Parisa Bady Of Meros Media On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t forget to build up your own brand. Sometimes digital marketers get so focused on helping their clients to build up their brand that they forget about their own digital marketing company’s branding.

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 Parisa Bady, CEO of Meros Media.

Parisa Bady merged her background in engineering and project management to become the founder and CEO of Meros Media. She believes in using data-driven approaches and strategic blueprints to help businesses expand and grow. In 2018 Bady started Meros Media as a one-person company, primarily focusing on growing private medical practices. The Iranian native has since grown the business, welcoming 20 employees, and accumulating an impressive roster of high-profile clients, including Cellaxys, Solaris, and The Sanctuary.

The impressive entrepreneur obtained her undergraduate Bachelor of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 2013 from Sharif University of Technology, widely known as Iran’s top engineering school and one of the most highly accredited universities in Asia. Bady continued on to work as a quality manager at an automotive manufacturing company in Iran before moving to the United States in 2011.

Determined to live the American dream, Parisa Bady moved as a 21-year-old immigrant, carrying everything she owned and a few hundred dollars in her pocket. Bady was excited to reach the traditional milestones of adulthood, diving right into higher education. She attended the University of Texas at Arlington, taking on a research assistant position while working to earn her Master of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering.

Upon graduation, Bady secured a position as a project manager at Metco Engineering. In 2013, she accepted a position at a 15 billion-dollar company, TE Connectivity, where she worked as the youngest project manager in the company’s history. After multiple years in the engineering and project management space, Bady decided to say farewell to the corporate world and become her own boss.

However, it wasn’t an easy road, after starting a couple of failed businesses due to a lack of marketing efforts I learned that a lot of businesses fail — not because of products or services or even operations — but mainly because of a lack of right marketing strategies and implementation.

Through her role as CEO at Meros Media, Bady has encouraged and led her clients to incorporate philanthropy into their strategic communication campaigns. Bady has spearheaded multiple charitable campaigns including matching donations for Relay For Life, providing a $5,000 donation to Veteran’s Care Charity in honor of Military Appreciation Month, and making a generous donation to the relief and recovery efforts in Ukraine in March of 2022.

In May 2022, the multi-faceted entrepreneur was included in Real Vegas Magazine’s prestigious honor, “Women Who Wow.”

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 started off in the engineering space, earning my undergraduate Bachelor of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 2013 from Sharif University of Technology, (widely known as Iran’s top engineering school and one of the most highly accredited universities in Asia). I then went on to work as a quality manager at an automotive manufacturing company in Iran before moving to the United States in 2011.

I came to the United States as a 20-year-old immigrant, carrying everything I owned and a few hundred dollars on me, willfully determined to live the American dream. I wanted more than anything to reach the traditional American milestones of adulthood, so I began to further my education. I enrolled at the University of Texas at Arlington and took on a research assistant position while working to earn my Master of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering.

After graduation, I secured a position as a project manager at Metco Engineering. Then in 2013, I accepted a position at a 15 billion-dollar company, TE Connectivity, where I worked as the youngest project manager in the company’s history!

After multiple years in the male-dominated engineering and project management space, I decided to say goodbye to the corporate world and start my own strategic media marketing agency — and that’s how Meros Media was born.

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?

Yes, I do!

So, I first started Meros Media as a single-person company and since it was just me I was convinced that I had to prove to my clients that I could do better than a company with a whole team. As a result, I spent all of my time focusing on producing results for my clients, sometimes even forgetting to eat.

Finally, I realized that there are talented individuals that can achieve better results than I could if they had the right manager. I came to the revelation that my biggest role in the company is hiring the best people for the specific role in each project.

I learned that it’s okay not to do everything myself and that sometimes it’s necessary to delegate work to others and in some cases those who are more capable. If I had kept going the way I was, then I probably would’ve burnt out by now and wouldn’t have allowed my business to reach the success it has.

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 husband is my greatest supporter and my rock. He’s also a leader in the medical field and just seeing how empathetic he is towards his patients inspired me to want to help private medical practices and clinics with their digital marketing.

My husband helped me to better understand the medical industry, which helped me gain the ability to better digitally market for medical practices. He always says ‘we are healing the world together,’ — him through his medicine and me through helping market cutting-edge private medical practices, thereby increasing awareness of these medical practices.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Meros Media mixes creativity with analytics. We have an amazing team, comprised of talented and unique individuals who complement each other by merging aspects of the creative world with numbers and analytics. Utilizing the leverage of an analytic mindset, we make decisions that are in the best interest of our clients and set them up for success, taking the guesswork out of marketing.

My media company has ample experience marketing medical practices, which makes us stand out from companies that work with companies in a variety of different industries.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Absolutely — I’m helping brand and market a very innovative and technologically advanced medical clinic called Cellaxys. This project is particularly fascinating because the clinic uses the power of orthobiologics and the body’s healing mechanisms to help patients extend their youth and live a much higher quality of life.

I really love projects like this because they allow me to connect people with medical professionals who will help improve their health and quality of life.

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.

