Inside Marketing Design at WEconnect

Charli: Welcome back to Inside Marketing Design. This is a show where I get on calls with my fellow marketing designers in the tech industry, and talk to them about how they get their work done at their companies. On today's show, we're taking a look inside marketing design at WEconnect.

WEconnect is a digital health company and they help people to recover from substance use disorder through an incentive-based mobile app. They also offer one-on-one peer support and have online meetings for people in recovery. It was really interesting to get on a call with Marina Snyder, who is the marketing designer and front-end developer WEconnect to talk about how things work when you're marketing for a health company, WEconnect is a very different type of tech company for this reason, and that it's not like where I work at ConvertKit and a lot of the other companies that we've had as part of the series, where a visitor comes to the website, hits sign up, becomes a customer and that's a conversion, what Marina ends up dealing with, and what we spoke a bit about on this episode is marketing to two different audiences. The health partners and then the people in recovery themselves, it's an interesting dynamic. And we had a good conversation about this and also just about in-house marketing design in general and the career path for it.

Speaking of career path, a little bit on Marina before we get into the episode, she's been at WEconnect for about a year now and has had quite a varied career before this. She has a degree in English and sort of started out working as a marketer, but that's where she got introduced to web design, was from the like marketer side of things and started freelancing, doing web design on the side, started learning to code as well. She's worked as a project manager in a design studio, worked as a front-end developer and she brings all of these skills together to be marketing designer plus front-end developer at WEconnect. So without further ado, let's get into the episode and take a look Inside Marketing Design, at WEconnect Health Management.

Welcome Marina too Inside Marketing Design. I'm very excited to have you here to talk about marketing design at WEconnect. Welcome to the show.

Marina: Thank you so much, I'm really, I'm excited to be here and thank you for having me.

Charli: Let's start by talking about the team that WEconnect. I think this is always a good place to start in these episodes just to give us the lay of the land and figure out where you fit within the company, where marketing design fits, how many people are working on it? So, yeah, tell me about that.

Marina: Yeah, so I am the marketing designer and front-end developer, so a lot of website stuff. And then I originally joined there as a marketing manager when I joined and then she left a while afterwards, since my background is in marketing, I've been able to help out with some of those other tasks with emails, social, whatever that may look like. And then working closely with our account management team with a lot of copy and kind of helping fill in some of those gaps. And then recently we brought on a copywriter, who's been a huge asset to the entire company. And then this week we actually had a senior content marketing manager join the team after quite a search and found just the right person so we're really excited to have her on board.

Charli: So for a long time then at the company, you were the marketing team, it sounds like.

Marina: Yes, with a lot of support from like all my co-workers, I couldn't ask for a better team with just people like jumping in and if I needed support, everyone was more than willing to like write copy or any way that they could pitch in. I am so fortunate to just work at a great place where people are more than willing to help you out.

Charli: And do things that aren't necessarily like their job, you know?

Marina: Exactly, exactly.

Charli: How big is WEconnect? I forgot to ask that earlier on.

Marina: We were about 25 when I joined and then recently as a digital health company and just with what's happening in the world, we just doubled actually in size.

Charli: Wow.

Marina: Yeah.

Charli: Wow, okay, so that was a very quick doubling and you're up to about 50 people now.

Marina: A lot of that is customer support and just like being able to support more people cause we'll have a lot more members, we're really growing how many people we're supporting. So just ramping up to up with that.

Charli: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I do think it's like a very, it's a small company attitude to have towards things, where people are willing to jump in and like help out in situations. And like you being willing to take on things that aren't necessarily marketing design or front-end work, while the company was searching for the right person, that's such a like a special thing I think, about working at a small company.

Marina: And I've actually, this is, I think this is the biggest company I've been at now. I've only ever worked at small company.

Charli: Really?

