Work Samples
Digital marketing work samples
Five pieces of paid social and market research work across three very different markets. The reason they are on one page together is that they gave three different answers to the same question, and knowing which answer a market wants is most of this job. Every figure here was screenshotted out of an ad account I manage or taken from a document I helped write.
Texas new construction
$8.20 Won on volumeBuyers are plentiful and the margin per deal is ordinary, so the job is getting cost per lead as low as it will go without wrecking lead quality.
Florida luxury
6.6x Won on one closingLeads here cost twelve times more and that is correct. One commission pays for the year, so a cheap lead would have meant the targeting was wrong.
Local outdoor retail
16 Won on researchNo ad spend at all. The deliverable was interviews, a survey and a recommendation report, because the client did not have a traffic problem.
New construction buyer campaign, Texas
- My role
- I built this one end to end for a buyer's agent in a Texas new construction market. The audience and the radius, the creative, the primary text and headline, the instant lead form, and the follow-up sequence that fires the moment somebody submits.
- Results
- 88 form leads at $8.20 each on $721.52 in spend, from 26,900 impressions and 8,147 people reached, at a $26.82 CPM. Real estate lead costs are usually quoted in the $30 to $60 range. At one point this account booked 11 appointments in 9 days.
- Why it worked
- The offer was not "let me help you buy a house." It was inside access to new construction inventory before it reaches the public listing sites, which is information the portals structurally cannot give you. Scarcity you can actually prove beats urgency you have to manufacture.
- What I would do next
- Cost per lead is only half the job. The number I manage an account to is cost per booked appointment, so the next move here is tightening the speed of the first follow-up rather than touching an ad that is already working.
- Leads
- 88
- Cost per lead
- $8.20
- Impressions
- 26,900
- Reach
- 8,147
$721.52 spent · Lifetime, campaign ongoing · Pulled 29 September 2026
Custom list versus cold audience
- My role
- A second Texas new construction account running the same category of offer, this time delivered to an uploaded contact list instead of a cold interest audience. I set the targeting, watched it, and made the call on where the budget went afterward.
- Results
- 73 leads at $16.96 each, from 38,253 impressions and 10,000 people reached, at a 1.51% link click-through rate off 579 link clicks. That is roughly double the cost per lead of the cold version above, off more impressions and more reach, which is the opposite of what most people expect from a warm list.
- What I take from it, and what I do not
- These are two different accounts rather than one clean split test, so I am not going to claim this proves anything on its own. What it did do was change how I sequence a new account. I now start cold and earn the right to spend on a list, instead of assuming a list of past contacts is the easier win because it feels warmer.
- Why it is on this page
- Because a portfolio that only shows the winners is not a portfolio, it is a highlight reel, and it teaches the person reading it nothing about how you think.
- Leads
- 73
- Cost per lead
- $16.96
- Impressions
- 38,253
- Link CTR
- 1.51%
10,000 reached · 579 link clicks · Pulled 29 September 2026
Luxury seller campaign, Space Coast Florida
- My role
- I wrote the offer and every line of the ad, built the landing page and the follow-up behind it, and set the targeting. The client is a listing agent on the Florida Space Coast and the offer was a free home evaluation aimed only at owners of higher-value coastal property.
- Results
- $2,405.91 in ad spend across seven campaigns produced a lead that became a closed home sale at $530,000, worth $15,900 in commission to the client at a 3% rate. That is a 6.6x return on every dollar ever spent on the account.
- The part people get wrong
- Cost per lead on this account ran between $28.83 and $146.48, against $8.20 in Texas, and that was the plan rather than a failure. Luxury targeting filters hard on purpose, so you pay more for each name and you get fewer of them. One lead here was worth more than every lead in a cheap campaign put together, which is why cost per lead on its own is a number that will lie to you.
Appointment confirmation page
- My role
- I built this page. It is what somebody lands on the second they book a call with us. The layout, the copy, where the testimonial videos sit, and the wall of real text messages underneath them are all mine, and it is live on our site right now.
- Why it exists
- Most agencies send a calendar invite and hope. The gap between booking a call and actually showing up to it is where the majority of appointments quietly die, and nobody watches it happen because it looks like nothing at all.
- What is on it
- 2 peer testimonial videos, then what to expect on the call, then 8 screenshots of texts from agents whose calendars started filling. The page asks for nothing and sells nothing. It only removes reasons not to show up.
- The number it exists to move
- Show rate, the share of booked calls that actually happen. That is the metric this page is built against, and it is the one I would be judged on if I worked for you. Every other sample on this page is measured in leads or spend. This one is measured in whether somebody turns up.
Market research for Mark's Outdoors
- My role
- Spring 2026, my market research course at Samford. Four of us formed Southern Signal Marketing Agency and took on Mark's Outdoors, the outdoor retailer on Montgomery Highway in Vestavia Hills, as a live client. I ran four of the fourteen in-depth interviews, wrote sections of the discussion guide, and co-wrote the industry projection that sat behind our recommendations.
- What we actually ran
- Sixteen people through in-depth interviews and a focus group, a twenty-one question survey, a read of more than a hundred Google reviews plus Yelp, forums and Facebook groups, and a search engine audit across Google, Bing, Yahoo and AI search. Four separate methods, because one of them on its own would have told us what we already assumed.
- What the research found
- Mark's did not have a product problem or a service problem. Both came back strong, repeatedly, unprompted. What it had was a discovery problem. Students were finding the store through people rather than through anything the store controlled, and the fix for that is not a better store, it is a channel the store is barely using.
- Why it is here
- Everything else on this page is paid advertising in one industry. This was a different market, a different customer, and a brief I did not write, and the work still came down to the same question: what is true about this business that nobody else is allowed to say?
Southern Signal Marketing Agency
Brantley Drake · Will Downs · Luke Ferris · Ty Ippolito
Samford University market research, Spring 2026. Client: Mark's Outdoors, Vestavia Hills, Alabama.
Students who knew the store heard about it from friends and family three times more often than from social media. The channel the store controls is the one doing the least work.
More likely to shop given an influencer partnership, and they were specific about which kind. Hunting creators at 42% against fishing at 17%.
More likely to visit a store promoted at a campus event. For a retailer twenty minutes from campus, that is a cheaper first touch than any ad.
We presented the report to the new owners of Mark's Outdoors. They offered internships to all four of us.
Certifications
Industry credentials I am completing this term alongside the coursework.
Google Analytics Certification
Google Skillshop · Fall 2026
Google Ads Search Certification
Google Skillshop · Fall 2026
Computers in Business
Samford University
The one page version
Experience, education, certifications and the tools I actually use, on a single page you can forward to somebody else. Opens in a new tab as a PDF.
Want the long version?
One campaign taken apart start to finish, including the three months of it that did not work and what I changed.