Blog Author Mellissah Smith - Page 44

Many businesses were in rebuild mode last year and are slowly creaping back from the economic turmoil of the last few years. It's been trying times and like most entrepreneurs, I am cautious about what lays ahead.

A reluctance to too much risk in the business is something that has held me back time and time again - and with good reason. I want to scream from the rooftops that I am ready and prepared to take risks to achieve my ultimate goals, but I know that it is fortuitous that I hold back and think through things a bit more deeply.

We are embarking on an influx of new employees. Reflecting on our growth and what it means to the business, I am more determined than ever to get our onboarding process right.

Fortunately, marketing is our forte and as such, there are a few things that we can do to make the onboarding process memorable.

It's dawned on me that old-fashion marketing managers are becoming increasingly unsettled in their high chairs with the massive transformation that has occured over the past 5 years in responsibilities.

I use to say, "marketing provides the forum for sales to occur". And that still rings true today, but what needs to be added to the bow is "marketing is responsible for revenue derived from inside sales platforms and anything digital or content driven".

Failure is inevitable and is something that is mostly out of our control. After all, who actually sets out to fail? I don't. But it happens, a little more often than I would personally like.

I fail at so many things; staying true to walking my dog each day, keeping 100% of employees engaged all the time, communicating the value proposition of our business when we have severely overserviced a client and it has then become an expectation, keeping a timesheet, and letting go.

My biggest failure 

In the past few months, I have had a business that is fairly much smooth sailing. We are adapting to our growth issues and ensuring that we streamline processes and constantly improve what we are doing in every facet of the business.

It's interesting to go through this process and realise that after 10 years, some sort of switch has been turned on, and we are picking and choosing our clients. We can't scale fast enough to cater for our burgeoning growth. Scale for most businesses isn't hard as long as you have the right processes in place. But for us, it is extremely difficult. 

Have you ever wondered about the reason why when you think of someone, they somehow appear? I do - all the time!

Tapping into my intuition has kept me in good stead and when I have ignored it, it has always come back to bite me.

Right now Marketing Eye has such an amazing team. I don't say that lightly, as to be frank, this has not always been the case. We are growing exponentially with more leads than one can handle, and as such have not one, but nine positions available.

Analyst group Merrill Lynch recently found that spending among women in the US is a staggering $5 trillion dollars a year.

Just as important, is that whilst women determine their own spending habits, they also influence men's spending habits.

I must confess, I am a slow adopter of Instagram. It's not because I didn't believe that it is a good marketing medium or any less of a social media must-have than Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook - but due to the fact that there is only so many applications a person can learn well before you have a major overload and start becoming ineffective.

My business does a little B2C but to be totally honest, we are more B2B marketers than B2C.

Instagram has more than 75 million daily users, and accounts for more than 13% of all internet users. So, why did it take so long to adopt this powerful marketing medium? The truth is that many marketers are slow and lazy for that matter, and have not adopted this medium as fast as they should have and are now failing to provide clients with the right marketing mix to powerfully promote their products and services.

I have been back in Australia for a week and it really has been an incredible experience in so many ways.

I feel more "entrepreneurial" than at any point in the past 12-months which is hard to believe given that Marketing Eye continues to grow, innovate, expand and further cement its position as a world-leading SMB marketing company and this journey is something that I live with every single day.