Creative marcomms leader. relationship builder. word nerd.

About me

Hi, I'm Melissa, and you’re probably here to learn more about who I am and what I do. My resume, LinkedIn, this portfolio, a quick look at my Google search results… they all can tell you all about what I’ve done and why I might be qualified for a role, but they can’t really tell you who I am as a professional, and a person. So, I’ll try to share some insights here.

I’m the classic storyteller—spinning yarns over a beer with friends for a laugh or being clever while penning copy for a tech startup. Whatever the situation, my stories always focus on utility, simplicity and interest. In a world too full of noise, I tell stories that cut through the jargon, ditch the acronyms and actually say something.

I’ve never met a creative brainstorm I didn’t like or a design concept I wasn’t happy to dissect ad nauseum. But I’m not just fun taglines and pretty pictures—I’m a unique hybrid, a true creative at my core yet deeply motivated by work that makes an impact and drives results. Any of my teams can quote my most notorious line: “I hate feeling like overhead.”

I've been doing this sort of thing for 14 years, including everything from creating and managing strategic communications programs, developing content marketing and thought leadership strategies, fueling and planning demand generation campaigns, driving internal communications and lots more.

Of course, I haven’t done it all alone. The best part of what I do is getting to work with awesome teams of creatives. I've been lucky to work with some of the smartest, most talented junior and senior level marketers in the biz over my seven-plus years as a people manager—there’s nothing I love more than helping my people thrive and find their own passions.

What else do I bring to the table? Energy. Curiosity. Ideas. The willingness to dive in and try stuff. A ridiculous sense of humor. Really skilled at finding animated gifs for any situation. Really bad Canva art.

Other stuff to know: I love em dashes (clearly). Hate Oxford commas. I like most every dog I meet. I snowboard and cycle, watch embarrassing television shows and am (unfortunately) a New York Giants fan.

Experience

Today, I’m senior director of corporate marketing & brand at Quickbase, building our reputation in the industry and expanding our brand footprint, helping businesses remove operational barriers and modernize their processes.

We’ve done a bunch of amazing, cool things in my two years. We launched our first-ever research-backed thought leadership program with the Harvard Business Review, creating some of our most successful content to date. We launched a snazzy new brand. We built a killer influencer program that’s become a media coverage machine. And we even used our own technology to help minority-owned small businesses get access to loans during the height of the pandemic (in things I never thought I’d say in my career.. MC Hammer tweeted about it… and many famous folks including Jamie Foxx collaborated on a video to promote it).

I’ve had a number of other roles spanning content, communications and more—check out all the details here. But some recent highlights…

Sr. Director, Content Marketing @ Cengage

In this role, I developed and implemented a comprehensive content marketing strategy for the higher ed business, with an emphasis on thought leadership. The cornerstone of this effort was launching a thought leadership blog, Today’s Learner, that saw 13K+ visitors in one month and 40K+ impressions on social (previous efforts saw similar visitor counts over six months), as well as a 23 percent landing page conversion rate.

Another key initiative I was responsible for was reimagining our key demand gen email campaign content strategy and recommending a revised approach. This included a shorter cadence, a focus on deliverability and more direct language, and drove 15x increase in leads in one year.

At Cengage, I had the pleasure of managing a content and creative team of eight wonderful individuals. Early on, I realigned the team into writing and design centers of excellence, and helped optimize processes for content creation and communication across team and other stakeholders.

Director, Content Marketing @ SnapApp
At SnapApp, I served as lead storyteller, developing and driving content and communications strategy to increase awareness of SnapApp across marketing technology industry. Here I managed a team of four creative professionals.

A key initiative I drove was a more modern content format focus (interactive, video, audio) that led to increased engagement. As a result, the SnapApp blog overwhelmingly became the top driver of organic website traffic, doubling traffic and subscribers over the course of a year, resulting in a Content Marketing Institute award for subscriber growth.

Our new editorial strategy and content process contributed to higher quality MQLs (6x improvement in conversion rate from MQL to initial call) and a shorter sales cycle. An example of the more thought leadership focused content developed was our research The Millennials are Coming! How Generational Differences Impact B2B Buying Committees.