Marina: So I've gotten very used to working, wearing a lot of hats and in that, found like the ones that I really love. And that's how I found that I really love doing marketing or doing marketing design and doing kind of visual and that creative work and have felt fortunate where I've been able to kinda shift my career in that direction because I have had access to more job responsibilities and able to kind of move in a certain direction, so.

Charli: Yes, I think you can grow faster in your career when you're at a small company compared to a big one. Even though the big ones look great on your CV, like the experience you're getting just isn't the same.

Marina: Yeah, totally worth it there.

Charli: So now you do have a marketing team, but who do you report to?

Marina: So I report to the COO and then I also have the new marketing manager will be someone who I worked very closely with. I also work very closely with the woman who heads up the account management team as well as sales.

Charli: What about other designers within the company? Are there any other designers on the team?

Marina: There are, yeah, we have product designers and that's one of the things I was actually really excited about with this role, was being able to work very closely with the other product designers. I think like a month into the job, I requested to trade my window desk for being able to be closer to the designers and just kind of like tap on their shoulder and ask them things, we meet once a week typically, just to kind of go over what they're doing, go over what I'm doing. They're very open to suggestions, which I like appreciate. And even though they are quite senior me, or very willing to kind of take suggestions and roll with my feedback. I've also helped out with like usability testing. I've done some testing with marketing materials and they've been very helpful in just kind of helping guide how I set up those tests and kind of lead me with some of like product design best practices to help better inform what I do over in marketing.

Charli: We are definitely gonna get into talking about that a little later on cause I love that, I do usability testing as well on marketing materials and it's not something that's super common, so, that'd be cool to talk about. So it sounds like that probably, this close relationship with the other designers on the team must have helped in this period where you were like a marketing team of one cause you still felt like you were part of a design team it seems.

Marina: Absolutely, yeah and it was, when I was one of my first or like my first big project when I joined the company was redoing the website entirely. And in that process, it got to a point where I had to say, "Hey, I can't take on any other projects "if we wanna get this turned around by deadline." And the other designers were just great with if someone needed like a brochure or kind of one off, more like graphic print design, they could usually take that over, like that overflow and very much appreciate that. And as a result kind of, once I had more capacity was always more than willing to jump in when I could and then support them how I can.

Charli:  I love that, I love that mixing of the responsibilities again, it's a very small company thing and it's very special, cool.

Marina: Yeah.

Charli:  This brings us in actually to talking about the focus of your work and what you end up focusing your design time on most which I find as a marketing designer is usually you focus on designing for the main marketing methods that the company like takes. What is WEconnect's approach to marketing? And what do you end up designing, most of the time?

Marina: Yeah, I start off with web design or not necessarily start, but that is what I really love doing and that's what I'm passionate about and I'm glad that I could kind of have that as my baby and have a lot of say in the website. Aside from that, we do a lot of presentation decks for like sales and we have two main audiences. One is health plans that are potential partners, so like very kind of big companies, executives that we're talking to. So a lot of that is more technical sales decks and like numbers and stats. And the other audience is the actual members of those health plans, which are people in early recovery. And so just the way we talked that audience is very different, stats have tested horribly. Like people just really do not care about numbers when they're just kind of at that stage in their life. And so yeah, having these very two different materials for the members and patients, it's more like posters or brochures or just kinda like very quick to read and just to scan versus executives, there will be more copy or like one pagers or things that are a bit more in depth.

Charli:  Right, sort of sounds like, like tell me from getting this wrong, but the executives and the health companies, that's like the customer but then the customer is not the user in this case because the users are the people who have a substance use disorder that you're helping out. Yeah.

Marina: Yeah.

Charli:  Interesting, there must be a hard balance to strike then on the website, as you're thinking about these two different audiences, how do you approach that, how do you handle it?

