I guess you could say I was a marketing writer / ghost blogger for a marketing agency. I had the pleasure of working with NEXT Marketing in Vancouver and the amazing Sandy Gerber for over a year, almost two. They have since closed their doors, which was sad. The reason I liked working with this company is, well, because they’re AWE-soooome. Sandy is the kind of business owner who thinks of her business’s interest when she makes decisions – it is so neat to see her in action. She also sees the need to rely on external expertise and she is not afraid to build her business using her own strength in branding and marketing while sourcing the strengths of others for aspects that are critical to marketing but may not be her own cup of tea (like SEO, web development or design – very specialized fields, so why half bake them, right?). Anyway…I had been doing market research for them, SEO for them and was also a marketing writer (shall we say “ghost marketing blogger”?) on really fun topics because I am so passionate about marketing. For example:
How to run a one-person marketing department without driving your marketer crazy
This one was written from experience. I’ve been self employed for most of my career (well maybe not if you count the days I worked all those minimum wage jobs during high school and college). But I remember what it was like working for a company and I can see what it’s like being an internet marketing service provider to other companies where I’m dealing with one liaison. It’s tough being a one-person marketing, do-it-all…person! So I got to write that marketing article for NEXT based on the best advice I could give from what I’ve learned.
Here’s another time I was a marketing writer:
If there’s something I luuuuv, it’s finding marketing examples, storing them away in my memory and bringing them up when it’s time to give an example of something amazing someone is doing in the marketing or entrepreneurial world. So this was a collection of niche marketing examples I had seen while watching Dragon’s Den, Shark Tank, Rachael Ray and spending countless hours learning cool stuff with TED talks.
And some more…
Marketing tools: where the pros go and what the pros use to market their own businesses – You can tell this was a topic focused on the SEO keyword “marketing tools.” Just sayin’. Since I get to know the ladies at NEXT here a little there a little, I happened to know what advice they would give, so I combined that with my own resources and now we have an amazing marketing article, right?
How to Improve Online Brand Awareness: Infographic – This was information I gathered entirely from Sandy Gerber’s webinar on how to create BRAND CHATTER™, which is basically improving online brand awareness, but since Sandy is so good at branding, she calls it BRAND CHATTER™ (yes you must use all-caps when you spell that). I basically took what she said and put it in writing. Not really a transcription, but more into a concrete article. And I made an infographic for it, that was so fun. Sandy was leaping for joy when she saw it because she was presenting at a conference and it was going to make the perfect visual for what she was going to teach.
TOMS Shoes: How they incorporate charity giving into the core of their brand and marketing strategy – This is one was co-authored with my e-marketing assistant, but it was her brainchild, so she gets all credit here :) She thought of TOMs as an excellent marketing example to write for the NEXT blog and I couldn’t agree more because TOMs believes in philanthropy and so does Sandy. We worked together to describe how TOMs is defying what we always think of business success and is turning giving into a business. Who would have thought a marketing strategy like theirs could collide the worlds of business and charity so well?
6 Foundational Elements of a Marketing Plan – This was also a co-effort with one of my writers, fairly self explanatory and gives the fundamentals of a marketing plan.
Why you should be segmenting your lists for good marketing results – This is a great piece on the reasons why you would want to separate and organize your lists for an effective e-mail marketing strategy.
Is it ethical marketing to say something is “free” when there’s a hidden catch? – This was a fun article I got to write while I was vacationing in Australia, and noticing some interesting marketing models, which my mind always tends to veer towards when it should be on holiday…
What are signs you have a good website …or a bad website? – This was the last article I wrote for NEXT, before they shut their doors and Sandy Gerber moved on to take a new position. It is a topic I’m passionate about, and covered the types of things I would look for when doing their online marketing research reports for their clients.
Web content writing for a marketing agency:
In addition to blogging, I was able to help the marketing company with their web content writing for their sales pages. For one, it was an SEO effort, to help increase the word count of their page content. But more than that, I wanted the marketing company to be able to demonstrate the value of what they did in detail, by showing potential clients the exhaustiveness of their marketing plans. And the thing is, they didn’t just do marketing plans at NEXT, they did a lot more. There was a lot of talent at that agency. So the result was that I got to dig into the finer details of what they do and write it out in a way that would make sense to sales leads (I hope it worked!). Here are the pages:
Marketing Campaigns – web page writing
Marketing Strategy – web page writing
Marketing Projects – web page writing
Marketing Portfolio – web page writing