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Agency — April 28, 2017

How we learn about Digital Marketing

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Hrvoje Pilić Performance Marketing Director
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Continuous learning and education is a huge part of everyone at Degordian. Here are some of the things we do in our Digital advertising department to keep the learning process as smooth as possible for newbies and experienced members.

Why bother with learning

Marketing has gotten huge over the years, and this applies to digital marketing as well. Although marketing fundamentals relatively remained the same in their essence, tactics, channels, and technology developed tremendously from the first web banner in 1994 to the marketing technology landscape in 2016.

What is considered relevant today, could be obsolete 6 months from now. There is so much to learn, but so little time. The importance of continuous development and learning has never been more relevant than today. By learning, you’ll get better results and see a big improvement in your work performance, and at the same time feel that your job has become much easier for you to execute.

What do we learn

Below you can find the structure and some of the materials we use for our learning plans in the digital advertising department to develop and learn. I tried to organize it from low to high level and they are all from expert sources.

Although it’s not a definitive list, it should be enough to get you started if you’re a newbie or to polish some areas where you might be lacking if you’re an intermediate/advanced level.

Degordian learning materials

BEGINNER

INTERMEDIATE

 

ADVANCED

How do we use it

We have a mentorship program for every person that comes to the team, starting from digital advertising interns. This includes a custom learning plan and learning from past experiences as well as mistakes, feedbacks, customized internal educations, external educations and access to learning resources like SmartInsights, Lynda and many others.

Every person that comes to the team gets a custom learning plan, a mentor, educational materials and goals they need to achieve. Each person also has the freedom to pick to learn something from the materials that interest them the most.

While learning from the materials in this post is great, you should be aware that they mostly cover the fundamentals, so keeping up with the news, changes and latest developments in the industry is also very important. That is where reading from all the industry blogs, newsletters, groups, and pages on social networks comes into play. So be sure to set up an RSS reader like Feedly and start reading, or at least follow a few Facebook pages or join some groups.

If you find things worth reading, but don’t have the time, you should put them in your Instapaper or Pocket, so you can read them when you get the time.

When I look at the things we do in our digital advertising team – processes, organization, and standardization framework, as well as plans, know-how and the results, I notice a huge improvement every year and attribute a large part of it to learning, and I don’t find it surprising that StrengthFinder from Gallup is dominant in many of the people here in Degordian.

All this can get pretty overwhelming, so do one thing at a time, don’t jump right in and start going through a bunch of courses or reading a ton of books all at once. Instead, pick your focus area and start one thing at a time.

Now that you know how we learn in Degordian, tell us how do you keep up with the digital marketing? What sources do you use and what would you like to add to the list?