Right Side Up Talent Spotlight: Kyra Serio

The Right Side Up Talent Spotlight series profiles some of our full-time employees and growth marketing consultants. We chatted with them to learn about their incredible professional experiences, expert marketing insights, and how they’re balancing work and life.

Kyra Serio | Project Strategy

Kyra Serio is a growth marketer who specializes in driving sustainable growth for D2C ecommerce brands. She’s passionate about developing solid growth strategies while fostering a supportive, people-first culture for her teams. She is part of the project strategy team at Right Side Up (RSU).

Tell us about what you do at Right Side Up.

I just joined RSU as a project strategist about a month ago. In this role, I have the privilege of working with clients on crafting strategies to solve their toughest growth marketing hurdles and connecting them with top-tier talent that is able to support them in achieving their goals. 

It’s been so wonderful to get to know the team at RSU. You hear in onboarding processes that people are helpful and all of those things, but here, people are not only kind and helpful, they’re also looking to improve and welcome feedback. I’m continually shocked by the caliber of colleagues, clients, and talent I get to talk to every single day. It’s a different level of expertise. At other companies, you have a handful of people that know what they're doing, but here, everyone is expert level. I’m a lifelong learner and couldn’t be more thrilled to get to learn from these people day in and day out.

What were you doing before Right Side Up?

I started my career at a startup agency focusing on mid-market retail brands that were trying to find their footing in the new, digital world. I had the opportunity to work with Vineyard Vines, a northeastern apparel staple, on scaling their paid social strategy. Through re-engineering dynamic product ads to ingest and prioritize margin for a SKU-heavy catalog and introducing a highly segmented account structure that allowed for very specific audience and creative mapping, we took a stagnated program and turned it around to be a large growth driver for the business. This project sparked my fascination with how to work with algorithms.

After learning the ins and out of executional digital marketing across all digital performance channels at the agency, I jumped over to Facebook to get a peek behind the curtain of what was actually going on with these advertising algorithms. Here, I got to advise SMB D2C ecommerce brands such as Tonal, TYME, Helix Sleep, Saatva Mattress, Rhoback, OneBlade, Resonance Companies, Love Your Melon, and many more on their growth strategies. Outside of client work, I was a key contributor to the go-to-market strategy for Conversions API within Facebook’s ecommerce SMB segment, successfully rallying our team to onboard the largest percent of clients within the first three months of the product becoming available.

After working at an agency and tech-side, I made the move to client-side at Tonal. This role allowed me to combine my passion for leading teams and crafting innovative strategies to unlock growth. There, I led a small but mighty team that successfully cut our Facebook ads CPA in half while simultaneously launching four new channels within CAC targets. While it was great to see the numbers our team was driving, what was even more special was the magic of my team’s culture and hearing directly from my reports that they didn’t know working in a remote environment could feel as connected and supportive as their previous in-person positions. I pride myself in having a supportive, people-first leadership style and was incredibly proud of the team I built there.

What excites you about the future of growth marketing?

Growth marketing excites me because there is always a problem to be solved and an opportunity to innovate. Just as soon as you think you have cracked the code, something inevitably changes and you are back to the drawing board to think creatively and critically about your next move. The best part of all, is that we can root our decisions in data. Getting to craft easy-to-understand narratives around complicated concepts and data sets to help people have “ah-ha” moments and really understand why we make the moves we do is incredibly rewarding.

With the industry evolving so rapidly, growth marketing looks very different from the beginning of my career. Platform algorithms are crazy sophisticated and the amount of data brands are now sitting on unlocks incredible new opportunities. Layer in the drastic ecosystem shift of iOS14, and we now have a whole new set of considerations and obstacles.

The privacy-centric direction of growth marketing’s future is very interesting. Big tech is focused on privacy-first product updates like Apple’s rollout of ATT prompts in iOS14 and Google’s plans to remove cookies in the coming years. Toss in continued government regulation similar to CCPA and GDPR and it creates a very opaque ecosystem for performance marketers to navigate through. 

While attribution has always been tricky, missing data sets from these privacy enhancements is making it even trickier. Especially for smaller brands that don’t have expansive martech resources and customer data sets. With less granular visibility into data, I think this will push growth marketers to incorporate more traditional marketing tactics like brand building, brand positioning, and partnerships. 

We are already seeing this play out with creative being a key indicator of performance in digital channels and the rise of influencer marketing/creator economy—both of which will only continue to become more important. I’m excited to see us humanize growth marketing by balancing personalization, brand relatability, and authenticity.

What has Right Side Up’s flexible structure allowed you to do outside of work?

Right Side Up’s working model has allowed me to move closer to my family and dedicate more time to the activities that fuel me. I live in a small town in northeast Texas called Atlanta, commonly confused with Atlanta, GA. Word around town is that the settlers of Atlanta, TX were moving west from Georgia and thought our terrain looked similar so they named all of the Texas towns after Atlanta, GA and the surrounding cities. My husband and I were living in Austin when COVID hit and we were in search of a change of pace. Both having grown up in more rural areas, we decided to take the leap and found a 1950s ranch house on some land that needed a facelift. A year in, we are about halfway through the renovation and loving the slower pace and talkative nature of the town. 

After being in a virtual world all day, it feels great to check out and reconnect with nature in the evenings. While I love solving problems and driving growth for clients, I can only do my best work when I have enough time to truly recharge. Being able to finish the work day and immediately shift into playing outside with my pups or going on a sunset kayaking cruise creates the perfect balance for me.

And now, let’s get to the fun stuff…

• When I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher. Growing up, my grandmother taught special education at a high school and I would get to go to the school with her in the summer when she was prepping her classroom. I would always sneak out with workbooks that I could go home and teach to my stuffed animals, siblings, or parents. As I got older, this translated into lots of babysitting and tutoring gigs. Helping people reach “ah-ha” moments has always been incredibly rewarding for me and is something that has become fundamental to my leadership style. 
• I love spending time outdoors. In the warmer months, you will find me out on the water any chance I get. Most weekends we are taking the camper and our kayaks out to different lakes and rivers in TX, OK, AR, and LA. 
• If I’m not outdoors, you can catch me at a live music venue. The smaller the better. I love going to feel the magic of emerging artists in intimate venues. There is something special about the connection between the audience and the artist that I love being a part of. 
• I should probably be embarrassed about my obsession with trash TV (where are my Bachelor Nation fans at?). Basically any reality TV dating show is right up my alley. I’m very excited about the Dallas edition of Love is Blind that is coming out soon. 
• On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I’m fascinated by productivity and business strategy books. Atomic Habits by James Clear has changed how I approach my goals and routines, making me realize just how impactful the small, 1% improvements we barely notice actually are to inflection points in our lives. What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 by Tina Seelig is a book I continually go back to when I get in a creative rut, reminding me of the vast opportunity that exists all around us. 

Want to speak with one of Right Side Up’s marketing experts about your company’s growth strategy? Drop us a line at growth@rightsideup.co to get started. Or maybe you’re interested in joining the Right Side Up team? We’d love to chat—reach out to hello@rightsideup.co and we’ll be in touch.