Julie Dion of Dion Marketing Company: How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales
An Interview With Orlando Zayas
Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.
In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales”, we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Julie Dion.
Julie Dion is a marketing professional with nearly two decades of marketing, public relations and advertising experience. She is hands-on and president of Dion Marketing Company, a boutique marketing firm that specializes in amusement, attractions, and destination marketing. Her company has worked with dozens of large and small family entertainment centers, waterparks, seasonal attractions, and destination icons in tourist markets throughout the United States. Their clients also include nonprofit organizations, government entities, manufacturers, b2b businesses and retailers.
Julie is recognized as a leader in the marketing industry and in her community and her company has produced top marketing awards of excellence for her clients including 8 Wave Review Awards from the World Waterpark Association 2017–2019. She is a speaker on various marketing topics for attractions and tourist-related conferences, including IAAPA (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions), WWA, the Ohio Wine Association and the Annual Field Owners Conference for tag sports. Julie serves on Duval County Florida’s Research and Development Authority, served on the Board of Directors for the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce’s Transportation and Logistics Council 2014–2016, was a 2015 Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce Business Leader of the Year, has previously served on the marketing committees for IAAPA and was a member of the Tourism Development Council for Duval County.
She has a B.A. degree in Journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with her area of concentration in Advertising. Her other work experience includes advertising positions with full-service ad agencies as well as holding the position of VP of Marketing for Adventure Landing Companies for 12 years.
In addition to her work experience, Dion also studied and completed extensive training through the Media Buying Academy in Washington, DC.
Julie is married, a mother of three children and enjoys running, biking, swimming, gardening and reading.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I have always been attracted to the advertising industry. I’m one of those geeks who watch the Superbowl for the ads. As long as I can remember, I have actually enjoyed commercial breaks during TV shows, looking at highway billboards and checking out how businesses brand themselves online and off. I even remember checking out and critiquing the ads in my dad’s Time Magazines when I was very young! When advertising pivoted from traditional methods only to digital formats, I had to immerse myself in digital advertising in order to offer our clients the best marketing solutions, which always tends to be a mix of traditional and newer media options.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
When I was the marketing director for a busy waterpark in Florida, I had an idea to partner with a local magazine that mailed its publication to over 500,000 households each month that surrounded the park. We offered the magazine a “Customer Appreciation Night” in exchange for the cover of the magazine. This meant that if they gave us the cover of the magazine to promote the waterpark, in exchange they could promote a Customer Appreciation Night to its advertisers and readers at the waterpark by offering $1 admission on behalf of the magazine.
Because the date we offered was on a Tuesday evening from 6pm — 9pm at the end of August when kids were already back in school, our expectations for a packed park were nil. Little did we predict that people would start lining up for tickets the morning of, over 8 hours early!
When the news stations started calling me, I thought, “Oh they must have heard about the promotion and want more details.” But no, they didn’t know about the promotion — only that the road leading to the park was backed up with traffic for miles and miles. The police were on-scene thinking there must be a terrible accident at the park. But it was people wanting to get into the waterpark for $1. It brought out more people than the park has ever seen, which is typically a good problem. But once the park was at capacity with thousands of more people expecting to receive the offer, people became irate and very angry with staff and other patrons, too.
The lesson learned is that there is such thing as too good of an offer! And to never de-value a brand with a low price point.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My experience has allowed me to learn from a particular person on how not to behave and treat others. I once had a boss who was so smart and media-savvy. She also always got her way. However, the way she got her way was by being aggressive, threatening, and harsh. She would raise her voice and argue with vendors and the media until she ultimately got what she wanted. In most instances, she was right, but the way she could have handled herself is not how I wanted to be. I am more of an avoider of conflict, and her actions made me uncomfortable. I vowed that I would find a different way to be influential and powerful without being offensive and bringing anger into the situations that could be dealt with differently with a better long-term outcome.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Most people who know us would say we stand out because we are woman-owned and women-operated. People really rally behind that. However, that wasn’t necessarily by design! We don’t consider gender when hiring and have just had more females apply for our open positions. Being a marketing company makes branding important to us naturally. And over the years, we’ve noticed a common thread that our clients say about us, and that is that we are on the ball — that we work really hard, are very responsive and get things done. We have taken that feedback and have incorporated it into our moniker and branding components. “DiON Marketing is ON the ball!” is something we use with all of our marketing materials and communications. We also use a beach ball in our visual branding efforts because our offices are at the beach which is a differentiator for us from the other marketing firms in the Jacksonville area.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Creativity: I am fortunate to be born with a creative spirit. Growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, I was always surrounded by creative people. Western North Carolina has always been a popular haven for creative people such as Thomas Wolfe and Carl Sandburg, with its beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains and folk music history of the Appalachia. I grew up in a modest household, and my mother was the best at being creative with what she had. She instilled that in me, and I guess even a more important trait I just realized I got from her is to bloom where you are planted (and do it creatively!).
