Social, Brand & Digital Marketing Director · Austin, TX

Leading brands
beyond the feed.

Spent over a decade doing the work before directing it. Now I lead social, brand, and digital strategy for brands that need sharper positioning, stronger creative, and paid media campaigns tied to the business outcomes that matter most.

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10+
Years in social, brand, and digital marketing
30+
Brands across hospitality, CPG, retail, and lifestyle
6
Industries: hospitality, CPG, retail, lifestyle, real estate, and specialty food

brands I've built with

Merit Coffee Maaribu Cafe & Gifts Maaribu Home & Design Pecana Nutmilk KESSHŌ Jupiter Supper Club Hotel Ella Lick Honest Ice Creams Nova Hospitality The Well Devil May Care Tenten Merit Coffee Maaribu Cafe & Gifts Maaribu Home & Design Pecana Nutmilk KESSHŌ Jupiter Supper Club Hotel Ella Lick Honest Ice Creams Nova Hospitality The Well Devil May Care Tenten
Selected work

Results that speak
for themselves.

A cross-section of campaigns, brand builds, and growth strategies. Each measured against real business outcomes.

Merit Coffee · via Resplendent Agency

Organic Social Influencer Marketing TikTok Launch F&B 2025–2026

Crossing 60K, launching a TikTok, and building a brand people actually follow

Merit Coffee had 52K Instagram followers, no TikTok, and was posting 3–4 times a month. The account had been stagnant for years. Starting in October 2025, we built a consistent brand voice, launched TikTok from zero with platform-native content that found its own audience quickly, supported a new location opening with 9 influencers, and drove 700+ comments on a single Austin FC partnership post. We're not halfway through the campaign.

2.79M+ views (+170%)
43.5K engagements (+84%)
12% engagement rate & climbing
60K+ followers crossed
Merit Coffee merch Merit Coffee brand spread

KESSHŌ · via Resplendent Agency

Organic Social Paid Social E-commerce Specialty Food 2025–2026

Crossing 5K, growing online sales, and building momentum with a lean paid media budget

KESSHŌ is an Austin-based bean-to-bar chocolate and gelato brand: handcrafted bars, gelato pints served from local trailers, and Asian-inspired flavors like Jasmine Yuzu, Ube Horchata, and Dubai-style Black Sesame. Strong product story, loyal audience, clear aesthetic. They needed a consistent social strategy to turn brand interest into measurable growth. We built content around product drops, founder storytelling, and flavor education, then amplified with a disciplined paid budget, delivering 15.73x blended ROAS across five months.

127.2% online store sales increase
104% YoY audience growth
1.69M impressions (campaign period)
15.73x blended paid ROAS
KESSHŌ chocolate and gelato products

Pecana Nutmilk · via Resplendent Agency

Organic Social Influencer Marketing Retail Launch Walmart 2024–2025

Supporting a national Walmart launch through social, influencers, and store discovery content

Pecana Nutmilk is a woman-owned, Texas-rooted pecan-based plant milk brand that was entering Walmart nationally alongside Erewhon, Whole Foods, H-E-B, and more. The social strategy needed to drive store locator visits and get consumers to find Pecana on shelves. We built content around the launch announcement, in-store product video, founder Kortney Chase's story, and influencer partnerships showing Pecana in holiday recipes. A single December Walmart discovery reel reached 108K+ views across Instagram and Facebook with 3,451 interactions and 27K accounts reached.

108K+ views on holiday Walmart reel
3,451 interactions on single post
+69.9% organic engagement growth
+57.7% impression growth
Pecana pecan milk products in fridge Pecana in store Pecana press coverage

Banger's Sausage House & Beer Garden · via Resplendent Agency

Organic Social Instagram TikTok F&B Austin 2024–2025

Bringing Rainey Street's original beer garden back to the spotlight

Banger's is an Austin staple: in-house sausages, an extensive beer selection, and one of Rainey Street's original beer garden cultures. They came to Resplendent to reinvigorate their social presence and reintroduce the brand to locals. Over three months, we built content pillars around brand heritage, menu craftsmanship, and community: founder storytelling, sausage-making content, and trend-led Reels that celebrated the humor and humanity of the place. Zero paid spend.

869K+ total impressions (+679%)
50K video views (+59%)
4.6K engagements (+53%)
208 new followers

Maaribu · via Resplendent Agency

Organic Social Paid Social TikTok Meta Ads Austin 2025–2026

Two brands, two briefs: organic community for an Austin cafe, paid performance for a home design studio

Maaribu is two Austin brands under one ownership: Maaribu Cafe & Gifts is a gluten-free cafe and gift shop on South First Street; Maaribu Home & Design is a curated home goods and interior design shop. Each needed something different. For the cafe, we built organic content from near zero: Instagram Reels and TikTok built around the menu, the ambiance, and local community moments. For the home brand, we ran Meta awareness and shopping campaigns focused on curated lifestyle creative and product discovery. The paid work delivered 946K+ impressions at a $2.37 CPM, far below the $8–15 category benchmark for home and retail.

703K+ organic IG views (Cafe)
2,710 net followers gained (Cafe)
122K TikTok views (Cafe)
11.76x Meta-attributed ROAS (Home)
946K+ paid impressions (Home)
$2.37 CPM vs. $8–15 benchmark (Home)
Maaribu Cafe food and gifts spread
Earlier work
The Crossvine
Brand + Social + Paid · Master-planned community, Schertz TX
380% website growth · 49.1% YoY engagement · 600+ content pieces
Renewal by Andersen
Multi-channel Performance · via lookthinkmake
682 consultation requests · 7.5M programmatic impressions · 369K+ sessions
What I bring

Full-stack marketing
leadership.

From positioning decks to post-campaign analysis, I own the entire marketing function and the results that follow.

Social Strategy as a Business Function
Social isn't a content calendar. I build social into the broader marketing mix, tied to business goals, informed by data, and run like an owned media channel with measurable return.
Paid Social & Performance Media
Campaign architecture across Meta, TikTok, Google, CTV, and programmatic. Structured for efficiency, tested for performance, and optimized against real acquisition costs.
Creative Direction
Directing shoots, overseeing visual identity, writing copy, and building the feedback systems that keep creative output on-brand, on-brief, and consistently strong.
Brand Clarity & Positioning
Helping brands understand what they actually stand for, then building the messaging architecture that makes it legible across every channel, touchpoint, and campaign.
Team Leadership & Operations
Building the workflows, reporting cadences, and cross-functional structures that let creative and strategy teams do their best work without constant escalation.
Retail & Hospitality Launch Support
Marketing infrastructure for brands entering new physical footprints, from national retail launches to restaurant openings. Strategy, creative, and paid aligned from day one.
Dena Hope Rand
About

The strategist
behind the work.

I started in PR, moved into digital, spent time teaching, and have been in marketing for over a decade. Along the way I've written the copy, pulled the data, directed the shoots, run the paid campaigns, and built the content systems from the ground up.

Most recently I led social at Resplendent Agency, working with restaurant groups, CPG brands, boutique hotels, retail concepts, and specialty food companies. Before that: lookthinkmake, Nova Hospitality, and years of client-side work that shaped how I approach agency work now.

The teams I work best with have a strong foundation and real potential, but need someone who can turn that into a system that performs.

Austin, TX · open to remote & hybrid
dena.hope.rand@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/denahope

The next
chapter.

Currently exploring director-level opportunities in social, brand, and digital marketing. Looking for in-house roles where I can build stronger marketing infrastructure and lead teams over the long term.

dena.hope.rand@gmail.com