When it comes to community building and marketing insight, Jana Devan, Director of Marketing for KTBA and Founder of Zettist, has skills in spades. Today, we want to highlight her business and discuss why she chose to be a 2022 Premier Sponsor of the KTBA. Find out more about her, her involvement with our organization, and more in this interview.
1 | Thank you for chatting with us, Jana. Could you please tell us about yourself, your business, and why you decided to join KTBA?
I started my marketing agency back in 2016 when I noticed something missing across brands—consistency. With the onset of social media, and a huge spike in digital marketing efforts in the early aughts, marketing materials were getting confusing. You could enter a store and get a totally different visual and emotional experience than you did online. So, we set out to change that.
Now, our team creates marketing strategies for established businesses to help build that consistency. So that each touchpoint of marketing sounds like it is coming from the same people. We do this through organic SEO, copywriting, content marketing, and social media marketing, and we can partner with other collaborators to grow our team and include other disciplines as well (more on that below).
In 2018, I joined the KTBA after moving to Kensington and joined the Board in 2020 as the Marketing Director. It has been beautiful to see how much this organization has grown in that time, from around 60 to over 90 members!
2 | Zettist has collaborated with quite a few of our local businesses and KTBA members. Can you speak to the partnerships you’ve fostered in the community, and who your ideal client is?
Our team is so lucky to be a part of such a collaborative and forward-thinking community. We have had the privilege of working with members like Rhianna White, Ami Lewallen, Helen Bonar, and Shana Hazan and partnering with other creatives on projects, such as members Petra Ives, Angela Noble, and Diolinda Monteiro. These client relationships and partnerships we’ve formed have been so special to us, and we look forward to continuing to work with businesses and creatives in our community.
Our ideal client is someone who knows the value of organic marketing and has an established business that needs a marketing strategy to help get their marketing materials across the line. Our best clients are mid-market enterprises and established businesses with a marketing team that needs help reaching their goals.
3 | Can you share with us what your favorite project has been or what you’re most proud of in your business?
To pick one favorite project would be nearly impossible. Each client we work with sparks new ideas and passions within us that we didn’t even know existed. But, one that lives close to all of us reading this is actually the KTBA.
Since 2020 we have been donating our time to create marketing campaigns for major events like the KTBA Bike Ride and Walkabout. In these years (and even through the pandemic), we have seen growth in every facet of the marketing mix. Not only in new memberships—which is a big goal of ours—but also in breaking records on website traffic, event attendance, and fundraising goals for our organization.
The KTBA sold out the bike ride last year well before the cutoff and had so much extra interest that this year we get to add a whole new route! The Board of Directors works tirelessly for these results, and I am inspired by everyone I get to work alongside on this team.
These are the sorts of results we see across clients and what makes us so thrilled to continue our work every day.
4 | What is one thing you wish everyone knew about Zettist or your story in general?
In marketing, it’s essential to find a partner who will strategically guide you through your growth spurts and give valuable advice and partake in thoughtful ideation with your team to take your business to the next level. Often, when we approach a client about content marketing, they think we are proposing just “writing blogs,” but it is so much more than that. Our content work sets you up as an expert on search engines and allows you to be found through everyday searches—which pays off long after we’ve done the work.
We have seen clients gain leads and conversions from the content we wrote several years ago. It is an organic discipline that will pay off for many years to come.
Want to work with Jana and her team? Contact them at heythere@zettist.com