Archive for the ‘Search training’ Category

How do you learn search marketing?

Search marketing and training. Some people would question whether they truly work together. But I believe that improving skills leads directly to increased productivity and a satisfied workforce. Having worked across many large agencies, I have observed how notions like search marketing and client management are different everywhere.

When I say that I work in search marketing, most people feel that my world is strange and incomprehensible – spent in front of a computer, looking into excel sheets and advertising messaging. In fact, search marketing is extremely interesting and can transform you and your business. In short, it can transform your life! In today’s world where the fastest medium of advertising is the internet, learning to run efficient search campaigns will make the difference and help your brand reach as many people as possible.

That brings us to the most important question; how do you learn search marketing? Most people who work with search campaigns – whether paid or natural search – would agree with me when I say that experience is the best teacher. There is no easy way to learn search marketing except for getting stuck into daily campaign management including bid management, copy writing and reporting. Here at Reform, we have hands-on experience running global search campaigns which is why training with us gives you that much needed insight into the dark side of the search world!

Training will take you from a point of non-belief and scepticism to a place where you will view a search marketing campaign differently. Search campaigns are actually fascinating to create, easy to launch and can be managed very efficiently. That’s how I look at search marketing everyday and this is what we hope to help you achieve with our training programmes. Whatever your search marketing need, come and train with Reform. It is training that will transform you!

Blog post by Sumitra Balakrishnan, Training Services Director at Reform

Searching for the answer: The IPA Search Certificate exam

This week I have been among the first set of delegates to sit the exam for the new IPA Search Certificate. After a 20 hour learning programme over the last 3 months, including e-lessons, walkthroughs, video snippets from industry experts, and downloadable key reading learning materials, came this two hour online exam of multiple choice questions and free writing long form answers. Reform wrote the content for the learning and the exam questions – before I started working here, sadly… any tips about things to focus on for the exam were unforthcoming despite my best efforts – so I have to admit to a certain pressure to do well!

Billed as an opportunity to ‘find everything you need to know about search in one place’, the twenty coursework modules covered themes from making the case for search with clients, to taking a brief and campaign planning, PPC and SEO basics, forecasting, technology and measuring success. To its credit the Search Certificate takes a wide perspective, focusing beyond Google, and could be considered to be complementary to the search engines’ own accreditation schemes. While the GAP exam, for example, is designed solely for practitioners and focuses on their particular systems and processes, the elements of the IPA Search Certificate that discuss streamlining workflow, managing time and clients, and integrating search with other channels, all make it stand out as full training programme.

The long form essay style section of the exam – which accounts for 60% of the overall mark – also means that any inclination towards, ahem, let’s call it a ‘collaborative’ approach to sitting the exam, is thwarted.

This is a the first independent qualification for search in the UK, and is designed to instil a high level of knowledge and service provision across the industry, encouraging those new to search to understand the challenges and opportunities posed by the channel from early on in their careers. From my own perspective, the learning content is of a high quality (though you could argue that I have to say that given Reform’s involvement…), and put together in a slick and compelling form.

Let’s hope that when the results come out in a few weeks’ time my score reflects that!

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Search Consultant at Reform