Marketing strategy and campaign planning
Annual and campaign-level plans: audience, objectives, messaging, budget options, phasing, testing and how success gets measured. I write them to be approved and reported against, not admired.
Marketing · Strategy, Campaigns & Digital
Strategy
before
execution.
I plan and run marketing campaigns for organizations with complicated internal audiences. For two years that meant leading strategy inside a national organization’s in-house agency: paid digital, brand and social across nine accounts, advocacy and public awareness campaigns, and the operational systems a growing department needed. Before marketing I spent years in labour relations research, which is where I learned to check what people actually think before writing anything.
Strategy
Provincial & national plans
Paid media
Multi-region, multi-language
Brand
Nine accounts, six platforms
Operations
Intake, approvals, tracking
Selected Work
Six projects
Also in the portfolio
Sustainable Jobs Mass Timber: national marketing strategy for a government-funded initiative
AI-assisted media monitoring, built with Google News Alerts and an AI summarization workflow
Internal communications strategy to make marketing services visible across the organization
Expertise
Seven things that have shown up in every role I have held. Tools change. The thinking does not.
Digital and paid media
Meta campaign planning, audience and geographic targeting, multi-language creative, budget allocation, and steady optimization against cost per result, reach and click quality. Recruitment, organizing and advocacy objectives on the same platform.
Brand management and social strategy
Directing strategy across nine accounts and six platforms for several brands with different audiences. Editorial calendars, platform roles, content pillars, growth planning, and the pre-publication review that keeps voice, tone and accuracy consistent under deadline.
Marketing operations and project management
Request intake, approval workflows, project tracking, hours and budget reconciliation, documentation and onboarding. Usually built where none of it existed, for a department running like an agency across a long internal client list.
Communications strategy
Internal and external communications planning, advocacy and public awareness messaging, and stakeholder communications for government, industry and member audiences. That included non-partisan messaging rules for an organization with real political exposure.
Research and audience insight
Qualitative research design, interviewing, thematic analysis, competitive and platform research, performance reporting. The habit of finding out before deciding.
Team leadership and cross-functional collaboration
Weekly one-on-ones, monthly brainstorms, quarterly reviews, biannual planning. Plus the working relationships with organizing, communications, procurement and government relations that let a campaign actually run.
About
Organizations tend to hand me the thing that has no process yet.
Most of my work has involved taking something loose and making it repeatable. A goal with no plan attached. A department with no approval process. A campaign performing well on paper and badly in practice. Across research, labour relations, teaching and now marketing, I am usually the person asked to build the workflow, write the strategy, or get several departments pointed in the same direction.
Good marketing starts with understanding people, which is where my background helps. I spent years in labour relations and policy research before I ever ran a campaign, and I finished an M.A. in Sociology while working. The thesis came out of about twenty interviews with carpenters in Ontario about their working conditions and whether they considered the trade a good career. That work trained me to listen to what people say rather than what I expected to hear, and to back a conclusion with evidence. It is the same reason I research what a niche watches before writing a content plan, and why a strong click-through rate makes me ask whether anyone finished the application.
I manage by clearing obstacles. Making workloads visible, protecting people’s time, giving direct feedback, and building systems so nobody has to ask permission twice. I am comfortable presenting a recommendation to a board and equally comfortable in the spreadsheet underneath it.
Experience
May 2024 – Jul 2026
Vaughan, ON · Hybrid
Marketing and Social Media Manager
Carpenters’ Regional Council (promoted from Social Media Coordinator)
The department worked like an in-house agency. Its clients were the national council, regional councils, dozens of local unions, training centres, procurement, organizing, government relations and a list of government-funded programs. My job was to balance daily delivery against the strategy and structure a growing department needed.
The role carried the organization’s communications work alongside the marketing: internal communications across departments and regions, external and stakeholder communications for government, industry and contractor audiences, advocacy and public awareness messaging, and final approval on everything published.
- Wrote a two-part provincial marketing strategy for Alberta: an operational plan for the delivery teams, and a board approval document presenting tiered social and out-of-home options with modelled reach forecasts.
- Planned, launched and optimized Meta recruitment and organizing campaigns across four provinces, including work running in four languages across more than a dozen locations, at consistently low cost per result on modest budgets.
- Led two advocacy and public awareness campaigns, and wrote the national marketing strategy for a government-funded initiative. Planning, budget and creative direction from concept to launch.
