DIGITAL MARKETING EXPERTISE
Building Your Success Online
A very long career
Let me tell you the story of the Creative Digital Marketing Program. I’ve been building and managing websites for a very long time. The goal for most clients was to be visible and get phone calls and email enquiries for new business for the sort of work they loved. That meant a continuous flow of new business leads without a lot of effort. Of course building a website was just the beginning of making that happen. It was so easy in the beginning and really fun (still is!) but as more people caught on to the amazing opportunities the internet provides, the marketplace changed and became crowded. We are working with multiple channels nowadays and we’re constantly doing more things with the same budgets in an industry requires constant learning as channels evolve.
A shift in focus to marketing
In the beginning I was focussed on the tools – I designed and built websites and did SEO really well. When I started there were no courses on web development or digital marketing. I just had to figure it out, and I did. I was always learning, it was an exciting time. I built a great process for web development that had a free discovery session (which was basically a free marketing plan but I didn’t know it then).
Fast forward many years to a convergence of not so great circumstances. My wonderful clients were retiring. I needed new clients but I’d let my own marketing go. This was also a time when early stage DIY web page builders entered the market and many small business owners started to design and build their own websites (and of course realised that didn’t work so well for business). I started to look more closely at everything I was doing, including how I served my clients and realised I needed to learn business and marketing properly if I was going to keep getting better results. So I did an MBA with a marketing major. After the MBA my world view changed. I describe it like this: I used to look down at the work with blinkers on – just me, my clients, their clients and the tools and tactics of design, coding, SEO and maximising conversions. Now, I look up, I look around, I look at the environment I run my business in. I could see the forces that were at play in the industry through some huge changes I’d experienced. And I learned how to look at business in a whole new light. I had worked with a lot of marketing managers before then and didn’t have a high opinion because back then the web was new and they didn’t seem to understand the basic mechanics of how the web worked and sometimes they asked for things I knew just wouldn’t work. But now I had a taste of what THEY had been doing, but I also had the context of how websites, Google, social media and all the things worked, coupled with my own processes that I had tested and proven with clients over the years.
Streamlined processes and better communication
Now I knew I could do so much more for my clients but here I was still working with small business budgets. I didn’t really want to change focus because I love working with business owners directly. Whilst my old clients trusted me completely I realised that my new clients didn’t understand a lot of what I was doing and they took longer to educate. They were getting a lot of random education out there and sometimes looking at what competitors were doing a little too much. I just didn’t have the bandwidth at that point to do all the hand holding I’d done in the old days. So I knew I needed to streamline my process, be more efficient and communicate better. And that was the start of creating my program. Funnily enough, it’s an idea that sat on my desktop for years (even the name!). Why does it take small business owners so long to get anything done. Well, with this program we’re going to pop a rocket under your plans for better results for your business. If you’re ready to learn, I’m here to help.
Let’s get started.