I am going to stray away from the pattern I have been following. But just for today. I have to vent about the absolute disaster that was the presentation of my marketing strategy today.

Never in my entire life have two people managed to make me feel so stupid. I have been here for two months and during that time I have gone back into the PPC ccampaigns that have been run by this company. I have looked at the click to enquiry ratio, I have analysed the enquiry to sale ratios, I have calculated the ROI on thousands of campaigns and adgroups, I have identified successful and unsuccessful keywords, and I have built proposals with budget indicators, and estimated ROI and projected sales attached. I have done extensive research into our competitors and what their daily spends are on PPC, how many clicks they get etc. I have looked at our reach vs their’s on alexa.com. I have laboured over excel spreadsheets for 1000’s of hours. I have even gone as far as to include elements that are not part of my brief, such as Social Media Marketing and the 4 R’s of marketing (evolved from the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) it is basically Recognise (or Reveal), Respect, Reward, and Retain) and all that jazz.

So I walk in to the meeting room, after fighting with the binding machine for almost half an hour, with three beautiful presentations. I struggle a bit with the projector and my laptop’s internet connection, but eventually I get it sorted… And then I wait. And wait. And wait.

Eventually, I get up and I have to go and find BL and BM and remind them (because their Outlook Calendars have clearly failed to do so) that we have a meeting now. “Oh!” is one response. “Where are we doing this?” is the other. This is not boding well for me.

So with everyone herded in, I start my presentation. I swear, I was about 30 seconds into it when BM starts lambasting me. Telling me quite clearly I have missed the mark with my strategy, and BL is asking if I even bothered to speak to anybody in the company about anything. She doesn’t feel that I have a good grasp of what this company is about. Apparently, the historical data in their DB’s is wrong. Some of it only started tracking at a later stage, and some of it is optional for the customer to complete, so all my stats are skewed, hence my ROI figures are out, leading to my projections being wrong, and basically all my campaign proposals and demographic data being completely wrong.

And then, as if the verbal crushing and the emotional shattering weren’t bad enough (I was sitting there listening to these two people killing my entire proposal OK. Cut me some slack. It was emotional), they both left when I was half way through my presentation. Then BM got a phone call and said he had to leave and he was gone.. And BL had another meeting. HOW RUDE!!!!!!!! I hadn’t even got to the affiliate marketing plans, or my input on Social Media. AND THEY WERE LATE!

And I was being told it was back to the drawing board for me. That’s great, except that this strategy was part of my first set of 60 day objectives for this company and I haven’t met them, which is NOT good.

All I can say is thank God it is Friday and that I have the whole weekend to try and put something together to redeem myself. Thank you for reading this far, and even if you didn’t, at least I have ranted and raved and got it off my chest. Good weekend all.

C

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