My Marketing Career Journey

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I am a marketing specialist based out of New York City with experience in automotive, apparel, nuclear energy, public transportation, and financial services. Read more about my marketing career journey below, click to see my resume, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Since March 2019, I’ve been a part of the Citi family as a VP of Creative Management, where I mainly focus on Existing Customer Marketing Retail Bank offers. The campaigns I work on reach over 110 million customers through mediums like email, direct mail, and website banners. Every quarter, I launch over 20 ECM marketing communications by processing creative and managing timelines and discussions with my partner agencies and internal cross-functional teams. At any given time, you will find me working on multiple campaigns’ deliverables within multiple processes and calendars simultaneously. I’ve become an agile project management machine.

My marketing journey didn’t just start here, though.

My Journey

I’ve always been interested in marketing, I just never knew it. Advertisements on TV fascinated me. Growing up, I catch myself thinking “Why are Gillette ads so dark compared to my favorite Kool-Aid ads? If Gillette used brighter colors, I’d care about them more.”, not knowing that it was probably Gillette’s intention to not have a 10 year-old female care too much about their products. In high school, I learned about business and marketing through the NYC College-Now program which further solidified my decision to attend Babson College and study marketing and business administration.

Getting my foot in the door

My career started in Boston working as a Marketing Consultant for a friend’s Hawaii apparel online shop. It was my first real work experience to apply concepts and theories learnt in class. Being able to see in real-time what worked and what didn’t was exhilarating and piqued my curiosity more. While developing various marketing strategies, I was able to improve conversion rates by 70%, decrease bounce rates by 72%, and increase ROI by 50% with AdWords and Analytics. 10/10 would do again and recommend to anyone starting their careers.

Wearer of many hats

Another friend presented me his business – to develop sustainable nuclear energy and make it accessible. He had the tech team, he secured Series A, and now he needs a business team. The idea was interesting so I joined the adventure as a Business Development Manager. With the rest of the team, I helped develop the pitch deck and portfolio and raised $3M in seed funding. With the additional funds, we onboarded more team members and I became the one to create and streamline payroll and benefit packages. Soon, it became apparent that our documentation process was becoming a bottle neck so I centralized our cloud and physical data solutions to increase operational efficiency. It was a whirlwind of a ride, but it opened up my eyes to start-up culture and taught me what it truly meant to wear many hats. While the experience sadly came to a close, my journey took me back to my beloved, hometown, NYC.

Back to basics

I came back to NYC at a time when the city wanted to revamp the transportation services along the waterfront. It was an initiative that would serve thousands of NYC residents who didn’t have easy access to other modes of transportation and connect miles of waterway. A huge project with a small team meant I would be able to re-live the startup hustle while focusing on marketing. It was truly a win-win arrangement. As a Marketing Manager, I helped launch 6 routes by overseeing the development of digital and print marketing collateral. I aligned the content and graphics teams to develop messaging and geo-targeted social media ads. I also generated an additional 30% brand awareness and engagement by optimizing and analyzing KPIs. Later, I developed new customer email journeys from inception to development. I also took the initiative to revamp all existing email campaigns. Little did I know that this would open doors to a new adventure in a completely different sector.