Shannon Black
Growth Marketing Leader
I came to marketing through storytelling — photography, filmmaking, and creative work. For more than a decade, I've built and scaled integrated growth engines across brand, demand, media, content, CRM, and digital experience, leading an ~$18M marketing operation across ten-plus channels.
Growth Strategy
Connecting brand, performance and customer experience into one growth system.
Demand Generation
Building acquisition engines across paid media, organic search, content, CTV and social.
Lifecycle & Experience
Designing CRM, web and conversion experiences that move prospects from awareness to enrollment.
Marketing Intelligence
Connecting media investment to downstream business outcomes through attribution, analytics and funnel intelligence.
01 / GROWTH ENGINE
I inherited an underperforming paid social program and saw an opportunity to build a broader acquisition engine. I expanded the channel mix, brought agency management in-house, introduced CRM-informed optimization, pioneered CTV, and built the measurement infrastructure needed to connect acquisition spend to enrollment outcomes.
The Build
Paid Social — took over underperforming account, scaled from $25K to $600K+ monthly
Paid Search — took over agency management, implemented keyword and match type CRM tracking
YouTube — added as brand and demand channel
CTV (MNTN/Hulu) — pioneered adoption, built custom attribution
Programmatic Display — broadened reach and retargeting
Reddit, LinkedIn, Spotify — diversified acquisition mix
Performance Max — integrated CLV and CRM data, shifted from volume to high-value conversion
The conversion layer underneath it
Media only works if what it points at converts. I led a ground-up WordPress reconstruction of a complex multi-program site — architecture, content, UX, SEO foundation, and the Salesforce integration that connects web activity to the enrollment funnel, built first through REST API and later streamlined through Zapier.
13 program landing pages, each designed around the prospective student journey and continuously A/B tested to improve inquiry and application conversion.
Admissions portal — I identified a gap in the FAFSA completion journey and proposed a FAFSA action trigger inside the portal. The resulting automated follow-up re-engaged students who hadn't completed financial aid, contributing to a 7-point increase in ISIR completion.
The team: a Media Strategist, a paid search agency, and direct platform relationships with Google, Meta,TikTok, MNTN, and Reddit.
Building a $17.8M Integrated Growth Engine
Example ad creative
Websites & Landing Pages - Various
After scaling the acquisition engine, I identified a structural ceiling: past a certain level of performance spend, you exhaust the addressable in-market audience. Performance captures demand at the bottom of the funnel. Brand creates the demand performance later captures.
The Diagnosis
Performance marketing reaches prospects only during the final active window of their decision. Brand is what ensures we're already in the consideration set when that window opens. Meanwhile, as third-party cookies disappear and platforms consolidate, the same operational discipline produces steadily worse results on degraded data. Branded search is the hedge — durable, first-party demand we own outright rather than rent.
The Recommendation
Brand — build a coherent visual identity and messaging system.
Media mix — the institution sat at roughly 5% brand allocation against a sector benchmark of 23%. The proposal closes that gap in phases rather than in one step.
Creative — full-funnel content that shows up at every stage of the decision, not only at the moment someone is ready to click.
Team — two targeted hires to execute at the scale the strategy requires.
The Process
Halo and lag-correlation analysis across a full annual cycle, McKinsey and EAB benchmarking, a complete strategy document, executive summaries, and in-person leadership presentations. The plan was written to be falsifiable, with named signals that would confirm or break it within twelve months
Status: strategic proposal, not yet implemented.
02 / BRAND STRATEGY
From Demand Capture to Demand Creation
03 / MEASUREMENT
The infrastructure that made it findable
None of this is visible without the reporting layer underneath it. When I arrived, marketing reporting lived in spreadsheets. I built the tracking architecture in Salesforce CRM, made the business case for Marketing Cloud and built the lifecycle and reporting infrastructure on it, then independently connected every advertising platform and the CRM into a single blended system — real-time cost per stage, across every channel, simultaneously.
Most organizations know their cost per lead. I built the infrastructure to know the cost per everything.
Pictured: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence (MCI) dashboard: spend reconciled against CRM outcomes at every funnel stage. Structure recreated with sample data.