Tenacity: Maybe it was instilled in me from my coaches growing up playing basketball and volleyball, but I have never been a quitter. I now think about how hard our coaches drove us teenage girls and how I am so grateful and appreciative of the experience. It was a time before everyone got participation trophies for trying — it was when we were taught that winning doesn’t come easy but only to those who give it their all, day in and day out.
indispensability: My father is a man of few words. When I graduated from college, I will never forget what he told me, and I took it to heart. It was to make yourself indispensable. I had to really think on that to understand what he meant. I let it absorb into my mindset, followed his advice, and was determined to make myself indispensable in whatever company I worked for. The advice worked well for me, keeping me focused on finding ways for companies that I worked for to need me. I’ve excelled in every job I had, making it as far as I could go until I decided to open my own firm. Now I use that same trait when working with my clients. We are fortunate to have some of the same clients we started with from 2012!
Are you working on any exciting new projects now?
Yes!
How do you think that will help people?
Because we are woman-owned and women-operated and we see how positive that resonates with other professionals, we are starting to become an inspiration to other women in the marketing industry and to women who want to be leaders inspired by other women. We are developing a 2022 Leadership Summit for Women centered around empowering entrepreneurial women. Our mission is to connect women in Northeast Florida and beyond for the purpose of promoting women owned businesses and celebrating women in innovation, business, and marketing
Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned in the beginning, sometimes companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.
We made a lot of mistakes in the beginning! Luckily, we could use our agency as a guinea pig since our firm was just starting out about the same time that search advertising was becoming a viable tactic for marketers. My experience up until then, just like everyone else’s, was with traditional advertising. But I knew that to get the word out about our marketing firm, we needed to invest in search ads. When we started using the Google platform, we created ads that competed with each other, used keywords that were too broad, and linked ads to pages that were not optimized, which created a high bounce rate, losing the user immediately after clicking through to the website.
Another big mistake companies could make is stopping too soon. PPC advertising often takes some trial and error before a campaign is optimized to perform at its best. The keywords that you thought would be the top-performing might not perform how you expect, or your bids might not be perfect when you first launch. It takes time to try different strategies and make tweaks to get the results that you are looking for. Trust the process and give your campaign a little time before deciding PPC advertising isn’t right for you. Your campaign needs time to collect the necessary data to know what adjustments need to be made.
And another mistake is that some people think once a PPC campaign has been built and launched that there is nothing left to do. The longer that a campaign runs, the more data you will receive about what is working and what isn’t. It’s critical for campaigns to be further optimized to improve results. Furthermore, it is important to check ads daily to make sure the campaigns haven’t stopped running due to a credit card expiring for example, or a simple mistake could happen such as entering the wrong end date. Technical glitches on digital platforms could even happen. Campaigns can also get flagged and paused for various reasons such as ads not abiding to certain rules.
If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.
The blueprint would look like a funnel. Funnel marketing has been widely affective for digital marketers. A marketing funnel breaks down a customer’s journey all the way from the general awareness stage when they first learn about your business to the purchase stage when they’re ready to pull the trigger and buy your product or service. Our “TOFU-MOFU-BOFU” strategy, which refers to the top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel as distinct phases leading to a call to action, keeps our communication efforts focused on achieving the goals set forth and most efficient for advertising spending.
