Marketing Engineer at Taoti Creative in Washington, DC

Marketing Engineer

Location: Washington, District of Columbia

WANTED: Marketing Engineer

Taoti is looking for an experienced marketing leader—someone with a proven track record of doing the work and getting results. Someone who can conceptualize campaigns as well as help execute them.

We’re also looking for someone knows how to leverage AI in a major way—someone who can serve as an AI leader and champion within our agency. It’s worth noting that you’re going to read the list of responsibility areas that follows and say to yourself, “so they want all the marketing in one role??” Yes and no. We don’t realistically expect to find a single person who is experienced and expert in every area below. Ideally, we do find someone who at least has exposure to all of these areas and can speak intelligently to them—who can ‘talk the talk’, even if you can’t ‘walk the walk.’ Of course, the more you can be strategic and tactical with, the better. But we do have others on the team (and some outside partners) who can support in areas where you don’t have as much hands-on experience. In your application, please address the areas where you consider yourself to have mastery versus a general knowledge and understanding.

The Day-to-Day

Daily work varies depending on our clients and what they need at any given time. That said, here are the typical roles you might play:

1. Conceptualize and Run Integrated Marketing Campaigns
   1. Develop integrated campaign plans that define audiences, objectives, messaging, channels, tactics, budgets, KPIs, and measurement plans.
   2. Partner with the creative team to develop campaign strategy, creative direction, messaging, and concepts.
   3. Determine the right mix of paid, earned, owned, and organic tactics rather than defaulting to the same playbook every time.
2. Develop Paid Media Strategies
   1. Develop paid media plans that define audiences, channel mix, budget allocation, flighting, creative needs, and KPIs.
   2. Recommend the right mix of search, social, display, and other paid opportunities.
   3. Develop targeting and retargeting strategies.
   4. Collaborate with specialists and platform partners on campaign setup and execution.
   5. Review campaign performance and recommend adjustments to budgets, targeting, creative, and channel mix.
3. Lead Social Strategy and Execution
   1. Develop social strategies that define audiences, platforms, content approach, cadence, paid and organic roles, community considerations, and measures of success.
   2. Translate social strategy into actionable editorial and content plans and lead execution with the broader team.
   3. Understand what works differently across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and emerging platforms.
4. Develop SEO and GEO Strategies
   1. Help clients understand how traditional search and AI-powered discovery are changing the way people find information, brands, and services.
   2. Develop actionable SEO and GEO strategies that include keyword and topic research, content opportunities, on-page recommendations, competitive research, content structure, and optimization for both traditional and generative search.
   3. Understand the mechanics well enough to develop strategy, identify opportunities, prioritize recommendations, and collaborate with content and technical specialists on implementation.
5. Write Things People Actually Want to Read
   1. While we do have dedicate copy writers, we’re hoping you’re something of a copy writer yourself, as the copy can speak directly to the campaign strategy, and vice versa.
6. Turn Data Into Recommendations
   1. We’re not looking for an analyst. We’re looking for a marketer who knows how to use data.
   2. Partner with analytics and account teams to develop marketing reports that do more than repeat numbers from a dashboard.
   3. Explain what happened, why it happened, what it means, and what to do next.
7. Help Us Win New Work
   1. Bring hands-on marketing expertise to business development.
   2. Review RFPs and prospective client opportunities.
   3. Develop proposed strategies, tactics, and campaign ideas.
   4. Write marketing portions of proposals.
   5. Participate in pitches and presentations.
8. What Else We’re Looking For

• • You try to leverage AI in all areas of your work. Not depend on it, but lean on it heavily to both make you more efficient and allow you to do things that you otherwise might not be able to do yourself.
  • You have experience developing integrated marketing plans and seeing them through execution. You’ve built paid media strategies, developed and executed social strategies, and used performance data to improve campaigns.
  • You understand SEO and where GEO fits into modern search. You can write strong campaign and advertising copy, work side-by-side with creative teams, and present strategies and recommendations directly to clients.
  • You don’t need to be the deepest specialist in every one of these disciplines, but none of them should be theoretical to you.
  • You’re equally comfortable asking “What’s the business objective?” and “Why is this ad underperforming?”
  • You can move from strategy to execution and back again.
  • And when someone asks what we should do next, you have an answer, a reason for it, and a plan for figuring out whether it worked.

The Day-to-Day

Team Taoti is a collection of doers. So we want someone who is hands-on and enjoys being in the weeds with the client work. The day-to-day will be more about producing actual work and deliverables than it will be about delegating to others. It's not that you won't have a team to work with. But expect to get your hands dirty on a daily basis.

