As a new member of the Delightful Team, I am ecstatic to bring my marketing savvy and passion for storytelling to my new role of Digital Marketing Specialist.
I employ my organizational skills, creative flair, and analytical curiosity to support client initiatives. And whether I’m crafting copy that drives audiences to act or helping monitor, analyze, and report on the performance of marketing campaigns, one thing is always certain: I believe in putting the customer experience first.
My Journey to Marketing
I graduated from Cornell College with a B.A. in English with a Literature focus and an emphasis on cultural and political communications. Now, I utilize my passion for storytelling and love of language to captivate audiences and increase conversions, engagement, and brand awareness.
I began my college career believing I wanted to go into publishing – because what else was an English major to do? But after interning at Westview Press in their Development & Marketing Departments, I quickly fell in love with marketing.
Marketing perfectly merged capturing an audience with content creation and analytics. It let me focus on specific campaigns while also necessitating that I always keep the big picture in mind and understand how all the little pieces come together and affect the desired outcome. Personally, I like to think of marketing as a puzzle whose pieces, depending on how you tilt your head, will shift and change. I wanted to be one of those people solving that puzzle.
My path was clear from there. After graduation, I spent several years learning how best to garner an audience’s attention and trust while delving into content strategy, email marketing campaigns, public relations initiatives, website copy, and other forms of marketing collateral.
Fighting Content Overload
During that time, I realized content is everywhere. It bombards you from all sides with everyone wanting you to see the newest product, the latest promotion, the brightest, shiniest toy on the shelf. I experienced this myself when I supported a B2B manufacturing blog – from helping develop the content strategy all the way through content creation and continued promotion. The challenge was taking highly technical information and product promotion requests and transforming them into conversational, engaging pieces of content that spoke to the audience’s actual needs.
By engaging with the readers and staying tuned to the questions they were asking, I was able to develop content that provided answers and made their jobs easier. I was also able to provide some humor – and promote services – in an educational context. (Think Thanksgiving-themed video on why not to cook your turkey in a vacuum furnace.)
Whether I was managing social media channels, developing brochures and case studies, or working with technical experts to craft industry columns and technical articles that aligned with the content strategy – my priorities included staying on the pulse of the industry and the current topics that mattered to customers. This focus meant I go outside a company-specific mindset and also led to the discovery of fascinating stories, such as a customer using equipment to heat treat parts for the Jamaican Olympic Team’s bobsled for the 2018 winter games.
In short, I found that to truly capture an audience and connect with them in a meaningful way that encourages engagement and trust, one thing was essential: strong, valuable content. Don’t produce content just for the sake of it. Create content that truly matters and that delights or helps improve your audience’s lives in some meaningful way.
Solving for the Customer Experience
Marketing also necessitates being open to the possibilities. There is no magic formula to engage and capture an audience; it requires agility and an intrinsic understanding of how your audience’s needs and desires might shift over time.
One of the things that drew me to Delightful Communications is their focus on creating experiences that are delightful and dynamic – for both the clients they serve and their respective audiences. In a world fighting content overload, a digital marketing company that believes in people not just pixels and places those same people at the heart of everything they do was refreshing and really resonated with me.
I couldn’t be happier to be part of the Delightful Team and embrace new opportunities to grow and expand my skillset. When not busy diving into the latest digital trends, I enjoy rediscovering all that Seattle has to offer – having recently returned to the PNW after tiring of the brutal, snow-sodden Midwest winters – as well as warming dreary days with good books.
Melissa Peebles
Digital Marketing Specialist, Delightful Communications