We use the funnel approach when building our client’s marketing plans, and we also include a visual of a funnel for explaining our approach to potential clients in new client proposals.
The City of Clearwater in Florida hired us to create network brand recognition throughout the Tampa Bay region, increasing awareness of partner programs and services, positioning Clearwater, FL as a location with resources to locate a business with the ultimate goal of increasing traffic to its website and phone line. Facebook boosted posts, media outreach and blog writing are tactics for the top of funnel for raising awareness, PPC and LinkedIn advertising are tactics for consideration, the middle of funnel, and retargeting, display advertising and phone call Google search ads are used for converting the audience to either fill out a web form or phone call. So far, our integrated ad campaign has resulted in 122.76% increase in web users!
Let’s talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?
Google Search by far!
We use other PCC platforms like YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, but by far is Google Search the most effective. It makes sense that our click-through rates is higher for Google Search than social channels since people use search engines more than social media to search online. We’ve looked into doing Bing ads and Yahoo ads, too, but since Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining an 92.47 percent market share as of June 2021, over 90% of our PPC efforts are going to focus on Google search, according to Statista.
Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?
The first thing you need for a successful PPC campaign is effective keywords. Keywords must be strategic and designed to maximize your return on investment. The best keywords have a good search volume without being too competitive. Keywords determine how much competition you will face as some have multiple advertisers competing. When your ad copy is optimized with keywords, you can ensure that your ads are shown for the right search queries.
Another thing that is important for a highly successful PPC campaign is choosing the landing page for each ad. Whether you choose to link your ads to an existing page on your site or design a new one, it is important to make sure users can find what they are looking for on that page. Search engines take into account the content on your landing page to ensure that it matches the intent of an ad. Landing pages are also useful ways to help convert users from a PPC campaign by offering them a discount that can only be accessed through the ads.
Lastly, conversion tracking will help you determine which of your PPC campaigns are most effective and will help you make changes to further optimize your campaigns. You can track sales, leads generated, downloads and any other key actions on your website. This data allows you to get a clear picture of what is working and what you need to change to make your campaigns even more effective.
Let’s now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?
No matter what, technology is constantly changing and improving, so adapting to technology is by far the most important insight for successful email marketing, and any type of digital marketing for that matter!
Subject line is king! With everyone’s Inbox receiving dozens of emails each hour (or is that just me?), a strong subject line will determine if the email even gets opened. Another opportunity is the preview line. A lot of email services like Outlook and Gmail allow for a preview line to show up after the subject line. If a preview line is not provided, the email will pick up the first few lines of text that is in the body of the email.
Personalization! We use subscriber data within email content to make the content feel tailor-made for the individual. It can increase open rates and drive revenue. Mail merging will provide your emails with more personalization along with targeting by differentiating groups through email tags
Strong offer/CTA Email marketing is one tactic to achieve marketing goals, and having a strong CTA (call-to-action) with just one click is one of the most efficient ways to get from A to B! And making sure the call to action clicks to the right place may be a no-brainer, but without paying attention to the details, you may forget to update a link from a previous campaign or not even put one in by mistake!
What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?
This year we started using Over the Top (OTT advertising), and it has been wonderful to be able to target so efficiently and effectively using television commercials to reach our audience. Video is so visual and wonderful for showcasing destinations like waterparks and theme parks. We’ve always been big fans the impact of TV advertising, but over the years, it has become so much less cost-efficient than digital alternatives that allow better targeting. Now, with OTT, we can target just like we do other digital channels. Using a CPM (cost per thousand) to compare against other media options will help you negotiate and leverage your campaigns to be as cost-efficient as other digital channels.
I am most passionate about using all the digital tools together, creating a seamless, integrated digital campaign that deems the best results! We do this using the funnel marketing technique.
Here is the main question of our series. Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Be Adaptable — In digital marketing, you are constantly facing new challenges. Trends are always changing and updates to platforms can drastically affect your results, but a successful digital marketer has to be able to adapt and make the best of these changes. There is a lot of trial and error involved in perfecting a campaign so you must be willing to use these challenges to grow in your career.
