Below you’ll find a deep dive into what I was involved with during my time at Thought Collect. I must warn you though, there are a lot of different projects or business entities mentioned below so it can be confusing. Bear with me, I will do my best to be concise and only illustrate the things that matter.
Before you start reading, it’s good to note that the structure below will be broken down into different marketing channels. This way it’s easiest for you to understand my entire involvement at the highest level. Each project or business entity touched each marketing channel below, but I’ve tried to group them where they were most applicable.
And for context, I was the first marketing hire at Thought Collect, which focuses on marketing services similar to other marketing agencies. Lastly, If you don’t want to read the details below, view my resume instead.
B2C and B2B Demand Generation
In my opinion, demand generation can be synonymous with two concepts — building value and nurturing relationships. Generally, the goal is to find who your ideal customers are and bring them value that they can’t get elsewhere. This can be done effectively with experimentation or A/B testing, a method to measure what works and what doesn’t.
At Thought Collect, I heavily focused on paid media, SEO, email campaigns, and social media campaigns to generate demand for the 2 businesses below. Let’s break them down.
Paid media
I’ve consistently managed paid media for Delusion MFG resulting in 7X ROAS and very quickly managed Brand Sick with 4X ROAS results. This consistent return was achieved through full-funnel strategies using native audience manager tools (i.e. pixels, lookalikes, interests, etc.) and additional external tools like Ahrefs and/or Builtwith to further refine my audience segments. By using other external tools I was often able to achieve better results than not using them.
SEO
When I first started at Thought Collect, I mainly focused on marketing operations and executing marketing plans. Eventually, I transitioned to having more managerial responsibilities. I would say my time was split between 80% managerial and 20% execution.
Here are some of the things I was doing while I was focused on marketing operations and executing marketing plans:
- Finding keyword opportunities to increase SERP for content and products using tools like Ahrefs
- Organizing internal links
- Link building
- Analyzing competitors
- Creating automation processes
Content marketing is some of the most fulfilling marketing work I’ve done. I’ve ranked many target keywords to page one, which generated direct revenue for the business entities you can find below. Once the foundation of these processes were created, I quickly transitioned into leading a team to continue the success.
For email, I helped strategize and execute email campaigns on a monthly basis. Eventually, I built enough experience to lead remote campaign managers to execute all of the moving parts. Types of work I did related to email include email automation, drip campaigns, newsletters, promotions, and outbound/inbound efforts. In terms of time spent, I would say 75% of the time this was a managerial role, and 25% of the time it was more operational.
Social
Social media was the first thing I was responsible for when I was hired. I scheduled and maintained social media content calendars across platforms like Instagram and Facebook on a monthly basis, sometimes Pinterest too. Eventually, I led a team to manage the calendar with promotions, product education, company updates, industry trends and more.
Projects or business entities most applicable to B2C and B2B demand generation
- Delusion MFG
- Brand Sick
Social Media and Influencer Marketing
When it comes to efforts in social media and influencer marketing, the main focus of these marketing channels were centered on the business entities below. For context, the four listed are all food services or restaurants under HMRX Group, the parent company.
Social Media
Directly managed the entire workflow from content strategy, content creation, content submission, scheduling, calendar management, and copy management. In addition, I’ve collaborated and communicated with in-store managers to coordinate logistics. Eventually, I led a team to manage these efforts while I focused more on strategy. Growth in foot traffic, growth in engagement, growth in sales, growth in social KPIs — things of this nature.
Influencer Marketing
Similar to social media above — I’ve strategized, coordinated, and managed the entire workflow with our influencers. I’d work directly with the owner(s) in finding solutions on how to leverage influencers on a local level in order to drive in-store foot traffic. To give more context, I’ve communicated, coordinated, and on-boarded all of our influencers both remotely and in-person.
Influencers provided us with fresh content to use, a new avenue for customer acquisition, brand awareness, and partnerships — which helped drive brand awareness and revenue.
Projects or business entities most applicable to social media and influencer marketing
- Drip N Scoop
- Deadend Bakehouse
- Dockside Kitchen
- Sunrise Cafe
SEO, Content and Affiliate Marketing
I think every marketer should learn the ins and outs of how to leverage SEO tools, they make marketing interesting by allowing you to reverse engineer successful strategies. For example, by using Ahrefs you can find the most popular pages ranking for specific keywords and learn why these pages rank well and how you can do the same.
Strategically, I did a lot of this (reverse engineering successful strategies).
Below is a list of blogs or business entities that I’ve built during my time at Thought Collect. For the list below, I created the foundation like SOPs and workflows and my awesome team helped with the rest. (If one of you are reading this, you’re amazing).
Workflows included things like:
- SEO/keyword research
- Topic creation
- Writer management
- Content distribution
- SEO optimization
- Affiliate management
- Link building
- and more
I created the system that allowed our words per week to peak at 80,000 words written and submitted. This translates to roughly 60-70 articles ready to be edited and published each week. Succulent City reached 100,000 monthly visitors in less than six months — mainly from high SERP ranking, referral traffic, and a bit of link building. Every entity below reached a point of making X revenue (sorry I cannot disclose), in other words, they all make money. At most, I’ve managed 25+ remote writers in our content team.
There’s a lot to say about the work I’ve done for the list below, if you want to learn more feel free to get in touch.
Projects or business entities most applicable to SEO, content, and affiliate marketing
- Succulent City
- Coffee Sesh
- Wine On My Time
- Gadgets Picker
- Best Baby Doll Strollers
- Best and VS
- Smart Money Mom
- Cole Review
- Reviews Cube
So, what did I actually learn?
Honestly? More than I could ever think of. And I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity because it allowed me to find a deeper passion for marketing and entrepreneurship. Having no traditional marketing background (I studied finance), this was all new territory for me.
Here are my five takeaways relating to marketing and teams:
- The ability to pivot or adapt when things get interesting is a strength in any marketing role — or any role really.
- If you’re not constantly looking to improve your marketing plans then you’ve lost. In marketing, there’s no room for “setting and forgetting.” Since marketing changes every day, this challenges marketers to do better work — every day.
- Understanding the big picture and having the intuition on how to break it up into smaller chunks makes for more effective marketing. One piece of content can turn into 10 pieces of content. One keyword can generate $10,000+ in revenue. One satisfied customer can give you 10 new leads. The idea here is that a single KPI can compound to something greater (and it should). It’s a marketer’s job to understand this, apply it in their marketing stack that makes sense, and produce impactful results.
- Scaling is very difficult but rewarding.
- Putting your team first solves a lot of problems.
And here are four things I learned about myself:
- I learned that providing value should be number one, for anything I do.
- I’m capable of more, always.
- I’m good at creating processes that scale efficiently.
- I learned that I really enjoy marketing.