Marina: Yeah, so far I have had, kind of trying to like segment the website. So I have like a page for health plans and we also have providers which are like treatment centers that either work under, like within the health plan ecosystem or independently, we partner with them as well. And then another page for people onboarding onto the app. We're about to start working on a blog and so it's interesting kind of finding what that content will look like and how to speak to more than one audience in there, in a way that's still cohesive. So I'm excited to see that be built out and working with our new senior content marketing manager on that and all the ideas she brings to the table with this just kind of unique situation.

Charli:  Yeah, that is interesting. We have that problem, well, problem, fun challenge, whatever you want to view, you take of it, at ConvertKit with our blog, because we produce content for creators to learn about marketing and building the audience, making sales online, that sort of thing. But then we also write posts about our company, which is more, I guess, for an audience of other remote companies or people wanting to start remote companies and they're not always the exact same audience. We haven't found a great solution for that yet, I think I wanna end up actually with two different blogs, each with a different brand name essentially for the different content. So it would be interesting to see how you decided to solve that problem too.

Marina: Yeah, that is a thought that's crossed my mind. We'll see

Charli:  Yeah, okay. So you spend a lot of time on the website, you spend a lot of time, well less time it sounds like, designing brochures and posters and like print type stuff. Anything else that comes up in your general day to day of designing? Do you focus on ads, social media content, that sort of thing?

Marina: Yeah, social media, not so much ads. I think I did like one ad when I first joined the company and we haven't really done one since. Emails also like a lot of, even before I was like a in house designer, I was doing a lot of like email templates and things like that. So that's still something I'm pretty involved in. I will say I probably do more time on like posters and brochures right now than I am doing on the website, because one of the ways that we talked to the like the member patient audience is creating a bunch of materials for our partners to then use to let let their patients know that this is like a free service to their patients that they're eligible for and can sign up for. So a lot of it is creating like a bunch of materials that we could hand off and then our partners are able to use those and just kind of make it as easy as possible for them.

Charli:  So with all this, because this is not a typical tech company in that it's like, user comes to website, user signs up for product user becomes paying member of product, that's how the company makes money. What are the metrics of success for marketing design at WEconnect?

Marina: What I think is really helpful and what I see as like kind of a good marker of my work is our form submissions. So having very CTA kind of focused web pages where someone comes to a page, there's one call to action, except the homepage, that's a little bit different and making sure we're tracking that. But yeah, it's challenging because with these like enterprise customers and clients and partners that we have, these are such long deals. It's not just like, they come and they buy. So, in addition to kind of tracking how many form submissions or conversions we're getting on the website, I think a lot of it is kind of the long game of this like longer sales process that we have. And so that is making sure that our sales materials, like our slide decks are just very polished, that the website has certain amount of polish that just in general, there has to be a certain quality so that we have their trust, because these are very large deals. I don't know what the numbers are, but it's nothing to cough at I'm sure, so.

Charli: Yeah, yeah and so it's more about the brand, right? And how that presents as a whole. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So if you're not, if it's not metrics then they like measure your work, I suppose, how do you feel like your work is measured and how do you know when you've done well with the project or with your job?

Marina: At the risk of sounding like I'm tooting my own horn, we have kind of a, the equivalent of employee of the month and I actually did get that twice so far this year.

Charli: Well done Marina, that's awesome.

Marina: Thank you, I think it's helpful for me to kind of just get a gauge on how I'm doing, cause of course we're always our own worst critics, but the feedback was just being very responsive and like quick to respond to things that were coming in as well as being really, really open to feedback and adaptable, which I think is important when you're doing design and not getting too married to what you're doing. And also just caring about the mission, I think that's, we have a lot of people on our team, like myself included who are in recovery ourselves and kind of have a different understanding of the space. And I didn't take their traditional route in that. And our company is very like program agnostic, meaning we don't say like, AA is the way to go or anything like that.

Charli:  Right

Marina: And so having discussions about is this keeping us open to people on any path that they're on into recovery? And making sure that that's communicated.

