Get to know… Jen!

What is your role at Vovia?
Director of Online Marketing Strategies. In other words, I work with my team to establish marketing tactics that provide our clients with a competitive edge in the online landscape.

What’s the best part of your job?
I love hearing the excitement in my clients’ voices when they start to see the results that we can deliver. It is awesome helping clients really excel in the online marketing space and a lot of their success is because of my team. I work with a very bright group of individuals that are incredibly reliable, resourceful, and a ton of fun.

What kinds of strategic errors do you see clients making when it comes to online marketing?
The three strategic errors I come across fairly often are:

• Making decisions that aren’t based on research or data that really matters. Google Analytics is a fantastic resource to help understand how people get to your site and navigate through it. If you haven’t dissected your analytics data or are focusing on the wrong metrics, you are missing out on insight!
• Developing a website that isn’t search engine friendly. Consult with your SEO vendor before you build a new site, otherwise you jeopardize the chance of your site coming up in search results and can also risk paying a higher cost per click in Google AdWords.
• Companies that try to do their online marketing in house. A lot of times companies will dedicate someone internally to manage online marketing campaigns and many other tasks on top of that. Online marketing is a science and is changing all the time. If you don’t have someone who really knows what they are doing or has the time to really focus on this, you risk running campaigns that don’t perform well. Unfortunately, most companies that do this don’t understand it enough to even know if their campaigns are performing well.

We heard you’ve traveled to 17 countries…Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, Mexico, US, Costa Rica, Cuba, Turks & Caicos, Vietnam, Bermuda….next on the list – Tanzania (I want to dive with whale sharks!) 

Which is your favorite and why?
It’s really tough to pick one as my favourite. Each one is unique and awesome for different reasons. Overall, my top 5 countries are:

• Backpacking India for two months: The culture, religion, and people – every day in India was jaw dropping. I’ll never forget having to enter a rat temple barefoot.
• Komodo Island National Park, Indonesia: Diving with 18 foot manta rays, massive sharks, and fish the size of my car. Not to mention seeing 12 foot komodo dragons with venomous saliva dripping from their tongues.
• Vietnam: Food! Pho and hot pots for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
• Cambodia: Angkor Wat is mind blowing.
• Thailand: Beaches, beaches, and more beaches…not to mention sleeping in beach huts!

What would be your luxury item on Survivor?
Snake repellent! Having a pit viper fall out of a tree in front of me, along with having a python wrapped above my hotel room door are some of the examples of how snakes seem to have a way of finding me!