Building a marketing department from nothing

The reader

HTS New England is a B2B engineering company based in Peabody, Massachusetts, part of a group of sister companies with offices across New England. The audiences were both internal and external: employees in every department across those offices, and the customers and job candidates the company's marketing would reach.

The problem

When I started in December 2019, the company had no marketing department. Nobody produced its newsletters, internal communications, process documentation, or marketing materials, because none of those existed yet.

The work

I was the marketing department: a department of one for roughly four years, growing into a small team near the end of my tenure.

Internal first. I built Connect, a SharePoint intranet linking every New England department, and wrote dozens of its instructional pages. I wrote more than 50 standard operating procedures, process guides, and how-to documents from scratch, covering every department, from HR documentation to company event coordination. I wrote and ran all staff newsletters and internal email. I created the digital signage shown on office monitors across New England and updated it daily. I hosted quarterly Town Hall meetings with leadership and department heads.

Then outward. I built and ran marketing campaigns hands-on in HubSpot: forms, landing pages, automation, lead scoring, and reporting dashboards. I directed, filmed, and edited a recruitment video. I wrote the website's case studies, news articles, and press releases. I produced training materials that explained the company's engineering services to employees at every level, built a line card covering all HTS brands and partner solutions, and coordinated trade shows end to end: planning, the live show, and follow-up.

The outcome

The 50-plus guides became the company's operational reference material and remain in company-wide use. That is the outcome on record, and the one I point to: documentation only stays in use if it works.

In December 2019 the function did not exist. By 2024 it had run for four years, documented the company's processes, and grown into a team.

Next

The method behind all three case studies, with a live demonstration, is under Writing.