Charli: That's amazing and so it sounds like for sure, you're not just in this role to take the work that has given to you, just do it and hand it back. Like you're playing a bigger part in the business, which I love to hear it, especially when design gets to do that in general, but marketing design in particular, I think that's really cool. Let's talk about a project at WEconnect and kinda go through it. Where does work usually come from for you? And I'm sure it's different depending on what type of work it is but yeah. Do you get handed a brief, how does it work?

Marina: Yeah, typically we have a pretty informal practice right now, which we are, with the new manager that's coming, she's talking about getting some different systems in place and I'm actually really excited to tap those in place and have a bit more streamlined and one place to track everything

Charli:  More structure.

Marina: Yeah and more getting ahead of things better, cause I've been doing as best as I can to kind of predict things that like, with like product update announcements, things like that. Just get ahead of those. As things are kind of, it's a fast paced environment, so things tend to shift. But typically someone will let me know like, "Hey, this is a project that's coming up." It might be like, I need this, like for first slide decks, it is usually quicker turnaround. So maybe like in a couple of days I'll need this. We have a presentation with a potential partner with other things, it might be like, Oh, I need this in a couple of weeks. Usually someone just tells me, hey, like this is a thing that is going to be, I'm working on it, it'll be coming to you pretty soon, who the audience is, is a big part of that, what the timeline is. And then I try to get content, sometimes there's not a lot of content, if there's not a lot of content I ask who I could partner with to get that content, ideally sometimes, occasionally I'll write the copy, but for the most part, I like working with someone else since I am kind of a strong editor, originally I went down that path too right after college. So it's easier for me to edit something than it is to just sit down and like write it from scratch.

Charli:  That's just another great asset to you being on the team, I guess, that you can be editor as well. That's really cool, okay. So it sounds like things are kind of fairly informal, which I think is very common in small companies that there's not a very strict briefing process that people have to go through. So talk us through the design side of things in the process. What tools do you use and what's that like in terms of like feedback loops and things like that?

Marina: Yeah, so I use Sketch a lot. It is kind of like a sketch environment with the product designers. And if it's something quick, like social media graphics I do in Sketch, just cause it's easier, it's quicker. For things like anything print design, I will actually go into Adobe, so like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, just depending what it is.

I love Figma, we're just not a Figma team. So I tend to go to Sketch. And for feedback, if it's a bigger project, I love getting people involved, like as soon as possible. And just being like, here's a really rough thing, don't let me like stray too far in the wrong direction

Charli:  Right.

Marina: If I need to course correct, let's do that now. I know some people like doing like, three different versions of something and then presenting that. And I think that's more maybe like an agency kind of approach to something, where you're working with clients. When it's in house, I'm just like, here's a super rough thing. Like, you know me, kind of, you could maybe guess where this is going. Like, is this kinda what you had in mind? When we used to be in an office, I'd go over and just like pull it up and show them. Sometimes I'm taking screenshots of my Sketch files and sending that to people over Slack. So it depends, but I try to involve people I'm collaborating with as closely as I can.

Charli:  And how wide is that, like team of, I guess project stakeholders? How many people are you usually asking for feedback for on a project?

Marina: It depends who asked me. For the sales team, I tend to work kind of one-on-one with people in the sales team. And actually also the same for the account management team. Usually there's a project owner of everything. And so I'm able to kind of work with that one person now that we have a copywriter, when we're asked for something in the marketing department, it's usually her and I we'll kind of pair up and then talk with the project owner on that. And then the other person, if they need to get like approval from anyone else. So I'll kind of take it and get approval.

Charli:  Nice, do you find that the project owner kind of manages the project as well? Or do you end up doing a lot of that work? I'm guessing it's as small team, you don't have a separate like project manager role.

Marina: Correct, yeah.

Charli:  So how does that side of things work?

