Blog Author Mellissah Smith - Page 62

The Australian Financial Review's front page headlines "$3b online advertising industry spooked" is in fact old news. Anyone in marketing knows that clients are paying for clicks that they shouldn't be, but for some absurd reason, everyone seems to be playing a blind eye to it.

On a regular basis, companies come to me and say that their website is getting thousands of unique visitors, but no sales inquiries. This could be for a number of reasons, or quite simply due to their SEO company manipulating Google Analytics to show results that don't exist.

I woke up this morning at 4am as I normally do, and decided to read the news online. Usually, I lay in bed for a few hours and think about the world, tossing and turning, hoping that by some miraculous occurence, my eyes will shut and I will sleep that extra hour.

What I read, shocked me. Top headline: "Joan Rivers Dies". Now, I did not know her, and I can't remember seeing much of her work, other than a snippet here and there, acknowledging her acid tongue jokes, or the fact that she has had a tad too much plastic surgery.

Why I was shocked is because this vivacious woman, with her wits about her, was fine one week, and had passed the next - almost without warning. You may say that she was 81 years old, and had a good innings, but she also was a very active woman with a lot of life to live and had a job doing live television when most would be resting in their rocking chairs.

Only weeks after getting over the reality that a childhood favourite, Robin Williams took his own life, I feel that death has all of a sudden become a part of my life - and to be honest I don't want a second of it.

It seems that I don't go a day without hearing about someone dying, which I believe kind of goes with the territory when you get a bit older. Whether it is someone you know, someone from afar or a friends uncle, cousin, brother, mother or companion. 

What I have come to realise is that in death, we somehow get defined in a way that is final. That's who we are- or more precisely were. The outpouring of grief from Robin Williams' friends and fans was heartfelt. My friends relative died last week, an important father figure to him, and when asked about it, my friend said "he was a gentleman". Steve Jobs, was defined as one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs - the person you would want to be in your top 5 people at the dinner table. 

How people see us in our final resting place is the way we are remembered and each of us have a different story to tell.

'Nothing would be done at all if a man waited until he could do it so well that noone could find a fault with it.' Cardinal Newman

The pursuit of perfection has been a struggle for me personally my entire life. What started out as a 'Virgo' trait, has led to a constant battle with striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance expectations of both myself and others. Going deeper then just a focus on personal life, my business has constantly been hindered by my inherent need for perfection, and I am not alone. There are many others out there that are exactly the same.

Entrepreneurs are renowned for certain types of behaviours including obsessive compulsive disorders, perfectionism, neuroticism - all often being the key reasons why things somethings don't go in the direction that they would have hoped. I call it self-sabotage, because noone is perfect and 80 percent is ok - yet trying telling that to my brain when it is on overload.

I learned earlier on in my business career that 80 percent had to do and by micro managing, nothing would ever get done, nor would the business grow. If only I could do everything myself, there would simply be no need for employees. Letting go and learning to adapt differently was singularly the best thing I could ever have done, and the only reason I have been able to grow an international business.

But from time to time, I fall prey to seeing things that are not done quite right, and having my little 'freak out' moment. 

When it comes to business, I desire the perfect marketing campaign, the perfect employee, and the perfect business - yet, that is impossible to achieve and you cannot place that kind of pressure and expectation on those around you - or you are bound to fail.

For a long time Marketing Eye has been toying with hiring an Inside Sales Executive, similar to a format that exists in the US. What has held us back in Australia is that we have not been fully equipped to train an Inside Sales Executive and therefore have been sitting on our hands when a decision has had to be made.

With an office move in Melbourne to a larger space, finally, the time had come and an opportune meeting with an American Inside Sales Specialist ensured that Marketing Eye Melbourne had their very first person in this position on board.

The world has become crystal clear to me of recent and I could not be more happy.

We all make choices every single day of our life, and often we don't think enough about the impact of those choices and what they mean to future opportunities that may lie ahead.

I've been back in Melbourne for a week and it has been an eye-opener for so many reasons and this journey continues to help me better understand who I am and what I want to be in the future.

Sometimes in marketing, you have to go in guns blazing.

In my experience, graphic designers can be a marketing company’s biggest weapon, with their ability to create collateral that packs a visual punch.  Cohesive graphic design communicates key messages within seconds, solving problems through the carefully selected combination of type, space and image.  It’s more than an art form; it’s a powerful tool.

If your market isn’t blown away within seconds of viewing your design, you’re doing it wrong.

Being a business owner has a multitude of perks; you can make sh*t happen, run your own schedule, feel empowered to do anything you set your mind to, fulfil dreams, make millions (if you work hard and are successful) and in general, you have an ability to change lives, that of your own and others. It's a pretty amazing role if I may say so myself.

The drawbacks, well, there are a number but one of them has never been that I didn't want to get out of bed and turn up to work. Instead, I wake up early and make my way to the office as fast and efficiently as possible. 

What I find challenging is the same things most small to medium-sized business owners find; people management, enough hours in the day to do all the things that you want to do and find the right talent. The latter being the single biggest issue I think most agencies find today.

What does Eva Mendes, dairy consumption and nudity all have in common?

After over 20 years in marketing industry, I’ve pretty much seen it all.

Then I meet a client that achieves the impossible, and recently, for me that was Frank Richmond, the Founder of Cirrus Networks.

While a sex tape is a good way to get media exposure for some; Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and alike - it's not the right way to get the type of media exposure to escalate your business's chance of being written about.

When I first started doing PR, I used to write a media release and fax it to a media outlet - all with varying results. The headline, like it is today, is worth it's weight in gold, and if you have a strong first paragraph, you may get that call back you have been waiting for.

That was soon followed up with 'pitching' on the telephone and depending on what mood the journalist was in or your ability to 'sell' a story to them, you either walked away with a published article or your press release was thrown in the trash can.

In 1998, the faxing part changed to emailing which was fantastic because it was a much faster and less tedious way of getting a media release out to journalists. It also was a much more environmentally friendly way to operate and allowed for changes to be made to ensure that each email sent out to a journalist was a one-to-one marketing piece rather than an everything to everyone, hit and miss style approach.