Like it or not, our clients expect us to be ahead of the curve. They’re counting on us to keep
learning and evolving our services to keep up with the constant motion that our industry (and
culture) is experiencing. How are you and your agency doing that? An interesting way to
assess if your agency is staying current is to evaluate your offerings. Ask yourself these
questions:

  • What product/package or service are we offering clients today that we didn’t offer a year ago?
  • How have we refined/improved some of the products/packages and services that we did offer
    a year ago? Have we evaluated them to make sure they’re still on point?
  • Where has our knowledge base increased in terms of audience, sales, technology, or
    marketing trends?
  • If we got called to provide a speaker for a conference called “Where marketing is going” who
    would we send and what would they say?
  • Who in our shop is learning something new and how are they transferring that knowledge to
    the rest of the team?
  • What’s next in terms of my own learning (topic, method of learning, etc.)

I’m hoping your answers pleased you. If you struggled to answer some of these questions or
don’t like the answers, then maybe it’s time to examine your agency’s commitment to lifelong
learning. How are you communicating to your team that you expect them to keep growing and
learning? How are you supporting that effort, not just financially, but also in terms of setting the
example, teaching what you know/learn, celebrating people’s growth, etc.

One of the aspects of our business that I love the most is that we get to keep learning. We
need to know so much about our clients’ industries, our own world of marketing, cultural shifts,
technology revolutions, and most interesting of all — people and how they think, behave,
respond, and feel. But it’s so easy to get sucked into the grind of the day that we forget to lift up
our heads and look around and decide what we should learn next. Consider this your friendly
reminder to look out over the horizon a bit more.

 

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