Marina: Well, we do in product, but not in marketing. And I think that will be a big part of the I'm the manager that just came in. That's gotta be part of her role, as well as like just strategy and kind of high level stuff. And then in the account management team, they do have someone who heads up that department and she's a fantastic project manager. I love working with her. My cat's wanting to get on my lap.

Charli:  Oh, hello, we love having a furry friend on the show. For anyone listening to the audio version, you're missing out right now. So it sounds like it's very, maybe not collaborative in the sense that you're working with other designers on the process, but very open to feedback and like throughout the whole way during the design. How do you know when the project's done? Like who decides this is ready to go, this is ready to ship?

Marina: It depends on the timeline. So like the website and one of the things I love about the website, is it's never done. It's just kind of like living thing that you could constantly be improving and working on and expanding. With other things, it's kind of how good could we get it before it's due?

Charli:  Right.

Marina: So and like slide decks, recently I redid the template for the slide deck, so that was kind of like a bigger project that we're continuing to add slides to and adjust those as our data gets updated, things like that. I don't think anything's ever really done, we're just kind of like evolving everything that exists over time.

Charli:  Yeah, I think evolving things is really important when you're a team of one as well. Because it's so much faster to start from a base than to start from scratch a lot all the time, so. That makes a lot of sense to me. This is all sounding like, it sounds like things are pretty great. Like you're in a good environment to get your work done. You've got a great team around you. What are the challenges that you face and like things that you're working through at the moment?

Marina: Yeah, I think the biggest challenge is with our, I've kind of talked a little bit about it earlier, but I haven't run into this before where we have our partners and then we actually don't have direct contact with their audience anymore. We used to go like in-clinic and help people onboard there. But one, when we're expanding, we're realizing we need to kind of shift away from that model and two, stay at home happened, So we're not able to exist and have that like one-on-one face time with patients and we, because of healthcare regulations, they can't just give us a list of like emails for everyone that we should reach out to. So I think that is the biggest challenge. And also shifting where, and one of the reasons I did a lot of testing too, is like, our marketing has to be super strong if we're going from like having a person in a clinic to having a poster in a clinic. And not saying that that could ever, I don't think a poster could replace a person just in terms of if effectiveness, but let's try to get it as close as we can and get it as like eye catching and do as much as we can to make that an impactful piece of marketing to let people know that this is a service that they could use for free.

Charli:  Yeah, this is when, like the brands that we work on, have to take on like a personality and be like, take up the space, right.

Marina: Exactly.

Charli:  So that people know who we are, what we do and can start to build a connection with it. I think that's, yeah, that's really fun challenge to have, but yeah, definitely a challenge. Let's talk more about this usability testing. Tell me more about that. Is that something you just decided you wanted to do? Were you asked to do it? How did you do it? All of the things.

Marina: Yeah, I, this was something I actually decided to do for the reason I just mentioned. Like I realized that we were, this is even before a stay at home, I realized with expanding our audience in the way that we're about to expand, or people that would be eligible for the app, that became a much larger number and realized our marketing materials would be lifting a lot more weight because of that.

Charli:  Yeah.

Marina: So what I did was we actually have what we call our ambassador program, which my coworker set up, which is a group of about 10 people who are in recovery, who give more in depth, like we meet with each of them, like one hour a month to do usability testing. Or in this case, I just sat down with them and had audience interviews. And I did like a bunch of different marketing materials with different images, different like headlines, different wording to try to figure out what would appeal to them? Also part of what inspired this was we realized that for legal reasons, we actually couldn't use the main value proposition that we've been using. So in our app, since it's incentive space, people could earn up to like $800 a year by checking into routines and staying like on track with their recovery plan because we use something called contingency management, which is basically rewarding you and it's shown to be the most effective standalone treatment for substance use disorder. That is why we have this as an incentive based app. And this is like a huge part of what we offer. However, in our marketing materials, we legally aren't allowed to market to people who are covered by federally funded health insurance. We aren't able to like incentivize them, essentially.

