Alexander Bolton
Digital marketing manager — strategy, paid, and the creative to match.
Last title: Director of Marketing. Open to senior manager and director roles — Richmond, VA, hybrid, or remote.
The case files.
Four accounts: the problem, the strategy, my role, the numbers.
A beloved Virginia diner grew its off-premise business without losing the counter it was built on.
Context
Bob & Edith's is a beloved Virginia diner — five locations when I arrived in 2021, seven by the time I left — with a loyal in-person crowd and a kitchen culture older than any delivery app. I owned the full marketing budget across paid social, email, delivery platforms, and local promotions.
Problem
Third-party delivery ran on the apps' terms. Menus, photography, hours, and promotions were inconsistent across all three platforms and every location, and the brand held no first-party data on who was ordering or why.
Strategy
I treated delivery as its own storefront. I standardized menus, hours, and photography across all three platforms — shooting every plate in-house on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K — ran targeted paid campaigns, and worked to bring the customer relationship and the analytics back in-house rather than rent them from the apps. The paid side paid for itself and then some: in Q4 2023, every dollar into DoorDash sponsored listings came back as $6.63 in sales — promotions returned $5.59 — adding up to $93K in promo-driven sales and 2,059 new customers in a single quarter, on one platform. And that same quarter, a single buy-one-get-one push in December 2023 took one location's monthly Uber Eats sales from $7,894 to $24,167, and another's from $6,676 to $16,685 — with the diners closed on Christmas that December, a holiday they had historically always worked.
My role
Director of Marketing, sole operator. Strategy, the photography, menu and listing production, the email program, the promotion calendar, and the platform negotiations, end to end. I also ran reputation across Yelp, Google Business, Facebook, and Instagram.
Results
Grew delivery sales 200%+ across the whole chain through end-to-end management of the three platforms plus paid campaigns. In one 90-day stretch in spring 2022, the diners cleared 8,700+ Uber Eats orders across five locations — before the sixth had even opened — while the program held a 93–99% online rate, kept missed orders under 0.5%, and carried 4.5–4.7 store ratings. In 2023 alone, DoorDash cleared $823K across 32,700 orders, Uber Eats ran as high or higher, and Grubhub added more on top. Grew Instagram from a few hundred followers to more than 2,000. The delivery channel ended up looking and reading like the diner it came from.
A delivery-platform relationship, turned into leverage.
Problem
The company website was dated and expensive to replace, online ordering lived on someone else's system, and the brand had no first-party view of its own customers. The delivery apps kept that data.
Strategy
Instead of paying an agency, I negotiated a partnership with DoorDash to rebuild the company website at no cost, moved online ordering in-house, and made sure Google Analytics was captured on our side to fuel future campaigns.
Results
A rebuilt site at a $10–20K cost avoided, online ordering owned in-house, and first-party analytics data that fed the campaigns that followed.
Started from nothing and taken to retail quality across the country.
Context
Honestly Smoked was a smoked beef jerky brand I founded and owned from 2017 to 2021. No store, no distribution, no customers, and a food product that had to reach the market at retail quality.
Strategy
I built the brand from zero: named it, designed the logo, and developed the packaging through multiple generations, including a major upgrade. I built a USDA-inspected production facility from the ground up on a local farm, sourced all beef from Keenbell Farms, and earned USDA inspection clearance. I ran full DTC ecommerce, launching on Wix and migrating to Shopify, with SEO, social, and Google Analytics-informed decisions.
My role
Founder and brand owner, end to end. Fulfillment was in-house until I scaled to a co-packer, managing vendor quality and process documentation to protect the recipe and standards.
Results
Shipped to customers in all 50 U.S. states and internationally, with wholesale accounts in large grocery and convenience stores across multiple states. Roughly $50K in sales in the final year, about two pallets of product.
An owned audience — the cheapest growth channel a small brand has.
Problem
An owned list only pays off when it is real and the sends actually get read. Rented reach on the platforms does neither.
Strategy
I ran the Bob & Edith's program in Mailchimp, building and segmenting a subscriber base and writing to it consistently, treating the champion segment differently from the rest of the list.
Results
A 10,000+ subscriber list, built from zero, holding a 40%+ open rate with ~3% click-through and ~6–7% on top campaigns.
The work.
Every frame on this page is my own work — shot, styled, and edited in-house.
Founder · Honestly SmokedPackaging & brand
Bob & Edith's · deliveryMenu photography
ProductProduct flat-lay
MenuBurger day
Grand opening · King StLocation launch
MenuBreakfast
FieldEvent marketing
BreakfastTwo eggs & ham
WholesaleOn the shelf
DeliveryListing photography
ProductProduct detail
BreakfastCorned beef hash.
MenuDessert
BrandBrand still
Directed, filmed, edited.
A handful of projects under Golden Bean Media — the same in-house production that shot every plate above. Click to play.
A marketer who can build the thing himself.
For most of the last decade the through-line has been ownership. I founded Honestly Smoked, a smoked beef jerky brand, and ran it from 2017 to 2021, from a farm kitchen to a brand shipping nationwide. I then spent 2021 to 2024 as Director of Marketing for Bob & Edith's. Since 2024 I have worked independently — consulting for an early-stage startup on its website build, social launch, and marketing strategy, and taking on select video production, from music videos to commissioned brand films, under my Golden Bean Media banner. Alongside the early years of that run, I was a technical director at WTVR CBS 6 — directing live morning newscasts, training and supervising technical staff, and serving as the sole technical operator of the talk show “Virginia This Morning,” directing, running audio, and operating camera at once.
I'm based in Richmond, Virginia, and I hold a B.S. in Business Administration and Entrepreneurship from Virginia Commonwealth University. Department-of-one means there is no one to hand the hard part to. I shoot the food and brand photography, cut the 4K video, design the digital menu boards, write the emails, run the analytics, and negotiate the vendor deals, then report the results straight. It never meant working alone, either: I co-led the chain-wide Micros-to-Toast point-of-sale migration — vendor coordination, rollout timeline, store-by-store staff training — scaled Honestly Smoked past my own two hands by sourcing and quality-managing a co-packer, helped open the chain's sixth and seventh locations, and coordinated store managers across all of them on every launch and promotion.
Honestly Smoked, in the field
Certifications.
All earned in 2026.
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Planning, building, and optimizing paid search campaigns in Google Ads.
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Configuring analytics and measuring site and campaign performance in GA4.
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A seven-course Google program on applying AI at work — brainstorming and planning, research, writing, content creation, data analysis, and app building.
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A Google course, offered through Coursera, on keeping current as AI changes day-to-day work.
View certificate