The biggest mistake I see in the beginning phases of digital marketing is not having a unified brand and messaging that resembles the target audience. People often advertise based on what they “think” their target audience wants and likes, not what they actually want. Marketing is a psychological game, you have to enter the minds of your target audience and think the way they think.

It is crucial to target your marketing campaigns to your target audience or ideal customer, speaking to them in a language they understand.

I ask my clients to describe their target audience during the onboarding process, and many of them can’t do it. They’re afraid to specify their target audience because they don’t want to exclude anyone and lose customers. However, trying to appease everyone is actually counterproductive. Brands that define their target audience have better digital marketing success. Many clients don’t understand that digital marketers need to empathize with their audience to succeed.

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.

In my experience, a successful digital marketing campaign, specifically for cash-based medical practices, is comprised of a combination of 4 key elements:

1. High-Value Patient acquisition, which includes lead and opportunity management, designing the patient journey, marketing automation, Email/SMS marketing, and webinars.
2. Robust sales Blueprint development, which includes sales and conversion training, patient care plan presentation, customize sales processes, and a patient follow-up framework.
3. Establish Market Authority: Social media presence, high visibility on google through SEO practices, creating a unique brand identity, patient testimonials, and content library.
4. Last but not least — Reactivating the current patient list through direct mail, email newsletter, SMS campaigns, and retargeting digital ads.

By implementing this blueprint we have doubled our medical client’s business in less than 3 years!

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?

My favorites are Google and Facebook ads. The most popular ad network is Google Ads because of its reach and Google’s high search engine volume. Billions of searches are typed into Google’s search engine a day, making it an ideal platform for PPC advertising. Additionally, both Facebook and Google allow you to target a specific audience, ensuring that your ads get in front of the right users.

Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?

1. Determine your ad goals prior to starting your PPC campaign, this way you have a way of measuring the success and efficacy of the campaign.
2. Use market research to identify and empathize with your target audience, so that you can use messaging that they understand. I always start by identifying the biggest problem or challenge that the target audience faces, and then try to market how they’d feel if they solved that issue.
3. Choose the right platform for your brand to run your PPC campaign. For example, if a majority of your target audience uses YouTube then run your ad campaign on YouTube. If you are targeting an older audience, utilize Facebook or Google.

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?

1. Clean your email list! Cleaning your email list to ensure email deliverability is the foundational first step of any email marketing campaign. This step needs to be repeated every few months. Email deliverability can drastically impact your email marketing campaign and your ability to even send emails.
2. Put extra effort into your subject line. The subject line determines whether or not your email will be opened, deleted immediately, or worse — sent to spam. Never use all caps in your subject line. Also, don’t type your whole email in the subject line, I’ve been seeing people do that a lot lately.
3. Make sure the design of your email is visually appealing and aligns with your brand. For example, have you ever gotten an email that looks like a bunch of gobbly goop, and if so, did you trust that brand? Most people would answer no, so make sure your emails look professional.

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?

Canva is my absolute favorite tool! Canva is a graphic design tool that makes digital design super easy. I love it because I’m more of a strategizer, not a designer but with Canva I can create some really professional and clean designs for my marketing campaigns or help establish a client’s brand.

Hotjar is an extremely useful tool that functions as an analytics & feedback program, allowing marketers to track user behavior on the website. This is a great way to measure human behavior with easy metrics that you can understand and check if your website is meeting its established marketing goals.

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?

1. Empathy — A skilled digital marketer is able to empathize with the target audience, placing themselves in the target audience’s shoes and understanding the ins and outs of their struggle.
2. Align your messaging to how your target audience speaks. People tend to enjoy being around people that are similar to them, so to gain the trust of your audience, you must build a rapport with the target demographic.
3. Appeal to your audience’s emotions. You’ll have better luck selling a feeling than product benefits, for example, if I said that these new earphones have no wire that’d be a feature. If I said, experience the freedom of wire-free headphones, that’s a feeling. As much as we like to believe that as humans we’re rational creatures, the truth is that we run on emotion and then fabricate rationalizations after.
4. Don’t forget to build up your own brand. Sometimes digital marketers get so focused on helping their clients to build up their brand that they forget about their own digital marketing company’s branding.
5. Remain open to learning new strategies and techniques. The one thing guaranteed in life is change, and the same is true in the digital marketing sphere. As new technologies and innovations are brought to market, digital marketing strategies will change. The best way to stay on top of your game is to constantly stay updated with what is going on in the realm of digital marketing.

What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?

I listen to the Marketing School podcast a lot. It’s a digital marketing podcast, that talks about helpful online marketing tips. The hosts are Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

The Online Marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield podcast is also pretty good! I listen to this one a lot while I’m driving. The host does a great job of breaking down complex ideas and strategies into actionable steps, that’ll actually help to maximize the success of your digital marketing strategy.

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. 🙂

Wow, that’s a great question!

If I could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, I would start a movement to have more emotional fulfillment in life. I believe that regardless of someone’s financial or relationship status, it’s possible to be more emotionally fulfilled by making small adjustments to the way we perceive things.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I would love for your readers to follow my work! My digital marketing website is MerosMedia.com and my LinkedIn page is: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parisasahebi/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

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Parisa Bady Of Meros Media On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, &… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.