South Bend, IN
574-292-0503
Reed Lyons just celebrated his one year anniversary in June working for J2 marketing. He is a project manager for the digital marketing firm, which has been in business for 10 years. Lyons attended school at Bethel College, which is now Bethel University. He graduated in 2010 and studied communications with a concentration in visual communications.
Q: Has media always been something you were interested in and wanted to work in?
Yeah, so even though I’ve only been here for a year I actually went back to Bethel and worked there for seven years. I worked for the Boys and Girls Club as their athletic director for a year, so there’s always been an element of marketing within this. When I was at Bethel I was the director of the campus activities program, I was the director of the intermural program for a time, I was the director of our…first year experience, so there’s a lot of kind of in each of these roles a creative communication element to it, to identify messaging, to identify outlets and to reach people where they would most likely interact and engage with your message. And so I think it was a natural transition for me to move, even though I had a hiatus from a true marketing position, I’ve always been involved in kind of a communications and storytelling marketing role from my undergrad.
Q: What was the chain of events that lead you to J2?
When I was at Bethel, my wife and I were resident directors. So as a resident director we lived in the dorms, we took care of students as well as kind of having director hats for different programs at the college. When looking over marketing roles after Bethel, it was a natural transition to move into more of a kind of a creative position. So I was hired on as a video production manager here at J2, specifically working as a project manager directly related to our video department. And so kind of in a short period I grew out of that role and took over project management throughout the organization, and that kind of lead into a leadership role on the team here. And so the natural transition was a friend who worked under me at Bethel. In the nature of a lot of job searches nowadays, it's good to have a network and it's good to have a community, and so while searching for a lot of different roles, this role and a marketing kind of role was on the horizon. It was kind of a more natural connection that a position opened up, people knew I was looking and then it ended up being a really good fit.
J2 has nine full-time employees, with positions in support, sales, office administration, project management and creative.
Q: How many clients does J2 have?
We usually manage between 35 to 40 clients on an ongoing basis. Our client s are split between either project based or retainers. Retainer clients are the ones that are going to have a month-to-month contract and certain hours where we need to complete marketing tasks in. We almost operate like the marketing arm of their company or organization. Some of our other clients hire us on for individual projects. Those projects would be like design this website, we build a lot of websites. Currently we’ve been doing a lot of virtual productions...and a lot of our video work has shifted due to the nature of the current cultural climate. A lot of people are moving their events online, so we’ve been doing a lot of virtual events. So my job as a project manager is to stay on top of these projects and their quality, their value, and the amount of hours, making sure we’re on budget and on track to finish a lot of those. So there’s a lot of kind of intermediary roles I do stuff in to kind of fill a need where it is, but most of the time it's coordinating between our account manager and our creative to make sure that projects are getting done and moving forward.
Q: How does analytics fit into the marketing part of your job?
What I’m responsible for, like I said with our clients kind of splitting between retainer and project, a lot of our retainer clients we give them monthly milestones and updates. So our goals in our marketing is “are we meeting their goals? Are we accomplishing what we set out to do?” A lot of that is sales funnel based, so are we tracking our conversions, are we tracking our impressions, are we understanding the interest and are we modifying and growing that? So [for] our monthly clients I put together a report that kind of analyzes different data sources and our efforts, whether that’s Facebook ads or Google ads, website visits, video views, all of that, put together in a monthly package to make sure that we are doing what we promised to do and that people are getting a good ROI. So a lot of our clients that come through, they want, like every business wants, more sales or more donations, more awareness. They have a very specific goal, and so our endeavors and our implementation and our tactics are all trying to help them achieve that goal, And all that stuff is measurable, whether we’re using ads manager, Google Ads or Google Analytics. We’re always providing an update on our plans, our intentions, whether or not we’re hitting the mark. And if we’re not, we idenfity what we need to tweak, how we need to work to improve it, and if we are we always ask what we can do more to make sure we stay on top of it if we need to change anything else. So a large part of my role then is kind of seeing what we’re doing and trying to figure out if it's working or not.
Q: Would you say that you have more retainer clients or more clients that just come with a specific project?
I would say we have more retainer clients than we have project clients. And that’s kind of the trajectory we’re hoping to go as an organization, to get larger retainer clients. And we can kind of move away from project-based and smaller short term and look more towards long-term relationships with small to medium businesses and kind of help them improve, because a lot of the metrics and analytics work better over time as we tweak and improve. A lot of the projects that we get, they’re challenging because clients kind of see us as a commodity and they shop us around with other people and they don’t kind of get the full idea of what we do and kind of how marketing operates. And so our goal is to be 100 percent retainer, but right now we are around 60 to 70 percent.
Q: What makes this job unique to your competitors in terms of how you use analytics to help your clients?
I think what makes it unique is we consider ourselves a creative performance marketing agency. So you have a lot of the performance marketing, which would be a lot of the data management a lot of the metrics, and then they would outsource a lot of the content creation. We have a creative and unique team that offers a lot of strategy and consultation with it and we are able to do a lot of the creative development in house. So even though we are focused on performance and focus on metrics and a good ROI, we also offer the elements of creativity to create content that has…clarity, in addition to just being efficient and being good at what we do. And so I think at a lot of agencies around here, you get one or the other. We can get a lot of the creative nature, saying "here's a logo, I hope you like it" or maybe "here's like a spreadsheet, I hope this works for you." You can go find someone else to do this, but we hope to kind of straddle the line between offering a beneficial metric solution at the same time of being in a business to creatively solve problems from a different angle.
