I remember it vividly. It was a Tuesday morning during the summer. I had been working so hard on this new website for one of our biggest clients. We were working with the business owner; he was tough, a knew what he wanted kind of guy, didn’t have time to mess around (as not many business owners do).
On this warm Tuesday morning, I was sitting at my desk with my head in my hands while 40 pieces of paper lay strewn across my desk, fresh off the fax machine. Yes folks, fax machines. My client had faxed over 40 pages of his website copy with handwritten edits sloppily written on the side of the paper, in handwriting that only a doctor could appreciate.
I thought to myself, “Oh. My. God.” This was in 2007 so I said every single one of those words, OMG wasn’t a thing yet!
How in the hell was I going to, #1, find the time to go through this, and #2, decipher everything in these notes? Unfortunately, no one had ever done this to us before so we really didn’t have anything in our agreements that required digital versions of content. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. Two-thousand seven me took quick notes and thankfully, just like any other digital marketing agency, we now have digital content delivery clauses…but I digress.
So there I was, wishing I had a bottle of wine in front of me to get through this and I just sucked it up and got started. It felt like it took me weeks to go through the documents and HAND-type his edits, but in reality, it was two days. All of these content changes were in the website, on their staging environment, and I felt proud. I did what I thought needed to be done.
In true client fashion, he was eager to see the site and we did a brief review over the phone before I had a chance to have someone else go through all of my handwritten note changes (mistake #1). We were on the phone with the client and he was paying attention to every single detail as if he was launching this sucker in t-minus five minutes.
As we were going through the site, he casually says “environment is spelled wrong.” “Ok, no problem, sir, easy fix, I can get that corrected,” I reply. (Ummmm, hello dumbass, Monique. Here is mistake #2, I didn’t tell the client that it hadn’t been checked yet; 2007-me makes a mental note that transparency will go far with clients!).
Well, as you guessed it, he found more typos, no doubt from my sloppy typing skills. He gets angry, as one would assume and he begins to yell.
“This is ridiculous, there shouldn’t be these many typos.”
Cue dumbass Monique.”Well, sir, (oh, and you know I emphasized this on the phone) you faxed over handwritten edits for content on the website, and it took us three days to go through all of this and hand type it out; so there probably are mistakes.”
Ha. Ha. I was still pretty fresh in my career so I had this naive thought, “hey, if I tell someone about their mistakes they will realize what they did.” Yeah, folks, that is NOT how it works in the real world. And boy did I find out!
It got dead silent on the phone, and he yells, “Not my problem. FIX IT!”
You know what folks? It wasn’t his problem, and we did fix it. We launched the website, and they were a successful digital marketing client of ours for several years.
We learn from every experience that we have. As marketing directors, content managers, we are under fire to make everything perfect, but guess what? It can’t and won’t be. If all of our marketing efforts and projects were perfect, then how would we learn from them? Finding your company’s story and strategy is the true essence of what it is to be a digital marketing manager, and if you feel overwhelmed with what everyone is asking you to do, don’t fret – I have been there, and I can be there for you too!
On Target is an Orlando based Digital Marketing Agency that helps brands stand out and rise above the noise. Through great storytelling, On Target turns companies into thought leaders. Founded in 2005 as a search engine marketing (SEO) firm, we’ve evolved into Orlando’s only agency that specializes in creating remarkable online content. If you’re looking to refresh your marketing strategy, contact us today.
Monique Diefendorf is the Digital Marketing Director at On Target Digital Marketing. She has been with the company for 11+ years and is excited to start her monthly blog series, “Tales from a Marketing Director.” If you are a marketing director and looking for light-hearted, entertaining, and relatable blogs, then come back once a month where Monique will continue with tales of tips, lessons learned, and life stories. And if you just want to talk to someone cooler than Monique (although, it is pretty hard to find someone cooler than Monique), call On Target Digital Marketing, our team is pretty cool and most of us really like tacos. I mean, who doesn’t like tacos? 1-866-998-6886.
