Mellissah Smith Show Notes

Mellissah Smith is a marketing expert, author, writer, public speaker, and technology innovator. Having worked with more than 300 companies across technology, health, and medical, professional services, manufacturing, transport and logistics, finance, and sustainability industries.

Mellissah has a well-established reputation as an experienced marketing professional with 28 years of experience. As the founder and managing director of Marketing Eye, she has taken the company from startup to a multi-million dollar enterprise with offices in Australia and the US.

Mellissah is the founder of Robotic Marketer an innovative, modern and AI based technology that develops and consists of marketing workshops and extensive strategies.

Mellissah is also the Editor in Chief of Marketing Eye Magazine, a quarterly magazine that covers marketing, entrepreneurship, travel, health, and wellbeing.

 

Most passionate about

• I’m one of those people who are very passionate about many things. Right now, I’m involved with my little startup, called Robotic Marketer. About four years ago, I decided to develop a robot that will help clients optimize their marketing departments. Today, I found out that one of the companies will be buying 10,000 marketing strategies from us over the next twelve months. I’m super excited but also exhausted.
• This Robotic Marketer is an AI (artificial intelligence) software robotic program that writes marketing strategies without a human. While it would normally take two or three weeks, or even longer, for a marketing manager to do market research and a competitors’ analysis, and to come up with a marketing strategy, the software literally takes 28 minutes. This robot for marketing strategies is the first in the world.
• It started with our own needs in my marketing firm, Marketing Eye, which is a leading small- to medium-sized business marketing firm in Australia and the US. We have quite a big team of marketing experts who write the marketing strategy for a client, which is a major part of the role in our company. So, I wrote about how automatic marketing would work and how it could develop marketing strategies without a human. I worked with a development team that developed the technology, and today it’s live.
• The product contains more than 40 pages of comprehensive marketing strategy that is aligned with each client’s business goals. It can definitely serve entrepreneurs.

Mellissah’s best advice about approaching customers

• The most important piece of advice for any entrepreneur is to understand the purpose of the customer’s business and what the market really needs.
• The very first thing to do is to get to know your customers or your potential customers before you even open the doors.
• Many entrepreneurs close their doors within the first five years, and they always say it’s about money. But, is it really because of money or because they didn’t invest enough in their customer, including the customer experience and understanding what the customer actually wants and needs?
• Make sure you put the customer first. There is lots of talk about how if you treat your employees well, they will treat the customers well. I don’t know if that’s actually true. At the end of the day, your business survives only if you have customers. That will happen only if you look after them and if they have a great experience. Customers who have a great experience not only come back to you but will also recommend you. That’s the easiest way to get new clients.

Biggest failure with a customer

• I have had a lot of failures. I definitely try to not make the same mistake twice. I think our biggest failure, and it’s a failure that would affect all consulting firms, is a lack of ability to communicate value to customers.
• If you’re a marketing agency (or a legal firm or an accounting firm), it’s very hard to communicate value to your client. That’s because the client doesn’t know what you are doing on a minute-to-minute basis. All they see is the result. And sometimes, in marketing, it takes time to get results, or the results aren’t visible in the first stage, as if you were doing a lead generation campaign.
• We had a client who was spending a lot of money with us. For just consulting, he spent around $20,000 a month. We were building websites, rebranding the company, doing annual reports, stationery, brochures, and more.
• While doing all those things, we weren’t communicating enough with the customer. We weren’t explaining what we were doing and taking the customer on the journey with us. Instead, we were working in a kind of isolated environment. That doesn’t work because the client feels neglected. The client feels like they are not part of the process. And if you don’t take your customers on that journey, especially in the professional services, they are going to feel left out. They are going to feel as though they are not being heard. Sometimes, they just need to be heard. You just need to listen. As a marketer, the best thing you can learn to do is listen. If you sit back and listen to your customer, you’ll be far more successful than if you don’t.

Biggest success due to the right customer approach

• Looking at the 10,000 marketing strategies that we are about to deliver or just looking at Robotic Marketer as a company; it was built to solve a problem that has to do with the customer.
• We haven’t officially launched yet and the lowest mark we’ve ever received for one of the marketing strategies provided by Robotic Marketer is 8 out of 10. It’s incredible. It really is. Robotic Marketer is successful because of its quality.

Recommendation of a tool for customer focus, marketing, or sales

• For sure, Adobe Experience Cloud. It marries creativity with marketing automation and CRM. It’s able to seamlessly integrate multiple technologies to create the best possible customer experience. And it’s all centered on the customer experience. At the end of the day, that’s what sells.

Mellissah’s key success factor

• I’ve been fortunate enough to have mentors who have surrounded me. In particular, I’ve had a mentor by the name of Jack Cowin. He has invested a lot of time into helping me develop. He has also been able to challenge me on a regular basis and make me think differently. Having that investment from a person you can look up to has been instrumental in helping me become more successful.
• From early on in my career, I have always surrounded myself with people who are much smarter than I am, much better than I am: really strong entrepreneurs or marketers whom I could look up to and learn from.
• I also think outside the box and I don’t worry too much about what everyone else is doing. I always tell my team: Be successful by your own definition, not someone else’s.
• Always learn, have a mentor, be open to feedback, and be brave enough to take a risk, innovate, and invest in things like technology to become better at what you’re doing. These are things that I have always made sure to do and they really helped me reach heights that I never dreamed of.
• I literally had no dreams of being successful. I really wanted to do a good job. I wanted to be a great marketer.

Mellissah’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get a fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, or conquering the mountain; I want to ask you if there is a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed?

• I haven’t climbed any significant mountains. I do go up to the mountains to ski but I always do so on a lift, so that doesn’t really count, I guess. But I suppose that I have a business mountain that I’m looking to conquer. I never thought it would be possible and it was never my dream but when it became a reality, it made me think differently: to have a business with a one-billion-dollar market cap. It’s really something that I’d never thought about but, with this technology company, things have suddenly changed.

 

Best ways to connect with Mellissah

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Website
• Robotic Marketer

More resources for Entrepreneurs

1. Don’t Miss – Customer Focus Strategy & Execution: Market Analysis for Fundraising
2. Hayut Yogev’s Latest post: The secret for entrepreneurs: Focus on creating value and the money will follow How to do it right?
3. Former interview: Smita Nair Jain “one should never give up no matter how impossible to climb-on their mountain seems to be.”