"Get my hands dirty with what types of projects/clients?," you ask? Good question. We recommend you check out our portfolio, as it's a pretty good cross section of clients and project types. https://taoti.com/portfolio/

To give you some back-of-napkin stats, about 60% of our business is in web design and development. (The rest being marketing, advertising, branding, etc.) About 90% of it is in the DC area. DC itself (across almost two dozen contracts) is our biggest collective client (for example, we just finished redesigning all the dc.gov websites and are agency of record for DC Lottery.) We're mainly a B2B type of shop. We do a fair amount of government work and non-profit/association work. Our commercial and B2C portfolio is smaller but growing. We typically develop in Wordpress, Drupal, Webflow (to a much smaller extent), but have recently been experimenting publishing direct from Claude to production and bypassing CMSs altogether. (Note: one of the challenges of this job is to make 'typical CMS-driven websites' not look like typical CMS-driven websites.)

What’s the corporate culture like?

“Fun but focused,” as one Taotian put it, is a great way to sum up our culture. We’re a fun and casual shop. The kind of place where you can wear whatever, bring your dog to work, come and go as you please, and have autonomy over your own day for the most part. But we take the work seriously and believe deeply in the ethos to make meaningful and measurable impacts for our clients. All the perks and shenanigans and borderline irreverent tone are fun, but to really fit in here, you need to be committed to the work and the results it generates.

One note on culture: it's closely aligned with the brand. So maybe you should check out our brand guide: Taoti - Brand Deck.pdf

Pay particular attention to our values, differentiators, philosophy, and ethos. If you're the right fit here, you should find yourself sitting there nodding your head as you read this stuff. If you don't, that's okay. But we're not looking to try to pound any square pegs into a round hole.

Want to see what life at Taoti actually looks like? Check out our Instagram or ‘about us’ video.

So what's in it for you?

• Annual profit-sharing bonus (we take 5-10% of the company profit at the end of the year and split up (not necessarily evenly) between the top 20-30% of performers to reward those who are best at driving the company forward.) The smallest bonus was still a 5 figure amount last year, for context.
  
• 5+ weeks of PTO (including 11 holidays). This number goes up automatically with each year of tenure.
• 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance. (50% for qualifying dependents.)
• Paid family leave for men and women (including PTO plus short and long-term disability options.)
• 3% retirement plan matching (plus access to a financial advisor).
• Home buyer help (including a $1200 closing credit)
• Mobile phone reimbursement
• You can opt for a company-supplied PC or Mac laptop.
• Charitable contribution matching
• Tax-free metro benefits
• A sincere respect for work/life balance
• Money and time off allocated for professional development (also increases with tenure)
• A diverse team hailing from over 11 countries last time we checked
• A very hip/cool/funky/quirky office space on Barracks Row, in the heart of Capitol Hill. Just 2 blocks from the metro!
  

Of course, the above is a quick list. Our handbook covers all the gory details.

Job Logistics

We are looking for a full time, W2, in-house employee. This role will report directly to the Chief of Staff and CEO and oversee a variety of other roles. While much of the staff does get about 1.5 days of weekly telework, this is an important leadership position, and we generally need you here each day to mentor the team, help build culture, drive energy, collaborate with other departments, etc. That said, occasional exceptions can be made for good reason (and frequently are). Because a shitty commute isn't good for you or us, we generally will not consider anyone with more than a 45 minute commute (though exceptions can and have been made to that rule. But we'd need a really compelling reason to flex on that, as tough commutes are always a strain on work life balance and employee happiness, regardless of what you tell us in the interview. (Note: if you live somewhere else right now and plan to relocate for this role, please make sure you note that somewhere in your application. Otherwise, you'll likely be ruled out on location alone.)

Our Hiring Process

We do not have a set date by when we're looking to fill the position. It will stay open until we find the right person, even if that takes months. Candidates are initially screened by our selection committee (comprised of subject matter experts and senior leadership--not an HR person, and certainly not AI) and given a score of 1-5. 1-3 gets the polite 'sorry, but you didn't get the job' canned response--usually within 2-3 days. 4s and 5s stay in the queue for further consideration (we may reach out with specific questions or do our own internal due diligence.) This part can take a while, so ironically, the longer it takes to hear from us, usually the better that is for you, as it means you're still in the mix (though if it gets to be 'weeks,' we do usually try to send a quick status update so you don't think we ghosted you. When we feel we have a handful of candidates that we could truly envisioning hiring, we'll invite them in for an interview (or series of interviews.) After which final selections / reference checks / negotiations will happen. We promise to respond one way or another to all applications at some point so that you get some closure (unless you didn't take our application seriously or were clearly a bot, in which case we simply delete it without further processing.)

Next steps…

If you’re qualified and interested, please apply on our website (www.taoti.com/careers.) Please note that these job ads often get placed onto other websites with their own application systems (we’re looking at you Jooble!) and some sites (looking at you Indeed!) have made up random salary ranges, so if you see one of those, know that it's not from us. We aren't able to respond to applications that don’t come through our own website (Because we use software to manage our hiring process, and without it, it would be the wild west here. So please be sure you’re applying on our website.)

Pretty please, no recruiters.