Erica Kastner
Music lover and sociology enthusiast. I thrive at the intersection of cultural immersion and dissection.

Standard Office Systems
As a Marketing Specialist for Standard Office Systems, I mainly focused on amplifying the managed IT services side of the business, a lot of which involved developing and optimizing a multimedia content strategy using various analytics platforms. In this role, I gained experience across a variety of media, from blogging and web design to video content and more.
A core tenet of Standard Officce Systems' marketing strategy is inbound marketing. A way it adheres to inbound marketing principles is by subscribing to the "They Ask, You Answer" philosophy popularized by Marcus Sheridan.
The main belief of this philosophy is that by adapting your marketing to focus on answering customer questions to aid them on the buyer's journey, you will establish yourself as a trusted thought leader, which will generate organic traffic and subsequent qualified inbound leads. This strategic approach has been a whitespace opportunity for the brand when assessing competitior positioning. To align Standard Office Systems' marketing strategy with this philosophy, I deployed various projects across all media.
The projects outlined below all either helped Standard Office Systems implement the "They Ask, You Answer" philosophy or helped achieve one of the marketing department's other goals of raising brand awareness, driving website traffic, and gaining qualified sales leads.
With all of my projects at Standard Office Systems, my work didn't end when I clicked "Publish." I further optimized content such as blogs, landing pages, and forms to meet KPI's and push the audience further down the sales pipeline using insights from a variety of analytics platforms such as Google Search Console, SEMRush, Hubspot, Brightedge, and Lucky Orange.
content marketing
My main role at Standard Office Systems involved populating its blog weekly with SEO-focused content centered around the "They Ask, You Answer" strategy. The purpose of this blog was to encourage visitors to explore the site further, cultivate their view brand as a trusted thought leader in the industry, and over time and with more interactions, gather information on qualified leads through forms and by driving them to our newsletter that sent educational industry thought pieces.
I consistently built out my content calendar by conducting keyword research via Google Analytics and SEMRush to identify whitespace opportunities such as the ability to rank for a popular targeted keyword, gain a featured snippet on Google, or add a post that will round out a topic cluster.
To boost the time on site, further building the company's credibility as a trusted thought leader while keeping the end goal of generating organic qualified leads in mind, I created blog topic clusters centered around the same short-tail keyword, included relevant internal links to other pages on the website, and added tailored CTA's on my blogs.
To increase the company's credibility on Google, therefore driving more visitors to the site, when creating blog posts, I followed SEO best practices such as changing headers, meta descriptions, and alt-text to pre-determined keywords, along with other tactics.
After posting blogs, I used Hubspot Analytics, Google Analytics, and Lucky Orange to identify opportunities to improve performance, for instance by adding a specific section or keyword, or re-organizing the page layout.
Results: Due largely in part to my blogging efforts, the company's total monthly blog views increased four-fold in 2020, in turn increasing its domain authority, blog subscriber count, and the number of organic leads.
Below are the links to some of my most notable blog posts.
Notable Blog Posts
What is the Network Security Key on a Computer?
This post was my company's highest performing blog at the time of my departure.
At the time, it accounted for over half of our blog traffic, garnering over 19,000 views a month and ranking #1 on Google for various keywords containing the phrase "network security key".
This post created multiple blog subscribers, who were fed content to further establish the brand as a trusted thought leader and gain additional information from them that could be used to determine if they were a qualified sales lead.
This comprehensive guide that I designed and wrote was created to rank for various dark web-related keywords in the hopes of increasing website traffic and creating organic managed IT services leads.
This pillar page received close to 800 views a month upon my departure from the company.
History of the Dark Web [Timeline]
This article was written to drive blog traffic and point readers towards the dark web pillar page.
At the time of my departure from the company, this post received over 1,000 views a month and ranked #1 on Google for the highly competitive keyword "history of the dark web".
product launch
To promote Standard Office Systems' Temperature Scanning Kiosks, which were launched in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the marketing department ran a multimedia campaign with three subsequent goals in mind: boost awareness, establish Standard Office Systems as a trusted thought leader for the technology, and drive qualified sales leads.
For the campaign, the marketing department ran sponsored ads on LinkedIn, published various informational blogs, sent a press release to local news outlets, and created an informational video that was promoted on social media and shared by the company's sales reps. To ensure that the company's sales reps were armed with the right selling materials to drive effective conversations with potential prospects, the marketing department developed a comprehensive product guide. I created or helped create every touchpoint of this campaign.
When strategizing how to make the product organically rank on Google, I realized that the product name was too competitive and the company's product would likely not rank on page one of Google, which is where the majority of clicks derive from. Therefore, I pivoted the content strategy and instead wrote blogs optimized for related keywords that involved questions or phrases the target audience would ask.
Results: My content strategy on the company's blog resulted in multiple blogs of mine ranking on page one of Google for highly targeted keywords, collectively bringing in multiple organic leads per week, with one blog in particular bringing in upwards of three qualified organic sales leads at its peak. Additionally, the promotional video published to the company's LinkedIn led to a high rate of impressions, which boosted product awareness, and the informational product guide was a key tool that the sales department used to drive conversations with prospective clients.
Blogs/Press Release
What is a Temperature Scanning Kiosk? [Info + Pricing]
Informational Product Guide
Product Webpage
Promotional Video
Below is the temperature kiosk promotional video which I wrote the script for and helped film. This video was placed on the product webpage to drive leads and increase website dwell time. Clips from this video were also used in promotional ads on LinkedIn.
website re-design
The company's old homepage was in need of a re-design that would improve its visual appearance, remove unnecessary information, and establish a clear narrative flow to give visitors a glimpse into key details about the company. My design was implemented using available in-house resources to meet these objectives.
In the screenshots of the old and new homepage attached in the gallery below are explanations of my thought process behind the design.








