Welcoming Christian Bullock to the MKG Team

We're extremely happy to official announce:

Christian Bullock has joined MKG Marketing as our Director of Paid Search Marketing.

Christian joins us from Amplify Interactive, a search marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon, and brings more than seven years of paid search experience across a number of different clients & verticals with him.

Specific to our working relationship, Christian is going to lead the charge in establishing paid search best practices and driving measurable results for our clients who utilize our paid search marketing expertise.

In properly welcoming him to the team, we wanted to let Christian tell us a little more about himself.

So without further ado ...

How did you get into the digital marketing industry?

It was pretty accidental, to be honest! After graduating from Washington State University (go Cougs!), I did what many tend to do: move back home with your parents. After about a week of watching The Price is Right and eating extremely sugary cereal for all three of my daily meals, I started looking for marketing jobs. I came across an ad that talked about "search marketing" and had never heard about it before (this is after majoring in Communications with an emphasis in Advertising). Read up a little about the fairly burgeoning industry at the time, thought it was something I could really prosper at, and the rest is history.

Why do you like working in the digital marketing industry (and paid search specifically)?

I feel like paid search strikes a great balance between art and science. The "art" aspect is learning about a client's industry, reading up on not only their solutions but who their competitors are and what their solutions entail, and figuring out the best way to cram a key benefit into a fairly restricted number of characters for a paid search ad. It's challenging but it's also pretty fun to learn about new industries.

The "science" aspect is all about testing. After you create different versions of ad copy: which one will outperform the others? After running an experiment and digging through the results,  why did one ad copy variation outperform the others? What's the next test? I definitely feel like I should be wearing a lab coat when I'm head-down in Excel worksheets and analyzing data.

What do you like to do for fun?

After watching ice hockey for years and loving the sport, I recently made the decision to start playing. One thing you should know: ice is slippery! Especially when you're wearing a shoe with a big, long blade on the bottom of it! This past summer my twin brother and I purchased hockey equipment, started taking skating lessons (because we needed to actually learn how to skate) and began playing for the Rangers, a C-level league team. We're currently in our league playoffs, but I'm happy to say that during my first "regular season" I had a goal, two assists and a handful of penalties. Pretty good!

I also like spending time with my family. Not that I'm biased, but I have the best daughter a Dad could ever ask for. My wife is a speech language pathologist and has gotten a kick out of analyzing her "babble" speech sounds and teaching her sign language.