Kate Tessitore
VP Digital Marketing - Private Company
Contact
Address:
Live in Palm Beach County, Florida
From Rockville Centre, NY
Date of Birth:
September 22 - Virgo
Things I Love
My Dogs Kobe & Maggie
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Favorite Movie
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Favorite Recent Book
It's Not You By: Ramani Durvasula
Taylor Swift
My Husband
Things that are Pretty
Cooking
...In that order.
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More About Kate
It is a pleasure to meet you, thank you for taking the time to visit my page and learn more about me. When I describe my 3 greatest strengths I include passion, creativity & analytical thinking. My 3 weaknesses (which, depend greatly on where I work) include being empathetic, not knowing when something is complete, and being critical about the processes set up for all project workflows. Consistency is the greatest strength any company could strive towards, it is just as important to McDonald's as it is to Apple. It is the cornerstone of any brand that wants to stand the test of time.
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Work Experience
2008
TJM Institutional Services & Brokerage
Executive Assistant
2009-2012
Didit.com
PPC Coordinator
PPC Account Executive
2012-2013
Hearst Digital
SEO Executive
2013-2015
Macys.com
SEM Manager
2015-2016
Autonation
Digital Executive
2016-2018
Green Arrow
PPC Executive
PPC Manager
2018-2020
Lamark Media
Enterprise PPC Manager
2020-2022
The Digital Intellect
Director of Paid Media
2022-2024
SPM Healthcare
SNR Director of Paid Media
Current
After graduating from Indiana University, I worked for my families company which was based out of Chicago. At TJM Institutional Services & Brokerage I was an executive assistant who also spent time training with the brokers and trading groups.
I got my first job in marketing completely by chance. A friend heard they were hiring and I was invited to interview. First I took a math & excel test measuring my capabilities with mathematic formulas, logic and projections. The second part centered around writing skills, which I felt confident about based on my journalism degree. Then we ventured in to a group discussion about visuals and creatives. After the formal interview with department heads to make sure that I was a good culture fit & had the potential to be a good worker, I was hired in the PPC department, on the same day I learned what PPC was.
I think back to this job a lot, not only did I love it & my colleagues and the clients I got to work on, but i don't think I would have ever applied for that job. It turned out being the perfect position for my skillset. Math came very easy to me, and what I was passionate about was delivering clear messages to an audience, whether it was written or visually delivered.
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I received a promotion and planned to be there forever, I was heartbroken when they shut down their NYC office.
I got my degree in journalism for a few different reasons, one major reason was my obsession with magazines, I dreamt of working on the other side of the publications that I consumed. I was hired as an SEO executive in digital and handled the brands digital content. My main responsibilities included front end SEO optimizations for all new content launched that day across all brands. I worked closely with the editors and the SEO team to develop long term rank strategies for core keyword themes that were specialized for each brand. I developed hub pages and link strategies and learned SEO while doing it. While the glamour of the job was very fun, the opportunity of achieving promotions or salaries to support even the smallest apartment in Manhattan was not realistic at this time especially in publications. I started branching out and interviewing based on having both PPC & SEO Experience.
I was hired by Macys at a very exciting time for the company, they were under rapid expansion and taking over all digital ownership for Bloomingdales & sunglass hut. It was my first position as a manager and was responsible for hiring the team that would be the search department on the east coast. All search was based out of their office in San Francisco so I worked with them closely at the beginning while they were training & explaining the very specific goals for the NYC department. I managed my team in rapid landing page creation based on PPC & SEO keyword strategies. I did get the opportunity to work with the team in creating these strategies, and I created the processes and guidelines surrounding the pages that were built.
This became a large priority faster then we were able to hire and I contributed to the creation and the re-opts for pages every 30 days in addition to managing the department. The pages performed better then any other digital channel at this time, up until then email marketing had the highest conversion rate, until this strategy was put into motion. Finally I worked with the development department to make this process more automated because the biggest loss of time was in production, after achieving this most of the department was unfortunately not needed. I stayed on in my role and continued to oversee & manage this department, which now was a team of 2.
While at Macy's I decided to relocate from NYC, I felt that I had the experience I aways wanted and now wanted to work somewhere that offered a different quality of life. I relocated to South Florida and did work remote for a short period of time before taking a role with Autonation in Fort Lauderdale. This role challenged and improved my website capabilities. My responsibilities not only included PPC ads management (search, display & video) but also included active updates across all of their sites on a weekly basis. It was a wonderful job and taught me many aspects of the digital marketing processes that I had never been exposed to. I owe this job greatly for showing me the larger picture of digital marketing that up until this role I had not analyzed or been exposed to at this level. I also was heavily responsible for analysis for all channels performance and how they correlate with eachother.
While at Autonation I was poached by an agency in Delray Beach, the opportunity did offer a higher salary and was a much better commute, but the thing that excited me was that while my appeal to the agency was to handle the Auto dealerships which was 80% of the clients, I had full freedom to grow the client list in which ever direction I wanted, as well encouraged to explore the channels that I also wanted to test and understand better. I loved this job, the CEO is still a very close friend of mine and often someone I reach out to during times of career crisis. I was able to run some ads across facebook and get some what familiarized, they did not have the technology available at the time to explore programmatic, it was also very difficult to get any e-commerce clients to better understand the changes that were happening on amazon. I was approached by an agency that operated at a NYC agency speed and focused on all channels including the newer spaces that I wanted to understand better.
