Mariaelena Morales

Integrated Marketing Strategist

I love marketing because it’s a puzzle.

Every business is trying to achieve something different, and marketing only works when all the pieces support your specific goals. Audience needs, internal capacity, business priorities, messaging, channels, timing, and execution all need to fit together. If one piece is off, marketing starts to break.

For 15 years, I’ve helped organizations solve these kinds of marketing puzzles. As challenges became more complex, my work expanded beyond campaigns and content into broader business questions: how teams collaborate, how decisions get made, what customers actually value, and whether marketing truly supports the organization’s goals.

That's how I approach the work now. I step back, look at the full picture, and connect the pieces so marketing decisions are grounded in business realities, not just trends, assumptions, or disconnected tactics.

My experience spans strategy and implementation across:

inbound and outbound marketing channels
customer and stakeholder research
campaign design and analysis
positioning and messaging
cross-functional planning and collaboration

But more than anything, I help you make marketing decisions that produce the right results for what you're trying to achieve.

Revenue Growth
Improved Positioning
Internal Alignment
Campaigns

TRIO Tours

Brightspark Travel

How can you better serve your audience with better marketing? TRIO programs received federal funding to provide college tours for underserved high school students. At Brightspark Travel, we identified TRIO tours as a growth opportunity. But previous demand generation consisted of only two emails to static lists over the course of an entire sales season.

We launched integrated marketing campaigns with new content and refreshed contact lists. In two years, we grew revenue from $1M to $2.5M and more than doubled the number of students served.

Image: Brightspark Travel

Find out how

National Performing Arts Festival

Brightspark Travel

How can better marketing grow your revenue? Our flagship theatre event, the National Performing Arts Festival, had seen declining bookings year over year. We knew the festival’s prime location at Walt Disney World® Resort could help sell the event and lift our struggling performance travel category.

We revamped the event’s branding, messaging, and content, which we served to a more focused audience segment. By the campaign’s second year, we boosted revenue by booking a record number of groups, expanding the event to a third full day.  

Image: Brightspark Travel

Find out how

Recruitment Marketing

Skills for Chicago

Can better marketing keep your clients happy? At Skills for Chicago, our recruitment marketing efforts were disconnected from the needs of our client success and talent acquisition teams. We needed to attract ideal applicants and refer them to our employer partners while reaching our community impact goals.

We developed new ways of working together to reach applicants more effectively. In only six months, we grew average daily applications by 42.5%, doubled our email open rate, and surpassed our annual job placement goal before the deadline.

Image: Skills for Chicago

Find out how

Miche 5K El Paso

Windy City Events

Wanting to expand their audience past the Chicago area, Windy City Events is preparing to launch their marquee 5K experience in El Paso. As a growing organization with a new marketing team, they needed support in crafting a strategic campaign to launch their event brand in a new market.

I designed a three-phase, multi-channel campaign to build awareness, generate interest, and drive registrations within their target segments.    

View the plan