from the ground up, investing in continuous education and training is a must.
Long-term client success
Because our days are focused on clients, finding time for hands-on learning is often difficult. While carving out time for continuous learning can mean taking time away from client work, it leads to better performance in the long run.
As an agency, your greatest competitive advantage is the ability to see what performs across multiple accounts. This valuable knowledge should be shared across client teams to improve performance across your agency. By siloing your learnings, your team may bill more hours, but miss critical insights and lessons that lead to the ultimate goal: performance and growth.
Employee retention, growth, and fulfillment
When good employees don’t see opportunities for growth at your agency, they leave. By providing continued education, employees can expand their knowledge and diversify their skill set.
Exposing your teams to new challenges, tools, and strategies outside their dedicated client work shows an investment in your employees’ careers while elevating their capabilities for your agency.
Training content that promotes agency authority
It may feel like the best way to stay ahead of other agencies is to guard your expertise. At Cypress North, we’ve found the opposite to be true.
If a topic is challenging our team, chances are other marketers are challenged by it as well. Whenever someone on our team brushes up on a topic to lead a training, there is an opportunity to create educational content to promote our brand.
Examples include:
Blog posts
Video tutorials
Downloadable resources, checklists, or planning templates
Conference presentations
Social posts
E-books
Content like this establishes your team as industry thought leaders, which helps you attract clients as well as top talent to join your team.
Our agency’s podcast, Marketing O’Clock, is an excellent example of this content strategy. We release weekly digital marketing news episodes and more evergreen content like tutorials and roundtable discussions. This is a winning strategy for both Cypress North and our customers:
Our team benefits from forcing ourselves to stay up-to-date on the latest news and updates.
Because we’re on the cutting edge of industry trends, we’re better positioned to exceed KPIs and keep clients happy.
Potential clients find our content online and see Cypress North as a leader in the industry.
As established thought leaders, we attract high-performing digital marketers to join our team, which brings even greater value and performance to our clients.
How to get the most out of employee trainings
Training and education can be a significant time investment. Below are some strategies that our team employs to ensure that learning sessions are time well spent.
Put learning on the calendar
Sometimes, simply showing up is the most challenging part of training your team. As an agency, we are bogged down with weekly tasks, reports, and client meetings. To instill a culture of continuous learning, you must hold your teams accountable by scheduling regular training sessions, webinars, and working sessions.
At Cypress North, we put learning on the calendar every day. Below is a training schedule for a typical week at our agency, including learning opportunities that we will discuss in depth later in this post.
Day | Training |
Monday | |
Tuesday | Account maintenance PPC training |
Wednesday | News podcast recording |
Thursday | Hands-on SEO training & PPC optimization training |
Friday | Digital Marketing University |
We add these placeholder meetings to our calendar every week, but these meetings can all have varying topics (depending on what projects we’re working on or if there is a trending topic that we need to cover). We do our best to ensure the team knows what will be covered during each event as early as possible, so they can plan their day accordingly.
Who should attend?
Before scheduling meetings, decide who on your team needs to attend training. At our agency, we invite every marketing team member to attend every learning opportunity. While these meetings are only required for coordinator- and associate-level employees, more senior members are encouraged to join if they have time.
As mentioned earlier, learning isn’t only for entry-level digital marketers. Even a veteran marketer with years of experience can benefit from learning about a new feature, product, strategy, or tool. Plus, because we aim to make training interactive, the rest of the team can benefit from hearing their point of view, too.
Utilize your entire marketing team
Cypress North is a mid-sized agency; we don’t have employees dedicated solely to training staff. We divide training responsibilities across team members to prevent training from becoming a burden, and we don’t only use senior employees.
The primary benefit to this is that nobody has to spend excessive time prepping for or leading training, but there are many additional perks to this approach.
Exposure to diverse perspectives and approaches: An unfortunate side effect of agency growth is that teams become more siloed, focusing specifically on their clients. There are members of the marketing team at Cypress North that I have never had the pleasure of working with even though we’ve both been here for years. Mixing up the leaders of training sessions allows us to get varying perspectives on challenges and enables our team members to hear from everyone, not just those on their same client team. Beyond continuous learning, breaking out of our client teams helps us get to know each other better. This leads to better camaraderie among the team and benefits our agency culture.
Sometimes, the perspectives and knowledge of greener team members is the most valuable of all. As a leader on client accounts, I often find myself caught up in reports, deliverables, and client relationships. Less-experienced marketers often spend more time working with Google Search Console and discovering new SEO or AI tools to help our clients. When we have the opportunity to combine these fresh ideas with years of client experience, the confluence of skills can drive incredible results.
Leadership training for junior staff: When a coordinator or associate leads a training exercise, they aren’t just passing on what they learned, they’re also growing their own leadership skills. Learning sessions are an excellent opportunity for greener employees to grow more confident in public speaking and other management skills.
Limit distractions
When I attend a virtual learning session, I’m often distracted by emails, reports, and Slack messages. Remote training is tough because it’s hard to focus on learning when you have your day-to-day tasks on the screen in front of you.