Measuring what last-click couldn't see
CTV receives no conversion credit in a last-click world, so when leadership questioned the spend, the numbers appeared to agree with them. I thought the numbers were incomplete, and built a system to find out.
What I built
A custom Salesforce/MNTN integration tracking ad exposure at the lead level, cross-referencing CRM and platform data to identify which conversions had been exposed to CTV before converting somewhere else. I also conceptualized and wrote the :30 spots, scripting the narratives and directing the creative team through production.
What it found
1.4M households reached; 81 confirmed student starts.
Among prospects exposed to CTV before converting elsewhere: +41% Google Search conversion lift and +40% organic application-to-start lift.
CTV wasn't generating demand. It was making every other channel work harder — and the channels downstream were taking the credit for it.
Presented to executive leadership. Budget was subsequently reduced pending external agency review.
The lifecycle architecture behind it
The webinar worked because the journey around it did. I designed and built full-funnel journey architecture in Salesforce Marketing Cloud spanning lead, application, and enrollment stages — multitrigger automations integrating email, SMS, ad audiences, and CRM data into sequences that responded to prospect behavior in real time. For three months I also stepped into operational leadership of the Marketing Cloud team while the Director of Marketing Operations was on leave, managing the platform, the team, and campaign execution without interruption.
A lead without a journey is just a name in a database.
04 / EXPERIENCE
Turning an Admissions Touchpoint Into an Enrollment Engine
When I found it, the webinar program for applicants belonged to Admissions — a Zoom call with dated slides walking prospective students through paperwork. Attendance was low. Energy was lower.
I pitched a different role for it: not another administrative touchpoint but a pre-orientation experience, built to create confidence, connection, and momentum before students started. I rebuilt it from the ground up — produced, branded, and repositioned around an honest, immersive preview of academic life - and integrated it end-to-end with Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud to automate invitations, followup journeys, and downstream tracking.
The Results:
51.7% start rate among attendees
5.02x more likely to enroll vs. non-attendees
+4.43% retention boost for online cohorts
The best conversion tool we had wasn't an ad. It was an experience.
Marketing Cloud Email Journey
Webinar takeaway materials. Concept & Copy.
Turning brand strategy into demand
Performance marketing captures demand that already exists. Brand is what creates it. This is the positioning work behind campaigns.
The Sovereign Creator - 2026 Brand Framework
Twenty-five years of Hollywood credibility, and no articulated position. Legacy film schools are slow and prestige-locked. Online platforms are fast and hollow. Neither describes what our students actually are: people building a career and a personal brand at the same time, who need institutional authority and industry speed in the same place.
I built the framework around that tension and named it the Expert Rebel - accredited, industry-born expertise moving at the pace of entertainment.
The part I'd defend hardest is the visual standard. Real humans, real gear, no exceptions. AI for texture and atmospheric light, never for subjects or equipment. When you're marketing an accredited school to people choosing where to spend four years and considerable money, depicting students and gear that don't exist isn't a style decision.
Internal brand framework. Not formally adopted; the positioning and voice are in active use across paid creative.
The Sovereign Creator - LAFS brand framework, 2026. Strategy, positioning, and deck.
Brand persona: the Expert Rebel.
Visual integrity standard for institutional marketing.
05 / BRAND ACTIVATION
Meta ad creative, disruptor brand voice series, 2026. Concept and copy. The Expert Rebel persona in execution.
The world is waiting for you
Campaign
Launched post-COVID, 2021
Written and produced for the post-COVID moment, when everyone had spent two years waiting for something to start. Open landscapes, vast possibility, direct address. Partnered with our Art Director; directed the creative team through production.
672% lift in branded search demand, measured via a controlled Google Search Lift test — brand investment converting into intent we owned outright.
Campaign
Your success is our mission. Your impact, our legacy.
Legacy 25th Anniversary Campaign
Built around a quarter-century in Hollywood and what the alumni went on to make. The brief was to make prospective students feel they were joining something rather than enrolling somewhere. Your success is our mission. Your impact, our legacy.
Written and produced; directed the creative team through production.
Good content isn't a volume game. It's a positioning game.
