Heidi Ekey
Open to remote senior & lead roles — permanent or contract
Thirteen years on in-house marketing teams taught me that a voice is only as strong as the hundredth email — the one someone else writes, six months later. My job is making sure that one still sounds like the brand.
What I do
Three things. They don’t come apart.
I find out what people are actually buying. Vacation ownership is a contract. What people are buying is a week where everyone is in one place again. The copy has to live there, not in the contract.
I make the words work hard. Rewriting a pre-arrival journey against its own click data raised CTR 19% year over year. Copy is a variable you can test, and I’d 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 and the rules that keep it consistent, lifecycle email, e-commerce at volume, 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 two writers on the launch. I helped develop the copy standards published in its brand book, and wrote the alt-text standard the team worked to.
Hyatt Vacation Club
A halo nurture program tuned market by market, plus pre-arrival, win-back, and the confirmations and receipts nobody ever rewrites. 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.
Kafferlin Strategies · CiviLink
Municipal consulting, a govtech product family, and a thought-leadership platform — run on a posting spec tuned per platform: hashtag ranges, links moved to the first comment where the algorithm punishes them, a native variant of every post.
How I contribute
An approved lexicon, banned terms with the substitution written next to each one, headline conventions, and a review step that catches it when someone ignores all of the above.
Pre-arrival, onboarding, nurture, win-back, and the confirmations most programs leave on the default template. Written to segment, tested against its own report.
Learned it at a catalog company, where the product page was the only salesperson. 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. It has to still be the same idea by the time it reaches the sign.
Ownership guides, program explainers, member newsletters, and destination features. Contract language turned into something an owner can read on a phone at an airport gate.
Deciding what gets written and why: audience, sequence, channel, and standards clear enough that the next writer doesn’t need me in the room.
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 me reading every output before it goes anywhere. I write the rules, and I catch the model when it’s wrong.
Working with me
I dig into the creative brief and ask for clarity up front. It saves everyone the headaches at proof stage — and if something about the product isn’t clear to me, it won’t be clear in the copy either.
I’ve worked inside a 50-person creative department and as the only writer in the room. I’m 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’s 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 where the deadline was the deadline. Experience, capabilities, tools, and certifications, all on one page.
Get in touch
Open to remote senior and lead roles, contract engagements, and content strategy work.
