Highwing

I lead marketing at Highwing, the first open data platform for commercial insurance. We provide insurance software for brokers and carriers to connect, access, and leverage insurance data analytics throughout every step of the customer lifecycle. Our platform helps brokers and carriers grow sales, speed workflows, and elevate the customer experience without adding headcount.

Since finding myself in this role, I have had to do a considerable amount of market research, learning how insurance works as a whole, monitor a quickly growing competitive landscape, and learn how to produce new types of content such as podcasts, animated videos, and other creative marketing tools. I’ve also had the opportunity to develop the full strategy for 2021 in the wake of a fundraising round. 

After our financing, I led PR efforts across a group of various stakeholders and investors, crafting messaging and coordinating timing between a variety of stakeholder groups. In the end, our press release generated 48.5 million aggregate readers totaling over $93,000 in equivalent paid media value. 

Today, I have designed and implemented a full marketing plan, including managing our video and podcast series, building and managing our website, coordinating PR, planning events, running our blog & socials, and implementing creative marketing projects.

How did I get here?

As I was finishing up school and the pandemic was starting, I began asking around my network for work opportunities and found myself consulting for Highwing, a startup producing an open data platform for commercial insurance. The first few months entailed mostly setup work, focusing on their website and social. After joining the team full time, my job became implementing a full scale B2B marketing machine. 

The content we put out includes regular blog posts, podcasts, social posts, emails, and videos. This had a bit of a learning curve to it, as a lot of the content marketing and distribution channels we were using were new to me, but it has been great so far.

I had never previously done any work on podcasts, and producing Zoom Into Insurance has been a challenge but an absolute pleasure. In addition, learning tactics for how to effectively distribute this content has been useful. When I write blog posts or question prompts for the podcast, I’m sure to include research from another firm that I can backlink. I’ll connect with the author of the referenced research and see if they have any input or are willing to share it along. This has been an immensely useful tactic for content distribution and brand building. 

When I joined the team, the website was pretty simple and, frankly, a bit boring. Despite a bit of design experience, I had never built a website from scratch and I was tasked with doing just that. Learning hubspot’s website tools along the way, I created a new site for Highwing, which I am pretty happy with.