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The [DGM] Breakfast Club

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

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No, this was not us this morning, but I did spend an entire Saturday with 14 future digital marketers at General Assembly.

The genesis of this offering was the 10-week Digital Marketing class that I led from Jan – Mar of this year. In the final session before Demo Night, we did a complete review of the entire course in a little less than three hours. That went so well that we decided to create a one-day “DGM bootcamp”, and that’s what we delivered today.

First, thanks to everyone who attended and participated. It was a great group, with lots of unique marketing challenges, opportunities, and questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed leading this unique offering.

We broke down the 10-week DGM class into 6 parts, walking through the nuts and bolts of each section, as listed below.

  1. Brand creation – starts with your core values; brand is everything you do; we used Atlanta Tech Village as an example of intentional branding & culture, and showed the Simon Sinek TED Talk on “Start with Why”.
  2. Measuring & metrics – measure everything, focus on 2-3 KPIs, analytics tools; we introduced the Google URL Builder as a very simple way to track each click in each campaign to have understanding vs. having only knowledge.
  3. The marketing funnel – reach –> CTR –> landing page –> conversion –> revenue –> loyalty loop; we watched the short Dave McClure (500Startups) video on “AARRR!“
  4. Owned content marketing – everything we produce is content; social marketing is content; we looked at Salesloft’s success in content marketing to build their company from nothing to $6M+ ARR in 2 years.
  5. Paid content marketing – Adwords and ads on social media channels are inexpensive, highly targeted, and powerful; we investigated how simple it is to advertise on Google Adwords, Twitter, and Facebook to conduct fast, cheap experiments to determine where your audience is and the best use of your digital marketing ad dollar.
  6. Marketing calendar – nothing hurts like a date and nothing helps like a plan; a plan implemented with a marketing & content calendar like the Insightpool freebie gives you freedom to win like Arby’s and Oreo and countless others.

GA served up Chipotle for lunch, and we had a couple of minutes left for Q&A discussion. I think this offering is a great way for new marketers to get a solid overview of the digital realm, for those considering a career in digital marketing to see what they’re getting into, and for managers and leaders to understand the basic ideas and functionality behind digital strategy.

I look forward to leading this class again on Saturday June 20.

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