Digital marketing agency Every1 tell us why training their clients is so important.

Marketing and SEO agencies exist to help support businesses and brands that they otherwise might not have the time and expertise to execute themselves.

Training could and should be an integral part of the start of any client relationship, not just to help indicate that your business has the skills and expertise a client needs but also to create a level of background knowledge that ultimately helps your two businesses to work better together.

Audits, meetings, communication and training

At the start of any new SEO or marketing project there are meetings and audits designed to help the agency figure out the best possible solutions to your business’s search and marketing issues.

You meet with the key people within the team that will be helping you, and they use audits to identify the different aspects of your website or marketing that need help to help them to prioritise tasks.

Part of this could also involve looking at the gaps in your internal knowledge and skillset. For example, your business may have ignored creating content for your website due to a lack of time or resource but also a lack of confidence in being able to execute a marketing and SEO strategy.

This can help to inform any training you might receive. This isn’t necessarily so you can complete SEO and marketing tasks yourself, however it is often useful to provide context, so you have a better understanding of the work you’re paying for.

Collaboration like this often leads to better client/agency relationships and helps to deliver stronger and more insightful content for your audience and customers.

This can also help to build your level of understanding, so you’re better positioned to provide the right information or assistance during different projects. Collaboration like this often leads to better client/agency relationships and helps to deliver stronger and more insightful content for your audience and customers.

Defining the training

If your agency suggests training, it’s always a good idea to take them up on it. Learning new skills is never a bad thing, especially if they are skills which can benefit not just your business but your staff members and their development.

For example, you might have an internal marketing department, they might focus on traditional PR, print and advertising but have little or no background in search-based content marketing.

A training session that provides a background on SEO and a level of insight into the role of content marketing could not only help them to better support your chosen agency, but also means they gain a wider knowledge of their field.

This can be used as a way to keep staff engaged and motivated as you’ve provided means for them to learn and improve their skills.

Training, as we’ve mentioned, will be defined by gaps in knowledge and skillset. The training should be delivered to the people best suited to plug those gaps within your business. This will commonly be marketing managers and commercially-focused staff, although the training could be delivered to any staff member who you felt would benefit from it.

How should that training be delivered?

Once you’ve defined what training needs to be done you need to think about the way it will be delivered. This can take many forms including:

• Presentations
• Hands-on training
• Workshops
• Shadowing
• Q&A sessions
• Tutorials

Different agencies will have their own preferred ways of delivering their training materials. However, it is important that if there are ways of learning that your team are more receptive to that you let the agency know, this way they can tailor their delivery to make it more effective.

The training should give your team a clearer understanding of what it is the agency is doing for your business and provide the context you need to collaborate more effectively. This means you should be in a position to better support your agency partner and vice versa.

For example, if there are fundamental search problems on your website your agency partner might identify them, but due to a limited SEO budget can draw your attention to them and put you in a position to be able to fix them yourself.

Better understanding

The improved understanding brought about via training doesn’t just benefit the client side of the relationship.

Your marketing team could work alongside your agency to create on-page and outreach content that better reflects your brand. Leveraging your experience and business knowledge allows for the creation of better content that meets search intent but provides authoritative and useful answers which helps to paint a more positive picture of your brand.

Training can be a mutually beneficial option for agencies and businesses. This is because the success that can be achieved is cyclical. Not only does the business learn, develop and understand but this also means they are better positioned to them help the agency deliver better results, in turn benefitting them as a business and providing better case studies for the agency.

Taking the time to learn more and understand is vital and should be a key cornerstone of building a successful client/agency relationship.

About the author

Every1 is a digital marketing agency.