Customer Stories: Scaling a marketing agency with self-directed learning

Peak Ace is an international digital marketing agency headquartered in Berlin, Germany. It specializes in digital strategy and AI solutions, paid advertising, organic search, content marketing, conversion rate optimization, and digital analytics.

The agency has over 210 employees servicing more than 200 clients across 30 industries. Its clients include Airbnb, TUI, Sage, AutoScout24, Luxair, and more.

Peak Ace has native speakers in-house for more than 25 languages, allowing it to run client campaigns on a native-speaker level in many countries. The agency’s current focus is on further integrating its digital strategy and AI solutions services into its client services.

Today, we’re telling you how CXL was key in upskilling its marketing team.

The Peak Ace story

The company has been internationally recognized, winning over 44 awards in 2022 alone, including “Integrated Digital Agency of the Year,” “Best Global Large Integrated Search Agency,” and “Innovative Agency of the Year.”

Steffen Bath is Head of the Marketing Technology, Digital Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimisation department and believes that you must rely on someone’s internal motivation for them to learn something.

I joined the company six years ago as a Senior Conversion Analyst, and then I had the chance to build the department  from the ground up. It was a great challenge, and CXL helped me to holistically educate the team, of course.

Steffen Bath

Steffen promotes a practical, self-motivated learning environment for the team, ensuring they can adapt to ever-evolving tools and maintain their competencies in different areas.

The communication and support we have are much more efficient if the team is familiar with the world of their colleagues in the organic and paid marketing departments. It strongly helps improve client happiness and client retention.

Ultimately, it makes working with our other teams much more efficient if my team knows more about PPC, SEO, etc.

Steffen Bath

The challenge

As a rapidly growing organization, the challenge was twofold. Firstly, the company had to ensure cross-departmental knowledge for effective collaboration internally and with clients. 

To address our clients’ challenges holistically, we need to work closely with colleagues from other departments, so cross-departmental knowledge is vital.

Steffen Bath

Secondly, it was crucial to provide effective upskilling for new hires, predominantly at the trainee, junior, and intermediate manager levels, especially given the competitiveness of hiring seniors or leaders in the market.

Developing senior managers and expert leads ourselves with a structured and efficient process makes us more independent of the respective supply situation on the labor market.

Steffen Bath

The solution

The solution implemented was an open-ended approach to learning, leveraging platforms like Measure School, Udemy, DataCamp, and CXL. 

The team also has in-house academies for areas like content marketing. Other options included different education methods, such as reading blogs.

The Peak Ace team also holds internal meetings several days a week to exchange hands-on knowledge.

Instead of enforcing mandatory courses, Steffen allowed his team members to select their preferred learning method and supported them by sharing his own personal experiences with these platforms.

I give my team a personal onboarding for CXL because I’ve been using it since 2017. I share my experience of what I learned – for example, CXL has a copywriting course from Momoko Price, including the complete path from research to wireframe, which was good – or I share how I have used the PXL conversion framework as inspiration to create my framework to prioritize A/B testing.

Steffen Bath

They realized that CXL’s content covered the wide range of topics necessary for their employees to grow into well-rounded marketers with expertise in various marketing facets. 

I want to use CXL because it has everything I need and is constantly being updated, and I don’t need to put a lot of effort internally into building a dedicated learning academy for two areas (CRO, web analytics) that are constantly evolving.

Steffen Bath

The results

CXL’s educational platform enabled the team to develop a broad understanding of various marketing domains, supporting collaboration with colleagues from other departments, improving client communication, and maintaining strong client retention.

My colleagues are quickly becoming self-reliant and self-dependent, so they mostly work independently, which is quite important.

Steffen Bath

I can’t put a mathematically measured number on a success metric, but we have a very solid client retention rate. Clients often stay with us for many years.

One of the largest hotel chains in Europe has been with us for 14 years because of our acquired skills, effective communication, and independent team members.

Steffen Bath

The main benefit of CXL is that it has increased the overall competency of the agency’s marketing technology, digital analytics, and CRO department by upskilling the newly hired staff quickly.