Digital Marketing Mastery

At Lean Labs, we recognize that choosing to work with a marketing agency isn't right for every business. And that's OK.

While partnering with the right one (at the right time) can rapidly accelerate your progress, you may initially benefit from the cost-savings that come with ideating, initiating, and analyzing your own campaigns.

When is the right time to hire a marketing agency? When:

1. You have identified a strong market fit.
2. You understand your underlying metrics.
3. You want to push growth as hard as possible.
4. When your marketing needs are larger than what your in-house team can handle.

If it's not the right time, it's not the right time. But that doesn't mean getting results on your own has to be a struggle.

Should you train in-house?

Sure, you can go reinvent the wheel, and figure out how to effectively train your team on your own. However, it's almost guaranteed that you will burn through money, talent, time, and learn every lesson with your wallet. There is a way that you can train your Growth Team in-house, affordable and relatively quickly. You can latch onto the tails of someone who has tread this path before you.

If Luke Skywalker had not found Yoda, he'd still be in that swamp.

Latch onto someone else's proven expertise to help your team level-up. But more on that later.

Business owners have always understood the value of marketing. If prospects don't know about your services in the first place, how will they ever find you and pay for them?

While businesses know they need marketing, execution, methods, and best practices have changed dramatically over the last few years (especially with the rise of the internet), leaving many business owners and managers unsure of how to effectively market.

Today, businesses have access to customers like never before. However, customers are more selective with their attention than ever. Therefore, it's imperative that businesses and marketing teams learn how to reach their target customers and engage them in a meaningful way.

• Nearly 1.7 billion people have active accounts on social media sites. (Jeff Bullas)
• Approximately 1 out of 7 people on the planet use Facebook every month. (Growing Social Media)
• 63 percent of adult cellphone owners use their phones to surf the net. (PRC)

Converting leads into customers is one part of the challenge, but what about attracting them to your website in the first place. Businesses who have mastered SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, and paid search advertising will undoubtedly have a leg up on competitors in the years to come.

To really stand out and succeed, you need to do more than repeat the same tactics. You need a way to to continuously level up your team's skills, strategy, and process.

You need to know what kind of results to expect, how to measure your results, and how to adjust your strategy as needed. Many companies hire marketing agencies to help them with just this type of task.

You will need this type of marketing savviness from you own "agency caliber" Growth Team. Ideally, you want more than one person on this team. However, if one person is all you can afford at the moment, that's OK too. Just make sure to work closely with this person to set small, specific, and achievable goals.

If your team is doing things well that don't work, it doesn't matter. The same is true for the opposite problem. Your job as the Owner/CMO/Manager is to have the right people doing the right things well. How do you achieve this? By creating a Growth Team.

No longer should a company divide sales, marketing, or customer success. These seemingly separate roles, all work toward the same goals: gaining new customers and nurturing them. The benefit of the Growth Team model is the alignment of sales and marketing teams and the continuous knowledge transfer that allows both groups to become more successful.

Building a Growth Team is really like building an in-house agency. If you model what works well for agencies, this will extend to the performance of your own Growth Team.

A high-caliber agency has a team of specialists that understands other roles as well as their own. This is key, as it helps every team member understand how their role fits into the larger picture, and improves team communication. You all speak the same language, have the same goals, and understand how and when to hand things off. To accomplish this feat, you need to enroll your team (and yourself) in a professionally certified training program.

Short of hiring someone whose sole job is to organize and train your entire team, a training program is the fastest and easiest way to ensure consistent results from the get-go.

We recommend DigitalMarketer's Mastery Classes and Certifications.

Why DigitalMarketer? We use their training to train our team. Yep, even professional marketers can stand to brush-up on their skills once in a while.

We were so impressed with the quality, structure, and accessibility of the content, that we asked to partner with DigitalMarketer directly.

You see, we've met with many businesses looking to transform their marketing. Many of them are just starting out, or not in the right place to hire a marketing agency. We saw a need for a reliable and high-quality marketing training tool, and with DigitalMarketer we can point businesses, not ready for a marketing agency, toward a solution that will level-up their team.

To become a digital marketing master without reinventing the wheel, you could read books and blogs, or attend conferences to figure out which books and blogs your team needs to read. Or, you could approach the very best digital marketers on this planet and beg them to crate a course for you, which would be highly expensive. Alternatively, you could sign up for Digital Marketing Mastery and have it already laid out for you and your team - plugging you into an already proven system.

Digital Marketing Mastery is a series of 8 online marketing classes—each focusing on a different aspect of digital marketing:

• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Search Marketing
• Conversion Funnels & Value Optimization
• Social & Community Management
• Paid Traffic & Customer Acquisition
• Marketing Analytics & Data Science
• Testing & Conversion Science

If you have been thinking about how to best take your organization's marketing to the next level—without hiring an agency—Digital Marketing Mastery could be the perfect fit.

In this guide, we'll provide a sneak peak of the program, to give you a better idea of what it is, how it works, who it's for, and if it's right for you and your business.

We'll also discuss:

• Why online marketing is no longer seen as optional.
• Creating the ideal Growth Team, and the key roles you need to fill within your organization.
• Why basic inbound marketing is not as hard as you may think it is.
• How to gauge team member effectiveness.

