Olga Andrienko

Semrush launched an unlimited PTO (Paid Time Off) policy for all employees.

Feel very excited about the new initiative that takes us one step further toward more productive, proactive, and conscious work relationships.

Unlimited PTO allows any employee to take time off at any time they want. This is all about trust and ownership. We don’t track hours - we track results.  
Letting people choose when they need to pause and recharge is the best way to reward them for their hard work. And promotes a healthier work-life balance.

Even before this policy, I approved vacations for my team in 99% of cases. My ask was to take less vacation in two months of the whole year because they are the busiest, but even then up to a week was always approved.

When I am concerned about someone taking vacation days, I am not concerned about their time off, I am actually concerned about their work. If someone's time off bothers me or the team, it’s a sign to have a retrospective or discuss the performance and expectations. That’s why for me unlimited PTO is a 100% great idea.

As with remote work in general, this practice is not something that executives should not be afraid to implement. Remote is the environment where you operate on trust and have little control over your team’s time. When you give people more autonomy and they perceive it with higher accountability - you get a more reliable and productive work atmosphere as the result.

#unlimitedpto #worklifebalance #team #trust #semrush

Brand marketing should drive revenue 
You won’t measure ROI of every activity, but it doesn’t mean you should report on likes and impressions

📐 Website traffic: Monitor the number of visitors and where they come from. An increase in direct traffic can indicate growing brand recognition. Same for referral and organic search brand traffic.

If you can aim for traffic/new unique visitors, then you can predict the conversion rates (just take the basic company-wide ones, you’ll be wrong 5 or 10 times but then you will adjust and build your own conversion models based on what you actually got).

📐 Revenue growth: Ultimate metric would be the financial indicators - purchases, subscriptions, MRR - whatever you report on. Monitor both short-term spikes that correlate with your biggest campaigns or spikes in any of the traffic channels.

📐 Brand’s visibility: Measure how well your target audience recognizes and remembers your brand. Analyze search volume data, social media mentions - you need to see a consistent positive trend there.

📐 Engagement metrics: Track likes, shares, comments, and follower growth. High engagement YoY indicates a strong brand connection. That is true only if you have your target audience as your social media community.

📐 Market share and share of voice: Analyze your position in the market relative to competitors and share of voice - a % of brand mentions relative to major competitors. Always analyze the growth, not only one point in time.

📐 Return on investment (ROI): Calculate the cumulative ROI. PR sometimes reports on how much the publication would cost if it was sponsored. Many reporting and analytics tools still have similar metrics. Social media team included media value in their ROI because what we do on social often appears in marketing media after. It might also be cost savings like ORM and crisis mitigations.

📐 Ratings on review platforms: this is not only about the customer satisfaction, but about influencing the buyer’s decisions. It is crucial to have a competitive score since 71% of B2B buyers (G2 data) look at reviews during the consideration phase when deciding between products.

📐 Sentiment: We periodically track sentiment in communities, identify the unfavorable views, improve it and then measure the sentiment again. In huge communities like Reddit this could bring a strong increase in word of mouth (which brings more increases in brand mentions and search volume).

#brandmarketing #metrics #marketingtips

2013: Joined Semrush as a Social Media Manager.

Applied because it was open - would've applied for any other marketing/sales position.

2014-2015: Built our community and my team. Became Head of Social. Started speaking for Semrush. First conference - AdTech London.

2016: Community grew from 2k to 80k. Our Twitter chat became a hit in the SEO community.

2017: Promoted to Head of Global Marketing, leading expansion to Asia, Latam, Northern Europe, and Middle East.

2018: Department grew to 60+ people across 13 teams. Felt increased responsibility, but still acted more like a mentor than a manager. Became the main face of the brand. Spoke at major SEO conferences like BrightonSEO, SMX and Pubcon.

2019: My burnout year. Too many direct reports, too many projects and too much travel. About to move to our HQ in Boston.

2020-2021: Promoted to VP of Brand Marketing. Led IPO comms and rebranding. Brand became crucial post-IPO. Revamped social media and reputation management. Identified advertising as my knowledge gap.

2022-2023: Took charge of the creation of our largest multimillion marketing campaigns. Went from beginner to advanced in creative advertising. Hired a new team of FMCG and retail marketers to scale our efforts.

2024: Streamlined Brand to four teams, including our Academy. Kicked off our marketing efforts for Semrush Enterprise platform. Got green light for our own marketing conference.

Always in growth mode, and always excited for what comes next.

Looking forward to my 12th year at Semrush.

P.S. I was late for my job interview.