Tag: marketing - Page 54

Wow! I mean wow! I just arrived in the office in Atlanta and I am completely and utterly amazed at the talent and sheer determination of our Marketing Eye team in Atlanta.

They are not only the best looking team in all of Atlanta, they are also the smarter and most competent.

Who would have thought that they could put together a team like this all by themselves and start running the business like I always dreamed it would be run.

Please keep your pants on, and never give away everything, it's as simple as that.

Too many entrepreneurs get so desperate that they give away the kitchen sink when in fact all their prospect wanted to know was that they could do a good job.

As an entrepreneur, it's hard to start a business and to keep it going year-after-year profitability creating value and jobs. But many do so very successful, and yet those who fail seem to do so falling often on their own sword.

For six months we searched for a VP of Marketing to run our Atlanta operations, and after searching Australia, US and UK/Europe we found Shara Atkinson. She is from Atlanta but for the past 10 years has lived in the UK. 

Hiring Shara has been a game-changer. Prior to her appointment, I was overseeing the US market and managed staff from afar. Let me share with you, "it's not the best idea". Running a new company remotely is very hard. It's easy for Marketing Eye to get business, but hard to keep employees and train them from a different continent.

Jeff Bullas describes the age in which we currently reside as the Age of Visual Culture; in this period of time where everyone has a camera phone and selfie stick to capture one of life’s many moments, the label certainly stands true. 

Visual content is now a universal language. It is Esperanto in image form. The image may be of a dog named Pippa with her own Instagram account or it could be an infographic detailing the complex nature of how to bone a fish Masterchef style. It may be a moving image of someone repairing a car engine or attempting fine tapestry.

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 magazine is now complete and will soon hit stands and be available online. It took almost six months to get it publishing ready and was a long hard process, but after losing a bit more hair, it was well worth the hard work.

In creating this issue, I have learnt a great deal about marketing, about the client services sector and about staying the course, even when the Tough Mudder founders seem to have come along and put insurmountable obstacles in my path.*