I’m Anne Zelenak, and I’ve been working on websites and in digital media my whole career. Since the beginning, my passion (and I think my strength) has been stepping into the mind of the user to really understand who they are and what they are trying to accomplish. That means I love to devour any available data (not just analytics but also personas, industry research, survey results, and anything else available). This approach has helped me deliver improved metrics for traffic, conversion and email subscriptions throughout my career.
At the same time, I also pick up and adapt to new technology quickly. It’s just been a requirement of working in digital marketing. Above when I said I’ve been doing this my whole career, that’s…a long time. When I started, the websites I worked on were hand-coded in HTML and Javascript, and anything resembling a content management system was custom made for the client. I registered websites to search engines before Google existed. I saw the dawn of email marketing, RSS feeds, and social media.
A lot of what I’ve done seems so obsolete now, but there really is unique value to having witnessed all the mistakes, successes and amazing advancements along the way. And the truth is, it all still comes back to the user – they have a lot more choices now but we still need to do our best to understand what they want from any given media at any given time.
When I talk about the user I also mean internal users – those of work management and internal communication systems. I think my brain sees the movement of work in a very clear, logical way. The more complex an organization, the more people there are who need to be involved for individual work pieces, reviews, approvals, etc. I like to get in with post-its, white boards, and swim lanes to map the most efficient flow so work can keep moving with both quality and speed.
Through it all I’ve found that websites are still my happy place – after all everything else (email, social, QR codes) usually ends up feeding back to that website for the final conversion. I don’t think there’s a CMS I can’t figure out, or a process flow I can’t improve upon.
I think my journey through digital marketing is unique, and my history is what sets me apart from others in what I can bring to each new day.