Bridget Brown
Founder & Creative Director
“When I was in the field as a reporter, I would visit business owners frequently. I saw many of them with amazing stories to tell, but they were too busy actually running their business to spend time telling their story. I help small businesses generate more leads and make more money by effectively telling their story.”
About Bridget
Bridget Brown is the founder of Create That Copy & Marketing and the creator of the Whole Team Marketing method. She has 20+ years of experience as a writer and communications professional.
Bridget spent 15 years as an award-winning broadcast journalist, with experience working in some of Canada’s most demanding newsrooms, such as CTV National News, CTV Calgary, Canada AM and City TV. She also worked as a public relations professional and media trainer.
Some projects that stand out for Bridget include responding to Hurricane Katrina for the Canadian Red Cross, following a group of Canadian soldiers through their field training for Afghanistan as a journalist and winning an RTDNA award for those stories, and writing a comedy script for an event hosted by award-winning comedian Brent Butt. These days, her specialty is writing business-changing email marketing campaigns, which routinely draw 15-20% more engagement than the industry average.
In her spare time, Bridget is working on her masters in neuroscience at King’s College London, with a focus on buyer behaviour. She has a degree in communications, a diploma in broadcasting, as well as a teaching certificate from Humber College in Toronto. She mentors and teaches other marketers in lead generation.
Bridget is a fourth-generation entrepreneur. Her great-grandfather, grandfather and her dad built three very different Canadian small businesses. She believes helping entrepreneurs, and being one herself is in her DNA.
Vanessa Paredes
Digital Marketing Lead
“My favourite thing about marketing is learning people’s preferences and behaviour patterns in a way that I couldn’t learn from day-to-day interaction.”
About Vanessa
Vanessa took on the Marketing Coordinator position in July 2021. She is a digital marketer specializing in pay-per-click advertising and content creation. Vanessa graduated from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas with a degree in Social Communication. She has certifications in many kinds of digital marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising including Google Ads, Amazon Ads for Retailers, Hubspot Inbound Methodology, and Facebook Ads.
Vanessa has produced high-quality work for marketing agencies, as well as for in-house marketing departments. Most of her experience has been with B2B companies.
In her downtime, Vanessa’s hobbies are exercise, music, and learning new things about all the many topics that interest her. She’s a very curious person and puts this skill to work as Create That’s research lead, studying the latest trends in media and marketing.
Janet Dirks
Media Relations Lead
About Janet
Janet joined Create That in February 2022. She is a household name for many Canadians, as she was the Alberta Bureau Chief for CTV National News. Prior to that Janet held journalism roles with CTV Vancouver and CBC. She reported from the frontlines of some of the biggest news stories in Canada and also spent time as a correspondent in London and Jerusalem.
Janet puts her 30 years of journalism experience into securing media opportunities and publicity for our clients. She is also our media training lead. Her research, communications and networking skills are invaluable to our clients.
Brands We’ve Worked With
These are just some of the brands we have been lucky enough to work with. If you’re hiring a Calgary digital marketing, branding or communications agency, make sure you ask who their clients are. Small business marketing is a specialty. Experience with blue chip corporations might seem impressive, but the tactics that work for those companies don’t work for small businesses. We have a proven track record with small businesses just like yours.
Our Vision
We believe the time to build the ark is before it rains.
Creating a sustainable marketing system is a hedge against lean or difficult times ahead. If business slows down, you have the means to return to growth as long as your marketing plan is running efficiently. During boom times, quality lead generation is a way to capitalize on your current success and store it away for the future.
We believe marketing should be a clear revenue source, not an expenditure.
We see too many small businesses focused on vanity metrics that simply don’t drive revenue. Things like social media followers, views, shares and likes. While these things can support a good marketing plan, they shouldn’t comprise it.
Small business owners are dramatically under-resourced compared to enterprise-level organizations. This makes it even more important that their marketing programs show easily calculated ROI.
Our Mission
We’re on a mission to help service-based small businesses (SBSBs) generate more leads.
Generating leads = connecting with your audience, and we know how to connect.
In my career, I’ve conducted more than ten thousand interviews. Seriously. I’ve done the math. I write an average of 33 thousand words of copy a week, a short novel’s worth. I’m working on a master’s degree in neuroscience to learn more about what makes people buy.
My team and I have expert-level knowledge of consumer behaviour. I devote my working life to using this expertise to help small businesses increase their leads in a way that feels manageable and natural.
Core Values
Our 5 core values drive our decisions:
Authenticity: We don’t let convention or external validation stand in the way of being real.
Humility: Our clients know their business best. We approach each project like enthusiastic learners.
Gratitude: We are so grateful that our clients trust us to help them grow their life’s work.
Respect: We work to make minimal impact on our environment while making maximum impact on our community.
Integrity: We only present work we believe in. We don’t mislead an audience, in our work or on behalf of our clients.
Small business owners know small business.
Keeping up with marketing is a challenge when you don’t have a whole marketing department at your disposal. At Create That, we’re the small business experts, and we share a little of that expertise in our weekly email, CT Insights.
Whether it’s new research that can help you grow, or how to apply for the latest small business grants, our weekly newsletter will help you make the decisions that lead to more sales.
Best part? It’s 100% free. Sign up below, and start bringing more leads into your business right now.
