Janelle Zacherl
October 29, 2020
We had a chat with Megan Ingram, Founder of Ingram Digital Consulting, who is based in Washington, DC. She is passionate about social media marketing, sports, fashion, coffee, and DATA! Megan leads a team of fearless advertising freelancers to help brands identify their unique story with digital analytics, SEO, digital strategy, creative production, and measurement. Read the full interview below.
Believe it or not, my 1st job was in accounting working for a public accounting firm, Grant Thornton. Shortly after, I realized numbers by themselves are a bit boring and headed to grad school to pursue marketing. In grad school, I fell in love with digital marketing and took a class by Professor Andrew Stephen on social media marketing and I was all in. I worked in a traditional digital marketing role managing a digital marketing program for a healthcare company, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and soon after got propositioned about joining an advertising and PR agency.
My 1st agency job was at Finn Partners in digital insights and got an amazing opportunity to work with clients across many services and applications from non profit, start-up, tech, and government in DC using social data to provide insights to account teams and clients. A few years later, I got an offer to join a large advertising and PR agency, Fleishman Hillard and was an integral part of their YouTube/Google account. It was an eye opening experience. I learned so much about the social media space and worked with many smart, brilliant people on cool cutting edge tools like Crimson Hexagon (now Brand Watch), Global Web Index, Julius, and more.
My most recent role before starting Ingram Digital Consulting was with start up, all-remote agency, and freelance platform Work Sandy. I got the chance to manage freelancer teams, which really shifted how I thought about advertising staffing and the way we work. My combined experience has helped me understand what it takes to build a business from the ground up but also understand what it takes to manage a large advertising account and how the big boys operate to be successful.
The core mission of the agency and tagline is ‘Your Brand. Your Story.’ but also embraces freelance advertising, digital nomad lifestyle, diversity, and a culture shift away from agency of record to project based, freelance work.
After leaving my last role due to some unfortunate COVID events, I really had time and space for the 1st time to really take inventory of all my collective digital marketing and agency experiences. What did I love and what did I hate? As a result, I created Ingram Digital Consulting which embodies my inspiration for not only digital analytics and digital strategy but my personal passions of sports, fashion, and food to create an authentic, unique agency brand. We want to be held accountable to our teams and work with 6-month contracts creating transparency across both account and client teams. I’m very excited about the path we’re already on and can’t wait to share more in the coming months as we get ready to kick off 2021 with a bang.
I’m a sports data geek and one of the reasons the NBA is my favorite sports league is it embodies all the things I love - sports, influencers, diversity, and fashion. I started teaching myself how to be a data analyst by scraping off social data about NBA athletes for fun (I know data geek). I love diving deep into sports analytics to make arguments for a team and player. A few years ago, I attended the MIT Sports Analytics Conference in Boston for fun because I love seeing the incredible things going in eSports and sports analytics, which are often at the cutting edge of media technology like AI, virtual reality, and AR. For any of my fellow data geeks out there, I highly recommend Tableau Public its a great way to showcase your analytics hobby with topics you are passionate about and helps sharpen those analytic skills.
I’m a big believer in work from anywhere and making your environment work for you. For me personally, I’m a WFA lifer but that being said, it doesn’t work for everyone. I want to be flexible and work with our team to unleash their most productive, efficient self. The most important thing is to be agile to any work environment and that to me is what work from anywhere stands for. We’re probably a few years away from any office space but I could see a future where we had a co-working space in the city when things start to get semi normal again.
I’m an Instagram junkie. I am just in love with the visual aesthetic of the platform and combine my favorite passions of photography with sports, food, fashion, and lifestyle. I’ve started diving into video and podcasts and am really loving the combination of IGTV with Reels and where the future of video and audio is heading. Teaser: we will be launching a podcast next year and will be recording Season 1 in Q1 so definitely keep your eye out (and for my digital influencers out there I’m always looking for guests).
Twitter is a close second with its speed, pace, and quality of digital marketers who use the channel brilliantly. Many social media and digital leaders have really helped propel Digital Marketing and Freelance Twitter such as Matthew Kobach, Jack Appleby, Michelle Garrett, and Madalyn Sklar to use the channel not only for building community and engagement but even job prospects.
“Social media marketing is about creating content that brings your audience together as a community and inspiring authentic conversations while increasing your brand's awareness.”
“The brands that win are the brands that tell a great story. When it comes to transmedia storytelling, the brands that win are the brands that tell many great stories and are able to connect them all together.”
“Unstructured data - harvested from blogs, forums, reviews and social media - is a rich source for studying human interaction and behaviour”
Find Megan on social @thedataoutlier on Twitter and LinkedIn.
October 29, 2020
