MTM Ep#21: Anthony Snively Spills the Beans on Effective Digital Marketing Hiring and Training

– [Anthony] So you kind of want to knock down those walls in between departments and, you know, instead of looking at it as, you know, just paid search, just paid social, SEO, look at it holistically as digital marketing and different kind of pieces of the puzzle would do that sort of stuff.

– Hi, you’re listening to More than Marketing. I’m your host, Arsham Mirshah, and I’m joined today by Anthony Snively, hi.

– Hello, guys.

– And we’re talking about attracting, retaining, and training your marketing teams. Now, this is More Than Marketing, so, yeah, we talk about marketing trends and, you know, platform, things like that but, I think in marketing, Anthony, right, you have different skill sets and specialties. And even if you have T-Shaped Marketer, to get a campaign out, you need all these different skillsets. So, you’re gonna work with a team and if you’re a CMO, or a VP, or director, or a manager, or whomever, or just a marketer, working with other people. But this episode we’re talking about, you know, building a team, right? And Anthony, he came to us, he came and did our academy, so he learned a lot of the, you know, platform, you know, marketing, basics, if you wanna call it, and platform, right?

– Mm-hmm, yep.

– And then went on. Why don’t you tell it, what, tell me your experience.

– Yeah

– Yeah, so, I joined up with WebMechanix, I guess, like my senior year of college. So, came through when I really came on, I really wanted to do a lot of like paid social advertising when I came in, was really excited about that sort of stuff. Lo and behold, started messing around with paid social, kind of figured out that wasn’t what I necessarily wanted to do. You know, but what the academy gave me was having that solid understanding, I’d say, like of the 101 kind of–

– Foundation, baseline.

– Yeah, yeah, the foundation of digital marketing and everything that encompasses that. So, when it comes to recruiting, training, all of that, it makes it simpler to have somebody who actually understands, kind of the science behind it and can tell you what pay-per-click advertising actually means. What encompasses search engine optimization, whereas, you know, if you don’t have that foundation it can be a little tricky to understand it all.

– Yeah, so you’ve done everything from recruiting, to project management, operations, and I think the biggest part of your job here is you manage our training. And training programs. We have several different training programs here and you’re kind of at the center of administering those. And getting feedback on them, and you know, and all that. So, let’s talk to the CMOs, let’s tell them, like, hey, how do you, recruit and train? Because, you know, truth be told, if you’re a, even if you’re an experienced digital marketer and you’re switching jobs, there’s still some training, some on the job training you need for that new job, right? Maybe they use a different project management tool, maybe they have a different, you know, process for going between departments. I don’t know, right. And so you still need some training. So I think every company needs a training program of sorts.

– Yeah.

– You would agree?

– Yeah, yeah, I would most certainly agree and I think there’s a lot of different ways you can structure that and we’re always trying to figure out the best ways to do that. But I’d say for most companies, if you’re leading a certain marketing team you should look at it not as a one size fits all tool but you should definitely look at it as every single person has different strengths and they’re coming in with a lot of different skillsets as well. So the college student who’s coming in with you, maybe they’ve had an internship, maybe they’ve just worked on a friend’s WordPress site, they’re gonna have very different training from somebody who comes in with four years of paid search experience. So you wanna take those sorts of skills and identify ways you can improve them. So the best way to go about that is having that college student or even the newly graduated college senior, you treat it again, as digital marketing 101, where it’s okay you guys offer PPC, SEO, analytics and email as well if we wanna include that. And you teach them the fundamentals of that, what are the various PPC networks? What makes up SEO? What are some junior level tasks that you would be given as a junior, yep. That could be stuff like key word research, we use AWAPS a lot as well, that’s kind of junior level tasks that’ll give them that foundation to have. And then with your mid level people what we see is a lot of the times in our industry I feel like people that are in the mid level get pigeonholed more or less which is why we are really passionate about having T-Shaped Marketers but some of the folks that we have, they’re just focused in paid search and if you’re a CMO listening to this, I’d recommend not taking that approach. Obviously there are variabilities, maybe that works for you. But when you just understand one piece of the puzzle you can be missing out on all the awesome parts of digital marketing as well. So if you have a training program, there’s people who only have one certain skillset, what we do is we make a customizable training plan for them and essentially identify the weak holes that they have. So we introduce to them, using some of the same intern materials that we use internally for those new hires. So if they don’t have any SEO experience, we showcase a lot of our SEO resources that we have. So just plunging those sorts of gaps and following up with managers and making sure that they’re getting deliverables that are gonna to reinforce that.

– I think the idea is that, hey look, when I only know one channel or one discipline then I am, it’s like only being on one continent. Whereas there’s the rest of the word, right, and that’s why you see people who travel, they’re cultured and they have different perspectives and they’re maybe more open minded or whatever and so this idea of the T-Shaped Marketer and trying to create that T-Shaped Marketer is saying, it’s both I think like a skills based, we’re trying to make so that they’re more efficient, ’cause they have these skills and they can translate the skills from one channel or discipline to the other. But it’s also like empathic, it’s empathetic, because if I’m a paid media manager and I know nothing about the creative process, then it’s really not fair to me to start poking and prodding at the copywriter or at the designer or whatever to say, “I need a landing page tomorrow,” well hold on–

– It takes time

– It takes time, you haven’t told me anything about this landing page. So by introducing them to the different disciplines and what the baseline, the foundation is for those disciplines, they develop a sense of empathy for that other specialty or person doing that.

– Yeah, yeah, and I mean it even comes to as well not getting to test out different things as well, like again, when I came in I really wasn’t interested in paid social and lo and behold it turns out since I was able to try that, that’s not necessarily where I wanna be spending my efforts at. So if you don’t give your folks a chance to try out new things they could just be pigeonholed in one thing and just not really satisfied with their growth potential just with that one channel.

– Yeah, and you never know who’s gonna be awesome at another channel, you don’t know. I don’t it’s required necessarily to force it onto people but I do think it’s wise to offer it, it adds some variety, some spice of life to the job.

– Yeah for sure.

– As well as, gives them that, more of that world view so to speak.

– Yeah, yeah, for sure. So it’s just letting them do what they feel comfortable doing. You know there have been times even where I’ve heard people who were only focused on paid search but they aren’t even allowed to go into the Google Analytics for one of their clients or something like that, and to us it just seems so foreign to us because everything is so much more integrated here. So you kind of want to knock down those walls in between departments. Instead of looking at it as just paid search, just paid social, SEO, look at holistically as digital marketing and different pieces of the puzzle to do that sort of stuff.

– It’s astonishing to me that you could be a paid search manager and not know the ins and outs of Google Analytics, that just makes no sense to me to whatsoever. ‘Cause it’s like how are you then finding, like here’s a really cool little trick, go to referring sites and look at different metrics, maybe conversion rate, maybe balance rate, maybe time on site, and do a weighted measurement in analytics, I’m getting way too nerdy right now. And that’s how you can find, when I found referring sites that drive traffic that converts, doesn’t drive a lot of traffic, but then you go to that site and you look at their advertising or media kit, and you’re like, “I can buy your email newsletter subscription “for pennies on the dollar,” as it compares to a CPM on Google or something. Anyway I digress, let’s come back, let’s come back and let’s back track. I’ve talked about training, that’s when they’re already here, let’s about recruiting, let’s talk about recruiting, where do we find digital marketers? They don’t train this stuff in school, although some of them are starting to say this, so what do you, talk to me about recruiting a little bit.

– Yeah so it depends as well, it’s not a like a one problem solves all problems kind of thing, or one solution solves all problems type of thing. When it comes to more junior level people, again what we’ve found really successful is investing in our internship, kind of academy is what we call it. So that’s a certainly a viable option but in order to attract people, I think what it really comes down to is you asking yourself, as a CML or a VP or whatever position you’re in, what makes your company unique? What would the world be missing out on if your company wasn’t around anymore? And when you dial in on those sorts of questions, you can better position yourself. ‘Cause recruiting is kind of like marketing and sales when it really comes down to it.

– Yeah it sure is.

– The conversion is when a person submits an application but you have work those sorts of candidates down the funnel.

– That’s so good, it’s so true, it’s so true, that is the conversion, literally in Google Analytics, what is your goal completion? It’s submitting an application.

– Back slash apply is how we do it.

– I mean that was an URL.

– So you kinda gotta look at it the way is what’s the awareness of the company? What’s your Glassdoor reviews? How have people heard about WebMechanix in the past? So you never really know how people are gonna come, you know there’s a few different ways to actually attract them. One of them is just having really personal job postings is something that’s very helpful.

– Personable you say?

– Yeah, it sounds like it was written by a human not just a robot or something like that. You know there is sometimes job descriptions that say, here are the requirements, here are the responsibilities and that’s it. You can get creative with it, obviously check with all senior level people but you can throw a little emoji in there.

– Yeah, throw emojis, check with legal, we’re not saying go and do that, but definitely yeah, throw an emoji in there. This is marketing, make recruiting fun. Maybe you’re a marketer at a I don’t know a more buttoned up or red tape type industry, maybe in financial, healthcare, whatever. Okay so now let’s have some, you can’t have too much fun there, so have fun on the recruiting.

– Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

– So make it human, make it personable. Talk about your differentiators. I would add, when you are were saying differentiators, I thought like core values, throw those in the job description, maybe, I don’t know, we don’t necessarily do that, it’s on our recruiting site, maybe not in the job description. Because that’s what, I mean, that’s how you’re gonna find people who aligned to your fabric.

– Yeah, yeah, and I mean that’s definitely something you wanna keep in mind even when you are hiring people as well.

– Yes, talk about that, so okay, maybe this person doesn’t have that much experience or maybe they have some experience, how else are you judging them? Or not judging, I hate that word, evaluating.

– Yeah evaluating is a good way to put it. A good way to do it is making sure, you know there are a lot of times during the interview process where you’re kind of gauging a lot of different parts that make up of person. You can have a super duper skilled person, but if they’re not a great culture fit, their core values, and their character necessarily isn’t aligned to the work that we’re doing, they’re probably not gonna be a good fit no matter how skilled they are. When those sorts of different, I guess categories to evaluate candidates is kind of like, what’s their culture fit, what’s their character, core values type of fit, and then what’s their skill fit? They’re kind of fluid, it’s not like we have check marks where it’s like, well they got a eight out of 10 on culture and then that. But we’re willing to look past certain skills if we think they’re gonna be a really hard worker and they’re gonna pick up fast. Of course if they have everything that’s great, most of the time with stuff, you can’t expect somebody to have 20 years of Facebook Ads experience, it’s not possible, Facebook wasn’t around 20 years ago. Same thing with anything in Google Ads, stuff is changing so fast, that it makes it very very challenging to find people with super senior experience. So you need to be realistic with what you can get.

– Yeah and I think looking for someone who I think, you nailed it, we can look past the skills if you’re a hard worker, if you have some evidence of hustle or evidence of learning because this industry changes faster than underwear, that’s a common saying I think, or maybe it’s common ’cause I say it a lot. Hopefully your underwear’s changing often because this industry definitely is changing often. So you need to be able to learn and be passionate about it, enjoy it, find someone who’s got some passion. Now let’s talk about the interview process. So okay, I’ve found some candidates and now I’m bringing them in, what are we doing in the interview process?

– Yeah so as much as interviews tend to be you trying to understand more about a candidate, it’s also the candidate trying to understand the company better. So it’s not this thing where you can play tough and not show hospitality to a candidate. They’re here and they deserve to be treated well so typically what I would say you should recommend is just start with showing them around the space. So they get a feel for the office and the mentality and the culture just from walking around. Showing them the different parts of the office and then of course offering them something to drink as well, they’re definitely super nervous because it’s an interview so you want to make sure that they feel comfortable and ready.

– Are you from the south by any chance because you’re very hospitable.

– No, no, just I guess my parents–

– They’re good people?

– Yeah, yeah, yeah.

– Let’s thank them, we’ll thank them.

– Thanks mom and dad.

– Was that a very stereotype that I just threw out there, the south right?

– I mean I think it’s a good stereotype to have.

– It’s a good stereotype.

– Well if it’s hospitality.

– Well, I’m not judging I’m just saying hospitality, south, that’s good stuff.

– But you know then once you get them water, tea, coffee, a snack or something like that, they get comfortable. So one of the things, I’ve heard a lot of different ways that people do interviews, sometimes people do interviews and it’s like eight people on a panel just badgering a person with questions over and over again. It’s not an accurate portrayal of how that person actually is, you’re putting them under immense pressure and in from of eight different people.

– Yeah, it’s not their job right?

– Yeah, exactly, exactly.

– They’re not a congress person.

– Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

– Maybe that’s good interview policy for congress people right?

– But not for our marketers. So what you wanna do then is section out your interviews in different timelines more or less.

– You know you mentioned actually going back, I’m sorry to cut you off

– No you’re good.

– You mentioned something good, so we look at character, you get culture and then look at skills.

– Yep. So you could theoretically have people, let’s say you like three people come in and interview, one’s interviewing for the culture, one’s interviewing for the character, one’s interviewing for the skills and you align the people who know the skills the best to do the skills interview, the people who know the culture the best do that. You often have me come in and do the culture piece because I’m a co-founder and I want to make sure our core values and culture are tight.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Now I get it

– Yeah, exactly.

– Now I see what you’re doing.

– Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it.

– There’s method to your madness.

– Yep, you take exactly what’s important to you as an org when you’re hiring people and making sure that the people who are coming in to interview, they have a role in mind. ‘Cause it just helps everybody be more efficient as well, that the skills people, they already know that the culture and character bits are taken care of already. The culture people don’t have to worry about the skills

– Yes.

– Most of the time, sometimes the culture people won’t be necessarily the best person to probe for skills anyways, so they shouldn’t be asking those sorts of questions. So it just keeps the interview process more efficient and it also is less intimidating to candidates as well when they don’t have to sit in front of a panel, in front of eight different people. Instead we want to have maybe two people in at a time from our company, and then switch out as different sections of the interview wrap up. And you always wanna be respectful of people’s time as well, because typically, unless somebody is in the middle of jobs or something like that, most of the time people who are coming in to interview are normally taking some PTO or something like that off of their current role. You wanna be respectful of them and make sure that they’re actually getting really good usage of their current time with you and not over, I guess over staying where their current workplace is gonna get, I don’t know suspicious or be like–

– Or whatever, maybe they have something else to do, ’cause interviews can go long, you ask some questions, open ended, you know, whatever.

– Yeah, yeah, and you always wanna leave room as well for them to ask questions ’cause again–

– I think that’s really important, you started touching on that at the beginning of this question and I think I really was hoping you’d come back and now you are. But I’m just gonna highlight it, nothing says passion, nothing says, I mean okay some stuff, but nothing says passion, nothing says desire more than someone who comes prepared with questions for you. They’ve read your Glassdoor, they have seen your website, they have taken the phone interview or whatever, the steps before to cultivate some questions that are important to them. Nothing makes me more upset in an interview than when I ask you do you have any questions for us? And the answer is no.

– Yeah.

– You have the owner of the company sitting across from you, ask me a question, a hard one please, I’m begging you to do that. It just says that you’re not ready or you don’t wanna be here in particular and you’re just looking for a job, you don’t care what it is. You know for us, that’s not who I’m looking to hire personally, maybe you as a CMO will have a position to fill and that’s just checking a box, I don’t know, but anyway. But deciding what’s important to you upfront and being realistic about it.

– But I would even say, adding onto it, if you are a CMO, what you wanna do is, I think there are different varieties or even qualities of questions as well. Sometimes it’ll be some really standard questions, like what’s a day in the life look like and that’s well and good but really gets me excited is when people ask the trickier questions.

– What does your future organization at this look like?

– Yeah, or if there was one word to describe working here what would it be and why? Or you know, what’s been a challenge for you guys in 2019? Or something like that where they’re getting to the meat and potatoes more or less of what the company is, who they serve and that sort of thing.

– No I completely agree, I’m glad we’re on the same page. I once asked that question, do you have any questions for us? And they’re like, “Actually I have one question, “what does lunch look like?”

– Yeah, yeah.

– What? At first I was thrown off, I was like, why do you care about lunch? But it turned out upon further, that they are actually looking for more of an understanding of the culture. Do people eat together or do they eat at their desks? And so I kinda had to probe that but that question threw me off. So you’re already asking about lunch and you’re not even hired yet? It’s more they’re trying to understand the culture. So that was kind of interesting. Let me take a quick commercial break and then we’ll come right back and talk about now we’ve interviewed, we know their culture, their character, their skills, now we’ve hired them, I just wanna quickly touch on what do we do next? What’s the first thing we do? First a quick commercial break, we’ll be right back.

– Sounds good. All right we’re back so we’ve interviewed, we have determined that they’re the right fit and now we’ve made a hire. And they start on Monday, so what are we doing, what’s the onboarding?

– Yes, so first and foremost it starts–

– Have a plan, right?

– Having a plan is integral to this whole sort of thing. Onboarding is such a massive part of the recruiting process, that I think sometimes it gets overlooked, because it’s like, well we’ve got him in the door, that’s enough for us. But it should instead be looked at kind of as, we’ve got him in the door, now let’s make sure that they’re set up for success.

– Success, yes.

– So what we kind of wanna focus on is every single company that you work at has a different system, they have different processes, they have different kind of everything. And sometimes a candidate’s gonna come in they know every single thing, sometimes they’re not. So you wanna make sure that you take into consideration that when you’re onboarding them. But what really helps us is just having, we use project management software called Asana, Asana is super helpful you can have this nice checklist basically that runs through everything that a person could know.

– Or needs to know.

– Yeah, or needs to know even. So making sure that they understand things related to how we use Google Calendar or Gmail, or our messaging app, Slack, understanding how they knew that. So when they come in on day one, recommend letting them start a bit later as well, because it just helps them get acclimated, establishes that this is gonna be a more relaxed day, because you don’t wanna throw your new hire into the fire on the first day like, “Hey buddy, thanks for joining, we need you to, you know, “redesign a completely huge website for us real quick.” So that’s not really great to do. So what you wanna do is always set somebody with them on day one, you don’t wanna just take them to their desk and be like, “Here you go,” that’s it. You wanna make sure that their immediate manager knows they’re coming and is kind of available at their desks to just wave, say hello, good to see you again, because it’s assuming that they’ve been involved in the interview process as well. So after that it’s just a matter of getting them set up on their machine, understanding their computer preference if you can, because if they work better on a Mac or a PC, or a Chromebook, that’s gonna help them ultimately be more efficient for you guys as an org. So what you wanna do then is just start running them through the core systems that you guys work with and how all of the sorts of pieces of the puzzle–

– And the nuances, like you said we use Slack, I’m sure many organizations out there use Slack, but the channels–

– Yeah and what they mean.

– The way you use Slack is different. Okay, we have Asana, maybe they’ve used Asana in the past but the way that we use Asana is different.

– Might be different.

– So those intricacies are what you wanna cover and make sure that they’re comfortable with and leaving room for them to ask questions.

– Yeah.

– I think number one in this is having an onboarding plan and that onboarding plan could be templated in a lot of ways, I know ours is for sure that we have. And we’re constantly making tweaks to the template. Hey you know what, we need everyone to install our CRM, this was a recent thing right?

– Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

– We need everyone to install our CRM plug in and it wasn’t happening, okay no problem, no one’s upset, add it to the onboarding and make sure everyone, do it once for everyone, add it to onboarding so everyone in the future will have it. And so now you have that template in onboarding and you can add things to it and modify things to it as your needs in an organization changes. But what it does is, what you said and said very well, is it sets people up for success, it doesn’t throw them to the fire, and force them to figure it out along the way, it just gives them that foundation, that baseline, you know. So I know you do this pretty well and systematically in a way. You do it by day, you do like day one I think is system setup, right?

– Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then what you want to focus on then for the second day, is more so gonna be focusing, we have specific tasks for you to complete, we’re not just gonna show you do how to do something, typically we’ll show you how to do something and then ask you to actually do it. Because that’s kind of the best way to reinforce things. So a lot of your second day, we’ll focus on actually those sorts of onboarding tasks. So whether that be setting up a mentorship meeting with your new manager, so you understand Google Calendar better. Sending an email to your manager asking if there’re any particular email groups that you should be a part of. So you’re gonna spend a good chunk of your second day.

