Kelly Peters is a storyteller, communicator, and marketing powerhouse who is helping tell the stories of tomorrow, today, as the Director of Marketing at Boston-based, late-stage weather intelligence company Tomorrow.io.
Kelly grew up in Pittsburgh surrounded by a great community, her parents, and an older brother. Her dad was a collaborative & analytical thinker who worked in IT, traveling the world for PPG Industries to help their factories update to new systems. He was an intelligent people person who was able to communicate data & systems well. Kelly’s mom was an artist, an incredibly creative painter, who taught her about problem solving and thinking outside the box. They met at Pittsburgh’s flagship academic institution, Carnegie Mellon.
Both were really supportive of Kelly’s creative ventures, encouraging her to find joy and be the best in whatever she tried to pursue. As a kid, Kelly created imaginary businesses like a candy store called “Quoms”. She was always making videos or building imaginary universes to market her creations.
She went off to Syracuse where she studied Broadcast Journalism, interning at a local TV station. Kelly even had the opportunity to travel to Singapore to intern at CNBC Asia where she developed a more informed view of international media & the world. At Syracuse, she furthered her love of learning and writing but didn’t see herself in front of the camera.
After graduation she landed at NBCUniversal as part of the prestigious Page program. She rotated around 30 Rock with stints at SNL, Syfy Network, and CNBC’s Mad Money. She loved being surrounded by a community of communicators. Everyone had talent, ideas, jokes, and energy. Kelly was drawn to all of it.
As her rotational program neared its end, she met an MSNBC executive who offered her a role supporting the network’s long-form documentary unit, including former shows like Lock Up. At MSNBC, she learned the importance of storytelling and how to understand story arcs as well as the details that will drive a good story. There was pressure to make critical story decisions to fit their long-form content into a 20-minute segment. It was difficult to leave so much good stuff on the cutting room floor, but brevity is the key to telling an effective story. She took that lesson to heart.
After some great experience in NYC, Kelly returned to her hometown of Pittsburgh to attempt to break into technology. A friend of hers introduced her to local SaaS company Industry Weapon with an opportunity to manage their partner program as a Channel Executive. It was a great first job in tech but another opportunity soon came that she couldn’t pass up.
Kelly is drawn to the energy of a high-performance community and taking advantage of opportunities as they come. When Pittsburgh anchor company Dick’s Sporting Goods came calling to join their website team doing content marketing, she couldn’t say no! She managed all of Dick’s Nike site content as they ramped up their investment in e-commerce, with free reign to position Nike styles across the website. She optimized copy, search rankings & product positioning. She even leveraged Dick’s studio to arrange photoshoots.
After a couple years of high-impact work, she wanted to return to a smaller team where she could make a bigger impact and found JazzHR, formerly “The Resumator” and now part of Employ. In a Customer Success role, she got her hands dirty crafting content for the company’s Help Center. With her rebranding help, leveraging subject matter experts from across the company, the Help Center helped the organization attain a 98% CSAT.
Kelly’s success in the role allowed her to join JazzHR’s Marketing team in a content & communications role in Boston. Moving to work alongside a fast-paced, high-performing team, led by Allie Kelly, she built out their whole content program and handled their comms strategy. She did strategic planning, wrote copy, and owned their agency relationships with media & analysts as the team grew to six team members.
Her work at JazzHR got her noticed by Tomorrow.io’s CMO Dan Slagen who was looking for a Head of Content. Knowing the type of team, energy, and opportunities she was looking for next, it was the perfect fit. Her whole interview with Dan centered around brainstorming ideas and she decided to continue the conversation full time!
At Tomorrow.io, she got to dig her teeth into industries she’d never touched – aviation, energy, logistics, trucking, etc. She learned about the impact weather had on those industries, talked to subject matter experts, and developed a content strategy that supported each unique vertical and its pain points. It was exciting and challenging to learn how to leverage content to fit into their bigger marketing engine under Dan’s tutelage. From Dan, she learned not to stay restricted to her job title and to think boldly.
When it came time to announce the company’s satellite launch, they knew they would have to be bold. First, they had to get their branding aligned as they prepared to launch a literal rocket into the atmosphere. Knowing video would be a part of it, the team thought, “what if we made a documentary?”
