Premier Talent Partners
Premier Talent Partners is a well-established, family-run company out of Palo Alto, with several locations across Southern California and New York. They hired a firm that I worked for, Staffing Nerd, to review and analyze marketing practices, including advertising, content management, and overall data management. They had invested significantly in platforms such as Yelp, LinkedIn, Google Advertising, as well as many job board advertising sites, and we're looking to ensure that they had a profitable utilization of these tools. Staffing Nerd was able to assess many errors that existed on their website, improve visibility of their existing content, and expand with a five-year plan for content utilization to maximize visibility on search engines for many terms that were directly relevant to job seekers and employers alike. My responsibility included weekly reporting of key metrics, such as search engine impression share, leads generated, and overall search engine health.
I was responsible also for generating dozens of pieces of content and restructuring the website to ensure that both employers and job seekers were able to find the well of information that we were creating, as well as to access it in a manner that benefited both the end user, as well as Premier Talent Partners for remarketing efforts. The tools I used included Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Hootsuite, as well as advertising platforms, including, but not limited to Reddit, Quora, Yelp and LinkedIn. Staffing Nerd is a spin-off staffing and talent acquisition marketing firm from Staffing Robot after Staffing Robot's acquisition. staffing Nerd had a few clients under their belt and was looking to bolster outreach efforts to increase client base of staffing companies, as well as identify improvements in their own website and marketing efforts. My responsibility at Staffing Nerd came down to creating content and identifying opportunities to engage with staffing companies through direct marketing efforts, advertising, social promotions, and highlighting conferences through all existing channels.
In addition, I was responsible for creating a plan for our main client, Premier Talent Partners, which spanned five years and a significant cost savings as I was able to identify channels that had less than desirable cost per lead.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AHewmio6WbyLQ_nTSK-KCifRhX2Z4V_g
Solstice.us
Solstice is a Boston-based company that went through Techstars, and discovered my work through a Techstars forum. The founder, Steph reached out to me as they were looking to enhance their marketing efforts. After raising a round of funding, I initially did remote consulting with someone who was handling their marketing efforts part-time. We identified some gaps and opportunities, and after 14 weeks, I flew out to their headquarters in Boston, along with another consultant that I had sourced, to do a complete assessment of their marketing efforts, to interview potential hires for senior-level and entry-level staff, and to create a comprehensive marketing plan as they launched a software component to their existing marketing efforts.
My responsibilities included management consulting of all senior leadership towards increasing brand recognition and brand awareness, as well as identifying opportunities within evergreen and modular content design. Based on their marketing, based on their product design, they needed both modular and evergreen content, meaning that they could create some outreach that would exist on their website and endure for the life of the company, as well as sectional, or as I call it, modular content, that is directly based on the locale for which they are targeting in a specific time frame. All three of the founders of Solstice worked on Obama's 2012 campaign, and their marketing efforts based on their product design required a similar type of outreach, so we leveraged their expertise and my experience to create a systematic design of outreach to ensure that proper markets were contacted, information could be requested easily, and the product rollout could be successful with minimal wasted spend.
Reflect.io
Reflect.io had been a Techstars company, and as a data visualization platform, they had experienced success through public relation efforts in TechCrunch, as well as being well-received by the Portland startup community. I was brought along, adjacent to their data scientist, to determine how to bring in new business in part due to growing investor concerns.
Through my work, as well as the work of a consultant that I sourced, we were able to use a host of advertising platforms to get a 2.8 multiplier in the value for every advertising dollar spent. We addressed opportunities in identifying IP addresses of the few dozen companies that were most likely to have a need or that we had already identified were using a competitive product at that time.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NZLvsIlW92PaLmo3c7sKEm0-yOyowGmVy6raQk8AcFc/edit?usp=sharing
Validated.co
Validated was a seed stage company. When I was approached by one of the founders, they were building a platform that would allow retailers to compensate in-store purchases to assist with validating parking, which is a highly desirable marketing tactic for larger cities. Validated worked with Uber, Lyft, car2go, and city parking administrators, and had the technology to enable these payments for the Portland market.
The issue that needed to be addressed was that the capability of the product team lacked a scalable view of the total addressable market. At the time, they were using seed funding to pay out of pocket for these discounts in a total of five retail shops, using location-based data points to know when users were making a purchase at a single store on their platform. My responsibility included, but was not limited to creating a strategy that would auto-populate every retailer in the Portland metropolitan area, to allow near, immediate, citywide adoption. This strategy led to an extreme overhaul of users and user-generated leads for the sales team to follow up on. In other words, without having a retailer sign up, we allowed all of our users to get parking validated at any retailer that they visited.
