Do a quick Google search for “multitasking” and you’ll find a wealth of articles and reports that pretty much arrive at the same conclusion: Trying to juggle too much at once will substantially undermine your productivity, so it’s best to tackle one task at a time.
That’s all well and good. I can certainly testify from my own personal experience—as a content marketer here at WordStream—that multitasking is generally a bad idea.
I am, however, one of the lucky ones: Because the day-to-day nature of my job makes it relatively easy for me to focus on one discrete project at a time, resisting the urge to multitask isn’t exactly strenuous. The same can’t be said for someone like Veronika Cervenakova, Performance Marketing Executive at digital signage solutions provider ScreenCloud.
Veronika hanging out with WordStream’s own Mark Irvine.
Tasked, like many fellow marketers at small and medium-sized businesses, with the management of several online advertising accounts, Veronika has an extraordinary amount of stuff on her plate. As the ScreenCloud employee responsible for everything from adding negative keywords to their Google and Bing campaigns to experimenting with emerging channels like Quora and Spotify, Veronika can’t necessarily opt out of multitasking.
So—how does Veronika use WordStream Advisor to lighten the load? We’ll show you! But first, let’s take a minute to get to know ScreenCloud at bit better.
Making digital signage easy for everyone
“Digital signage” is another one of those terms—even if it looks completely foreign to you, it’s pretty likely that you’ve encountered it a number of times in your daily life.
Have you ever walked through a shopping mall and seen giant screens projecting slideshows of various retailers’ products? Ever worked for a company that used TV monitors to keep you and your coworkers up to date on monthly performance?
Digital signage is the common thread! At its core, it’s a technology that enables businesses to make internal- and external-facing content visible—and, thus, readily accessible—by putting it on larger screens.
Via ScreenCloud.
Often, in order to boost team morale and impress prospective clients, marketing agencies will use digital signage to showcase their best work around their offices—provided that the solutions they’re using are simple and intuitive, that is. This wasn’t the case for ScreenCloud founders Mark McDermott, Luke Hubbard, and David Hart. At their agency, getting clients’ success stories to properly project onto larger screens was a massive headache.
So they set out on their own to build a better tool. ScreenCloud was born!
Only a few years later, the company boasts more than 70 employees and over 8,000 happy customers, ranging from the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams to the National Institutes of Health. And from what we can tell, this impressive growth isn’t going to stop any time soon—not when they’ve got such a talented employee at the head of their digital marketing campaigns.
Bringing new meaning to “global marketing”
When WordStream’s senior customer marketing specialist Kim Castings and I sat down to call Veronika, we were expecting her to be in London—the city where she lives and works full-time. Instead, we were surprised to learn that she was on her third consecutive week of working remotely from Russia—where she was staying temporarily while taking Russian language courses! As Veronika went on to mention later in the interview, ScreenCloud is pretty cool about the whole remote work thing.
She’s not a global marketer solely in the sense that she often works remotely from countries around Europe, including her home in Slovakia; Veronika’s also a global marketer in the sense that she’s targeting prospective ScreenCloud customers in completely different parts of the world—the US, Australia, New Zealand, and more.
Veronika dominated US trivia night when she came to Boston for our customer roundtable.
And how, exactly, is she reaching these far-flung prospects? In the manner that we so often recommend to our readers and customers: with a diverse, multi-channel approach. On a day-to-day basis, Veronika acquires and re-engages leads with robust campaigns across Google, Bing, and Facebook—the three core channels supported by our software solution, WordStream Advisor. Beyond enabling her to spread the ScreenCloud brand to a wider audience, this three-pillared approach allows Veronika to create a seamless, cohesive experience for individual prospects. By reaching relevant people both as they’re searching on Google and Bing and as they’re scrolling through their news feeds, Veronika drives the volume of qualified leads that ScreenCloud needs to continue growing at such an impressive clip.
But she doesn’t stop there: As the leader of ScreenCloud’s performance marketing program, Veronika is also responsible for testing less mature advertising channels that could empower the company to further expand the reach of their messaging—Quora, Spotify, Pinterest, and Amazon among them.
I don’t care how talented you are. When you’re tasked with regularly optimizing performance across three core channels while simultaneously exploring new growth opportunities, the idea of successfully multitasking goes directly out the window.
Unless, of course, you’ve got the right set of tools to help you cross high-priority items off your to-do list and free up valuable pockets of time that you can use to get everything else done.
Partnering with WordStream to lighten the load
Veronika, like many of our advertiser customers (we also serve marketing agencies), didn’t create the Google Ads account she currently manages; instead, she inherited one from a previous account manager. Let’s just say … it wasn’t pretty.
“The account was super messy, and I didn’t know where to start optimizing. A lot of stuff needed to be fixed and I had limited time. I was still onboarding in my role at the company!”
Unsurprisingly, Veronika already knew about WordStream through our company’s founder, Larry Kim. Because she had attended (and very much enjoyed) one of his speeches, she decided to head straight to our website and sign up for a free trial of WordStream Advisor. Thanks to the guidance of one of our sales managers, Tara Castagna, Veronika knew our solution was the one she would need to succeed as the sole owner of many different advertising channels.
Via Larry Kim.
“I know first-hand [from previously working at Google] how complex Google Ads can be. I needed something to make my life easier—to make everything more efficient.”
Something else Veronika shares with many of our customers is the fact that she reports to a manager; whether ScreenCloud partnered with WordStream wasn’t entirely up to her. As such, she had to do a little bit of convincing.
“My manager had experience with PPC at the time, so it wasn’t about teaching him anything. It was more about pinpointing where we were wasting spend and how we could fix it.”
Eventually, Veronika got the job done—ScreenCloud got on board with WordStream. We couldn’t have agreed more with her advice for other digital marketing professionals who need to convince their bosses that WordStream Advisor is a worthwhile purchase:
“You have to emphasize that it will save you time and money. Make sure to identify two or three specific examples of how it will help towards this end.”
For Veronika, the first step towards saving time and money was identifying which individual parts of the account—campaigns, ad groups, keywords—were eating up a lot of budget without producing much in return. Working with one of our onboarding specialists, Kaitlyn Boehm, Veronika was able to clean up ScreenCloud’s account and reorganize it in such a way that their budgets were allocated according to performance—i.e., such that more money would go towards campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that delivered the best results.
Now that Veronika has worked with our in-house specialists to clean up the mess that she inherited, two of her favorite features to use on a regular basis are QueryStream—a tool that tells you which search queries are triggering your ads and enables you to add them as either active keywords or as negatives—and our keyword tool—which, after you’ve entered a seed term, generates a list of potential keywords that you may want to add to your account. As robust as QueryStream is, sometimes you’ve got to take matters into your own hands!
We offer a free version of the keyword tool to everyone!
I think Veronika’s affinity for both QueryStream and the keyword tool speaks nicely to the flexibility of WordStream Advisor: Whether you’re slammed with work and you need a quick fix or you’ve got some free time and you want to uncover new opportunities, we’ve got your back.