Situation: When I joined Tiger Mist & I AM GIA, they had not had a dedicated Digital Marketing Manager in a while. They had previously worked with an agency who had set up their campaigns, but they had rarely touched them at an architectural level since.

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Task: As the new Digital Marketing Manager, it was my job to make sure the campaigns kept running and to not go over budget. I had effectively zero digital marketing experience when I was hired, which my boss, the Head of Ecommerce, knew. But he knew I could handle it, taught me everything I needed to know, and his only instructions were: "don't go over budget." With such a low bar, I knew I could do more.

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Actions: I embarked on a mission to learn everything I needed to know about digital marketing and about our campaigns. This involved extensive research, countless YouTube videos, and building close relationships with the managers leading our account at both Meta and Google. This was an interesting time in Digital Marketing as many platforms were switching over to automated campaign management – a process that had previously been extremely manual. The agency that had been working on the campaigns before had left them manual as they had not "believed in" (aka understood) the more automated campaign management. After reading everything I could about these new automated campaigns, I decided to switch our campaigns over, with the approval of my boss. This ended up being more involved than anticipated, as the new way of serving ads affected our processes as well. I had to create better workflow processes, which is another story altogether, but essentially, we needed to plan, create, and approve deadlines, marketing copy, and collateral even faster to benefit from the new automated campaign structure.

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Result: These deep changes in our workflow processes and dedication to optimizing the new automated campaigns led to a 54% growth in revenue while reducing ad spend by 30%. This more efficient way of planning and serving ads gave me more budget to work with – to finally scale instead of just treading water.

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Learning: Looking back, I learned so much from this experience. I not only learned how to research and develop new ways of doing things, but I learned how to advocate for my ideas and lead without much authority. I also realize the information I learned about automated campaigns was nascent understanding of AI. Back then it was called "data-driven" and "automated" but it helped develop many of the skills that I now use to understand algorithms and AI platforms.

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Growth: I've since used what I've learned to help optimize many ad campaigns – as well as explain how automated campaigns work to clients, especially after Meta and Google completely discontinued use of manual campaigns, forcing clients to use the new platform. I have also used my skills and continued curiosity for algorithms and AI to add other automated processes and AI tools into my workflow processes.

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