Meet Ayokay’s newest Digital Marketing Specialist, Hannah Chael! Hannah joined us to help streamline our social media, email, and digital marketing operations. We sat down with her to discuss what brought her to the company and what she wishes others knew about digital marketing.
Q&A with Hannah
Q: What is your position at Ayokay and what does that entail?
A: I am the digital marketing specialist. My role is to do content creation for our social media clients. I also do newsletters, and general email marketing for our email clients. I also work internally with the marketing team to make sure that everything that the client wants is incorporated into the work that we’re doing.
Q: What brought you to Ayokay?
A: So when I graduated college, I knew that I wanted to work at some type of marketing agency and I was looking to be in the digital media field. I just really liked the idea of being able to be creative and strategic at the same time since that’s what I studied in school. I also knew that Ayokay does a lot of work with nonprofits, especially in the healthcare industry. That’s something that I had experience doing social content for in the past. Also, technically, the LinkedIn job posting – when it said “Do you use emojis in your copy?” I was like “Yep, this is me.”
Q: What’s one thing that you wish people knew about your job?
A: Sometimes it’s a little hard to talk about what I do with other people because they hear that I do social media and then the usual response is “Oh, wow, that sounds really easy. Doesn’t seem like it requires a lot of work.” Blah, blah, blah. I think that a lot of people don’t realize how important social media is for businesses because it’s not just like playing with shapes and colors and design. That’s part of it, obviously, but it’s also using strategy and collaborating with your teammates and your coworkers because the ultimate goal is to convey the message that your audience wants to hear. So I wish people knew that there was more about working in a marketing agency than just playing on my computer and designing stuff all day.
Q: What are some areas you’d like to learn more about while at Ayokay?
A: I would really like to learn more about SEO and other data-oriented skills. While I already have a solid foundation in the creative side, I would really like to expand further into the behind-the-scenes side of marketing. I understand that this side of marketing is just as crucial as the creative side, and I really think it’s important to be well-rounded in my knowledge and skills. By gaining this knowledge in the analytical areas, I feel that I could contribute more effectively to overall marketing strategies and hopefully get better results for any projects I am involved in.
Q: Your experience before coming to Ayokay was working as an intern at Indiana Immunization Coalition. How do you think that work prepared you for working at Ayokay?
A: The Indiana Immunization Coalition is a non-profit organization similar to the non-profit organizations that we work with at Ayokay. It’s important when you’re dealing with healthcare especially that you’re making sure you’re using terms that are easy to understand and not offensive to anybody. With marketing and healthcare, there’s always going to be people who are bashing on it. It’s a polarizing topic because everybody has such strong opinions about it. But I think a big thing was learning the language and learning what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. I think that definitely really helped. And then also just being in the social media space in general, keeping up with what’s trending and looking at what kinds of things other companies or organizations might be doing for their marketing and being able to take ideas from that.
Q: What do you like to do for fun?
A: I spend a lot of time doing arts and crafts activities. It could be anything from painting or drawing on my iPad. I like reading. I picked up reading this last year so I’ve been getting really into that. I play pickleball a lot when it’s nice outside. Our pickleball courts have a pool right next to them, so it’s nice to go play pickleball and then jump into the pool to cool you off.
My favorite hobby, though, is probably doing my nails. It’s something that I’ve been doing for eight years or so. I used to go to the nail salon a lot and I’d spend, you know, $60 to $70 to get my nails done. Then I was like “Well, I should just learn how to do it myself.” So I did. Now every couple of weeks, I’m like, “Okay, time to redo my nails and see what other design I can come up with for this set.” So shapes and colors, it all goes back to that.
Autumn is Ayokay’s Marketing Operations Manager and oversees all client marketing work with a particular focus in digital advertising, social media, and email marketing. When she’s not juggling various client projects, she also supports internal marketing efforts to spread the word about how Ayokay can help their organization.
