Marketing Communication Specialist

In my previous job as a thought leadership specialist, I was responsible for writing the technical papers that provided the meat of the company's content from website, blog, editorials, presentations, social media, and press releases. These were derived from the technical papers I wrote and repurposed by the whole marketing team.

I entered the corporate and business development world as a technical proposal writer for a small company transitioning from serving the US government and UN operations in Iraq to becoming a contractor for the Oil and Gas companies establishing operations in Iraq. I then moved to another Oil and Gas service provider and worked as a technical paper writer before I was promoted to become a thought leadership specialist, single-handedly creating the backbone of the company's entire digital marketing content and helping drive the company's shift to digital marketing.

News writing or press release writing is a basic requirement for communications professionals. Even when I was working with PR agencies, I was still writing news stories and press releases. These days, when just about anyone can self-publish and publications are operating with a very lean editorial team, I find that being able to write a good press release that editors can readily use is essential.

I have written case studies since I started working as a communications assistant for development projects in the Philippines funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations in the Philippines. When I shifted to corporate and marketing communications, I found myself writing case studies to support the business development team in documenting past performances and translating those into full-blown technical papers as well as repacking them to make customer experience stories for the website, blog articles, and the company newsletter.

When liaising with PR agencies, and pitching stories with editors, I find that being able to write articles on the go has helped me land interviews with major publications. In my previous jobs, I was able to get our company published for free (outnumbering paid editorials) because I sent editors an interesting article to convince them to interview our subject matter experts or they published the articles as is.

I was only able to lead this when our regional director decided to deviate from the global marketing team and asked me to create a regional campaign where we lessened the touchpoints (customer journey) for our clients in the region. This did not work however because the global marketing team would not permit us to use (buy) another email marketing tool. However, I also single-handedly started an email newsletter for an education project documenting school-based innovations during the COVID-19 pandemic that could be replicated post-pandemic.