An Interview with Lena Milcarek
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Lena Milcarek, who’s works in the Marketing Consulting industry. She is a marketing director and founder, and her companies include Lena Milcarek LLC, Benson SEO, and Studio Rubric. I met Lena in 2018 while interning for Studio Rubric while she was the marketing consultant for Marc Maron’s website we were building for his podcast, WTF.
The main questions I had for Lena were mainly about her day-to-day tasks and projects since I am interested in data analytics and marketing as a future career path. She was very thorough in our interview and provided me with a great deal of information about her background and current line of work.
When Lena started out of college, she worked at a travel agency as a marketing coordinator. Once she learned about SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing/paid search), she knew that there was opportunity in that market since most people used Google as a way to research and make purchase decisions. So, she started taking on freelance work, side jobs, and online courses to quickly increase her "years of experience" and then landed a job at Jos A. Bank as their SEM/SEO Specialist. From there, Lena moved into software and business-to-business operations at Cision. She moved from Paid Search to SEO and finally to director of demand generation. However, she felt the company was volatile and there was little job security.
Due to this, she started working mostly as a freelance agent in her spare time with Benson SEO and Studio Rubric until she felt she was in a good place, in terms of client hours to move into full time consulting. Now, Lena works with a few different companies doing digital marketing (SEM/SEO/Paid Social/Analytics) for a wide variety of industries. She discussed how it was intimidating at first to not have a set income, but she has come to love the flexibility in scheduling and input. Lena emphasized that it is also important to highlight that many of her current clients are former coworkers and bosses. We then discussed how this is something to consider with all professional relationships in that you will never know where a relationship will go. So, her word of advice to me is to treat everyone well and take ownership in your work and expertise.
We then discussed several topics in the marketing industry, which allowed me to gain an idea of what it is truly like to work as a marketing consultant. Lena offered extensive info on how Google uses sponsored advertisements and paid “placement boxes” to help businesses when people use this search engine. For example, she explained that in her work, she will view group patterns and demographic data in order to build reports for companies so they can understand how to increase their internet traffic. I was surprised by this because I was unaware of the depth and intensity that is put into gaining internet traffic for a company’s website. I found all of this information very interesting and useful, and definitely have become even more interested in the field of marketing.
