Yanni Gu

Chief Content Officer & Executive Content Advisor

Yanni Gu is a seasoned digital marketing and business professional with background and experience in growing digital businesses, online traffic and lead generation, creation and execution of digital marketing strategy, market and consumer research, business plan development, consultative selling, proposal creation, P&L management, talent sourcing, and leadership and management of teams.

Her specialty from the business perspective is in the creation of innovative marketing capabilities, along with the implementation of efficient processes and formation of the right teams that meet company growth goals. Her specialty within the digital marketing space is content marketing, which entails leveraging strategic content creation and distribution tactics on and off the brands’ websites to grow market share and online revenue. Aside from content marketing, other digital marketing experience includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Online Reputation Management, paid media (PPC, display, native advertising, and paid social), Digital Public Relations, Social Media, and influencer marketing.

Throughout her career, Yanni has worked with SMBs as well as Fortune 100 and 500 brands. Her client portfolio range from eCommerce to local brick-and-motor business, B2B and B2C. She has worked with three startups in the digital agency space, two of which successfully exited to a national and global agency with 82 offices across five continents within two to three years of her joining the companies, respectively. She also has experience in the media/publishing side with a San Diego-based online lifestyle publishing company that also successfully exited to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

In 2012, Yanni Gu was brought on by Covario, who exited to iProspect in 2015, to build out the Content Marketing division. Under her leadership, the content team grew from one person (herself) to 12 people internally and reached an annual revenue of $5M+ from $500,000 in three years, a 900% increase.

As the Director of Content at iProspect, she managed the division’s P&L and worked closely with finance to ensure proper financial reporting and hitting the financial targets. She also developed and maintained strategic partnerships with other agencies, vendors, as well as a few dozen freelance writers and designers to provide quality work and the needed scalability and flexibility in order to support sustainable growth. Yanni and her team emphasized on the development and use of efficient workflow and processes.

As a result, the content division was able to support almost 2x the client revenue amount per person compared to the agency average. The content capabilities include digital PR, publisher outreach, influence marketing, viral content campaign execution, creative content development (images, infographics, animated gif, interactive, and video content), and blog and content hub creation. These capabilities were one of the primary reasons for Covario’s successful exit as iProspect only offered paid media and some SEO services before the acquisition.

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