Find out how our PPC team worked together to keep up with Google Premier certifications — and surprised the rest of the office with a Google Bike!
At Adept, we’re dedicated to being a Google Premier Partner for a number of reasons.
Beyond benefits like having badges on our website or access to case studies, we can connect with Google representatives on behalf of our clients and receive exclusive access to beta tests.
And...if you’re lucky, being a Google Premier Partner can get you a really cool office bike!
Developing Team Certification Sessions
Part of remaining a premier partner is keeping your team’s certifications up to date. When I joined Adept Marketing, I lost all my certifications since they were under my old agency’s badge.
While working to receive the certifications, Sara (my boss, and Adept’s EVP of Digital Strategy) and I realized that some of our team members’ certifications had expired as well. We decided to get together on a biweekly basis and begin knocking out these tests together, as a team.
Certifications like these can feel mundane—especially if you’ve been working hands on with these tools for years. We hoped by meeting together and taking the tests we’d accelerate our timelines and make it feel less like a chore.
What we didn’t expect were the group sessions to evoke stimulating questions and engaging conversations, which is exactly what they did.
What We Learned from Team Certification Sessions
It turns out that despite our work within these platforms every single day, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees.
For instance, not all our clients run on video, and video offerings have accelerated rapidly over the past few years. Without these certifications, it would be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, and miss out on things that don’t directly apply to our clients right now.
It’s also far too easy to silo knowledge within an agency. Have an audience question? Ask Megan–she’s worked extensively on those. Analytics issues popping up? Talk to Sara–she’s fixed more problems than you’ve seen. But you may not realize other team members could have valuable insight as well.
In our certification sessions, a simple Google question would turn into a larger strategy discussion, offering us perspective from points of view we may not have otherwise heard. We even solved a few real-time client problems along the way!
So...What Does This Have to Do With a Bike?
This year, Google started tracking our certification growth and assigning points for completing them. With 6 team members getting certified across 6 tests, we started racking up points.
We looked into what we could redeem these for...we could get hoodies for our PPC team. We could get stickers, fidget spinners, or water bottles for the team. But, we eyed a larger prize—the infamous Google Bike.
And, we were able to keep it a secret until its arrival, leading to a rather exciting first spin around the office!
One of Adept’s core values is comedy, and we thought there would be few things as funny as rolling out our new bike after a company-wide meeting and letting everyone take a spin.
Maintaining our Partner Status is serious. It benefits not only our growth, but our clients’ growth as well. In the spirit of Adept, we were able to turn this ‘task’ into a fun team building experience, and a sweet, sweet way to go on coffee runs.
Oh...and we got the fidget spinners too.😉