As everyone who is reading this knows, I left my position of Director of Marketing at Visit Lake County to be the Senior Digital Strategist & Consultant at Dooley and Associates, a digital marketing firm in Kenosha, WI. The question that people have asked me after they hear I am at a new company is, why would you leave? It is then followed by the person saying, it seemed like you really liked the job, you were there for a long time, you’ve accomplished so much, why leave? It’s a simple question, but one of the toughest professional decisions that I had to make, and one I did not take lightly.
Tourism is a fun industry and I met a lot of great people and learned an incredible amount. Nine years ago, I was in my 20s and not sure where I was headed professionally, Visit Lake County took a chance on this Wisconsin kid who didn’t know much about Lake County, tourism (except for traveling with family as a kid), and who turned the position, marketing department, and brand into a respected Destination Marketing Organization. I have so many people to thank who helped me along the way. When I started, social media was just getting started, I grabbed it by the horns and ran with an opportunity to be on the cutting edge of marketing and technology, not only in Lake County, but in Illinois and in Tourism. I kicked it off with a blog for Lake County, a Kids blog, Facebook, Twitter, created a webisode series on Youtube and added Pinterest and Instagram. Upon my departure, the blog alone generates one-third of the entire website traffic (nearly 160,000 user sessions a year, Social Media Impressions and Engagement topped 1.7 million, and in my last year, the website user sessions increased by 33% over the previous year (504,000 users sessions for the fiscal year, with the highest month being our peak summer travel season of July 2015 with over 100,000 user sessions). Those kind of results make things difficult to top the next year, but with 5 months remaining in the fiscal year when I departed, we were on pace to beat those numbers and have an even better year.
So why leave?
That was all being accomplished while the state of Illinois was in the midst of a budget battle. Visit Lake County is funded through a state grant program that was offset by local funds from co-op marketing programs, membership dues and community partnerships. With the state in a budget battle, I did not want to be caught, as you never know how things shake out. Second, I was looking for something to help me take the next step in my career. My goal is to either lead a digital marketing department or to educate businesses on social and digital marketing, manage their campaigns, speak at conferences, etc. I have also dreamed of being my own boss as well. I have done so much at Visit Lake County, and it was time for me to move on. I needed to take that next step to get experience of managing multiple accounts, how an agency works, manage Google Adwords campaigns and more. Another step in becoming complete digital marketer.
Along the way multiple people told me to never stop learning and we should try and learn something new every day. I learned Social Media marketing, blogging, brand management, running ad campaigns, HTML coding, how to build a website, and now I am learning Google Adwords, how an agency runs and works, Drupal websites and increasing my knowledge of content marketing.
Will I even like this? Will I be successful? What if I fail? These are all questions that I have asked myself and others. People have told me to be confident in myself and I will be just fine, I have a network of professionals that I gained trust in who will support me. If it doesn’t work out, no big deal, you can always change again. There is only one way to find out and that is to give a try. Take the leap of faith and the net will appear. Plus, there is always the saying, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. Here we go, onward to the next adventure.
Here’s to the journey ahead!