We could confirm their location and we could provide the same incentives as though the retailer were a part of our platform. Using this marketing method, we were able to go directly to retailers where we knew that our customers were shopping at, inform them that we had already paid for their customers' parking validation, which allowed the platform to flourish, leading to acceptance into Techstars, as well as a follow-on investment, an acceptance from Jaguar Land Rover.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iAO5DUrshfeixhp6jsoUTegT1q0jL5lk147OoUAVriM/edit?usp=sharing
AlphaPrep.Net
AlphaPrep.net is a bootstrapped company out of Portland, Oregon. They were in the beta stage, providing machine learning, exam preparation for networking certifications, such as CompTIA, Cisco and TIA. I had previously consulted on social media tactics to boost beta user growth, and within two years, we had generated the first $100,000 in profit for the company with nearly zero investment.
My responsibilities included educating the team of technical founders, who eventually determined that I should be brought on as a co-founder and given equity for my contributions. They were open to seemingly high volatile growth in the early stages of the company, and with no marketing budget, we acquired our first 10,000 users primarily through Quora. Quora is a Q&A or a forum-based website, and using questions generated through AlphaPrep.net, we could both ask and answer questions through Quora, and hired many of our students to come on as trainers to educate the general population on highly technical questions, providing answers and referencing back to the assets and resources available on AlphaPrep.net. Again, with no funding, we were able to generate substantive revenue in the first two and a half months, which gave us the capability to hire interns from all over the world, including Egypt, and those interns were trained by myself to serve as community managers, reducing our costs, and allowing us to focus on the technical aspect and the B2B portion of the business. additionally, I was responsible for making points of contact with educational institutions.
The founders, the original founders were hesitant to take this approach as they had previously lost a $300 million contract with ITT Tech when the company went bankrupt. My outreach started with several introductions to local Cisco educators, and along with the support of 6,000 Minion Tic Tacs, I landed a contract to fully replace the Oregon Institute of Technology's introduction to computer networking class, replacing their existing curriculum with AlphaPrep-based learning strategies. This led to conversations with Cisco Corporation, and AlphaPrep.net is now in discussions to use the machine learning aspect of the product to replace how the Cisco certifications exam is administered globally. IMMUNIO is a Canada-based startup that had gone through Techstars, and upon receiving funding, hired a colleague of mine at Staffing Robot, who had hired me. When he left Staffing Robot to go to GitHub, he offered me a marketing contract to replace him at IMMUNIO, which included managing ad spend, content creation, and overall website design.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zvNrqiE0e6e_sPQ2_wu6hDihcKuK4hjEZn78j-cv1Ew/edit?usp=sharing
IMMUN.IO
IMMUNIO is a web application security company with highly-differentiating features that were best utilized by the top 100 technology-based companies, including Netflix, Twitter, Apple, and Google. At the time, we were looking to acquire LinkedIn as a customer, and the same day that we launched a campaign, specifically directed at LinkedIn, it was announced that LinkedIn's data had been breached, going back to a series of hackers who had gained access in 2009. IMMUNIO was able to acquire LinkedIn as a customer, and my role continued as we explored podcast advertising and creating a series of seasonal events to attract network security engineers, inform them of potential gaps, and close a significant amount of new deals.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EW3H8NbS4FddG9i0LQe_7s7QDXbiqH_oDz7aA1VBz30/edit?usp=sharing
ISoftData
ISoftData is a company based out of Lincoln, Nebraska that offers inventory management solutions as well as has a subsidiary, which offers quality assurance software for companies in food and beverage. After meeting the president of ISoftData, I informed him of some of my personal research using a tool called Google Search Console. And based on my sheer enthusiasm I was hired on as a consultant. During our first 15 minutes with his engineering team, I uncovered that there were over 550000 pages on their website that were not being indexed for a variety of reasons.
This led to multiple opportunities for which I was eventually brought on to assist in consulting full-time. The first opportunity was to address an issue that only a handful of companies in the state of Nebraska had, and that was the fact that they had over 2.2 million products available on their website. This becomes an issue with Google as they carefully appropriate resources to only display a certain number of pages from every website. With millions of pages available we needed to identify how one webpage could serve the purpose of multiple, which led to the design of category pages as well as location-based searches using the same framework of a Yelp-style webpage in which we could display our vendors. And we could create webpages for the highest traffic cities in the country, which were using our website to buy truck parts.
After creating our vendor locator feature, I moved on to work on a weekly email. A weekly email was used by our direct competitor with a broken down site map of all parts which had been added in the last seven days. The engineering team was hesitant to apply any resources towards this. And seeing the value of such a feature, I took it upon myself to bring on two additional consultants to generate an email in PHP and HTML that would query our sequel database and populate a similar format of email. Overall, I was only able to lift search impression share by six and a half percent during my tenure at ISoftData.
