About Me

Hi, my name is Masha Mahdavi, and welcome to my blog. 

The purpose of this site

I created this blog to share my observations, ideas, thoughts, and experiences with other marketers and business owners. I have been working with many clients and noticed that many business owners get overwhelmed with the amount of available data. Access to a lot of data means that the metrics that truly matter often get lost in the shuffle. So I hope that by sharing my experiences and thoughts on marketing while focusing on value metrics instead of the volume metrics we often see in the reports can help others to focus on wielding that information to build tailored and robust marketing campaigns. 

Is it a job or a lifestyle? (my story)

I am passionate about digital marketing. I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in Business administration with a focus on marketing in 2008, right at the peak of the economic slowdown when no one was hiring. Even though I have worked as a brand ambassador for many brands such as Axe, Coca-Cola, Dove, and many more, experiential marketing was fun but not where I wanted to focus my career. Digital marketing was barely covered in school (at the time), and I had to know how businesses and brands utilize the internet in their marketing mix. Therefore I got an internship at Machine Shop Marketing, where I got hands-on experience on many campaigns, but they were more social media and PR focused. I wanted to understand the Google algorithms and how sites rank. So after six months, I got another internship at a digital marketing agency, Promoting Group. They were a boutique agency focusing on search engine marketing. Although I started as an intern, over the years, I worked my way up to account manager and then to director of operations. When I started, I had an amazing mentor Daniel Rutberg, who taught me the basics I needed to be able to continue learning on my own. I have never told him, but I am very grateful for his guidance and for igniting the passion I have today for digital marketing. 

While working at Promoting Group, I worked with many clients from law firms, plastic surgeons, and small business owners. This experience gave me insight into how to cater a marketing strategy to different industries and businesses to evaluate their potential ROI and select the appropriate marketing strategies to achieve clients’ unique business goals. It also gave me hands-on experience planning, executing, and, later in my career, overseeing many SEO, Google Ads, and social media campaigns. 

One best part of starting at the bottom and climbing the corporate ladder was that this allowed me to be involved in every aspect of creating and executing a marketing strategy. Whether writing blogs, doing an SEO audit, SEO content strategy, link building, google ads set up and management, or social media calendar planning, designing posts and ads, to analyzing and reporting, I had an opportunity to do it all. And let me tell you that I loved most of it. There is something amazingly rewarding about launching a campaign and watching the data accumulate. There is no grey area; at the end of the day, you know whether your campaign achieved its goals, and if it didn’t, you better understand why and what needs to be done to improve it. I believe that today’s marketers are, in a way, scientists. Yes, we create beautiful ads and come up with calls to action and well-phrased copies; however, at the end of the day, our true superpower lies in collecting the right data and analyzing it to make better decisions. 

Although I enjoyed my time at Promoting Group, after four years, I wanted a change and desired to work in-house. I don’t want to focus on one marketing tactic because my clients either do not understand the benefits or do not have the budget to utilize a multi-channel marketing strategy. Luckily, I saw a job posting for a marketing position at a law firm in Los Angeles, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to work on a marketing campaign in a competitive industry. 

When I started working at Wilshire law firm, we had a small team, but the firm’s owner wanted to grow. During my second week at the firm, I was told to “do what it takes with no budget limitations.” My job was to get more new clients. So that’s what we did. When I left almost four years later, the marketing department grew to 14 team members, and the law firm expanded to two additional floors in the building. 

Although working in-house was a valuable experience that taught me how to integrate marketing strategy with the in-house intake, aka the sales team. It also taught me the intricacies of managing a team of talented and strong-headed individuals while adjusting the marketing strategy as the firm expanded, changed priorities, and added new practice areas. However, the best part of that experience was meeting my now business partner Matt Post. 

I first met Mathew Post for a job interview where I was looking for a unicorn who could do both web development and SEO. It was a challenging position to fill, and I was interviewing for what felt like a lifetime. Our initial interview turned into a nerdy marketing conversation that l lasted hours. We talked about technical SEO, where we saw the industry heading, what it takes to truly move the needle in competitive industries, and much more. While all past interviews were dead set on convincing me what the length of a page should be or how meta keywords should not be ignored (and yes, I rolled my eyes every time I heard that line). Sidebar, how are these still the hot topics in SEO? Anyway… Matt was and is, to the day, one of the best marketing brains I had the pleasure of working with. So starting our marketing agency was an opportunity I was waiting for. I have spent years thinking about going out on my own, but the timing was never right. However, after years of working at an agency and in-house, I was finally ready, and SEM Dynamics was born. 

When we first started SEM Dynamics, we created a set of values that were very important to both of us. Our goal is to ensure that our clients have open, clear, and honest communication from our team. We focus on educating clients and business owners on demystifying digital marketing. There is too much misinformation and marketing should be accessible to everyone. 

I promise I am not always in front of my computer (personal life)

Let’s start at the beginning. I was born in Ukraine, and my family moved to Los Angeles when I was eleven. I consider Los Angeles my home, and I have done everything you would expect from an Angelino. 

• As a teen, I would sneak into a pool hall through the back door because you had to be 18 to enter, and nothing would stop my best friend and me from playing pool, even though we were never good at it. 
• Take advantage of the fantastic live music scene in LA. 
• In college, I spend all my free time rock climbing and often bring my books to study in between. 
• When possible, I would jump into a car when it starts raining in LA and dumping powder in Mammoth. – some of my best memorries. 

I am lucky to have met so many amazing people in my life. One of those amazing friends is now my husband, who inspires, puts up with me, and supports all my whims. 

Recently we moved a few hours outside Los Angeles to get away from the city and to get closer to nature. While we are at it, I figured it’s a good time to get that Master’s degree that I always assumed I would go back to school for but never made time for. Currently, I am in an online Masters’s in Communication Management program at USC. I am going part-time and truly taking advantage of this experience, which will be a few years at my paste.

 What’s Next

I am very fortunate to be able to do what I love for a living. This allows me to not just focus on helping other businesses grow and scale but also educate based on my wins and losses. I want to be able to share this with more than just my close circle of contacts. So, here I will do weekly posts of my journey with emphasis on utilizing data for marketing success. And if anyone has any questions or wants me to cover any specific topics, please feel free to send me an email. I am a nerd at heart so let’s nerd out together.