They kicked the idea around and tapped their long-time video producer extraordinaire Travis Wilber to help. The benefit of their small and nimble team meant they’d have great internal access to scientific experts to help tell the story. Externally, Kelly talked to her media contacts, friends, and her brother Scott Peters, who is also in video production, to brush up on her long-form storytelling chops.
In the ultimate test of her passion for storytelling and evolution of skills, Kelly authored the script, project managed the interviews, and helped pull the project together alongside Travis and the help of an amazing team to produce 6 Years to Launch. This awesome ~25-minute documentary tells the story of Tomorrow.io’s first satellite launch into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And spoiler alert, they’re considering a sequel…
As Tomorrow.io’s Director of Marketing, Kelly makes sure their Enterprise & Government business units have the strategy, positioning, and materials in place to make their GTM strategy successful. She oversees 2 full-time team members, along with a group of close freelance partners, on a Marketing team of 5. She even manages a recently hired AI Marketer, Ruth Favela, who helps the team proactively manage their awareness and understanding of all the latest AI tools so the team can save time and better allocate resources, staying on the cutting edge. For example, Ruth has helped the team uncover new tools, like Claude, along with embracing enhancements to existing ones like Gong’s AI Insights to pull out customer learnings the Marketing team can translate into new campaigns.
Marketing is Storytelling
Kelly had the benefit of starting her career in Media, telling stories. She sees everything through the eyes of a storyteller.
When it comes to Marketing, Kelly pictures a story arc and takes potential customers on a hero’s journey. She thinks of the pain first, always. Consider that in aviation, for example, the pain may be lost time & people getting delayed. Connecting with people through whatever medium it is, not just sticking to typical B2B campaigns, Kelly puts herself in the prospect’s shoes to say something that really hits them.
The “secret sauce” is considering what is between the pain and the solution. Kelly considers whether someone has ever heard of Tomorrow.io and all the distractions they might get while the message is being delivered via e-mail, social, or video.
Using emotive language to tell a story in a way they wouldn’t expect, pulling a detail from a case study, she’ll craft the message to be more human and considerate of a real-life use case with the ROI attached.
Recently, the Tomorrow team launched an e-mail campaign following the flooding in Southern California. Rather than detailing the typical forecast and what “should be done”, Kelly and in-house meteorologist Ed Carroll collaborated to inject more personality and empathy after the difficult events. Telling the story of how technology can help in a way that speaks to an audience’s emotions made the campaign resonate. A prospect responded with an opportunity because the message connected with them. That’s the whole point of going the extra mile to make sure you’re understanding your audience.
Kelly positions Tomorrow.io and their products as the cutting-edge friend who can show you the solution (and change the world in the process). “What if you stopped assuming the chaos around you was unavoidable and started taking a proactive approach? We can help. Trust me, we’re already doing it for other big names like JetBlue.”
3 Career Insights / Learnings
How You Work Matters – “How you are to work with matters just as much as the work itself. If you are someone who people want to collaborate with and are open, kind, and genuinely invested & engaged in projects, more people will want to work with you. The results will be better too”
Don’t Let Job Titles Restrict You – “Your role or job title should push you forward and think big, not just make you feel like you are limited to certain things. I’ve been encouraged and now encourage my team to think boldly, beyond the typical expectations for a B2B Marketing Director.”
Execution Always Trumps Ideas Alone – “Early in my career, I was intimidated by coworkers who were really good at articulating strategy. I couldn’t understand how they were seemingly single-handedly executing on such grand plans. I realized as I advanced that sometimes, ideas are just ideas—and that’s great. Not everything has to be a new to-do list item. But the holy grail is being capable and willing to do it all. If you have ideas & vision AND can also execute, you’re ahead of 95% of people. Following through will carry you through”
Kelly aspires to continue to lead teams that are mission-focused like her team at Tomorrow.io. She feels passionate about marketing something she believes can make an impact in the world, working alongside talented people, and building teams. One day perhaps she’ll grow to become a CMO on a team building toward an impactful mission working on cool, big ideas with her hands in a bit of everything.
If you’d like to learn more about Kelly, you can find her creating compelling stories at Tomorrow.io, in the North End for a meal on her trips back to Boston to visit her team, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the stories you tell and missions you back in the years ahead!