Keep Learning — In today’s world, technology is changing at an alarming speed. To be a successful digital marketer, it’s important to always continue learning. Keeping up with the newest innovations in the tech industry means that learning will always be part of your job as a digital marketer. New technology can drastically change how you engage or where you focus the majority of your efforts. At the end of 2020, Google released a new version of Google Analytics. This new version came with a learning curve but also has exciting new features that will improve conversion tracking for our clients. Ongoing learning isn’t just about new technology, your willingness to learn about other disciplines can take your career in new directions.
Understand SEO (search engine optimization) The basic role of SEO is to increase exposure of your brand to potential customers on search engines. If you are not specialized in SEO, you don’t have to know the ins and outs of backlinking and technical SEO, but it’s still important to have an understanding of it and how it can impact other parts of digital marketing. For example, keyword research is extremely important in PPC advertising and also for SEO. If you understand where your website ranks among different keywords you can use those to better optimize your campaigns. Does your business always how up on the first page when searching a specific keyword? If so, save your budget for the terms that don’t show your business on the first page of Google results.
Have a Clear Understanding of Sales Funnels — The customer journey is important no matter what part of digital marketing you are specialized in. Marketers need to understand this journey in order to effectively communicate a brand message and convince a potential customer to consider a product or service. It is also important that your communications match what stage of the funnel a person is in.
Be Able to Analyze and Improve your Strategies — Being able to interpret and respond to statistics is a key trait for digital marketers. Fortunately, the rise of digital marketing has given us more data to analyze than ever, but it’s important to keep an eye on all of this data to be able to tell what that means for your company. This can include monitoring sales, web visits, clicks on an ad and more. You can see how your audience is responding to your content across different platforms and tell what is working well. But it goes further than just looking at the data. You will need to be able to implement a response based on your findings to improve your strategy and meet your marketing goals.
What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?
I follow a lot of other marketing firms on social media in other markets to see what other firms are working on, to learn trends and to get ideas. I also use regularly and lean on Ubersuggest to learn SEO skills for our own website and for client applications.
There is a book that I’ve read countless times and provide to my staff as a must-read. It always puts my mindset back into perspective and how I want my agency to thrive and be perceived. That book is called The Power of Nice by Robin Koval and Linda Kaplan Thaler who remind its readers that it pays to be nice. Thaler was CEO and chief creative officer and Koval was president of the The Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency that has since merged with Publicis Group. Where so many companies encourage a dog-eat-dog mentality, The Kaplan Thaler Group has succeeded through chocolates and flowers. In ‘The Power of Nice’ they demonstrate why — contrary to conventional wisdom — nice people finish first.
Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I think movements are born out of passion. When it comes to feeling passionate, I am passionate for those who are actively doing their best with what they have to work. We’ve held suit drives for a local organization who provides resources to people coming out of prison who are trying to get jobs. We’ve supported Beaches Dial-a-Ride, which offers disabled persons and the elderly with affordable transportation and essential services to lead independent, healthy, socially engaging lives. Dial-a-Ride has become a vital means of supporting our local seniors and disabled who would otherwise be homebound.
One day, I’d love to start a movement that would literally start a “movement” towards healthy living. So many people could have survived the pandemic and other diseases if they lived a healthy lifestyle. Exercise, eating right and having a positive mental outlook on life is key for healthy living. It sounds simple, and most people know that, but over 36% of Adults the United States are obese, and another 32.5 are overweight according to Healthline. Obesity is linked to more than 60 chronic diseases, too.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Here’s a link to our website: https://www.dionmarketing.com
We have a blog that is updated monthly on our website and can be found here: https://www.dionmarketing.com/blog-cover
We are also active on social media. Here are our handles:
www.instagram.com/dionmarketing
www.linkedin.com/dionmarketing
www.facebook.com/dionmarketing
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
About The Interviewer: Orlando Zayas is the CEO of Katapult, an award-winning omnichannel payment platform. Zayas is known for his revenue growth strategies and visionary leadership in the eCommerce and retail space. His future-forward expertise has led companies such as GE Capital, Safe-Guard Products International, and DRB Capital. Zayas is also highly committed to providing educational opportunities to underprivileged communities through his philanthropic endeavors. Zayas’ business insights are regularly featured in publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Retail Insights, and more.