Heidi Ekey
Open to remote senior & lead roles — permanent or contract
I help protect it.
After 13 years working on in-house marketing teams, I've learned that great copy isn't enough. Brands stay strong because someone is protecting the voice behind every campaign, email, webpage, and product launch.
What I do
Three things, and they only work together.
I find the human truth underneath the product. Vacation ownership is a contract. What people are buying is time with thier family, all in one place again. That gap — between what a company sells and what a customer is actually after — is where the writing lives.
I make the words work hard. Rewriting a pre-arrival journey against its own click data raised CTR 19% year over year. Copy is not jewery. It is a variable you can test, and I would rather be measured than admired.
I make sure it stands up to everything. A voice is only real if it survives 36 nurture emails across nine markets, a legal review, a landing page, and a sign in a lobby in Hawai‘i. I write the standards that keep it consistent — and then follow them.
Selected work
Brand voice, lifecycle email, e-commerce at volume, language governance, and running three brands at once. Each one links to a short case study.
Hyatt Vacation Club · Marriott Vacations Worldwide
Two acquired resort portfolios became one brand in 2023. I was one of the two writers who gave it a voice — and helped write the standards that still govern how it talks.
Hyatt Vacation Club
A halo nurture program tuned market by market, plus pre-arrival, win-back and the transactional sends nobody optimizes. Pre-arrival CTR up 19%. Halo up 10%.
Blair · Bluestem Brands
Eight years, 300+ e-commerce pages a year, and a digital share of sales that went from 20% to 50%. Plus one product name I took all the way to a registered trademark.
Hyatt Vacation Club
I wrote the recommendation that changed which words the brand was allowed to use — substitutions, eliminations, and the reasoning behind each one. Plus the alt-text standard the team wrote to.
Kafferlin Strategies · CiviLink
Municipal consulting, a govtech product family, and a thought-leadership platform — each with a different audience and none of them allowed to sound like the others.
How I contribute
Not adjectives on a slide — an approved lexicon, banned terms with mandated substitutions, headline conventions, and the review process that keeps it enforceable.
Pre-arrival, onboarding, nurture, win-back, and the transactional layer most programs waste. Written to segment, tested against its own report.
Trained where the copy was the store. Subject lines, product pages, offers, and CTAs measured on click-through and order value.
One idea carried across email, landing pages, paid social, direct mail, print, signage, and scripts without thinning out along the way.
Ownership guides, program explainers, member newsletters and destination features. Dense material rewritten so a person can follow it.
Deciding what to write and why — audience, sequence, channel, and the standards that let other people write it consistently.
WCAG-conscious UX and alt text; copy aligned with FTC rules and state disclosure requirements in a heavily regulated category.
Product and property naming, including trademark clearance through TESS/USPTO — and one mark carried through to registration.
Prompt and context design with a human review gate. I decide the rules, read every output, and catch it when it is wrong.
Working with me
I ask the annoying question early rather than the expensive one late. I would rather understand the product properly than write around the parts I do not follow — which is usually where the real idea is hiding.
I have worked inside a 50-person creative department and as the only writer in the room. I am comfortable with legal review, brand guidelines, competing deadlines and other people’s opinions about commas. I hand off clean, I document what I decided, and I make it easy for the next person.
In their words
“In every workplace, there are just a handful of people who can always be depended upon to do the right thing and go the extra mile… because it is good for the company, the clients, and their colleagues… Heidi Ekey is one of those people.”Janet BrindleDigital Product Manager, Disney Experiences
“When you find a writer like Heidi, you hire her and never let her go. Heidi’s insatiable curiosity, drive for excellence and ability to deliver stellar copy make her an indispensable member of any creative team…”Colette BonavitaSenior Communications Lead, Northwest Bank
The short version
Thirteen years in-house across hospitality and retail, plus two years in a newsroom that taught me to file on deadline. The full record — experience, capabilities, tools, certifications — reads cleanly on one page.
Get in touch
Open to remote senior and lead roles, contract engagements, and content strategy work.