Charli:  Okay, there's so many hurdles that you got to go.

Marina: Yeah. So that was also part of what inspired like, without talking about this really cool thing we're offering, how could we entice people, especially people who are in recovery, which is, a niche in itself and people have different motivations and different kind of where they're at, how much, how they're processing the world around them. Typically kind of earlier in recovery, it's a little bit harder to focus on things and there's just kinda some fogginess. So yeah, I met with seven of our ambassadors and did like 1/2 an hour to an hour of just like talking through stack ranking with just a lot of variables. And then based on the feedback that I got from that, I created two stack ranking exercises that like only had one variable each and then actually had one of my coworkers who I love working with and he's just very like plugged into the recovery community, actually had 10 folks that he knows who aren't really familiar with our company, look at those and stack rank those as just like their first introduction to Weconnect, which I thought was just very helpful for in the context of like marketing materials,

Charli:  Yeah, getting that first impression for sure.

Marina: Yeah, so and then based on that, kind of were like, people like this people, and like I mentioned earlier, like they don't like numbers, they just really don't care.

Charli:  So this is where learned from the testing, yeah.

Marina: So yeah.

Charli:  And stack ranking is I'm like, let me see if I've got this right, you give them a bunch of options and just getting them to pick like, which you relate to the most, to the least

Marina: Exactly.

Charli:  Is that what it is, yeah, cool. I do a lot of, I do use a research calls, which where I'm doing similar things to what it sounds like you're doing here in these, but we also do a lot of AB testing on our website, but like, because you're designing posters and brochures to like be in clinics and things like that, you can't AB test a poster, using some sort of software because it's a real physical thing in the world. And so, yeah, that's obviously why this testing you're doing in research is so important.

Marina: And we are, as our way to try to kind of get around that, because like I mentioned, we don't have direct, we aren't sending out emails directly, we are doing like link tracking. So just kind of getting that set up where we should be able to track more easily, those things that normally would automatically be baked into like, if we were the person sending the email or whatever, so.

Charli:  That's great, that's really interesting to hear how you're approaching that. I've been surprised honestly in this series, that not every person that I've talked to has spoken about testing and research. So yeah, it's just interesting to me to hear when companies choose to do it and when they don't.

Marina: And I think it's also, it is, I mean, it's so common in product, but like at like a design studio, like that's not really common thing. And for me, I think if I was working at a design studio, like doing similar things, I wouldn't necessarily think to test, but because the other designers that I'm working with, our product designers and just seeing how I could learn from them and grow from them, from just like my interaction with them, this is the way that you grow. At least in my eyes is like learning how to do smarter testing, you know? And I was kind of aware of things, but I didn't like setting hypotheses and like just kind of having a different approach and a more sophisticated approach to this. I learned from just being able to kind of rub shoulders with them essentially.

Charli:  I also think this is another reason why, like I personally love working in in-house design is because maybe testing isn't so relevant in a studio cause you're working for a client and handing it over and moving on to the next project. Whereas being in-house, we're testing to figure out like what our next project is gonna be basically to keep improving the thing we work on. So it's interesting that you've been having some new people join the team lately and the company is obviously growing a lot. Do you see WEconnect hiring more marketing designers in future? Like where does marketing design go at Weconnect and where does your role go in the future, do you think?

Marina: Yeah, I think it's something that we potentially will be doing. I've discussed it a little bit with my boss and now the new marketing manager. We've talked about this a little bit and I'm pretty open with folks that I love doing hands on creative work. I really like being an individual contributor and would like to continue to grow in that capacity, having managed creatives before, I'm not necessarily looking to go that direction. That being said though, I like mentoring people, like I'm open to that. I don't dream of managing like a creative team though, and kind of pulling away from the creative work. So I'm always curious, like how other people are kind of pursuing that. I think that's not something that's talked about a ton it's just like, where do you go from here? You're an in-house marketing designer. I feel like I worked a long time to kind of get here and I'm very happy here, but I'm curious being the first in-house designer at this job and at my last job, or in house marketing designer specifically, I don't really see what's next.