- Supervised and mentored the marketing team through weekly one-on-ones, monthly brainstorms and quarterly performance reviews.
- Built the department’s request intake, approval workflows, project tracking and onboarding documentation from scratch, including an hours and budget tracker covering the full internal client list.
- Reviewed and approved content across nine accounts and six platforms, and built an AI-assisted media monitoring workflow to keep leadership informed in real time.
2023 – 2024
Sales Administrator
Team 2000 Realty Inc.
Administrative support for residential real estate transactions, keeping documentation and records accurate under deadline.
2021 – 2024
Graduate Teaching Assistant
University of Guelph
Ran tutorials and supported coursework for undergraduate sociology classes of 100 to 200 students while completing graduate research.
2020 – 2021
Research Manager
Carpenters’ District Council of Ontario
Labour relations and legal research supporting arbitration and government advocacy, including union submissions on Ontario Bills 148 and 66. I also conducted confidential interviews with at-risk construction workers, documenting trades experience for a government pathway program.
2017 – 2020
Summer Student Research Assistant
Carpenters’ District Council of Ontario
Labour relations and policy research across three summer terms, including case law research and Ontario Labour Relations Board work.
Education
Master of Arts, Sociology
“A Good or Bad Career? Carpenters’ Work in Ontario”
Read my ThesisCertifications
- Google Analytics Certification · 2026
- Fundamentals of Digital Marketing, Google · 2023
Volunteer
- International Volunteer, Habitat for Humanity · 2019
- ESL Program Volunteer, University of Guelph · 2020
Contact
Get in touch.
Open to marketing and communications roles. If you are hiring, or you want to talk through a campaign problem, use the form and I will get back to you.
Thank you.
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01 · Provincial Strategy · Budget Approval
The Alberta
Integrated Strategy
A province-wide marketing strategy spanning paid social, organic content and out-of-home. I developed the strategy documents, structure and presentation, translating input from across the team into a clear operational plan and an executive-ready budget proposal.
Part One
Internal Operational Plan
For the communications, digital and operational teams. Everything needed to execute, coordinate and report.
Part Two
Executive Board Summary
A budget document for the board. Tiered options, modelled outcomes and a clear ask, with the operational detail left in Part One.
The Challenge
The organization needed a steady presence across five Alberta markets rather than a series of disconnected regional pushes. It had to serve brand awareness, long-term recruitment and event visibility at the same time. It also had to be fundable, since an executive board would decide the budget. That meant presenting real options with the consequences of each one attached.
Audience Strategy
Four audiences sitting at different stages of the same decision, plus three priority trades. Paid social and out-of-home were positioned at the top of the funnel, warming people up for recruitment and event messaging rather than asking for a conversion straight away.
20–29Students & pre-apprentices exploring the trades
25–45Apprentices & journeypersons active in the field
30–59Contractors & employers, the decision-makers
EventsGeneral public, community and families
Placement targets followed the audience rather than the media plan: Indigenous friendship centres, career fairs and employment hubs, sporting event crowds, competitors’ training centres, flooring companies and supply stores, and construction-adjacent workplaces.
Budget Options
Rather than a single number, I built three social tiers and three out-of-home tiers. Each one carried its daily spend, campaign frequency, placement volume and modelled reach, with the out-of-home figures and media information provided by the team. The board was choosing a level of ambition, not approving a line item.
The Calendar
Four quarters, each with a theme and the real events behind it, so spend lined up with the times of year people were already gathered in one place.
Awareness, education, workforce readiness
High-intent audiences: students and career switchers. Career fairs and university sport. The message is that the trades are a career, not seasonal work.
Pre-event and brand awareness
Reaching people outside formal job-search spaces. Expos, festivals, a marathon. The goal here is familiarity rather than recruitment.
Maximum reach and cultural relevance
The largest exposure window of the year, built around major summer events. The Stampede was budgeted separately as its own short, high-impact push.
National visibility and year-in-review
National sport exposure plus city events, holding presence through the slower hiring months and closing the year on credibility.
Measurement & Governance
Separate measures for each channel, because out-of-home cannot be judged like paid social. I established the measurement framework for reach, engagement, video performance, frequency, placement coverage and flight delivery, with site traffic and dynamic QR codes providing a more direct read on response.