However, with more than a billion impressions per year, this small lift had a significant and lasting impact as well as my other informal role at ISoftData, which was creating a space for some senior engineers to gain a confidence to take on responsibilities as leaders within the company. This started out as a rocky process of asking them to start running meetings. Yet within a few weeks they were approaching me to thank me, and were soon able to pass off parts of their workload to junior staff to better attend to the overall direction of the product lines, features and timelines that had been sitting in our backlog for several decades.
https://datastudio.google.com/open/10zW4cGOnurhJPc6uKKQCoQwR9xA_qxsX
Shaun White Enterprises
Shaun White Enterprises includes a variety of sub brands from apparel at Target to an event titled Air and Style. Air and Style takes place in multiple cities every year. And a former colleague reached out as they were looking to make sure that they had a comprehensive, organic search and paid acquisition strategy along with an AB testing objective to increase revenue per website visitor. My role and responsibility started with identifying opportunities to increase visibility through the website, which led to the utilization of Optimizely to create variations of the purchase page where tickets and other products and services were offered. Through our efforts in a quick three-month contract and through the diligence and hours put in by the entire staff, I had requested a lot of changes which luckily led to a net increase in sales per person of $55 by using multi-variate strategies and allowing data to tell us which packages are more likely to get purchased based on location, IP address and device.
Hatchlings
Hatchlings is a Facebook and iOS gaming company based out of Des Moines, Iowa. Hatchlings was founded by Brad Dwyer when he was a sophomore at Iowa state university. I met Brad while I was working at Coaching Actuaries and in discussions with how I'd set up our email marketing, he was interested to know how he could create an email marketing strategy to reduce new user churn, which at the time was close to 95%. in other words, for every 100 new users on day zero, only five would return on day one.
During my first hour of consulting at Hatchlings, I informed Brad that he was about to hit a million users on the newest game launch, and with that we were able to create a year-long email campaign giving out $1 million in-game currency. The strategy of determining how in-game currency was doled out was in direct proportion to how frequently in-game users played and purchased existing premium features. Not having significant user experience, user design and research experience, I consulted with the author of the book, The First Five Minutes, an expert in tutorial design, to identify how to make the game more enjoyable for the users. In one paragraph, he summarized that the game was inherently not fun, which was a result of changes in Facebook's API, which led me to begin querying user behavior data and purchase behavior to identify which users were spending the most. And with a survey, we discovered an intense close knit group of users who had found the forums as a place to feel comfortable, find community and build value to enrich their own individual lives.
Armed with this information, we re-engineered the tutorial design for the game and gave responsibility to key users to welcome new members and create a higher sense of community, which had, until that point, been the only feature for which we could attribute sales. Part of this included my responsibility in determining methods of increasing caught revenue per user and we were able to double the average annual revenue per user with two key strategies. The first, mentioned earlier, was through a daily email announcing the previous day's winners. The second was to build an in-game notification system on top of existing technology, which notified all online users of any purchase through the system that had been made. We discovered that we were able to lift sales by 20% within 60 seconds of any purchase being made, a direct result of our in-game notifications.
Swym.it
Swym was going through Techstars when I discovered the company. I was in the Techstars cohort in Seattle, working with another team and Swym contracted me to identify how to better understand the owners of Shopify and other shopping platforms' users to be able to recognize the best method of acquiring store owners as customers for Swym's enhanced eCommerce product. Upon receiving my contract, I immediately looked into where Shopify users sought out information and discovered that Shopify's forum was highly trafficked and had many questions and which the answer lied in Swym's product. We also used technologies such as BuiltWith to generate lists of websites that use Shopify, and after sourcing this list, begin outreach for a survey that would help us identify which market segments had the highest propensity to purchase add-on software for their eCommerce stores.
DNC
The DNC, at the time, was experiencing high turnover and needed someone to instill confidence and community in an otherwise dysfunctional state. I was brought in to speak after a multi-week contract of identifying technologies that would support their growing efforts to stay in touch with voters and affiliated party members.
Having a better understanding of the technology used and how it was installed within the organization, both technically and through human capital, my consulting turned to allowing a unique sense of connection. The strategies I shared included turning website visitors into voters along with creating pipelines to assist staff to understand metrics for converting visitors into voters at a granular level.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1v4myLNRPE4uMAcQ3W1aYNX2dkDxNSTNz
Staffing Robot
Staffing Robot is a staffing and talent acquisition marketing company based out of Portland, Oregon that was acquired by Advanced Medical. Staffing Robot were seeking a junior search engine optimization analyst, and I moved from Iowa to Oregon to fill that role for them. Initially, my role started with assisting senior staff in launching new staffing websites, it was here that I began my interest, now an obsession, with search engine result pages, ranking search engine visibility and one tool in particular, Google Search Console.
As a consultative advisor to 30+ staffing companies, I adjusted Staffing Robot's, service line and internal processes within 90 days of acquiring a customer and launching a website. This included an educational series which walked marketing managers at these client sites through how to choose between organic and paid marketing.
We were able to up-sell 30% of our new client base on additional marketing services by using data generated from their own website to identify gaps in marketing processes that had existed for years. At this point, I was given the title of sales and marketing manager, during which, I would continue to support staffing companies and also represent the company at conferences and trade shows, along with the nickname The Analytics Guy.
https://www2.staffingindustry.com/site/Editorial/Daily-News/Advanced-acquires-Staffing-Robot-39995