When the content team was eliminated in May 2025, the blog went three months without ownership and monthly views fell to 13,966. I took stewardship in August, absorbed the function into the Digital Team, and built a volunteer contributor network to fill the gap. By January 2026 monthly views had more than doubled, to a record 38,472.
The results
+23.6% blog views year over year, +28.3% active users, +26.6% sessions.
62 posts published, roughly seven a month, with no dedicated headcount.
121K search clicks from 34.1M impressions; 196 pages ranking in Google's top ten and 58 queries in the top three.
99.8% of clicks from non-branded search — prospects finding us through topic searches before they knew the brand existed.
The editorial strategy
Rather than chase volume, I established six content pillars: entertainment and industry events, education and skills, craft and industry insight, alumni, campus and community, and diversity and culture. Across every pillar the voice is warm, clued-in, and industry-aware — never academic, never clickbait.
The next phase turns this foundation into a fully resourced engine integrated with paid media, lifecycle, and brand: moving existing top-five keywords into the top three, refreshing time-sensitive content, expanding the tentpole calendar, and rebalancing coverage across programs.
Rebuilding a Content Engine Without a Content Team
06/ CONTENT & SEO
Instagram Social Post: Concept and copy. Pinned post as conversion driver.
Instagram Social Post: Concept and copy.
Created accompanying blog post: Costume as Character: What the Met Gala Teaches Us About Visual Storytelling
Instagram Social Post: Concept and copy.
Created accompanying blog post: Title Sequence Design: The 90 Seconds That Tell You Everything
I build lean, high-performing teams around clear strategic direction, giving people ownership while creating the structure, systems, and accountability they need to succeed. I lead across functions and stay close to the work without getting in the way of the people doing it, connecting strategy to execution and execution to measurable business outcomes.
In Practice:
Strategic Direction — Translating business goals into clear marketing priorities, roadmaps, and measurable outcomes
Team Leadership — Building lean teams, developing talent, and creating clear ownership and accountability
Agency Leadership — Managing agency partnerships, budgets, performance, and strategic alignment
Cross-Functional Leadership — Bringing marketing, admissions, creative, technology, and executive stakeholders together around shared goals
Executive Communication — Turning complex marketing data and strategy into clear recommendations that drive decisions
Building Teams That Punch Above Their Weight
7 / LEADERSHIP
By the Numbers
5x — Student population growth during my tenure
672% — Lift in branded search demand following brand campaigns
5.02x — Higher enrollment likelihood among webinar attendees vs. non-attendees
51.7% — Webinar attendee start rate
+4.43% — Retention lift for online cohorts following the webinar program
+41% — Google Search conversion lift following CTV exposure
+40% — Organic application-to-start conversion lift following CTV exposure
38,472 — Monthly blog views, an all-time record in January 2026
+23.6% — Year-over-year blog growth without dedicated content headcount
~36% — Relative App-to-Start decline identified, diagnosed, and addressed
+7 points — ISIR completion uplift through coordinated email, SMS, and website intervention
“Shannon is a results-driven, hard-working, unstoppable force. She embodies integrity and has a unique ability to see through problems to find the proper solution. Because of her broad set of expert-level skills — with her digital marketing campaigns, multiple website redesigns, and organizational restructure plans — she's helped increase the school's reach, brand awareness, and bottom line. Shannon opens your eyes to change, encourages you to ask ‘why,' and will always be there to help pick up the pieces when things don't turn out the way they were intended.”
Cara L. Himmel — Director, Marketing Operations | The Los Angeles Film School
“Shannon single-handedly transformed our dysfunctional, bloated website into the thriving platform it is today. She is a pioneer, introducing LAFS to WordPress and Salesforce, recognizing their potential to drive company growth. When she sees something that could be improved, she is not afraid to roll up her sleeves and do it herself, often without anyone asking. She is an unsung hero for The L.A. Film School, and many overlook her invaluable contributions and don't realize how much she's improved the company. Her campaign visions emboldened the Creative team to perform at their best. Shannon is sharp, artistic, fearless, and brings everyone she works with to a higher level."
E. Shuttleworth — Art Director & Graphic Designer | The Los Angeles Film School