Pillar Booth is a B2B startup that sells phone booths for offices, warehouses, libraries, and more. It’s a fast-developing space now that remote and hybrid work environments are the norm. I initially connected with Pillar in 2019 and worked with them in a consulting capacity to set up their SEM strategy. Utilizing digital strategy in a more traditional industry was an exciting opportunity that allowed us to carve out a space in the market that primarily functions through dealer relationships and tradeshows.

Over the next few years, I helped scale the paid search program, eventually expanding to additional channels like display and social. Eventually, I I joined full-time as the Director of Marketing to build out a robust marketing program:

  • Scaled and diversified the paid channel portfolio

  • Lead a website redesign

  • Built out a CRO stack using web analytics and chat tools

  • Managed agency vendors

  • Launched a content marketing strategy to create case studies across our major verticals

The highlight of my time at Pillar Booth was creating a marketing strategy from the first Google Search Ad to a full-fledged function that helped the business scale up to $3MM in annual revenue.

Freelance Performance Marketer

I’ve built a one-man marketing agency where I build and scale digital channels for various organizations. I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients across various verticals, including D2C e-commerce products, B2C PFM fintech apps, local retirement communities, national healthcare brands, and many more.

This process has helped me develop a framework for helping D2C brands set up a lean and efficient tech stack for web design, Shopify management, CRM, and front-end marketing.

Maintaining this solopreneur endeavor has been an incredible way to stay active and hands-on in managing ad platforms daily. Across my clients, I’ve managed paid social, paid search, display, programmatic, Pinterest ads, email marketing, and much more. The experience has been invaluable for staying on the cutting edge of the digital channel landscape.

Musician

I’ve been involved in the DIY touring music scene since I was 17. Since then, I have played many hundreds of shows all over the world.

I take great pride in the work ethic, discipline, passion, and creative expression that I’ve honed through my years on the road playing music.

Lots of moments in my musical career have carried deep significance for me. Here are a few important ones: the Chicago House of Blues, the Aftershock Festival in Sacramento, and the Forum in Melbourne, Australia.

Avant is a fintech startup that has built a consumer lending platform providing personal loans and credit cards to middle-income borrowers with fair credit. When I joined Avant, the customer acquisition engine was driven entirely by two channels; prescreen direct mail and a prescreen environment affiliate program with Credit Karma. This is because Avant’s focus on a narrow portion of the credit spectrum required highly segmented targeting to avoid a decline rate that would drive an untenable CAC. As a result, digital channels hadn’t worked; the inability to deliver prescreen marketing via digital meant that the CAC was far too high.

To scale our digital marketing, I initially applied optimization techniques I honed at Zacks and Radiancy. However the inability to compete with the prescreen framework that direct mail and Credit Karma provided meant that our CAC was always too high. but To that end, we partnered with Acxiom and TransUnion to develop a unique program called ODS (Operational Data Store), an anonymous database of millions of Americans who have a high likelihood of being eligible for approval of Avant products. This could allow consumers to check if they qualify for pre-approval without requiring a prescreened hard credit pull, thus enabling us to deliver a version of a digital prescreen flow. The unit economics of this funnel would enable digital channels to outperform direct mail and affiliate programs.

My role transitioned into a marketing operations role to build the ODS platform that would enable us to unlock digital channels.  I helped architect a process that involved:

  • Digital channels to deliver initial impressions

  • Web development to deliver the consumer experience

  • API development to transfer data between Avant, Acxiom, and TransUnion

  • Database management for the ODS file housed at Acxiom

  • Credit product specifications to determine which offer to return to customers

  • Credit application product knowledge for how to tie all of this together with Avant’s application engine

This was an incredible opportunity to step above my role as a digital marketer and understand the alignment between marketing, product, data, and development.

Radancy (Formerly TMP Worldwide) is a digital marketing agency that focuses on talent acquisition for enterprise clients. The goal is to optimize the candidate journey to drive recruitment efficiency at a lower cost per hire. It was a fascinating role for me since it involved deploying the techniques of performance marketing in a new context. My primary client was Boeing, and I managed the paid search and programmatic advertising to drive talent acquisition across Boeing’s various business units.

I joined Radancy during an acquisition of a custom SAAS solution by ad tech startup Perengo that was designed to deliver programmatic advertising across a series of recruitment boards, including Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn, etc. This was a fascinating front-row seat to the deployment of ad tech at scale.

The highlight of my time at Boeing was building the programmatic framework for delivering advertising across recruitment sites through Perengo’s platform. We built the framework for optimizing cost per hire for various roles and grew the programmatic advertising to a significant portion of our monthly conversion volume across all digital media.

Zacks Investment Research is an equity research firm that provides a series of products offering stock analysis, insights, and recommendations across various sectors. It uses an e-commerce lead generation model, acquiring leads through a variety of digital channels. These leads are then entered into an email newsletter funnel, eventually converting into customers of one of the subscription products that provide specific equity research.

The channel that drives the vast majority of leads by far is Google Search Ads. So joining Zacks as an SEM Strategist was a great place to cut my teeth in learning the principles of performance marketing and developing channel expertise in paid search. Lead costs, quality, break-even rates, and retention rates were vitally important metrics, and the strategy we employed on the front end in SEM directly impacted downstream revenue for the organization.

The highlight of my time at Zacks was helping scale our paid search channel from $50k in monthly spend up to over $250k while maintaining lead quality and retention rates. We accomplished this through an aggressive deployment of optimization principles; testing different lead magnets, landing page designs, ad copy, keyword targeting, and more. Additionally, we worked closely with the CRO team to align our search methodology with the email strategy and product promotion. This was an ideal environment for developing a deep expertise in paid search.