Most of my team works in-office, so we have the option to hold in-person meetings. However, we have two offices in different cities. For the larger training sessions (where we try to get the whole team together), we cannot get everyone in the same room. So, we utilize a hybrid approach.
Here is an example of how our hybrid training works: whoever hosts the meeting will sit at their computer (in their office) and share their screen. The rest of the team gathers in a separate conference room and pulls the meeting up on a big screen.
This approach allows whoever is in charge that day to share slides or a site they are troubleshooting on the big screen, while the rest of the team engages in the meeting.
The team members in the conference room don’t get distracted by their day-to-day tasks and feel more comfortable speaking up and sharing insights because they are attending the meeting in-person. And, anyone working from home can still participate in the meeting, or we can record the sessions for new employees to watch later.
Make training interactive
To get the most out of training, it’s vital that your team is engaged and excited about the topic. Through trial and error, we’ve identified some strategies to help us achieve this goal.
Use real client accounts: Two of our most valuable training sessions are hands-on account maintenance training and client-specific working sessions. In these trainings, the session leader gets the team together to work through a particular challenge or project. We encourage our team to bring their own client challenges to these sessions to benefit from other team members’ perspectives, including upper management and coworkers that do not work on that client account. This keeps our team more engaged because the knowledge they acquire will impact their actual client performance. It also allows us to feed two birds with one seed, training the team while executing deliverables for our client.
Ask for feedback: Instead of just delivering a lecture to the group, we involve the whole team to keep everyone as tuned-in as possible. Before showing the group how to approach a problem, the session leader asks everyone what they would do. This strategy keeps everyone engaged and lets us get varying perspectives on the same problem.
Record everything
Record every marketing training session and upload it to a shared folder. This adds another step to the process, but your future self will be grateful when you have a library of training videos and educational materials for new hires.
Recording meetings also allows anyone who missed the training to go back and review. Plus, if there are any questions on the topic in the future, your team can easily reference the video.
Make learning a scheduled part of your agency’s week
The different types of “training” that your team can engage in each week include (but aren’t limited to):
Weekly marketing team standups
Working sessions
Industry certifications
Marketing 101 trainings
Book clubs
Industry news
Weekly marketing team standups
At Cypress North, we gather the entire marketing team for a 30-minute call at the beginning of every week. This allows us to:
Update the team on company matters
Check in on workload for the week ahead
Share learnings from the previous week
Every team member concisely shares something that they learned. This doesn’t have to be something “new” or groundbreaking. Chances are, if a tool, feature, or strategy is new to one person on the team, it will be new to someone else.
This is a quick exercise, but it challenges us to continue to grow our skills every week and pass our discoveries on to the rest of the team.
What seems small to one person could be a game-changer for another client’s performance.
Working sessions
I’ve found that hands-on learning is the best way to grow my skills and confidence. Regularly scheduled, client-specific “working sessions” allow the entire client team to collaborate, strategize, and learn.
One team member shares their screen and everyone puts their heads together to work on a specific project or challenge for that client. When we’re forced to set time aside to work together, it allows us to learn about new tools, strategies, and approaches to a problem.
Industry certifications
From Google Analytics to HubSpot, to Google Ads and more—there are plenty of digital marketing certifications for your agency to pursue. I’ve found that hands-on learning is a better approach to growth, but some potential clients value these platform certifications when choosing an agency partner.
We have employees take these certifications when they’re new to the team before they have a full client workload.
Marketing 101 trainings
When teams are siloed into client accounts, they miss out on learning the strategies and tactics that don’t impact their clients. At Cypress North, we schedule “101” trainings every week.
One team member leads the call and covers a digital marketing topic. This could mean showcasing how to use a tool, troubleshooting Search Console reports, deep dives into Google Sheets tricks, or covering best practices. These trainings give our greener employees opportunities to learn skills even if they don’t apply to their current client accounts.
Book clubs
Optional marketing book clubs are a great opportunity to challenge your team to think critically and learn.
Content doesn’t have to be specific to agency disciplines (SEO, PPC, etc.); books about branding, sales, or leadership can also help with professional or agency growth.
Industry news
Staying up-to-date (and ahead of clients) on relevant industry developments is just as important as growing hands-on skills. Encourage your staff to share breaking news via Slack, weekly emails, or at weekly marketing meetings.
Embrace continuous learning for agency success
Prioritizing education enables your agency to stay ahead of industry trends and adapt quickly to changes, ensuring that your strategies remain effective and your clients are satisfied. Additionally, investing in the education and growth of your employees—regardless of their experience level—not only improves client outcomes, but also enhances employee satisfaction and retention.
Ultimately, by fostering a culture of continuous learning, your marketing agency can achieve greater authority, drive better business outcomes, attract better candidates, and stay ahead of the competition.
Christine Zirnheld is a senior digital marketing manager at Cypress North, specializing in PPC. As a host of the Marketing O'Clock podcast, she covers breaking PPC & SEO news stories with lots of sass. Twitter | Linkedin