Q: You mentioned earlier tracking conversion and impressions. Would you say those are generally the insights you're looking at most? What insights have you found to be the most valuable for your clients?
I usually think of it as a funnel. On the top of the funnel we talk about awareness, and we track awareness by impressions. The next level you would see would be interest, and we track interest based on clicks. The next as you go deeper down into the funnel would be decision, and we track that by engagement. And then finally action, which we track by conversion. So those four different tiers are how we quantify whether or not what we’re doing is working. If you have impressions...it’s the amount of people seeing your content, the amount of people watching something, the amount of people getting to your site, the amount of people who are having your ad on their screen. And then we figure out if we’re hitting the right audience, like are people clicking on it, is it interesting? Are people starting to watch our videos, are people starting to click on our ads? And finally how long are they engaging it? That’s where we check in on bounce rates on websites. On pages, are they on long enough to read all the content? Are they going to watch the video all the way through? Are they going to engage with the entirety of our social media carousel? Or is it just kind of a short burst and then a high bounce rate? After decision and engagement, we ultimately want to track conversion because conversion is connected to a shopper’s sale, conversion is connected to an application or a contact form. We want to do our job as marketers to get leads and to getting leads into a funnel that puts it into the sales team or the organizational team or the admissions team, kind of moves it to the next step so they kind of pull next to continue to warm up those leads and to maintain that. So that’s our goal and that’s how we like to operate with a lot of our retainer clients, so we do track based on those four categories. And any time we start to drill down and if something’s not working, we can move back to the previous one and tweak it a little bit.
Q: How are you able to manage the clients’ data every day to get those monthly reports out?
We use a lot of third party software to combine a lot of insights and track all of their information. I know I’ve already mentioned Google Analytics so we are a heavily Google-centric analytic company... We focus a lot on Data Studio which is another Google software to provide us analytics on how our ads are doing. We have a software called Databox that compiles a bunch of different data connections into visual data, so graphs and metrics. We use Mailchimp for our email marketing to track our success rates and open rates and engagement on email marketing, and then we do the same thing with Facebook... Each different platform has it's own data management software and then we also use some third party ones to combined them all together. So a lot of it is we’re heavily software-centric. We use a lot of different views that communicate really well, giving us the information we need in a beautiful, clean package.
Q: How have you seen working with the clients' data change over time? Are there certain things clients think are more important now or that you think is more important for the clients to know now than in the past?
I think some of the hard part is...even the rapidness of digital change in the last couple months. A lot of our small and medium businesses kind of dip their toes into the digital realm with e-commerce or with websites and obviously that’s been a huge push in the last few month with everybody being at home and trying to buy things online and the stay-at-home orders across the country. That’s been a real challenge to identify what is your online presence and how are you starting to rank in Google. We focus a lot more on SEO nowadays than we did in the beginning. It's one thing to have a website, it's another thing now to start identifying how do we start ranking higher. And so kind of trying to dig into Google's updates and how they’re managing their search queries, and then how we’re crafting pages to have our clients ranked, filling our profiles on Google My Business and Yelp and other social network sites. It's just the nature of people who are kind of looking at companies and ideas on their phone are more based on Google and queries versus specific URLs and phone calls and traditional ads, and so as we adjust. We want to stay on the top of that curve. So if you had asked what’s the biggest difference between now and 10 years ago, it would just be the importance of a unified digital presence, or even just a digital presence to begin with.
Q: How do you think analytics software and data management software could be made more efficient in the future for you to help your clients better?
I think just because we, and by we I mean we have these mega corporations that are collecting so much data on target audiences all the time...and so it's tricky because each one kind of wants to have a monopoly on their own information and how they operate. And I think becoming more efficient is creating a way to kind of communicate across the different platforms with what you’re trying to do. And I know some of the clients use the software to try to bridge the gap by getting reports from Google, by getting reports from Mailchimp, by getting reports from Facebook, by getting reports from all these different elements. And I think one thing that would really make things more efficient would be the growing unification of that, but I know that’s probably a pipe dream since everybody makes money by getting individuals onto their platforms. So it's always going to be complicated, it's going to get more complicated, but they also know that they need users and they need people to work that data since it's always going to be there. I don’t have a good answer to your question, but I think that the major efficiency in the future is probably going to be due to the nature of how are we going to manage the amount of data that people are getting from tech companies having on everybody... It’s all there, it's just a matter of getting to it.
Q: Is there anything you would want to tell students or tell someone that wants to start working in a media industry like marketing?
The one recommendation I have is that you have to have the passion and drive to take the initiative to learn on your own. I think that the nature of the school cycle and the curriculum change, it's just always going to be slower than the tech trends that are going to be needed in the industry. I think that there’s a lot of online certification, whether it's through Google or SEMrush or HubSpot…there’s going to be a constant flow of online certification and training that’s going to require an extra level of diligence outside of your traditional courses. The traditional courses are great to build foundations on, but whatever job in the media that you get to, you’re going to have to learn more. You’re not going to be prepared because the curriculum just doesn’t move as fast as the industry. And so if you want to get a leg up, I would suggest kind of shifting your education passion to getting some certifications, to watching some training, to taking some online classes, to kind of working through software and that versus textbooks and theory. Just because you’ll get the textbook theory,, you’ll get the practicality or you’ll get the ideas but you’re just going to need to learn the practical implementation at some point.
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