Charli:  Like you haven't got that role model in your company to see this is like the future career path for me. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that I've been thinking about this a lot lately in my career too, because I saw the path to growth clearer for me when I worked at a bigger company, when there was levels of like senior and then there was like our lead and who would lead the team, that sort of thing. At a smaller company, things are a little bit different in that way where the career growth doesn't necessarily mean like stepping up a ladder and managing more and more people. For me, it's meant more like taking on more responsibility within the company and being involved more in the company. And it sounds like you're already doing a lot of that. You're not just thinking about the marketing side of things. That's what it's meant for me as being more involved with a brand and how like overall campaign directions and things like that.

Marina: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And yeah, being the person who has been in the marketing department like the longest, out of the folks who are here now, I do notice, I am like, I'm kind of defining the brand voice when it comes to copy

Charli:  Yeah.

Marina: And things like that. And the manager who just came in, some of the discussions we've been having is just kind of how I could take the lead on just like the brand for the company, even outside of marketing a little bit and kind of be growing that. Like I said, it's interesting to hear how other people have done this, cause also so often, and I think you've talked about this in the past and content you've put out is the, for like visual design, graphic design, so many people discuss like agency life and like what that looks like in an agency. And it is pretty much like you're a junior designer, you're a designer and then you're like, ultimately going to creative director. Like that's of the goal. But an in-house marketing designer, it's like oh, like you mentioned there, you had a clear path at a bigger company. I've never really seen that cause I've always worked at smaller companies, but yeah,

Charli:  Yeah, yeah.

Marina: It's interesting to see how it works in other places and see what I should be aiming for if it's not, ultimately management, so.

Charli:  In my intro I mentioned about how you had this career path to get to where you are and you said it during this episode as well, that you've worked hard to get to here, why did you choose to pursue in-house marketing and design and what do you love about your job?

Marina: Yeah, like I mentioned, I've had the opportunity to wear just so many hats and my first job out of school, like my first full-time job was a marketing coordinator and really getting to work on the website there. And that's when I like just totally fell in love, started teaching myself web design a bit more seriously than like Myspace coding. I think many of us started off with.

Charli:  That was definitely my start, yeap.

Marina: But yeah, the hands on creative work, I really also like working with one brand and being able to kind of compare since I've worked, I was at a, in a studio for a short time as project manager and also being a freelancer and now being an in-house designer, I think one of the things I like the most is I do have more creative autonomy, like at my job, I feel like I'm, like I've kind of proved myself and people just trust me to kind of take the lead and do my job rather than like, with clients it's a little, they wanna be a little bit more hands on.

Charli:  Yeah.

Marina: And they might have more time to kind of manage that project versus at work, we're all kind of like in our own zones. And so it's kinda like, hey, we need this, when could you get it to me by? And then I do it and it's either like, like let's adjust this or, okay, cool, it looks good. Like, let's move on to the next thing, so.

Charli:  Right, yeah you can really get to know the brand and just be trusted cause like you said, you're also developing the voice and developing what their brand should be as well. Yeah, I love that.

Marina: Yeah.

Charli:  Well, thank you, Marina. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Where can people go to find out more about you? Is there anything else that you want to shout out?

Marina: Yeah, yeah, well first off, thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun. And if you are someone in recovery from substance use disorder or just dealing with any kind of other mental health things just right now is a crazy time in the world, go to weconnectrecovery.com and you could find our daily support meetings that are online for free. We have at least seven a day. And then for anything about me, my website is marinasnyder.com and you could find links. I'm not super active on social, but you can find links to my channels when I do happen to go on those.

Charli:  Sounds great, thank you Marina. I really appreciate your time and thanks for sharing with us.

Marina: Yeah, thank you again, this is great.

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