Digital Marketer Speaker

As a seasoned digital marketer, Mary Cate knows what it takes to make sure your marketing investment is performing and delivering ROI.

Her insights have been featured in Newsweek, ABC News, HubSpot, and the Agents of Change Podcast. She has worked with organizations like SmartBug Media, The Arbor Company, FourSight, Arrow Senior Living, and HubSpot.

Why? Because she has figured out the process of treating marketing as more of a science than an art. Mary Cate shares a seven step process that can be implemented right now to lower your cost per acquisition, increase qualified leads, and increase marketing ROI.

She offers three speaking topics:

Workshop: Making the Spaghetti Stick: Setting the Foundation for Strategic Digital Marketing Decisions
No one likes to waste money – especially in business. On average, marketers admit to wasting 26% of the budget given to them on ineffective channels. Instead of just throwing spaghetti at the wall, it is important to understand what factors can lead you to help make the spaghetti stick when it comes to your marketing. In this workshop, Mary Cate will walk participants through the three foundation-setting steps in her process for improving overall digital marketing performance and maximizing investment.

By the end of this workshop, you will walk away with:

An understanding of buyer personas, why they are important, and how to create them - including a buyer persona and profile template.
A process for reviewing competitors digital marketing strategy and the tools for how to use this information to create your own digital marketing strategy
A benchmark and goal setting worksheet and an in-depth overview of how to pull critical key-performance indicators and what they mean for your business
The information needed to pull these three key components together to set goals and next steps to improve your overall marketing performance.

Keynote: Making the Spaghetti Stick: Setting the Foundation for Strategic Digital Marketing Decisions
No one likes to waste money – especially in business. On average, marketers admit to wasting 26% of the budget given to them on ineffective channels. Instead of just throwing spaghetti at the wall, it is important to understand what factors can lead you to help make the spaghetti stick when it comes to your marketing. A big part of that is understanding your current marketing performance. This session will explain why your marketing data is important and how to use it to your advantage to improve marketing ROI.
After this session you will be able to:
Understand what steps to take to increase your marketing ROI overall
Implement a benchmark and goal tracker to help your team focus on valuable marketing metrics
Use your marketing data to come up with goals and hypotheses to test solid marketing theories.

Who should attend? This session is for digital marketers who are being pulled in many different directions and are looking to understand what to prioritize and focus on in their marketing strategy.

Keynote: The Road to Marketing ROI: Conducting the Proper Research
Marketing strategy is like building a house. All good houses start with a solid foundation. The easiest way to make sure your digital-marketing foundation is solid is through research.
To get a full understanding of who you are marketing to, how they make decisions, and what else is out there, it is important to deep dive into both your potential customers and your competitors.
In this session, you will learn where to start when it comes to customer and competitive research.
You will learn three ways to conduct customer research, the process of creating buyer profiles and buyer personas, and who should be conducting this research for your organization. You will also learn about the buyer’s journey and how that fits into your buyer personas and content marketing strategies. Mary Cate will also give you a buyer research template to take home so you can get started creating your own buyer profiles and personas.
Knowing your buyers and how they make decisions is priority number one in a solid marketing strategy, but a close second is knowing your competition. It is important for you to (1) know who your key competitors truly are, and (2) know what your potential customers are experiencing when they interact with those competitors. For your competitors, Mary Cate will walk you through her own competitor report card and how to grade yourself and your competition in key areas.
Once you have done the research, you can confidently and strategically move on to the fun stuff: building a strategy and goals. All of this information will help you decide where you should focus your energy.
This session will lean toward research around digital marketing, but these principles are flexible to use in any aspect of your marketing-strategy research.

Key Takeaways

You will leave with an understanding of buyer personas, profiles, and how to start creating your own - including a free template to do so.
You will know how to use a competitor research report card to determine how your marketing compares to your competitors
You will know how to use this research to set your marketing strategy up for success.

Award-winning digital marketing consultant, Mary Cate Spires is the leading expert on using data and research to improve marketing ROI. While in college, she was introduced to the world of digital marketing through an internship with (link hidden). With an aptitude for strategy and analytics, Mary Cate quickly fell in love with digital marketing and was promoted to inbound marketing specialist. She has since embraced the lessons she learned to forge her own reputation as a digital marketing expert.

Mary Cate graduated summa cum laude from The University of South Carolina in 2015 with a degree in Public Relations she accepted a position with MyCheck, a New York City-based startup. In her role as inbound marketing manager, she saw firsthand how HubSpot’s marketing approach drives top-line revenue growth. From there, she began working for Smartbug Media, the highest rated Hubspot Partner agency in the world, as an inbound marketing consultant.

Today, Mary Cate specializes in ROI-Driven marketing. Under her mantra, "Don’t spend money on marketing if you aren't measuring key performance indicators,” she helps clients set and measure realistic goals and hits them time and time again -- pivoting when necessary to optimize what’s working and quickly abandon what isn’t.

The University of South Carolina named Mary Cate, Public Relations Senior of the Year and was part of the Public Relations Students Society of America's Bateman Team. Her team placed third in the national competition and received the prestigious Public Relations Society of America Mercury and Silver Wing awards.

Mary Cate has continued to receive accolades throughout her career as a digital marketing consultant. At the Arbor Company, she was awarded three Platinum, two Gold, and two Honorable Mention Marcom awards for her work in digital marketing excellence and senior care marketing.

Her insights have been featured on ABC News and in noteworthy publications and podcasts like Chief Marketer, HubSpot, and Maiden Voyage. Mary Cate helps leaders build a strong customer base to experience high return on investment. Her unique approach dives deep into data and research to help businesses make marketing decisions work smarter not harder.

Technical requirements are a laptop and screen.