Governance was written into the plan. All creative and messaging approved centrally. Non-partisan messaging only, with no employer-specific or political endorsements. Reporting monthly or quarterly, with recaps after each event.
The Honest Part
The plan also said, in writing, what would make it fail. Coordinating remotely could not capture timely content or keep pace with live events, so I made a named Alberta-based point of contact a condition of delivery. The responsibilities, the risk of going without one, and a blank for the name all went into the document before sign-off.
“This role is essential, not optional.”
Key Takeaway
A strategy is a document somebody has to approve. Tiered options with honest ceilings, and a named condition for failure, are what make it fundable rather than aspirational.
02 · Paid Media · Performance
Paid Media,
Campaign by Campaign
Recruitment and organizing campaigns across four provinces and four languages. Each one planned, launched, optimized and reported on its own terms, then judged as a portfolio.
The Challenge
Two different jobs sat on the same platform. Recruitment campaigns had to reach apprentices and tradespeople across provinces. Organizing campaigns required highly targeted audience strategies, with success measured by meaningful organizing outcomes rather than conventional digital metrics such as clicks or impressions. Both ran on modest budgets, so every dollar had to be placed deliberately.
The Approach
Every campaign ran through the same six steps. The structure stayed constant. Targeting, language and creative were built for the region and the workforce.
- Discovery. Sit down with the internal requestor. Objective, location, trades, audience, timeline, budget, existing materials, past performance and the barriers to recruitment. The business problem before any creative work.
- Strategic planning. Objectives, audience personas, geographic targeting, budget recommendation, phasing, messaging, testing opportunities, success measures and how the campaign would be optimized.
- Creative direction. Briefing designers and content creators, recommending imagery and messaging, flagging what to test, approving final creative. Judged on whether it would perform, not only whether it looked good.
- Launch. Schedule, budget against the approved plan, geographic and audience settings, creative implementation and tracking. All verified before spend started.
- Optimization. Several variations launched early so the data picked the winners instead of an assumption. The strongest concepts carried into later phases while new variations kept fatigue down.
- Reporting. Performance translated for people who do not read Ads Manager. What the numbers meant, why they moved, which creative worked, and the recommendation attached.
Targeting in Practice
Targeting was written per campaign, never reused. Spanish-speaking tradesmen in their twenties and thirties. Carpenters aged 20 to 50 in one prairie city. Indigenous workers, flooring suppliers and construction suppliers for a training push. A parenthood audience, served in both Spanish and English.
The largest single campaign ran in four languages across fifteen locations on a modest budget, and returned one of the lowest costs per result in the portfolio.
Reporting the Portfolio
I kept a running log of every campaign: objective, locations, languages, budget, targeting, impressions, reach, clicks and cost per result. Recruitment campaigns were measured on cost per result and click quality. Organizing campaigns were measured on reach and frequency inside a specific workforce, because a click was never the real outcome.
That log is what made the drop-off below visible. Without campaign-level records kept consistently, it would have read as a run of successful campaigns.
The Impact
Strong click-through, weak application completion. I found the drop-off in the campaign data and recommended changes to the job postings and the application process itself. It changed how the team evaluated campaigns after that.
The campaigns performed well on every media measure that mattered: strong reach and impressions on small budgets, at consistently low cost per result. The finding that changed practice was what happened after the click.
Key Takeaway
Good advertising cannot fix a bad application form. The ad is one step in a journey, and the only honest way to judge a campaign is to follow the whole thing.
03 · Advocacy · Public Awareness
Two Advocacy
Campaigns
General Contractor Liability and Tax Fraud Awareness. The same job, approached from opposite directions: one led by paid media, one carried entirely by organic content.
501,374
Impressions, GC Liability
74,551
People reached
6.7×
Avg. frequency, two weeks
The Challenge
Both campaigns had the same underlying problem. A piece of construction policy that matters enormously to workers and contractors, and almost nothing to anybody else until it is explained. Each had to support active advocacy while educating members, policymakers and the wider industry, during periods when policy attention was already high. What differed was the budget and the channel available.
General Contractor Liability
Paid Meta
Paid Meta advertising targeted to Ontario audiences, with a focus around Queen’s Park, supporting lobbyists throughout active advocacy efforts. The campaigns helped build visibility and reinforce key messages while the advocacy work was under way.
