Steve jobs talks about “connecting the dots” in his commencement speech to the students at Stanford University. It’s the concept of experience, failure (learnings) and hindsight that are so important in your journey throughout life.
My Journey
It was 2nd of Jan 2015, I was up at my parent’s farm and starting to plan out the year ahead as you do at that time of year. This is when I started to realise how unhappy I was with my business. We had a digital marketing business, purely doing SEO and SEM, and we certainly weren’t setting the world on fire. We just couldn’t get the consistent results for all our clients (some were up, some were down).
I couldn’t crack the nut to work out what was going to get great results for our clients (we’d tried many things). I decided it was time to exit the business, so we sold it to another digital marketing business in June 2015 (who proceeded to run it into the ground, but that’s a story for another day).
Even after selling the business, it kept bugging me that we couldn’t get the results of good consistent growth for our clients. It’s amazing what just sitting, thinking and analysing can do isn’t it?
So, I looked through all our own history of what worked and what hasn’t worked, I spent a heap of time with my brother who had a really successful retail business, and I grilled my good friend who had successfully exited 2 businesses for 8 figures.
The Night I’ll Never Forget
I’ll never forget the night I was sitting in Brisbane, at a pub in west end all by myself, drowning my sorrows because I just couldn’t figure it out. I felt like I had wasted 3 years of my life as a failure. On my third beer, it finally dawned on me what we needed to do.
It’s about every part of your marketing (and indeed your business) working in a cohesive unison. It’s communicating the right messages, to the right target audiences, at the right time through the right channels. It’s about building a complete marketing system (that’s the engineer in me) that ensures everything is on brand, on message and, most importantly, on value to your target audience.
It’s about finding the right team of people (harder than we all imagined), to build the right strategy, with the right analytics, implementing the right optimisation process and management framework that will ensure our clients get good consistent growth month on month, year on year.
Just doing SEO or just doing Google Ads will never work…
It’s about doing great marketing every day of every week of every month of every year. It’s about showing up with the right message to the right target audience, and then never stop showing up! And that’s exactly what Due North brings to the table. It’s the agency I wish I had found 15 years ago and I’m super proud of it and our team.
Funnily enough Steve Jobs was right (who would have thought he was a smart man) – it’s about connecting your dots of experiences, failures, and learnings (your own and from other people) that takes you on your own amazing journey of discovery.
Cheers, Ben
