Lori Shepard, momentum director, FRWD
Lori Shepard is leading efforts to help brands make bigger gains by continuously taking small steps as the momentum director at FRWD, a Minneapolis-based full-service digital marketing agency.
Shepard, working in a newly created role at FRWD (pronounced Forward), said her goal is to help make better decisions with their digital marketing investments. She is leading strategy and execution of integrating paid, owned and earned media tactics to help clients meet their business goals.
"The best, highest-performing campaigns I've worked on have been campaigns that are incremental, meaning that they're not just one thing that has a start date and an end date," Shepard said. "It's something you build on. That's the core of the FRWD mentality."
Shepard checks social media listening tools, website analytics and other data daily to find new steps to take and check results of previous efforts.
"FRWD has a way of talking about making small moves every day," Shepard said. "It really aligns with my perspective on digital marketing and how important the details are to performance."
Shepard previously worked on digital marketing solutions for brands including American Express, Anytime Fitness, Target, Red Wing Shoes and Crystal Farms. She also worked for the New York Times and Time Inc. in New York City, creating integrated ad programs.
Q: What's your approach to brands as momentum director?
A: Often my job as a marketer is to give products a little push in visibility and sometimes they take on a life of their own and that's what you want to have happen. A lot of times I feel like I'm not only steering clients into a direction where they're making better investment decisions but I'm also steering brands into wider audiences. That's what I like about the title because it's about pushing brands into new places.
Q: Why do you like working that way?
A: I'm highly competitive so you're always competing against the performance of what you did before. You always have something that you're trying to improve upon. You're always looking at yesterday's number to beat, last year's number to beat. You're making progress every single day. That's way more rewarding.
Q: How has FRWD's approach to content marketing changed?
A: We've been more focused on paid media where now as brands are becoming less campaign-driven and more content-driven we're looking at having a bigger influence in the owned and earned space. We're trying to find content that buzzworthy in that earned space. We nailed the paid in the past and now we're looking at it from a full, 360 of what we can do in the content marketing space.
Todd Nelson
