You’ve landed on my website from my resume.
Well first off, thanks for your interest!
If you want to get right into how I think about marketing, I’d love for you to watch the videos below, especially Part 2 where I introduce a marketing model I created here in ’23. I’m calling it the Content Conduit Marketing Model.
I’d also like to tell you a bit of my career story.
I’m proud of my resume, but let’s face it:
Resumes are dense. Stories tend not to be.
One theme of my career is investing in my education to level up.
A year after getting my BA in Political Science at UCSD, I went back to school to study nutrition. I got certified as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner by the Nutritional Therapy Association. I was exploring building my own practice, but I was also applying for jobs. I landed a job at The Honest Kitchen, one of my all-time favorite brands. They liked my background in Sales (I put myself through college working full time Sales jobs) and they liked this new certification of mine.
I started out as a traveling product demonstrator, got promoted to an in-office job as a product specialist, was offered a program to grow, and long story short, grew it to a $3M/year revenue generator. In the process, I joined the marketing team and found my calling as a marketer.
Incredibly inspired and thirsty to learn more about marketing, I became a huge fan of the HubSpot Academy. I went bananas and got certified in content marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, digital marketing, sales enablement, and SEO.
After 8 very successful years at The Honest Kitchen, I felt like it was time to challenge myself in a new industry and put my skills to the test. I clicked with the CEO at Exponents, a trade show exhibit design house. As their very first marketing hire, they gave me the freedom to build up key channels from scratch and tasked me with solving their major problems: unqualified leads clogging up the pipeline and high customer acquisition costs.
Where to start? Well, I had learned and saw first hand how important it was for sales and marketing to be aligned, especially with B2B. As the lone marketer, and with the small team of sales executives, we aligned around pipeline and conversions – starting with defining the funnel stages and customer journey. I knew exactly how to deliver Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) because we defined what that was. Cool, once again I was directly impacting revenue!
Keyword research was a key tactic. I figured out the high-intent keywords people were searching with. The agency that Exponents was using before I joined, were running digital ads optimized for awareness to generate traffic. Problem was, they were burning through tons of $$$ and the leads were not converting. The sales team was bogged down and wasting their time. I was given a small budget to test against the agency. I outperformed them so decisively, we let them go and ran with my strategy.
Running parallel to the digital advertising campaigns were email marketing campaigns. I was repurposing the SEO content I was writing for the blog for emails to our subscriber base. I couldn’t believe how many hand raisers this generated! I was also learning about conversational marketing from Drift. I ended up getting the budget to install their chat bot product on our website. I built all the playbooks; routing leads to sales, other pages on the site, or into content nurture flows.
Everything was going great until the pandemic hit. The trade show industry went to a standstill and thus Exponents had to let go of most of the company. Unfortunately, marketing (me) was a part of the necessary layoffs. It was a really hard time, for a variety of reasons, but we bounce back, don’t we?
My first work during the pandemic was with an early stage start up in the CPG space: Maison Bloom. The Honest Kitchen operated like a startup – when I joined in 2011 they were in year 9 and had several rounds of funding. Maison Bloom was working on acquiring seed funding when I joined at team member #5. I owned market/competitor research and this fed into developing customer personas, buyer journey maps, content for the website, and also revisions to the pitch deck. The customer surveys and interviews I conducted helped inform product development and also validated the value props in the pitch deck. I’m very proud to have been a direct contributor to the founders acquiring seed funding. I also learned a bunch about project management from the CEO who is a former PM for Hewlett Packard.
I went back to school for a Digital Marketing Professional Certificate from San Diego State University in 2021. It was an intense 400-hour program, but it was incredibly rewarding. Marketing has so many facets and they were all starting to click on higher and higher levels for me. I graduated top of class in April of 2022.
Navigating a tough and competitive job market during the pandemic, I believe this certification really gave me the edge to land my next role as Marketing Project Manager for PetDx, a biotech startup.
My time at PetDx was career-defining. I got to continue my career in marketing and continue to grow as a leader in the role of a project manager. The company sponsored me to take the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam, which I passed in May 2023.
With 15 years of marketing experience and two key professional certifications, I am ready for my next big opportunity!