Meet Trailblazer Christine Dart

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christine Dart.

Christine, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started CBD Branding in January 2015 – hard to believe that was nearly five years ago already! CBD actually stands for my initials, Christine Briana Dart, and not the medicinal compound like many might think. Before I started the company, I had had a few years of marketing experience under my belt, including running my first company, Temerity Dance. I was teaching ballroom dance lessons to wedding couples and was hosting a weekly salsa night in the Cherry Creek neighborhood of Denver. I learned how to market myself and how to promote my salsa night. I saw a gap in the salsa scene… most of the scene I was familiar with was pretty focused on competitive and flashy dancing, which is cool to watch but can be a little overwhelming for newbies. While there were introductory salsa lessons in town, almost every beginner I spoke with said that the lessons moved really fast and they didn’t learn much. They were left a little too intimidated to get on the dance floor afterwards and just assumed they “weren’t dancers”. I focused my salsa night on welcoming the wallflowers onto the dance floor and getting them as comfortable as possible. I loved seeing someone smiling while doing a few basic salsa patterns after claiming they had 2 left feet only 60 minutes earlier. After some perseverance, word got out and my salsa night started to grow! 6+ years later, I still bump into former students that I met through these salsa nights and most of them are still dancing. It makes me feel like a proud mama in a way, haha.

Anyway, while it was never lucrative for me, running this dance company taught me a lot about marketing, branding, and promotion. I then pursued marketing as a career and worked for a couple of companies before starting CBD Branding so that I could pursue my own vision of a highly personable, transparent, and consultative marketing service. The company has gone through some transitions since 2015 when it was primarily focused on branding and design. From that branding focus, it morphed into a social media service, and eventually a more technical and data-based company that builds automation flows, content campaigns, and lead funnels. As a business owner, it’s really beautiful to see how companies can grow and mature just like the people behind them.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There have definitely been struggles along the way! While CBD Branding was only started in 2015, I consider my road as an entrepreneur to have begun when I first moved to Denver in 2012. There were months that I slept on a flip-n-flex cushion (those things we played video games on as kids that fold into chairs) and other months that I slept on a friend’s air mattress. Those were not fun times, but it was worth the sacrifice for me to pursue my dream of working for myself – even though, at the time, I didn’t even know what kind of business I would run! I was just passionate and knew I had a lot to offer once I figured out my direction. As my vision became more clear, my skills became sharper, and the money followed. My best advice for those who are just starting their entrepreneurship journey is to get really clear on your vision. Not just for your career, but for what you want your life to look like because they need to go together. Once you’re pretty sure about the direction you want to go in, it’s important to invest in yourself! I don’t just mean “treat yo self”, but invest in your career skills and invest in things that help you to work better, i.e. your health, select conveniences that help you to focus your time better, and things that make you feel more put together and confident. You’ll have to trust yourself on what is a smart investment for you and your career and what might be frivolous spending because, at the end of the day, only you can define that balance.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about CBD Branding – what should we know?
We specialize in helping businesses get leads digitally. Basically it looks like this: We help them figure out who they are trying to reach and how to best reach them. It might be by offering valuable content to these prospects or it might be direct product advertisement. Ideally, prospects fill out a form and enter into a lead funnel where they’ll receive more information about the brand and move closer to conversion to a sale. This is optimized behind the scenes with automation workflows. Generally, we use either Facebook or LinkedIn advertising to reach the prospects, although I look forward to adding more digital advertising options to our offerings in the future. We use the data extracted through our advertising reporting process to provide useful information to our clients about the demographics of prospects interacting with and how they are interacting with the brand’s materials. We also use this information to optimize our ads and to consult our clients on potential new marketing avenues that may be effective for them.

In addition to all of this technical jazz, we also design all of the elements used in our campaigns from landing pages to graphics. I personally love the clean, eye-catching aesthetics we bring to our campaigns.

What sets us apart from most marketing companies is that we operate on a very close-knit level with our clients. We spend a lot of time getting to know the individuals on the teams we will be working with, how they like to work, what their ideas are, and what their goals are. We are very considerate of client budgets and their time. As a consultancy, we also love to share our knowledge and make it a priority to teach our clients what they need to know to make their marketing it’s best going forward.

We’re interested to hear your thoughts on female leadership – in particular, what do you feel are the biggest barriers or obstacles?
I think that barriers to female leadership have *mostly* dissipated in the U.S. over the last few decades and I’m proud to know and work with many brilliant and highly successful women. I’m also proud to work alongside many men who have trusted their businesses with my knowledge and skillsets.

While I personally haven’t run into any kind of gender barrier in my career recently, when I was younger, I did have a couple of occurrences of male figures that seemed to want more from me than work. I have also had a boss in the past that made it pretty apparent that he only really liked and trusted the men in the office and made some very sexist remarks from time to time. While I know that I’m fortunate that I have only experienced a minimal amount of these kinds of behaviors, I’m sure there are many women who have experienced it more often.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cbdbranding.com
• Email: cbd@cbdbranding.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christinebri

Image Credit:
Background photo in CBD Branding image: Victor Fossen

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