In our sixth instalment of our Marketing Heroes interviews, we spoke with Mirena Boycheva the Founder of Leadvertising Solutions.

Please introduce yourself

Leadvertising SolutionsFirst, I’d like to thank Pure360 for inviting me to a Marketing Heroes interview. It’s a huge honour for me as this is the first official interview I’m giving since the founding of my own agency.

I am Bulgarian and for the past 8 years I’ve been living abroad pursuing my passion for marketing and my dream to become a marketing specialist, helping other businesses grow. Everything started when I moved to Berlin to graduate my Master’s degree in Marketing and to take my first steps towards building a career in this industry.

I started working as a digital marketing intern for the leading online fashion retailer Zalando SE, which gave me a very good boost into digital advertising as a whole and helped me to start climbing the ladder. Being young, entrepreneurial and passionate about paid digital advertising, I decided that there is no better place to continue building up my skills than the digital marketing capital of Europe – London. I’ve worked for two well known digital marketing networks, working on worldwide known brands such as PayPal and The Telegraph.

I noticed that there is a gap in serving the small and medium-sized companies, which didn’t have big budgets to spend and couldn’t afford to pay the high management fees of big agencies. After 4 years of working in teams with very knowledgeable people, sharing great moments with my teammates, learning a lot from my colleagues, attending many conferences, seminars and training, I decided it’s time for me to get to the next level and build my own agency.

Many people were telling me that this is a big step and it is very overwhelming, which gave me even more strength to make this real. That’s how I founded www.leadvertisingsolutions.com

Please tell us about your brand?

Leadvertising Solutions is a conversion focused PPC agency with headquarters in London. The aim of the company is to work with small and medium-sized companies, growing start-ups and non-government organizations, helping them grow their businesses and deal with the challenges in the highly competitive market.

I help my clients drive higher traffic volumes to their websites and convert it into a better ROI. I find managing PPC budgets of SMEs exciting and this motivates me to prove to my clients that they don’t need to be huge or already have built a big brand in order to get attention from their potential customers.

Paid search is sometimes the only and the quickest option for a small brand to get users’ attention and expose their products to their potential customers. Thanks to all the different strategies I use and being up to date with all best practices,

I’ve managed to help all my clients to achieve better results and understand how digital advertising can work in their favour.Besides that, I’m also doing white label work for other international small agencies like mine. I’m helping them grow their clients’ businesses, as well as their own.

What are your main roles and responsibilities?

I’m responsible for everything starting from finding potential clients, pitching for a client, preparing account audits, optimizing accounts, client communication to invoicing and accounting.

While doing everything in my company by myself, my main goal remains to keep clients satisfied. Flexible with working hours and days, I always respond as quickly as possible to each client email and I take as a priority my clients’ feedback. When you do things right, the business runs well, there are lots of positive testimonials and clients multiply very quickly.

What is your main marketing focus and goals for 2019?

My main focus is to help as many businesses as I can, to find a few people to support me as a team and to start providing more services such as web development, SEO and web design since there are clients who are looking for the full package solution.

How important is email to your marketing mix and how much of your budget (%) is allocated to this?

Email is a crucial part of my marketing mix. The entire communication with existing and potential clients is predominantly lead via email. I use email marketing as part of every most stages of the customer journey. However, there is still no set budget for it.

What are your main challenges you face as a marketeer?

One of the main challenges is to keep up with the changes in the industry. The platforms I work with in order to provide my service are constantly changing, being optimised, enriched with many new tools and features. This, of course, is one of the industry’s advantages at the same time.

However, the complexity of the platforms leads to another challenge – the more complex these platforms become, the more difficult it gets to educate the clients how digital advertising works. For instance, why paid search works this way and how the budget spent is being justified.

It’s challenging to explain that paid search is a result of the synergy between all advertising channels and is highly impacted by the phases of the user journey. That’s why my main focus as a service provider is the transparency of my work and providing customized and visualized reports.

Which other marketeers inspire you and why?

I don’t really have anyone specific to mention here. I’ve been inspired by all the people I’ve worked with before, whom I learnt from and all the ones I partner with right now. There are many people around the world with different nationalities sharing the same passion and interest in paid search, which gives me the inspiration to continue learning and bonding with more digital nomads.

If you could give one tip to aspiring marketers what would that be?

My tip would be to be dedicated to what they do and never stop learning. As mentioned, this industry is very dynamic and demanding as there are new strategies and tools released every day. In my opinion, if a marketeer wants to succeed, they need to choose what to succeed in, what to specialize in, what to be known for.

I’m providing predominantly paid search services because that’s my speciality. It’s not because I know how to do paid search only, but because this is what I do best and I see clients appreciate this a lot. Any additional knowledge or experience about any other channel is a plus, but there should be a specific focus on one thing in order to become a master in it.

What are your marketing trends predictions for the year ahead?

My predictions are that many more small companies will start looking for digital marketing services in the near future. Some of those would have been managing their campaigns by themselves and would start feeling overwhelmed by the constant updates in the industry, struggling to keep up to date and hence their ROI will start decreasing.

Others would have just realised that they need to start advertising as everyone slowly begins doing it. It became crucial for a business to have an online presence because if they don’t it’s almost as if they didn’t exist. Besides, advertising on search engines would become affordable to any size of business. On one hand, the many different options to narrow down the target audience and increase their relevancy would decrease the percentage of waste. On the other hand, there’s a rising number of freelancers and small agencies like mine which provide high-quality services at a decent price.

Thanks Mirena for taking the time to speak with us!

We have some more great interviews with our Marketing Heroes lined up.  And if you’re an expert in the field of marketing and would like to get involved please drop us an email.

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