Our speaker today was Clara Moses from Hydrate Marketing.
Clara Moses
Clara Moses is an Account & Content Manager at Hydrate Marketing. She spends her workdays collaborating with her client accounts and the Hydrate team to plan and implement campaigns. While she is a lover of process and procedure, her main passion is helping businesses tell their stories through content. She has successfully done this using a variety of channels, including blogs, marketing emails, social media, videos, and podcasts. Leaning on her journalism and creative writing background, she brings a combination of technical skills and out-of-the-box thinking to the table.
Clara shared via a PowerPoint presentation the following:
The motto for Hydrate Marketing is: Brand growth is thirsty work.
Clara shared Hydrates Marketing core values:
- Imagine having an team embedded in your company that knows everything marketing inside and out—all for a fraction of what it would cost to hire full-time employees…
- That’s what working with Hydrate is like!
- We support our diverse group of clients’ business goals by creating strategic marketing plans and implementing relevant tactics that work 24/7 to bring them more leads, prospects, and customers.
Example of what they have done to help local businesses:
Applied Bolting Technology: Over our five years of partnership, we attracted over 1,000 webinar sign-ups, grew their LinkedIn network to over 4,000, and added over 16,000 contacts to their HubSpot CRM.
Stave Puzzles: Their social media follower counts have grown from 560 to over 4,520 on Instagram and from 2,050 to over 3,500 on Facebook.
Wealth Conservatory: They saw a 22% increase in revenue in the first 18 months of working with Hydrate and we continue to hit new goals together!
Their Team includes:
Clara Moses: Account & Content Manager
Madison Merrihew: Director of Marketing
Dan Evans: Fractional CMO
Heidi Judd: Social Media Specialist & Graphic Designer
This is the graphic she used to describe the “Roadmap” when working with businesses
Clare then moved on to talk about the current environment:
She shared that rapidly growing companies are deprioritizing marketing
Growth is a good problem to have, but acquisitions, new markets, added services, and referrals create complexity.
What worked when the company was smaller often doesn't scale. An experienced Fractional Chief Marketing Officer brings the strategic leadership and alignment needed to keep the business moving forward.
That’s exactly what we’re helping TSS Advisors, one of the nation’s fastest-growing accounting and advisory firms, accomplish.
Companies are struggling to hire the right people.
Believe it or not, marketing tactics can even assist HR teams.
For example, within weeks of rolling out social media and public awareness campaigns for FUJIFILM Dimatix, all 66 open production positions were filled, and resumes were flowing in from across the country for engineering positions.
Also, the employment ads we’ve run on Facebook and Instagram for Dartmouth Dining have reached more than 2 million people, generating over 3,000 form submissions from interested candidates and 150,000 visits to online application pages
Employee-generated content is having a major moment.
61% of Gen Z and 40% of the population overall discover products through employee-generated content.
Companies are discovering that some of their most authentic brand advocates are already on the payroll.
Starbucks’ “Coffee Creators” program taps into this by empowering baristas to post videos and other social media content related to their work. This reflects a broader shift toward employee-generated content.
The opportunity: Empower employees to tell real stories instead of controlling every message. Authentic voices can help brands stand out in crowded social feeds and strengthen your overall content strategy.
Impact of AI
AI has made internet research faster than ever but faster doesn’t always mean more accurate. Reddit, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia rank among the most-cited domains by tools like ChatGPT.
These sources aren't inherently unreliable, and they are all moderated to an extent. However, because anyone can contribute content to these platforms, the information hosted on them may be biased, written by someone without expertise on the subject, or just plain inaccurate. So, when using AI, especially in a professional capacity, you need to apply a healthy dose of your own human critical thinking skills to your research.
This is why we build Custom GPTs for our clients: AI assistants trained on their existing assets and configured to think, write, and respond in ways that are aligned with their brands.
The “AI slop” debate has taken center stage.
When it comes to graphic design, it’s still difficult to imagine a world where humans don’t hold the majority of responsibility for direction and creation within this art form. It’s hard, if not impossible, for a machine to produce the same caliber of design as a professional who is intentionally working layer by layer to build a final product. AI can speed up projects (although sometimes it can’t even do that); however, we’re still in the camp that thinks that while these tools can support human creativity, they can not completely replace it.
One of many reasons we believe this as marketers is the damage that using AI-generated visuals instead of true graphic design can inflict on your brand consistency and reputation. Even big companies have been learning this the hard way. For example, Colgate was called out for an AI-generated image with design errors, generally odd visuals, and overall, clearly poor execution.
That why our team prioritizes strategy and branding when designing graphics and only uses AI when it makes sense, given its strengths and weaknesses.
Inclosing Clara let us know that the way people research online is changing fast.
Search is changing. People are increasingly turning to AI for direct answers, which means businesses need to optimize for both traditional search (SEO) and AI-powered search (GEO).
SEO helps your business rank in search results, like on Google. GEO helps AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, understand, trust, cite, and recommend your business.
Visibility now means showing up in both places. Our complimentary SEO & GEO audit identifies opportunities and provides practical recommendations to improve your presence across traditional and AI-powered search.
Here is a graphic she shared about some of their clients:
