Introduction
Over the past 12 months, PPC has changed a lot at Aira. Today, I’m going to share exactly how and what the future looks like for our paid media clients.
We’ve been working really closely with our Google Premier Partner Dublin team (shout out to Finn), to make sure we’re delivering the best possible service to our clients, and as such, we get access to loads of cool stuff such as:
- Early access to BETAs which have helped our clients’ accounts and businesses to grow ahead of their competitors;
- Exclusive training to make sure our team is up to speed with the latest changes and features ahead of time, and much more.
As a result, our paid media team has grown very rapidly!
My experience over the past 12 months has shown me that having Google as a strategic partner is invaluable for both our clients and our agency.
This was never truer than the day we got an invitation, telling us that we had been invited to a special initiative called the Elevator Programme.
We had been handpicked as one of the highest potential Google Premier Partner agencies in Europe, with an ambitious vision. Go team.
What is the Google Elevator Programme?
The Elevator Programme is a full six months of training, led by renowned business consultant Robert Craven, who has helped more than 1,000 companies to revolutionise the way they work.
The first session kicked off at Google HQ in Amsterdam, where top tier agencies from the UK, Ireland, and Europe came together to learn, grow and network. ✈️
The training itself covers at all areas of being a digital agency, from people and culture, through to finance, operations, sales, and marketing.
The aim is to help agencies continue to grow sustainably, whilst still delivering the highest levels of performance for their clients.
Google call it ‘a highly effective Mini-MBA’ with a focus on helping you to actually operationalise the learnings in a sustainable and effective way.
What does it mean for Aira?
I’ll be honest, when I saw ‘Mini-MBA’ and who the mentors were, I panicked and emailed our co-founder Matt and said…’I think you should go instead’.
Feeling somewhat out of my depth, I wanted to pass on the opportunity and let someone more boss-like (and used to wearing a shirt) take my place.
Both Paddy and Matt have always maintained that they want to ‘create the CMOs of the future’ - it’s not just a nice tagline for the website, they actually mean it. With this in mind and despite my best efforts, Matt persuaded me to go anyway.
I’m glad he did because the learning so far has been invaluable. Some key takeaways so far have been:
- How to create a vision and strategy to continue to grow paid media services at Aira;
- Identifying the opportunities we are going to be able to offer the team as a result;
- How we are going to continue to innovate for our clients;
- The types of challenges we are likely to encounter along the way.
In short, the programme is helping me to grow paid media as a channel for the agency whilst also learning to be a better mentor and line manager, which ultimately feeds into delivering the best possible service for our clients.
How is it helping our clients?
Through creating a strategy, we were able to highlight a number of actions which we are now looking to implement to improve our service offering:
- Embracing automation and using more tools to help with data analysis and campaign optimisation;
- Branching out into landing page creation to help improve results post-click;
- Defining our process for all areas of PPC from ad copy creation to keyword structure, to ensure we are delivering consistent results;
- Continuing to find external training for the team in supporting areas such as Tag Manager and analytics.
Summary
We’re around about the halfway point at the time of writing this post and I’ve already been able to use insights taken from the programme to lead to actions within Aira. We’re continuing to improve our service offering for our clients and to grow our team alongside our client’s businesses.
Thanks Google!
