7 Differentiators to Blackbird’s Approach to Training – and How They Benefit Clients
We ask a lot of our team members at Blackbird and make no bones about it. Training great marketers is one of the most powerful things we can do to grow our clients.
In the first few weeks at Blackbird, even brand-new performance marketers have their hands on the controls, with team members providing mentorship and guidance. Without giving away all of our secrets, our training methods rely on:
Active learning
Asking questions
Trial and error
Patience
We’ve found that for both new hires and the mentors they learn from, there are tangible advantages from our training that translate into better performance for our clients.
We recently had a wave of new hires, so we sat down with them and the folks training them to pick their brains on the training process and what makes Blackbird unique.
The new team members:
Account Associate Macy Lustig
Account Associate Anna Seitz
Account Associate Rishita Arora
Account Associate Rachel Trac
Clockwise from top left: Anna, Macy, Rishita, and Rachel
The trainers:
Account Manager Alex Capurro
Account Manager Sandy Garcia
Account Manager Ethan Paasch
Here’s what they called out as our differentiators.
A steeper learning curve
Each one of our newcomers called out our hands-on approach, where trainers oversee but the newcomers are driving the action, as both challenging and a key to accelerated learning. Blackbird’s account associates make plenty of mistakes made through a trial-and-error process, with assistance at the ready when they get stuck – and they all said it’s a much faster way to absorb information than just watching someone go through the steps over Zoom.
Context
For the new hires, getting an idea of how their work affects the bigger picture has been a huge driver in accelerated learning. All three agreed that learning to see how initiatives are connected takes tasks out of silos and makes their significance clear, which is a rare realization for brand-new digital marketers.
Rather than charging ahead and checking boxes, Blackbird employees are encouraged to ask questions about how things fit together and how they work to achieve our clients’ business objectives.
Resourcefulness
While we do a ton of hands-on learning and give our newer teammates a safe setting to learn from trial and error, much of the work our most successful marketers do is on their own. The trainers were aligned in saying that the ability to raise your hand and put yourself out there is a key skill, as is the ability to be methodical about processing big waves of information.
Blackbird employees who take the initiative to prepare for what’s coming and ask for more to learn have proven to have what it takes to drive client campaigns forward.
Communication
For our trainers, teaching new teammates is great practice in slowing down and explaining the reasoning behind each technique, which often translates into more productive conversations with clients. This is equally true for newcomers when we put them on the spot and ask them to explain why they went in a certain direction.
We’re also looking for our newcomers to ask about the “why” behind Blackbird’s best practices and methodologies. This is a great mental muscle to build to help our team members get strategic with our clients. If we ask questions that help keep the client’s overall business goals front and center, and make recommendations based on those goals, we stay out of order-taking territory and get to work on a more meaningful level.
It’s the difference between saying “Sure, we can launch that retargeting campaign,” and “Is your goal to lower CPA? Let’s do an incrementality study to show how much revenue that retargeting campaign would actually drive, and let’s explore some awareness campaigns to bring people into the funnel at lower costs.”
Fresh ideas
Blackbird newcomers hitting their training stride have been known to ask questions that give their trainers new ideas. Even more common: trainers learning from fellow trainers, with each volunteering to teach an aspect of marketing that plays to their strengths.
Trainers often take strategies they’ve learned to use in their accounts and share them with other teams, which is win-win knowledge sharing that also shows newcomers the real-time nature of marketing improvement. “Have you tried…?” is one of the most common and valuable questions that comes up in every stage of Blackbird training.
New perspectives
The trainers pointed out that their role of explaining marketing fundamentals from the ground up is a great prompt to re-examine their own reasoning. Each training lesson is an opportunity to refine an approach, not just repeat talking points from the last go-round.
The other bonus of new perspectives: they can provide reminders to reconsider processes that might not have been on the table for a client previously – say, an upper-funnel campaign to test given new measurement tools, or a Shopping campaign made viable by better product catalog structure.
Confidence
A huge part of client services is standing up for good strategy, even when it means disagreeing with the client. That’s a lot to ask of anyone relatively new to an industry, but Blackbird training makes a point of asking our team members to justify their decisions.
This builds more than marketing chops; it builds confidence in the face of questioning. Even though we like to have fun and we treat each other with respect, it’s not an easy thing for a newcomer to face questioning from someone with years of experience. Sharpening those skills in a safe environment is excellent practice for doing it when the stakes are higher.
If this all sounds a little intimidating, it should. We designed it that way.
Those who can power through the training and build a strong foundation for analytical marketing are well prepared for the rigors of client service, while others might be able to recognize early that agency marketing isn’t a great fit, which keeps all parties from over-investing.
Either way, the outcome is good for clients, who only work with A players, and marketers, who get better at their craft faster than they would elsewhere. This is why we say that our real business isn’t marketing; it’s training great marketers.
“The life so short, the craft so long to learn” has been attributed to both Hippocrates and Chaucer. This makes the quote (at least) 800 years old, and it still influences the way we approach the craft of marketing and training the marketers who drive our clients’ growth.