– I don’t even know you did that, that’s good, that’s very good.

– So your second day is gonna be a lot of taking care of the tasks that you need to.

– That’s where that email came from.

– Yep, yep, yep.

– You’re a sneaking man, that’s good stuff, that’s smart, I like that.

– So then kind of after that is where you’re feeling more acclimated with everything, so that’s when you can kind of one, start to maybe delve in, dip your toe in some real work starting out, but of course, no super rush on that.

– This what, day three?

– Yeah more or less. But as well on day three, you’re gonna start doing some meet and greets as well with select people.

– Scheduled.

– Yeah, scheduled meet and greets that are just a nice time to sit down, meet somebody else from a different team, because when I joined WebMechanix, I think we were about 30-ish people, and then it was must easier to just meet and greet with more folks. It’s still pretty simple and straight forward to do that, but setting out dedicated time for people across teams to meet with one another, just makes each other feel more comfortable with each other, which allows them to do better work basically. You know and they usually get a chance as well during their first day just to, I meant to say this earlier, just get lunch with the new person as well. It’s a super great way to introduce them to all sorts different people across teams. ‘Cause you just need to say free food is in the kitchen. Come say hi to the new person.

– And everyone rolls to the kitchen.

– Everybody rolls in and then you get to meet them.

– And you get to meet them. It’s good way to make them fell comfortable unless they’re super introverted and then you ask them, “Hey, we’d like to do this, “would you like to?” Some people say no and that’s fine, that’s okay.

– And that’s okay.

– That’s back to hospitality, it’s not about doing the same thing every single time, it’s about making them feel comfortable, that’s the end goal, right?

– Yeah for sure.

– So yeah, the meet and greets are really good because then you get people knowing one another and you never know, sometimes they share common interests or common friends or something like that. And now this relationship is built and it can go then go on and work–

– Really well together.

– Yeah exactly. It’s something you would never have known it you didn’t make the connection.

– Yeah, yeah, and you know, lastly, something else that we kinda have been doing now new, is you know we worked with a media manager more or less to kind of plan out every single hour of that new hire’s first week. Setting up his meet and greets, setting up their onboarding, but then also just, they’re going to be meeting with direct members of their team that they’re going to be working very closely with. And since you’re gonna be working so closely with them it helps if you know their name for starters but also kind of just understand them as a person. And then once all those meet and greets happen we just would recommend as well doing some sort of customized training plan, again, going back to making sure that you know people are well versed in a variety of things or at least understand that-

– They’re always learning.

– Yeah and always learning and at least understand that SEO stands for search engine optimization. You know, we want to sure that they have a customized training plan so if they lack one skill we can train them up on something else right away with the training materials that we have. And then basically after that they can sign up for different certifications as well that we recommend.

– You know what would be really cool?

– What?

– We used to have, long ago we had this, a glossary of terms, ’cause we use a lot of acronyms

– Yeah we do have a lot of acronyms.

– And I’m sure we share some with you out there but I’d imagine that you have your own inside your own company or your own industry, definitely both of those, maybe inside your own team, right, like a TPS report, I don’t even know what that stands for but people from office, the office do. So yeah, and acronyms, that’s something that we should do

– Yeah that is something we should do.

– I can dust it off, it’s deep in our Drive, but I can dust it off.

– We have a lot of acronyms

– Oh, the acronyms man. And you know Anthony, it’s funny you mentioned names and meet and greets, I was interviewing someone recently and I asked them, “What do you think the most challenging part of your, “say you get the job, “what’s the most challenging part going to be for you?” And they thought about it, thought about it, and they said, “Knowing everyone’s name, “learning everyone’s name within the first two weeks.” And I was like, “What?”

– Yeah, yeah, yeah.

– Wow, I didn’t see that coming, this was totally, but what’s interesting about it is that was that person’s concern, that’s what they were concerned about,

– Yeah for sure.

– Not, whatever, the work load or understanding the industry, or whatever, so I thought it was kind of interesting.

