She says she’s not a flashy person. Isn’t a yellow shoes type of gal. And yet, here she sits, reclining on a couch with yellow sneakers discarded on the floor next to her, revealing socks with an eye-catching sloth pattern. And they aren’t even her only pair of sloth-themed socks.
Arianna Henry, Engenius’s new Digital Ad Specialist and Project Coordinator, may just have to come to terms with her subtle flashiness. It wouldn’t be the only thing she’s learned about herself lately.
She embarked on her new role at Engenius in September 2021 and began to realize that she enjoys the troves of data she has access to. In the digital marketing world, data is incredibly valuable. It helps her to see which landing pages are and aren’t converting, which miniscule tweaks make noticeable differences in ad performance, and how money can be redirected when seemingly good keyword matches aren’t yielding conversions in a crowded field.
It’s a little bit of alchemy, a science mixed with an art, that Arianna is fully embracing it, even though she knows that online advertising can be a bit of a nuisance at times. “You annoy people, and that’s part of it,” she says, “but you don’t want it to be hard for people who actually need your services to find you. We’re not trying to sell people things that they don’t actually need.
“You have to make something that’s engaging and that people actually want to buy. You can’t lose sight of that.”
Hers is a role that is constantly in flux. She works with Google Ads along with ads on Facebook and LinkedIn, requiring her to be mindful of how people use each platform as well as strategic best practices. She is part digital marketing coordinator, part ad strategist, and part client liaison working to keep them up-to-date on their ad campaigns.
Arianna had a lighter workload on the day of our interview, so she devoted much of her day to professional development, like reading on the latest advertising trends.
Reading is an important part of Arianna’s life. She is currently four books shy of her goal of 24 books read in 2021. She doesn’t confine herself to one genre–this year alone, she’s devoured diverse titles, from C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce to Greek mythology to the millennial-rite-of-passage volume Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
In fact, in a roundabout way, her love of reading is responsible for her move to Greenville. She migrated south to attend Bob Jones University as an English Literature major from her hometown of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania (which, for trivia buffs, is the Keystone State’s only town, thanks to Pennsylvania’s convoluted municipal classification system that includes townships, boroughs, cities…and Bloomsburg).
Arianna met her husband, Sam, while they were both Bob Jones students. Thanks in part to credits earned while participating in international mission trips, she was able to graduate a semester early, in December 2019. They were married in January 2020 and settled into their home in Greenville, a place she doesn’t see herself leaving anytime soon.
Even some of her close-knit family is in Greenville. She and Sam invite two of her younger siblings, both currently enrolled at Bob Jones, over for pizza each Sunday night.
But part of the excitement of Greenville is the opportunity to serve clients better. Sure, she loves the restaurant scene and the fact that basically anything you could ever need is within a day’s drive. Dig a little deeper, however, and it’s easy to see the passion she has for her job.
“There’s so much room for growth with digital marketing,” she observed. “We work with a lot of small, local businesses that don’t have big budgets that they can put into digital marketing. I want to help them serve their clients and meet them where they are.”
And she’s clearly excited about the possibilities: “I don’t know that we’ve even scratched the surface of what we can do.”
Start the Conversation
Interested in learning more about how our agency and can help your business?
