Maria Tchakarov
Grand Rapids,MI
Summary
Strong communicator, team-player and data-driven Senior Strategic Marketing Specialist with over 6 years in curating cross-channel audience experience for direct-to-consumer, e-commerce and dealer brands. Passionate about utilizing data and research to root all content and campaigns in empirical evidence to create meaningful and on-target deliverables. Eager to produce business growth by unifying strategy with creativity and collaboration with clear objectives for measurable outcomes.
Overview
6
6
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Strategic Marketing Specialist
Steelcase
Grand Rapids , MI
07.2022 - Current
- Provided leadership and direction on creative and sales strategy for product positioning.
- Tracked industry trends to ensure relevant positioning in the marketplace.
- Created promotional materials such as website content, sales and dealer training, application development, and digital promotion.
- Monitored competitor activities to stay ahead of the competition.
- Developed marketing campaigns alongside product marketers targeting potential customers.
- Collaborated with internal teams such as Digital, Brand Communications, Product Marketing, Engineering, Sales, and Retail to maximize effectiveness of assigned campaigns.
- Analyzed sales/dealer feedback and generated reports on trends, opportunities, and threats for our user experiences for specific products (Answer, Power, Monitor Arms, Flex Collection, HADS, etc).
- Coordinated with external vendors such as photo and video teams to ensure successful execution of marketing initiatives (promotion, sales resources, website collateral, etc).
- Designed surveys to measure user satisfaction levels with product resources and content offered by Steelcase through our website.
- Maintained a comprehensive understanding of all Furniture products and offerings in order to effectively communicate value proposition through various channels and ultimately boost sales.
- A trusted partner to all Product Marketing Managers that helped boost overall product awareness and sales.
Content Marketing Specialist
The Stow Company
07.2021 - 07.2022
- Content planning and strategy: create annual content strategy, facilitating quarterly content planning, set cross-channel promotional calendar creative strategy (advertising, web, email, and social media)
- Content development: develop all written cross-channel content, coordinate visual needs with graphic design team, support UX vendors, work with influencer projects, aid in photo and video shoots, and more
- Content execution: ongoing optimization of all external content distribution channels, schedule and deploy all social posts, monitor all social channels
- Responsible for driving qualified leads and subsequent conversions for DTC and retail channels through written and visual content
- Expert in the DTC and retail consumer profiles
- Creating purposeful content to refine and enhance the consumer journey throughout their path to purchase and acquisition to loyalty
- Cross-functional content support: written content for retail product brands
- Developed style and voice for social media to create consistency across media platforms
- Performed competitive analysis to identify industry trends
- Collaborated with content contributors to build optimization strategies
- Prioritized and organized tasks to efficiently accomplish goals
Digital Production Specialist /Digital Marketing Associate
The Stow Company
Holland , MI
05.2018 - 07.2021
- Responsible for developing creative direction for retail rendered images
- Created audience specific visual and written content for DTC and retail consumers
- Monitored social media platforms and assessed engagement, reporting results to marketing management
- Developed DTC social media strategy and content calendar
- Planned long-form content that fed cross-channel content initiatives
- Wrote cross-channel, strategic and engaging social media and email copy to generate site traffic and subsequent leads
- Collaborated with Marketing Operations Specialist, Marketing Manager, Graphic Design Team, and Front-end Development to strategize and deliver on DTC digital content
- Directly impacted the growth of DTC social media followers by over 11,000 users in 2 years
- Responsible for executing webpage build outs on WordPress site for dealer network channel, build outs for e-commerce promotions, and other front-end site production
- Managed the intake process for documents, files, images, videos and more to execute site production
- Collected, wrote, and deployed product launches for big box retail online sites
- Worked across multiple departments to corral people and information for deployment and completion of projects
- Reviewed and proofed all finalized content before go-live to maintain a well-kept digital presence
Education
Bachelor’s Degree - Marketing, Sales, Advertising and PR
Grand Valley State University
Skills
Hard Skills
- Omni-Channel Marketing
- User-Experience Marketing
- Multi-Network Marketing
- Marketing Campaign Development
- Leading Art Content Direction
- E-Commerce Retail Marketing
- Paid Media Management
- Organic Media Management
- Content Strategy Design Direction
- E-mail Journey Marketing
- Brand Development
- Strategy Development
- Product Launch
- Project Management
- Dealer Content Creation
- Application Development
- Demand Generation
- Full-Funnel Marketing
- Campaign Management
- Product Training
- UX/UI
- User Journey Research
Soft Skills
- Critical Thinking
- Detail Oriented
- Brainstormer
- Relationship Building
- Reliability
- Researcher
- Optimism
- Curiosity
- Leadership
Accomplishments
- Grew direct-to-consumer social media following from 2,300 followers to 15,000+ followers in 2 years through audience-focused, data-driven content creation and paid/organic promotion journeys with the partnership of a digital agency.
- Successfully curated all written content, creative direction, and UX strategy for the re-launch of a direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand with a complete product-line swap in two months.
- Developed and executed over 300 creative briefs.
- Discovered new consumer findings that significantly impacted user engagement, cross-channel traffic and sales.
Program Experience
- Airtable
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Basecamp
- Webdam
- Bynder
- Hootsuite
- Later
- Django
- WordPress
- SharePoint
- Formsite
- Wistia
- Adobe Suite
- Trello
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Analytics
- Smartsheet
- Mural
- Salesforce
Timeline
Senior Strategic Marketing Specialist
Steelcase
07.2022 - Current
Content Marketing Specialist
The Stow Company
07.2021 - 07.2022
Digital Production Specialist /Digital Marketing Associate
The Stow Company
05.2018 - 07.2021
Bachelor’s Degree - Marketing, Sales, Advertising and PR
Grand Valley State University
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