It all started in the 90s when I was encouraged to follow my dreams. Media. The Arts. Performing, being the star of a show all about me. You can be anything if you put your mind to it, they said, so I took on an Arts Degree at Murdoch University in Perth. Computer Science would have been a wiser choice. I was always good with computers and friends who took this route were working in IT and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by the end of the decade as the industry boomed.
But I was always pretty special, and packed up and moved to Sydney to follow my dreams, cutting my teeth on this new thing called Marketing for a promotions company in exciting Kings Cross. We had an email address. One. For the whole company, which came on to a single computer in the corner next to the fax. I’ll never forget building my first email campaign. It was a massive success and transformed the business over the next few years.
Flash forward 15 years and I’m the Marketing and Communications Manager at a global entertainment touring company out of Melbourne. Everyones talking about Digital Marketing and I’m wondering if I’m getting left behind. So I start reading everything I can and doing online courses. I attend training events to up skill in every digital area I can. I realised of course that it was what I’d been doing all along, there is just new terminology as the technology gets more sophisticated.
Digital marketing relies on the basic principals of marketing, it’s just more accountable in the way you can measure and test and it. I like that. It’s exciting and useful. A new way to approach an old problem. Let’s use digital technologies to automate the mundane, collect the right information, create a better user experience and deliver outcomes. Awesome, tangible outcomes that we can measure and grow together!
