By Russell Easther, ADMA Tutor.

A few years ago I was in a situation to buy my first apartment. It was, and still is, a neat 2 bedroom apartment in Southbank that I’ve called home now for the past 2 years. This was my first property purchase, and the task of learning the property market was not easy.

I spoke to a mortgage broker, but he was quite keen to get me to borrow my maximum lend. I spoke with real estate agents, who were helpful but didn’t advise me on property beyond their list. I spoke with friends who were quite helpful in exploring my options but they weren’t qualified or necessarily had the time to help me out. They were very keen to show me their moves in the big property world, and sell the benefits of what they’ve bought and the surrounding area, but it just didn’t suit me. Essentially, to make this purchase I needed information from an unbiased and professional source and I learned that this was hard to find in the real estate industry.

In my day to day consulting with clients and corporate training for ADMA, I still see many biased and loaded recommendations from marketers and digital agencies both large and small. These agencies are often in the ear of marketing managers, who may not be strategically across the digital channels, and are an easy sell for these businesses. This could be the real estate agent or the mortgage broker preying on the uneducated and first time home buyer. You can draw parallels between this buying situation and the digital marketing situation, (granted: the home purchase usually has more zero’s on the price) but it’s imperative that marketers get the bigger picture of digital, the strategic lay of the digital land, from an unbiased and professional source, such as ADMA. Otherwise, you are probably doing yourself, your brand and career a disservice by not up skilling the in one of the fastest growing channels of the past decade.

Over the past 4 years, I’ve taught hundreds of marketing managers the basics and advanced concepts in digital with no hidden agenda via ADMA’s certificate in digital marketing class and other short courses they offer. My participants graduate digitally empowered, to challenge the agency, have better and higher level strategic conversations with partners and internal department plus feel more confident and informed when they place their marketing dollars in digital channels.

So I’ll ask the question, where do you get your digital education from?

Posted by Russell Easther, The Interactive Group and ADMA Tutor.

Find out more about ADMA’s digital certification and short courses.