Meet Sara Johnson | Digital Marketer & Agency Founder

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sara Johnson and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sara, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I was working at a large agency in Chicago doing digital media buying on the search marketing. I was trying to pay off student loans so I was helping smaller agencies around town with their digital media. During that work, I realized that small agencies were struggling to learn digital media because the engines didn’t pay any attention to them because their budgets weren’t big enough. I loved helping them and getting them best in class and following best practices so it inspired me to quit my full-time job and freelance full-time. The need was so big that now we’re a team of 15 helping marketing departments and agencies big and small have analytics driven digital media advertising using tools like Facebook/Instagram ads, Google Ads and banner/video/audio ads.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
We focus all of our efforts in digital media, so we do strategy and execution for advertising on search channels, social channels and digitial banners/videos. When I worked at large agencies, this type of work was often very time-consuming and we found ourselves working nights and weekends consistently to get campaigns live. We couldn’t just call the rep and have them do it, we had a login and that was it. We also didn’t get a chance to do anything well so we couldn’t analyze performance or build sound strategies for what we SHOULD be doing, we were always just racing to the next thing. One of the things that we’re most proud of and what sets us apart is our approach. Our core focus is becoming experts in the platforms, learning how to get the most from them and using data and analytics to guide our decisions on what to do next. One of our mottos is “work smarter, not harder” so we implement automation and processes for repeatable work so that our attention is on analysis, testing and enhancing the performance. We work with agencies and marketing departments giving them peace of mind that the work is being done well, performance is going in the right direction and we’re learning from what we’re doing.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Lisa Dobias and the Texas Media Program at the University of Texas has been one of the biggest contributors to my career and business. Through her program, she taught me what good media planning looks like and instilled in the the art and the science of targeting the right audiences with the channels available. Through that program, I was able to recognize what bad media planning looks like. Most of my peers were introduced to digital media through being hired at an agency and the training was maybe a day. That’s why I spend my day seeing what could be better in terms of targeting the right audience and using the tools to get the most return as she taught me the foundation of how to do that.

Website: https://leadlabmedia.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsonsara/

Image Credits
Levi Walker https://leviwalker.com/