Lead grading (also known as lead scoring) is the process of assigning numerical values to each lead...
At Digital 22, we take a different approach to most marketing agencies and choose to give away our secret sauce. We teach clients how to do the things they pay us to do because we believe transparency and education benefit us (and them) in the long term.
"It's infinitely easier to teach people a theory. It's really hard and time-consuming but super valuable to someone to teach them how to actually sit down in front of a computer and do these things."
No. This isn't the agency standard. Most agencies make marketing seem like a mystery. 🔮
To find out more about why we take this approach at Digital 22, hit the play button below to hear from Rikki and Andrew in the latest episode of Inbound After Hours.
We've heard it all from teams believing we do nothing but click a magic button every month or else that we're non-stop busy breaking into search engines and busting down the back doors of the internet.
Neither is quite true.
When we show clients our inner workings, they understand that marketing is more complex than knowing which key to press. Yet it also isn't anything like a cheesy Hollywood movie. Ergo, we don't "hack into Google."
What's more, clients don't leave us when they know that all-important info, as most agencies fear. In fact, they build a better relationship with us because of it.
Why do we do it?
After years of agency experience, we started to notice something: the most successful clients were those who were willing to learn, understand our way of working and get in on the action. 💡
Since then, education has become a core part of our working relationships and has blossomed to become its own ethos. We stopped walking down the most obvious road and started to forge our own path, one where we didn't keep stuff for ourselves, "just because".
"It not only helps us to get buy-in to what we're doing, but I think it's such a better outlook and approach to empower clients to do what we do."
Now, clients are less likely to say things like "can you turn it up?" and expect instant results. As we demystify digital marketing, people get that it takes more than changing a bit of code or writing a few words to hit huge milestones.
What does it look like?
Client education is human, transparent and honest. In reality, it looks like:
- - Giving client's access to data and educating them to understand its context 📊
- - Never fudging reports and picking a handful of metrics that are performing well to make everything look rosy 📈
- - Moving towards more informed conversations where clients can be part of the solution 💬
- - Explaining everything on video and being available for quick questions 🎥
- - Valuing the journey — not just the destination and enjoying the ride together 🚗
To help, we created a community of small business owners, CEOs and one-man-bands to give them a place to learn about marketing, explore training and empower themselves.
But the Inbound After Hours group is just the beginning.
What does client learning look like in the future?
Through the lens of covid, digital learning has become more and more popular. This has been something we've embraced with open arms creating online training and a huge library of free digital content from deep-dive blogs to podcasts on every imaginable marketing topic.
However, we're excited to roll out our education ethos more and more in-person, starting with the return of our LOVE INBOUND annual event next Spring.
"Events, in general, are such a good way to rapidly learn a lot of things from top people but also actually are a super enjoyable way of doing it."
We think networking and spending time in one-on-one sessions improves the industry's experience and helps accelerate learning even further.
To find out more about what Rikki and Andrew discussed in this episode, make sure to watch along using the video at the top of the blog or hit play on the SoundCloud link to listen on-the-go.
Learn about any aspect of marketing in just one click
If you can't wait until next Spring, get clued up on any aspect of marketing by listening to our library of podcasts. As Andrew confesses in pretty much the first minute of this one, we're a podcast machine, producing dedicated podcast content on the topics of SEO, PPC, video, design, content marketing and more.
Never miss a video again by subscribing to our YouTube channel using the button below. 👇👇👇
