Gillian Gold
Storytelling + strategy that makes your audience click.
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Built and optimized SEO-driven blog content from the ground up for the rapidly growing romantasy reader community, focusing on discoverability, audience engagement, and organic search performance. The project centered on identifying high-interest content opportunities within a niche but highly active online audience.
I began by conducting audience and trend research to uncover themes, tropes, and topics resonating with romantasy readers. Using SEMrush, I identified high-opportunity, low-competition keywords and strategically integrated them into long-form blog content using on-page SEO best practices. I also designed custom graphics to strengthen visual engagement and support content shareability.
The content achieved strong organic performance, including ranking #2 on Google for “Best of Romantasy 2025: A Must-Read Guide.” Additional articles generated significant visibility within six months, including 1.58K impressions for “Best of Romantasy 2025: A Must Read Guide for Fae Lovers, Dreamers, and Morally Gray Men Enthusiasts” and 2.47K impressions for “Falling For The Bad Guy: What Jaxon Vega Teaches Us About Spicy Vampire Romance Books.”
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Led the strategic development of a full-funnel digital marketing campaign for Frozen Garden as part of the worldwide PNW Digital Marketing Competition. The project focused on building a scalable customer acquisition and retention strategy for a premium DTC smoothie subscription brand.
Working collaboratively with my team, I helped develop a comprehensive 12-month campaign plan that included channel strategy, audience targeting, creative direction, and performance forecasting. We created original campaign graphics and mapped tactics across the customer journey to support both brand awareness and conversion goals.
The final strategy projected a 2.2x ROAS and was presented through an 8-minute competition submission video. Out of 295 teams worldwide, our campaign placed in the top 5%, recognizing the strength of our strategic thinking, execution, and campaign planning.
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As part of my honors thesis, I redesigned Western Michigan University’s third-party study abroad webpage to improve how students discover and evaluate international program options. The existing experience made important information difficult to find, creating confusion and increasing cognitive overload for prospective study abroad students.
To develop a research-backed solution, I conducted secondary research on study abroad participation benefits and analyzed how peer universities structured their third-party provider webpages. I then designed a UX-focused prototype in Figma that prioritized information hierarchy, accessibility, and clearer decision-making pathways for students.
I validated the redesign through A/B testing with WMU students, where 67% of participants found the updated experience easier to understand and less overwhelming than the original page. The project culminated in a successful honors thesis defense, with ongoing conversations around incorporating elements of the redesign into future university web improvements.
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Developed a full-funnel 2027 paid social strategy for Our Place focused on scaling sitewide revenue and accelerating customer acquisition across Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. The campaign was built around a $750K media budget with the goal of increasing revenue by 50% and new users by 75% year over year.
Using an audience-first planning approach, I identified high-intent women ages 25–44 and segmented campaign periods into distinct prospecting and retargeting strategies to better align messaging, creative, and spend allocation with customer intent. I modeled budget distribution and performance forecasts using ROAS-driven calculations to maximize efficiency across all four campaign periods.
The strategy projected $5.73M in revenue at a 7.64x ROAS — significantly outperforming industry benchmarks — while driving an estimated 300K+ new users and successfully meeting both acquisition and revenue growth targets.
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