Lamark was everything you would expect from a full service marketing agency. The had an in house creative department that was able to create digital assets immediately. The were expanding on programmatic so they had no problem allowing me to handle the accounts on my list who were utilizing this channel. My client list for PPC was extremely diversified and the larger brands were utilizing data programs that I had never used before, I was able to learn more about how each channels were correlating between eachother & I had better data about my individual ppc campaigns. My responsibilities at the agency were endless, there was heavy involvement between the departments, which allowed me to work closely with Social, SEO & Amazon Shopping.
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I was offered a job in February from a friend who I met networking. He had started an agency and was handling a great deal of monthly spend considering they were just exiting the start up phase. He wanted me to build the entire paid media department, however I wanted, whatever I needed and a salary that was hard to ignore. It did seem risky, they had a large number of addiction treatment centers as clients and I was currently managing one at Lamark and they required a certain level of attention but they did spend a great deal of money. I also had an advantage to understanding the recovery industry, having been sober myself. Since my sobriety was not something I shared in professional settings on any level, I kind of liked the idea of my recovery experience being an asset to a job appose to a secret. While I was considering the role, March 2020 happened and we all learned what covid was.
I took the job, and built the department out. I hired one team member to start out, and she shadowed me remotely for 2-3 months, I still feel horrible for how painful it must have been to be on a 7 hour google meet with me for months, the women I hired ended up being not only excellent at the job (I joke that i never intended for her to be better then me) she is also one of my closest friends to this day. I wanted to keep our department revenue return high and I knew how volatile this industry could be, I didn't want to overstaff until we had a consistent client list that could be labeled as retention (based on very limited experiences of losing or gaining clients). It is easy to say we have a 99% retention rate, our clients love us but if your not scaling the services those clients use or the number of clients you have, who cares what your retention rate is.
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My biggest focus include 3 areas: 1. setting up campaign expectations, realistic KPI's for clients especially clients when we pitched them. What should they expect based on the budget they had available and what their quality goals should be. 2. I wanted department KPI's - Growth was the most important aspect to me, we needed more clients to be less dependent on the unrealistic erratic clients we currently had. We would never be able to keep employees if that was acceptable and we didn't have enough clients to not accept any level of behavior. 3. Finally I wanted to be relationship focused, I wanted to put emphasis on the fact that we understood their industry not only did we understand it from the clients side, who is seeking help we knew it from the business side, the clinical side and we knew how to apply that to the marketing strategy. If we had strong relationships with our clients we had a partnership and they trusted us with the more important data that would essentially allow us to perform better.
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My time at TDI was wonderful, we over exceeded every goal we set and we grew our client list by 300%. We had one of the lowest budget margins because between me and my senior specialist we took on the responsibilities that needed to be done, instead of hiring right away.
My su​cess at this role gained attention by agencies who also specialized in the healthcare industry. I was offered a senior director role at the largest healthcare agency in the country. I was asked to do the same thing but a much greater scale, the client list alone was probably 5x as large with more consistently high budgets. It also included a large number of clients in industries including, nursing homes, hospitals, autism and dental.
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I grew fast at this role, we had one of the most advanced development teams I had ever worked with & that was the most thrilling part. I was responsible for managing my department and hiring, expanding and training ppc specialists. In addition I was responsible for training the account managers & analysts to understand and communicate necessary data about ppc with our clients at a deeper level of understanding.
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I worked closely with the other directors of content, design, seo & data analysis and I could not have asked for a better collection of human beings to work with. It was by far the best collection of people based on personality, intelligence and work ethic. The CEO and COO we two of the smartest, kindest, supportive bosses I have ever had. Eventually it became increasingly hard to hire ppc specialist who could handle our clients and I was never able to fully step back from anything even after hiring someone to fill that need. I was on every call, I was the fist person that was contacted for ppc questions or any questions. The amount of work that needed to be done did not match the amount of people we had to do it.
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I was not able to draw the line for realistic requests and delivery times, and I was absolutely burnt out. Our clients had great success so the growth was great but not helping my department specifically. I had to leave and it was a very hard choice to make, but unfortunately the only way i know how to do this job is 100% constant go or I will feel like a failure. What I have learned since then is that the environment and the culture that surrounds you will depict the experience you have with work like balance. Work with people or companies that support not only your role with their company but your right to life outside of that company. There is no $$$ that is worth constant anxiety, missing doctors appointments, missing time with loved ones, Oh & there are ways to get both!
Private, full-time contractor. I teamed up with an amazing woman who was running a very successful boutique agency with excellent talent & opportunity.
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If you are looking for a second opinion on digital marketing and would like to schedule a quick chat please feel free to reach out!
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Also happy to create a proposal, complete an audit or competitive analysis for your company/brand or industry.
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