– Yeah that’s cool.

– That’s crazy what’s on people’s mind and you just don’t know until you ask.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Great man, great, onboarding, I think first off if I could put together having a plan, knowing that there’s certain things that has to happen like setting them in the systems and showing the intricacies of that.

– And being available and being patient as well, just really stopping and being like, look, if you have questions, feel free to Slack me, I’m always happy to help you out basically with anything and that still happens with some of our newer folks who have been here for three months now or something like that, where they have a question about moving files around in Drive or they need to added to some sort of time tracking project.

– I saw you doing that, I saw you doing that yesterday.

– Yeah, yeah.

– With someone who’s been here a couple of weeks and you were like, hey, just showing them how to do time tracking. Even though you did it in the onboarding, they needed a refresher or something specific for a certain platform or whatever.

– Yeah, exactly.

– That’s awesome man. You’re a good person Anthony, I hope you know that.

– Well thank you man. I think you’re a good person too, Arsham.

– How about them apples? All right cool so we have a little time, let’s talk about, just real quick touch on what we do to scale, right, so the mark of an organization is growing or it has a lot of turnover maybe, for either one of those cases, what can you do for continuity?

– Yeah, I’d say write things down or record videos even of it, we use a tool called Loom, which is fantastic for recording videos. But web developers for example, they take documentation, whenever they’re building any sort of website or web application, you should do the same thing for your organization as well. If something happens where one marketing manager is just doing one task, he or she is the only one who knows how to do it, there’s gonna be a cost of time basically when that person leaves and somebody else has to learn it

– A major hole, a major hole. So you need documentation.

– Yeah, so as soon as you start taking documentation and there’s a lot of stuff, a lot of guides that we have internally for anything from keyword research to basic account management, to just how to use different systems that we have here, so that kind of helps with scaling of making sure that those guides are simple enough that somebody can come in with little experience and follow along in the steps of a certain guide to complete a real entry level task and be able to complete it without having many questions. As well as using templates as well. A lot of time, at least in the marketing industry, a lot of the things that you do are repeatable.

– Yes.

– And you’re gonna keep on doing them, so instead of reinventing the wheel every single time, you may as well create templates that you can update as different systems change. When Google AdWords changes to Google Ads, and they role different features, you wanna keep that sort of different templates.

– Keep it up to date.

– Yep, exactly, so just writing stuff down and recording videos of demonstrating how to do certain things is gonna greatly help you scale up.

– Scale and that’s the word, scale, ’cause now I don’t have to sit with that person. I’ve recorded the video once and I can use it over and over again, I don’t have to sit with them and take my time, they can watch the video and learn it themselves.

– Or even, one of our creative directors, he was going out of the office for a little bit, he was like, “Hey man can you show me “how to get ready to prep “for being out of office?” And I was like, “Here’s a template for it, “just follow it along.”

– Literally we have a template for OOO prep, out of office prep and that’s because we’ve done it so many times that we just put it into a template.

– Yeah, and it eliminates the risk of missing something.

– Yes, well said, I love that you said that, because even myself, who’s done a particular thing a million times I’d say, I still use templates, and why? It’s because I wanna make sure I’m not missing something because that’s what happens when you think, when you think you’ve done this so many times that you’re not gonna miss something, that’s when you miss something.

– Yeah, for sure.

– So it just reminds you that, that was good. So dude, this was awesome, thank you so much for spending you are time with me and hopefully getting some good actionable insights and takeaways, practical tips for interviewing, for our training, for all onboarding, which all leads to that retention and then also for templatizing here for scale.

– Yeah for sure.

– So I really appreciate your time man.

– Yeah man thank you for having me.

– Yeah absolutely, hopefully this was helpful to you out there, please comment, let us know what was helpful, what you might wanna hear more about. If you want, Anthony will likely spend time with you and help you because he’s just passionate about this space, he’s passionate about people, and making sure people have great experiences in this marketing world. So yeah, so feel free to reach out, like, subscribe, comment, share this with your friends. Thank you Anthony.

– Pleasure man.

– One more clap, and we’ll see you next time on More Than Marketing.

– Alrighty.

– Cheers.

– See you guys.