Because the audience was geographic and the window was short, paid was the only way to guarantee the message was in front of the right people on the right days. I planned the targeting, budget, scheduling and creative direction, and monitored performance while it ran.
Tax Fraud Awareness
Organic only
Tax fraud in the construction industry, explained for two audiences who rarely read the same thing: government stakeholders weighing policy, and a public with no particular reason to know the issue exists. This one ran on organic content alone.
Without paid distribution, the work moves into sequencing and message design. Educational posts, awareness graphics and advocacy messaging published several times a week, timed to periods when policy attention was already elevated, and built so members would share them into networks the organization could not buy its way into.
What They Shared
Running both taught me the same lesson from two directions. Paid media buys certainty about who sees a message and when. Organic content buys credibility, because it arrives through someone the audience already trusts. Neither one substitutes for the other, and an advocacy campaign is usually stronger when the plan says which job each is doing.
My Role
Campaign lead on both. Strategy, communications planning, Meta advertising strategy, scheduling, audience targeting, budget recommendations, messaging direction, coordination, performance monitoring and reporting.
The Impact
On the GC Liability campaign, 501,374 impressions against 74,551 people reached. That ratio was the point. Roughly seven exposures each across two weeks, which is enough repetition to make an issue feel important without wearing the audience out.
The objective was awareness of a policy issue, not clicks. Awareness needs frequency, because people do not absorb legislation the first time they see it. But an advocacy message that appears too often stops reading as information and starts reading as noise, so I kept the audience deliberately tight and let the message repeat inside it rather than chasing a wider reach.
Performance was monitored against reach, impressions, frequency, click-through, cost per click and engagement, with optimization decisions made from that data while the campaign was live.
Key Takeaway
On an awareness campaign, frequency is the strategy and reach is just the container. Repetition is what makes an issue register. Restraint is what keeps it from becoming noise.
04 · Audience Research · Content Strategy
Why Trades
Content Travels
Before writing a content plan for the trades, I went and found out what actually performs in the niche. Then I wrote down why, so the strategy could be argued with.
The Challenge
Institutional accounts in the skilled trades tend to underperform, and it is rarely a production problem. The organization needed a content direction that could compete with individual creators for the attention of people considering the trades. That meant understanding the niche as it behaves, not as an employer brand would like it to.
The Method
I identified fifteen high-performing pieces of content across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok in the construction and skilled trades niche, then documented each one the same way. Platform, format, the hook in the first three seconds, approximate views, and a written explanation of why it worked.
Coding a set of examples against a consistent frame and reading the patterns back out is qualitative method applied to a marketing problem. It is the part of my research training that transfers most directly.
What the Research Found
Five patterns explained most of the variation. Two of them are uncomfortable for an institutional account, which is exactly why they were worth writing down.
Salary transparency is the hook
Every piece that named a specific dollar figure outperformed. An hourly rate. A wage progression from year one to year five. A house bought at twenty-seven. The audience is either already in the trade, where the number is validation, or considering it, where the number is aspiration. Both react to real figures.
“Competitive wages” says nothing. A number says something.
Person over brand
The highest-engagement accounts in the niche are individual people, not organizations, and the gap is not close. Institutional posts about empowered workers draw single-digit engagement. The algorithm rewards a face, a voice and a personality, and imperfect beats polished. For an employer brand that points at one answer: put members on camera, not the logo.
Underserved identity angles overperform
Content led by women and underrepresented groups in construction consistently beat the niche average, with unusually high saves and shares, because almost nobody else is serving that audience. Two evergreen high-intent formats also kept recurring: how to get into an apprenticeship, and an honest union versus non-union comparison.
Turned Into a Plan
The social plan gave each platform a job instead of posting everywhere identically. Facebook for community and event promotion. Instagram for recruitment discovery and visual storytelling. LinkedIn for industry credibility and contractor engagement. X for real-time event coverage. Six organic content pillars, a cadence per platform, and a quarterly arc running from awareness through recruitment momentum to event coverage and year-end credibility.
Member and trade spotlights
Education and awareness
Event promotion and coverage
Recruitment support
Industry leadership
Real-time updates
Key Takeaway
A content strategy that cannot say why a format works is a guess with a deck around it. Research first and the recommendations survive their first disagreement.
