Serenity: How We Build Successful Marketing — from Employee to Client

“Mousetrap” is a podcast about marketing—or how to sell cheese. In its seventh episode, host Ekaterina Rusakova, formerly in Product Performance at Serenity, talks one-on-one with our colleague Yulia Panetskaya. Yulia progressed from a paid search specialist to a senior Product Performance role, making her product the most profitable at Serenity.

The team knows Yulia as a responsible, organised and demanding leader. So the episode covers not only Serenity’s performance marketing work, but also setting clear responsibilities, motivating specialists and managing time to earn more, alongside the human question: “How do you keep it all going?”

Listen to the full podcast here:
Apple Podcasts
Yandex Music
Mave

Read on to learn how a marketing agency with a “teal” approach builds its development processes.

As a product lead at an agency built around self-management, Yulia’s main responsibility is to develop, document and regularly improve the workflows in her area, with a focus on profitability. Without clear processes, a team cannot organise itself.

At Serenity, this means working with every team lead to improve proposals, set quality standards, package case studies and train managers. Alongside ongoing process work, the agency introduced dedicated project managers for each discipline. They can contribute to strategy, discuss decisions with specialists as peers and clearly document conclusions based on results. This specialisation improves quality and reduces the risk of mistakes.

Yulia points out that a strong brand is not essential for every business, but combining brand-building with performance marketing can significantly improve results. According to McKinsey’s research, this combination can increase marketing investment effectiveness by up to 30% and contribute to revenue growth of around 10%.

An integrated approach also shapes the work within each discipline. In performance marketing, for example, we build sequences of touchpoints: some support awareness and brand-building, while others generate leads and drive specific conversions.

It used to be difficult to measure the impact of brandformance. Today, modern media formats are much easier to track: we commission a report for each media campaign and monitor how many people exposed to brand advertising move on to the next steps.

Our experience shows that building the right team directly affects results. Freelancing can be unpredictable, while an in-house team may have limited resources. Serenity’s approach is to form specialised teams led by project managers with strong practical skills in specific areas of marketing.

This approach enables clear strategic planning from the proposal stage and keeps everyone on the project working in sync. Instead of isolated tasks typical of freelance work, the agency offers a joined-up approach in which every specialist is part of a coordinated team.

If you do not estimate how long tasks take, it is difficult to plan your time well or avoid taking on more than you can manage. Yulia describes several familiar techniques for allocating and estimating time that have become part of her routine through regular use. To make them second nature, she recommends planning on paper.

In our view, managing time effectively increases the value of a specialist’s working hours. Earning more means achieving better results in less time.

Yulia also saves a lot of time with neural networks. She recommends using them instead of delegating some tasks to specialists, since they can often find additional context and produce a strong result faster. In the podcast, she shares examples of tasks she handles with AI tools.

Yulia highlights empathy, reflection and respect for colleagues’ values. For example, Serenity holds regular quarterly feedback sessions, which the team considers an effective tool for rapid development. It is a format that works best when you are ready to read, consider and act on the feedback.

At the agency, motivation and retention come from having enough projects, strong earning opportunities, a comfortable working environment and relationships built on equal footing. Mutual feedback has become a distinctive part of our culture, supporting healthy professional development.

After this warm conversation with Yulia, one thing stands out: success starts with caring about your work and product, and building sincere relationships with partners.

Serenity’s areas of work—inservice page.

Listen to the full podcast on your preferred platform:

Apple Podcasts
Yandex Music
Mave