Nancy
Hillman
Social media marketing, content creation, creative strategist, and copywriter
ABOUT NANCYHello! I’m Nancy, a speech-language pathologist turned social media specialist and content creator. Over the last 6 years I have worn many hats as a content creator, copywriter, brand ambassador, and social media specialist through my own personal platform and collaborations with companies ranging from GRE prep companies and continuing education platforms to Vera Bradley and PINK.
My work as a brand ambassador and content creator for Vera Bradley.
My content creation for oral motor/sensory tool company ARK Therapeutic.
My E-book has sold 118 copies generating a $1,500 net profit.
Why should I trust a speech therapist to do marketing?
Great Question. Let’s start with what a speech-therapist can do that a social media specialist can’t.
As a speech-therapist, my typical month goes like this - I independently manage a caseload of 80 families across 12 zipcodes (and 2 counties) ensuring they receive all their recommended services (regardless of how many times they cancel/no show), are up to date on their prescriptions, annual/6 month evaluations, doctor/specialty referrals, documentation, and that I am providing quality, individualized services.
It’s also my job to provide an additional 3-6 initial evaluations a week during which I am required to screen a child in all areas of development, conduct a thorough formal assessment of their speech, language, feeding, and swallowing, calculate and analyze their results, document all my findings in an error-free report, assess their need for specialty referrals, write out goals and a treatment plan, assess the family’s needs for a case manager/social services, and communicate the results in a away that will make the family understand and care about their child’s need for services all in the span of 60 minutes. Oh, and don’t forget - the child is usually climbing on top of me and my laptop since they’re all under 3-years-old and love screens.
Fall 2019 Vera Bradley Duffel Bag social media campaign.
TrueLearn Partnership Announcement 2021.
Now let’s talk about what this speech therapist knows about marketing and why.
In college I had two part-time jobs: one teaching courses on health and safety to incoming students and another working remote as an entry level data analyst for Bryco, LLC a software solutions company. Both jobs didn’t give me the amount of hours or the compensation I needed to survive as a full-time student drowing in student loan debt.
So I got curious… the era of the influencer was upon us in 2018 and I wanted my piece of the pie.
I started looking into corporations that were offering ambassadorships/partnerships to college students to promote their brands and got my first break working as part of the Victoria’s Secret PINK campus team as the social media specialist/graphic designer. A few months after that I became a content creator for the nationwide boutique EVER ROW. A year later I became the campus ambassador for Vera Bradley through Wasserman (previously Riddle & Bloom) and got to meet weekly with Wasserman’s marketing consultants at their headquarters while churning out content and planning campus events/giveaways. The goal was to make Vera Bradley’s brand synonymous with youthful, fashion-forward college-students and move away from their previous brand association with older demographics.
After these experiences I decided to create my own social media platform and build it up enough to get brand partnerships/sell my own products so I could keep 100% of my cut. Every piece of advice I read said the same thing “find your niche” and “find your audience” so I did. I started a platform marketed towards undergraduate and high-school students who desperately dreamed of getting into the impossibly competitive speech-language pathology master’s programs and named it Sunshine Speechie.
Over the next three years, I transformed Sunshine Speechie into an instagram with 7,000 followers, podcast, and E-book in the speech-language pathology community. I started getting brand partnerships with TrueLearn, ARK Therapeutics, SpeechPathology.com, Teachers Pay Teachers, and various authors/small businesses. I worked closely with companies and their marketing teams to create visual content/graphics and copywrite that reflected their mission and appealed to my audience.
Since becoming a full-time speech therapist, I haven’t had much time to pursue my side hustle of social media marketing/content creation. Over the past year, I’ve realized I miss the creative outlet and opportunity for growth that marketing provides. And while being a speech therapist has been incredibly rewarding, life is short, and I’m ready to make a change to chase my passion. I’ve started spending my free time taking courses in marketing analytics, social media marketing, Google Analytics, and data analytics.