DigitalMarketer is a website devoted to creating a community of highly effective marketers and Growth Teams. In addition to a plethora of blogs, resources, and guides, the site offers an online learning platform (DigitalMarketer HQ), designed for businesses and marketing teams seeking to learn the best practices, strategies, and methods used in digital marketing today.

Founded by Ryan Deiss and Russ Henneberry, the program shares the exact tactics used to launch and grow Salesforce.com's company blog from zero to 120,000 unique visitors per month in less than a year.

Russ has conducted more than 600 digital marketing projects for small to mid-sized businesses through content marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click campaigns. This is why we LOVE the Digital Marketing Mastery courses—they teach actionable and proven strategies, not fluff.

There are currently 8 mastery classes available—each focusing on a different discipline of digital marketing. Each unit is taught by an industry expert and comes with training videos, downloadable resources, study guides, quizzes, and a certification.

Individuals who successfully complete all classes—also referred to as the Mastery Intensive— will emerge with the skills, knowledge, and experience that only a Certified Digital Marketing Professional can possess.

There are two ways to go about certifying your team using DigitalMarketer's courses:

For businesses looking to jump-start their rapid transformation and build a successful Growth Team, the Digital Marketing Mastery Intensive provides everything you need, and keeps you accountable. The Digital Marketing Mastery Intensive guarantees that your entire team gets certified in all 8 core disciplines of digital marketing in just 12 weeks. This option is best for companies who are serious about investing in a rapid transformation of their Growth Team.

Run more like an online classroom course, the intensive is taught by industry experts once a week live. The class sizes are small, with only 25 students allowed per class.

The course includes dynamic group discussions, course projects, trainings, quizzes, and real-life business scenarios. At the end of the 12-week period, students will be given an exam.

The course is delivered in the following manner:

Once a week, on Tuesdays, students receive video lessons for the week’s unit. Each unit typically entails four to six hours of video and assignments. For each assignment, the student has six days to complete the task. On the following Monday, students are sent the previous week’s unit exam. If completed successfully, the student achieves that unit’s certificate.

Every Thursday, students attend office hours with the unit’s instructor, allowing for further instruction and Q&A sessions.

Upon completion of the 8 units, a final course project and final exam are given. Once the course instructor grades the student's work, and approves it, the student is eligible for the Certified Digital Marketing Professional designation.

This format provides a greater level of accountability. There is a schedule, a live instructor to provide feedback and keep your team on track, a group of digital marketers to support you and your team and go through the course with you, and ensures each team member is completely trained and certified within 12 weeks.

Once your team has completed the intensive course, they will each be considered experts in digital marketing.

According to DigitalMarketer, they will have the skills and be able to:

Pricing for The Digital Marketing Intensive course:

The tuition for each team member is $4995. While this may seem like a large investment up front, the value of having each member of your Growth Team expertly trained in all areas of digital marketing is priceless. Knowing that every team member is competent and knows the most up-to-date best practices for executing digital marketing will inevitably provide a high ROI within a few months of completion 

If $4995 per employee seems out of reach, you can take the courses individually. While this way is cheaper, you lose the accountability that comes with a live instructor. You could spend quite a bit of money on the individual courses, only to have your team take them slowly or not at all.

With this option, companies can purchase access to DigitalMarketer HQ, the best value option, with pricing for teams of five $295/mo, and teams up to 20 at $495/mo.

In our own experience, we've found DigitalMarketer HQ and the individual Digital Marketer Mastery Classes to be effective for a variety of reasons:

• They contain supportive learning materials: downloadable worksheets, templates, and exams.
• They are actionable and contain real-life examples whenever possible.
• Supervisors can control who takes which course, and when, in a special manager's portal.
• Supervisors can also monitor progress in the portal, and receive notifications of completion.
• All team members become disciplined in all areas without breaking the bank.

Additionally, Digital Marketer practices what they preach. They have literally broken all of their best practices down to a science, and share what to do step-by-step. The company has publicly acknowledged that they are on track to gross $50 million in 2017; not bad for a small marketing company based out of Austin.

*Note, in our opinion, the number one key to success with the DigitalMarketer HQ is having an accountability coach.

Have you ever seen a business or brand called out on Twitter? How about Facebook? If you work for the company at hand, you might cringe. However, if you're just a regular consumer, you might feel immensely grateful for the impromptu review. Like it or not, businesses are held accountable to a higher level of standards than ever before with the use of social media and online reviews. In this course, participants will learn how to assess business goals, how to use social media to provide A+ customer service, and how to increase brand engagement. Overall, it's a great course for understanding how to build social media accounts that don't look like ghost towns.

While we highly suggest the Digital Marketing Mastery Intensive for high growth teams that want to level-up quickly, we realized that not every company will be able to invest 5k into each team member. Either option saves your business money due to the digital format. The business does not have to reimburse plane tickets, hotel rooms, or meals for a conference halfway around the country.

All mastery programs are 100 percent digital and can be accessed via laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

Pricing For Each Plan

Team larger than 20? Talk to us