From the moment your fingers touch your keyboard, to the endless, tiring hours that your pour your heart and soul into strategising and pondering what your next marketing move is going to be, writing a marketing strategy is an arduous task, but a necessary one.

When it comes to employee appraisals, it is important for the appraisee to look at industry standards, benchmarking and peer group feedback. It's not just managers that know what is happening on the floor and numbers are can never truly reflect an employees contribution to an organisation.

Every marketer has tricks up their sleeve. If they didn't, they are not trying hard enough. Having been a marketing consultant for many years, I have had the pleasure of rolling up my sleeve and showing the world (well, mostly people in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney) how they too can use some of the tricks of the trade to accelerate their marketing reach.

At Marketing Eye, we employ a lot of marketers and over the years you learn to refine what type of marketer you look for in a role such as marketing consulting.

Like any company, we realise that reinventing yourself internally is the only way to keep people's jobs interesting. While many of us like routine, it's when this is turned upside down that we really put in our best performance. Just a few tweaks here and there, and all of a sudden you see things so much more differently than ever before.

I'm sitting at the airport about to hop on my next plane. I dress the same way every flight for comfort; a Nike pant, Armani knit, Nike shoes and jewellery. I wear a scarf to lift the outfit just in case my luggage goes missing at the other end, and I always pack a pair of heels in my hand luggage. I am ready.

The most phenomenal changes are occuring in our business right now, and it is exciting and scary all at the same time.

Being a marketing consultant is truly insane. Trying to explain what you do on a daily basis, is like talking another language to most people that are not in the industry - and for reason. We all work at different levels and few of us really talk to each other about marketing because everyone wants to be the top marketing expert that clients go to for advice.

It's not in your imagination, but marketing your business is getting a whole lot harder. What was once an easy to achieve goal, is now polluted by too many choices for both your customer and yourself, in the marketing mix.

As a customer, it is confusing and very few companies have fine-tuned the art of simple. We all learn at University to "Keep It Simple Stupid" - the KISS principal, but too many of us have forgotten that and perhaps we no longer believe it to be relevant. I do. Confusing the client, and our clients confusing their customers is a huge mistake and only when a customer identifies this do they start the breakthrough to achieving their next step towards achieving their ultimate marketing goal.

The question is often asked of our people at Marketing Eye : "What do you do that other marketing firms don't?". And the answer is quite simple.

While other's are now using the term "outsourced marketing department", few have actually defined it quite like we have at Marketing Eye. After 24 years in the industry, I have learned a lot from both succeeding and failing. From these learnings, I have developed a series of systems, processes and ways in which to improve our capability of delivering world-leading marketing strategies to businesses seeking a high growth return.

The difference is from start to finish