Blog Author Mellissah Smith - Page 52

When asked today what I think a Marketing Executive would need to have that they may not have needed a few years ago, my answer was simple. "A Marketing Executive must be a social media expert."

Employees are the heart and soul of any organization. I once named a recruitment company in Australia "Human Directions" because it is the human direction of a company that ultimately determines whether your company is going to be successful or not.

I learned a lot over the past 16 years of being in business about people. I have had employees lie, steal, manipulate, gossip and conduct unethical practises that are not within the company's core set of values let alone my own.

The only thing more powerful than a big idea is the team that can see it through. 

Many of us have big, huge, gigantic ideas - but how many of these ideas actually see light of day. Statistics show that not many do. 

If you are anything like me, you live and breathe ideas and the very essence of your being is celebrating the fact that you are an "ideas person". But an idea is just that unless you do something about it.

The sun is shining and we have all gotten over the winter blues, but with that comes the mid-year, summer holidays slump.

There is so much to do, yet all that many of us can think about is the long-waited summer holiday that is imminent.

Perhaps you have gotten out of the normal rhythm that your sales and marketing efforts have been in, or maybe it's not quite working like it use to.

Don't fear! You are the norm.

What you do next will really set the mark on how you will end the year from a sales and marketing perspective.

5 Ways to get over the mid-year marketing slump

Marketing Eye is an international business. With our expansion to Atlanta and then other locations throughout the US, we had to really think about what our organizational structure was going to be like moving forward. After a lot of investigation, and research, we decided to work as a flat organizational structure and give people the power to make important business decisions.

Every Friday is different. Some days we are so busy, we can't scratch ourselves. Other's we are creating great brands, and needing to free ourselves from the shackles of everyday work life and think outside the square. 

Our environment is transformative. I say this because each of our offices has their own unique personalities. They seem to encompass the culture that has fostered from an environment free of layered management and flat in structure.

Recently I shared a presentation about the value of marketing automation implemented correctly in a business. I gave the presentaton at Cebit 2015 and rather than use a generic case study, I focused on my own company, Marketing Eye, as an example of how to implement marketing automation and gain immediate results.

To give perspective to this, Marketing Eye has a substantial amount of traffic coming to our website each month, mainly due to the popularity of this blog and the effectiveness of our SEO team.

I live my life through two time zones; Melbourne, Australia, and Atlanta, Georgia. No matter where I am at any given time, these are the two time zones I consider most as I go about my daily life.

We have now been in the Atlanta for a few years, and have recently attracted a top-notch international marketer to our fold. She will head up our Georgian operations and with her 20 plus years experience, will bring much to the table. 

When thinking about how her onboarding should look, I have taken time to reflect and get feedback from others in the organization as to how we should embark upon onboarding our new senior manager. 

There have been a number of trains of thought, namely around giving her the freedom to work in an environment that is shaped by Marketing Eye, but not "owned" by it. We don't want to stiffle her creativity or what she may bring to the table. Instead, we want to encourage her to use her wealth of experience particularly in the technology space and help our clients reach the next level.

Marketing Eye has a methodology on how we work with clients. That's unchangeable. It's what we have built our business on. But its the grey areas around it that we are most open to providing freedom for marketing managers to explore their own experiences and catalogue of skills to take us further away from anything that our competitors could possibly offer.

We feel innovative. If you asked any employee at Marketing Eye, they would say this is the cornerstone of our business. But so often people get busy working that they don't have the time to think about the business side of things.

It's so important that we utilize this opportunity to do just that. By providing a framework and the ingredients and support to take the local Atlanta based business to the next level is important. 

She will have a blank canvas but with paint and a brush to express her creative flair. I can't wait to see what's next for Marketing Eye Atlanta and share it with you all.

Marketing Eye's journey over the past few years has hit some major milestones as the business heads into a future rich with possibility.

Despite our  rough expansion into the US; we set up ‘part-time’ and employed a few people who were left to their own devices, the road has cleared and we are looking forward with enthusiasm. 

Failure is inevitable and mostly out of our control. Nobody actually sets out to fail? I certainly don't. But it happens, a little more often than I would like.

I fail at many things: walking my dog each day, keeping all employees engaged 100% of the time, communicating the value proposition of our business when we have severely over serviced, keeping a timesheet, and letting go.