As I Continue to Reflect During My Job Search – Chapter 2

The background – honestly, its important!

I have been involved with marketing in some way most of my working life, but I did not have the word marketing in my job title until 8 years ago, when for the first time specialized in marketing as a full-time role as part of General Parts Groups management team.

When I look back to that time, I think it is fair to say that digital marketing was the area in which I was the least experienced and as any management training worth its salt will tell you, identify your skills gaps and find your team to help you bridge that gap!  

One of my early projects was the company’s website, which was at the time being looked after by the IT manager, Kevin Schoenheider. Kevin is an altruistic person, so he will hate me saying this but…….. his dedication, commitment, knowledge, and sheer guile helped propel me forward, and he remained a constant asset in turbocharging (yikes showing my age there) our marketing efforts. There, I said it, apologies/you’re welcome, Kevin!

My second piece of good fortune was also triggered by Kevin. He was already aware that SEO was an issue for our website, and he had an outside company in mind to help us work on the issue. Enter Brenda Norkosky from the WSI World who makes the third and final member of what was to become our marketing brain trust for the next 8 years!

To cut a long story short, with Brenda’s input we quickly decided to abandon our existing site and start over with a new site that better represented the company’s growth vision and delivered on SEO best practices.  As all you marketers out there will know, alongside the black art piece of SEO, such as meta tags, backlinks, load speed, etcetera, is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of all websites — the content! We worked together on site-structure and core content, keeping in mind the keywords we wanted to be found by, and if memory serves, this is when Brenda reminded us of a website truism, all sites must grow and grow and….!     

One of Brenda’s growth tactics was blogging, three a month to be exact. Honestly, this is a commitment for a small team but there is no doubt it helped tremendously, giving the company a way to further demonstrate its personality and competencies, and it greatly boosted the search engine authority of the site, in fact traffic grew 275%. Over time I/we got quite good at the blogging process and grew an expanded group of contributors, which encompassed the entire senior management team of the company.

Get to the Point Steve!

This blog was written by me alone; that is to say without AI. I have watched with interest the ‘great AI commercialization’ taking place with experts springing up to teach us more at an alarming rate. There is no doubt that AI will be an invaluable tool in the mechanization of customized marketing especially in predictive marketing, but it’s not a bespoke creator! AI can find connections between known things much more quickly than a human and I therefore think of it as an illuminator. The great irony is that AI needs feeding, so let’s hope people continue to have the inspiration to create original content. My inspiration came from remembering the conversations (or teamwork) between Kevin, Brenda, and myself. It strikes me at this point that I cannot remember a single question I have ever asked a chat-bot!  

So, inspiration verses illumination, a new concept for marketers to grapple with, but grapple we must as ‘the game’ has changed. It has arguably never been easier to ride a wave, but finding a new one, or a less crowded one, that you can ride for longer may have just got more difficult.

I think it is fair to say I have amused myself while writing this blog, amused being the keyword here. Something AI has yet to grasp, perhaps it never should. 

Thank you for reading,

Stephen