Blog Author Mellissah Smith - Page 5

I’ve seen my external accountant twice in 10 years – which says a lot about how accounting firms communicate with their customers.

While ‘post COVID’ is a little premature, the current sentiment in the market really lends itself to thinking about what a career in marketing looks like today.

In the past, there was almost a sure ride from marketing intern to marketing graduate, then depending on which direction you decided to head, a slow ride through from Marketing Executive to Marketing Manager. For the lucky few (those who worked the hardest), Chief Marketing Officer or as we like to call it, CMO.

When I started out in marketing, I worried that I wasn’t extraverted enough, wasn’t fashionable and preferred a good book over a cocktail party.

Since then, marketing has changed and the ‘nerdier’ marketers are fast becoming the rock stars due to results they derive for their clients, and the ‘fashionable’ lot are seen more as events specialists or publicists. Now, that’s a stereotype, of course, but the gist of it is that things have changed over the past three decades and what was once considered to be ‘cool’ is no longer the case.

A few years back, we have inside sales executives with our marketing agency, and it worked like a treat. We acquired between 8 and 11 new retained clients on 12 month contracts every single month per inside sales executive.

One of the biggest conundrums entrepreneurs and business leaders have with their employees is helping them focus their efforts on ‘thinking outside the box’.

For years, I kept my business strategy in my head. It was a reliable place to keep it, or at least I thought. My memory is fairly decent when it comes to things that matter and reaching my business goals – matters. 

With our marketing plan, that was another story. Writing it down is what we do, and we know that it is the only way to achieve marketing goals, aligning the sales function with marketing tactics that derive results.

It’s been one month since I’ve entered the marketing industry as a Marketing Graduate. Overwhelmed is the frequent feeling of the day, but excitement is what’s keeping me going.  I will be honest; my marketing degree was a breeze in comparison to my first few weeks as a Graduate. Yes, difficult in some respects (namely group projects and catching peak hour public transport), however, learning on paper the aspects of marketing and its cultural influence meant that completing the work was far more above the surface than I had realised.