05 · Operations · Leadership
Creating
Structure to Scale
As the marketing team supported priorities across the organization, we identified a need for greater structure around requests, project prioritization, and workload visibility. Working with my director, I helped develop the processes and workflows that allowed the team to manage priorities, track projects, and scale its support across the organization.
The Challenge
A growing team supported the national council, regional councils, dozens of local unions, training centres, procurement, organizing, government relations and a long list of government-funded programs. Each one behaved like a separate client. Requests arrived informally, approvals varied by project, files were hard to find, and nobody could see workloads clearly enough to plan. Leadership had no reliable read on capacity.
What was Built
Approval workflows
Clear expectations for review, revision, approval and publication. This is the quality gate that let nine accounts across several brands stay consistent under deadline.
A project and hours tracker
A master project list with type, deliverable, lead, team, allocated versus actual budget and status. A live work log the team filed into on assigned weekly slots. Dashboards that rolled it all up into hours by client, hours by team member, percentage billable, project versus admin split, and active projects by status.
A client reference system
Short codes and categories for the department’s full internal client list: locals, regional councils, national bodies, programs, training centres and external partners. Every logged hour and every invoice landed against the right one.
Onboarding documentation
A guide to department structure, responsibilities, workflows, approvals, systems and expectations, replacing informal knowledge transfer and cutting the repetitive training every new hire needed. I also rebuilt the SharePoint structure with naming conventions and tags so files could be found.
Why It Mattered
The tracker was not administration for its own sake. Because hours were logged against clients and split between project work and admin, the department could finally answer questions it could not before. Which internal clients consumed the most capacity. How much of the team’s time was billable. Where a project stood. Whether spend was tracking against the approved budget.
I also ran the department’s financial administration: annual budget preparation, invoice and vendor tracking, cost allocation across internal clients, and reconciliation against approved budgets.
Leading the Team
Systems only work if people are supported inside them, so I built a rhythm the team could rely on.
WeeklyOne-on-ones. Priorities, workload, obstacles, development
MonthlyBrainstorms. Campaign ideas, cross-account planning, lessons learned
QuarterlyPerformance and analytics reviews with each content creator
BiannualStrategic planning. Annual campaigns, special dates, resourcing
Key Takeaway
Campaign results get the credit, but capacity decides whether a team can deliver them twice. Building the operating system is marketing work.
06 · Brand Governance · Social Strategy
Nine Accounts,
One Standard
Nine accounts, six platforms, four provinces and several brands with genuinely different audiences, held to one standard by a single review process.
The Challenge
A national flagship account, national and provincial bodies, and a set of local unions across several provinces. Each had its own audience, region and content needs. Every account had to sound like itself while holding to organizational messaging and non-partisan rules. Several were onboarded from nothing during this period, including one that launched with no followers.
The Approach
- Reviewed and approved all marketing and social content across nine accounts and six platforms before publication. Voice, tone, brand consistency and messaging accuracy, under deadline.
- Directed strategy for the flagship account across five platforms: content planning, editorial calendars, platform optimization, campaign scheduling and growth.
- Built a monthly evergreen content subscription for the locals. Holiday, special-date and awareness-day kits with ready-to-post templates, so smaller locals stayed consistent without full support.
- Optimized profiles with consistent branding and searchable information, and connected website content to social promotion so posts stayed discoverable past publication.
- Ran quarterly analytics reviews with each content creator, monthly brainstorms and biannual planning, and pushed creators to coordinate campaigns across accounts rather than run nine parallel calendars.
Platform Strategy
The flagship account carried recruitment, member stories and advocacy across five platforms, each with a distinct job rather than the same content posted everywhere. The deliberate bet was LinkedIn. An industry and contractor audience was reachable there and almost nobody in the sector was competing for it. That account grew by an order of magnitude over two years and became the organization’s strongest channel for industry credibility.
Instagram and Facebook roughly doubled over the same period on recruitment discovery and community content. TikTok was activated from nothing. X was held steady as a real-time channel rather than chased for growth.
The pattern repeated across the wider portfolio. The largest local accounts grew steadily on member stories, job site footage and giveaways. Ratification and event coverage produced the sharpest engagement spikes. Indigenous trades content was consistently the strongest performer on the national construction account. New accounts were launched from nothing and brought into the same standard.
Key Takeaway
Governance is what makes growth repeatable. Approval is not overhead, it is where brand strategy actually gets enforced. Template kits are how a small team serves a large network.