Senior Marketing Communications Manager (2023-)
I began working with the American Brain Tumor Association in early 2023 as Senior Marketing Communications Manager. It’s a small, mission-driven nonprofit in the healthcare sector which is my favorite type of company to work for; I knew that my skillset could make a big difference for the community we serve and that my work could impact their lives, if only in a small way.
The ABTA is a national organization but at the time I joined, had a small-town approach to digital marketing. The website was a wordpress site but hadn’t been maintained in years and was pretty much stuck in the 2000’s in its look and feel. It was dated, had too much type embedded into images (missing out on important SEO opportunities), and the navigation was virtually impossible to decipher. The bounce rate was over 75% and the repeat site visitor rate was under 1%.
I was finally able to refresh the homepage in late September 2024, with a refresh of the rest of the site over the next 2 months. As of this writing (2/25), the bounce rate has dropped to 65% and repeat site visitors are hovering between 65-68%. After clarifying the main navigation, the largest difference in the site is the hits to our educational information on brain tumors. Now that people can find them, those pages are getting quadruple the amounts of hits they had gotten in 2023, with the pages refreshed in their look and feel but no changes to the copy or actual images.
Using built-in Elementor funcationality like tabs and toggles to shorten huge blocks of texts, and breaking those large bits of text into smaller bits with H2 and H3 sub-levels, the information became more digestible and easier to understand, especially for our audience which consists primarily of brain tumor patients and their caregivers and may have cognitive impairments.
In addition to clarifying pages and navigations, I implemented a popup strategy to build our newsletter list and it is currently growing 3-5K members… per month. I also made sure that every page has at least 2 CTAs for signups or products for more list-building, and “feature areas” listing programs and relevant blog posts to encourage engagement and participation.
Another strategy that is driving engagement for the ABTA is a robust social media strategy that I’ve implemented in the same time-frame as the website refresh. The ABTA has been around over 50 years but people don’t know about it. By posting daily, especially paying attention to brand awareness and free patient educational materials and services, I’m driving people to the site in droves and that’s why the newsletter list is growing exponentionally. It’s a classic digital marketing technique and it’s working wonders for the ABTA. An inherent problem with the ABTA audience is that brain tumors are often fatal so our audience needs to be refreshed and nurtured more frequently than other audiences. This strategy is working to reaching new people and letting them know about our amazing patient services programs and products.
In addition, I’ve built a Sharepoint intranet for our department, implemented content calendars within Asana, mentored a social media ambassador program, updated our PRF process, and am leading our team in an attitude of breaking down internal silos.
