How Valentine, Head of Marketing at Fleet, Uses Dust

Pauline Pham

Aug 29, 2024 • 6 min read

Founded in 2019, Fleet is a unique IT equipment management company enabling users to rent, manage, secure, and renew their entire IT device fleet from a single platform.

Earlier this year Fleet added a fresh face to their team, taking on SEO specialist Valentine Chelius as their new Head of Marketing. Coming from several years working exclusively in SEO, Valentine faced the challenge of rapidly adjusting to a significantly broader role at Fleet. At the time of her hiring, Fleet’s marketing team was decidedly small. All at once, she became responsible for creating new internal structures in addition to keeping up with various ongoing marketing tasks.

How could Valentine master all aspects of her expansive new role while facing the constraints of limited support and critical deadlines? These demands led Valentine to search for a solution that could help her to create diverse on-brand content and learn essential new skills for her role.

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Fleet is an IT equipment management solution for businesses that provides streamlined leasing of computers and office technology. The company aims to offer a unique solution for computer and device acquisition for startups and SMEs. From a single platform, users can rent, manage, secure, and renew their entire IT device fleet. Since its establishment, Fleet has simplified the process of acquiring and managing office technology leases for over 1000 companies globally, which includes startups, agencies, SMEs, schools, and more.

Valentine embraced a new role but felt overwhelmed by the wide-ranging responsibilities.

Prior to joining Fleet, Valentine spent four years working at Aircall as Global SEO Manager before shifting to PayFit to serve as their Global SEO Lead. After spending more than five years deepening her specialization in SEO, Valentine pivoted away from SEO to join Fleet as Head of Marketing.

In her new role at Fleet, Valentine courageously took on a plethora of new tasks and responsibilities that pushed her beyond her scope of expertise and into the multifaceted world of marketing.

As anyone who’s worked in marketing could tell you, the responsibilities of a marketing lead are extraordinarily wide-ranging. Valentine’s new role at Fleet covered digital acquisition, branding, visual identity, partnerships, tracking and performance, SEO and SEA, newsletters, and all forms of external communications. In other words, Valentine would have to become a jack of all trades almost overnight.

Stepping into this new role, Valentine was tasked with taking charge of ongoing deliverables and communications while setting up her new role's structural framework. Not only was she being challenged to quickly master various unfamiliar tasks, but she also faced the obstacle of being supported by a notably small team, comprising two temporary interns. Understandably, the bulk of long-term marketing responsibilities were placed on Valentine’s shoulders.

Faced with this daunting scenario, Valentine enlisted the help of Dust, an AI platform she discovered during her previous role.

How Dust Empowered Valentine as Fleet’s Head of Marketing

Learning new software

Dust served as Valentine's lifeline when it came to learning new software like the CRM platform HubSpot.

While Valentine had no previous experience with HubSpot, a CRM software, she needed to dive deeply into the software to fulfill her role. HubSpot can require some dedicated online study in order to be fully mastered, and it’s typically easier to use for those who are familiar with CSS.

While she initially found the CRM quite complicated, she gained understanding and familiarity by asking Dust questions such as how to go about creating a report, which field to use, and how to clean data.

“I was just curious to start with, and then curiosity turns into a necessity because of very [short timelines]. So I had to learn fast and couldn’t do half of my job without [Dust].”

Leveraging internal data to draft content and ensure pitch-perfect branding

Valentine utilized Dust’s potential to make the most of the time she spent on external communications. Dust turned out to be a major help in writing content for newsletters and other brand assets. Thanks to Dust’s ability to retrieve data from existing Fleet sources and use it to generate an initial draft, Valentine had a strong starting point for creating content that aligned with Fleet’s brand guidelines and tone of voice. For example, although she had never written a press release previously, Valentine created a solid press release in accordance with PR best practices with the help of Dust.

Another trick that helps to ensure harmonious and on-brand content at Fleet is Valentine’s custom curated data source or “brand checker.” She created a “brand checker” data source by inputting Fleet’s on-brand messaging and tone of voice into a Dust folder, which can then be plugged into any new Dust assistant or task. This versatile data source set has enabled Valentine and her team to create content with consistent messaging and tone of voice.

Creating a custom Dust assistant to streamline external communications

Additionally, Valentine has created a key custom Dust assistant Valentine for her day-to-day use in content creation. This is an SEO Manager Assistant for content creation.

She created this assistant by starting with SEMrush keyword data and asking the assistant to create topic clusters and provide search intent.
From there, Valentine selects queries to focus on and requests a content brief structure. The assistant then provides several options for meta tags, headings, key points, and internal links.
After iterations and once the brief is finalized, Valentine and her team move on to writing.

The assistant has access to company folders including the “brand checker” that maintain consistent tone and product information throughout the process. Although the content is initially AI-written, the team remains closely involved, reviewing and adapting the text to ensure quality and accuracy. This has been a huge time saver for Valentine’s team given their small size and tight deadlines.

Furthermore, Valentine uses Dust’s prompt coach template to create instructions for her custom assistants. She also uses assistants to check some technical SEO recommendations before sending them to Fleet’s development team.

Valentine’s advice on when to create an assistant:

“I would say–create assistants when you have recurring tasks. And also when you have…big one-shot things you don't know, like a video script, like a press release, like how to come up with a complex dashboard. So I would say that the two use cases are recurring tasks and new things.”

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Getting access to multiple LLMs in one place for the highest-quality content : A critical feature of Dust that led Valentine to implement it into her role at Fleet is that it provides access to several LLMs in one place without the need to juggle multiple subscriptions. Of these LLMs, Valentine personally prefers to use Claude most for its formatting, tone, and relevance of answers.

Conquering new creative tasks:

Valentine’s proudest Dust-empowered moment so far has been creating a video script, something she had never done before and had to deliver on a very short deadline.

“I would say that was completely new ground for me…The process was great and something that I hadn’t done before. So I’m quite proud that I discovered [how to do] this, and even the freelancers thought the script was good.”

Improving the efficiency of translations within a global company

Due to her fruitful and effective use of Dust within the scope of marketing, Valentine became a strong advocate for integrating Dust into other tasks at her company.

Beyond Valentine’s role in marketing, she has also encouraged the integration of Dust into other teams, improving collaboration and efficiency more broadly at Fleet. This has been particularly true in the realm of translation.

Dust has allowed Fleet teams to cut translation times by generating translations that require Fleet’s local teams to simply proofread rather than create them from scratch. This prevents a long back-and-forth between internationally located teams, saving time and boosting efficiency at this globalized company.

According to Valentine, Dust has successfully eliminated the translation bottleneck at Fleet.

Excited about Dust’s possible future applications at Fleet

Looking to the future, Valentine is particularly excited about Vision–Dust’s new image analysis tool, which blew her away with the accuracy of its generated image descriptions. She envisions future uses for Fleet’s website accessibility that could be highly time-saving.

Through her bold experiments utilizing Dust to overcome the challenge of accomplishing new, diverse tasks with limited support, Valentine got the impression that using Dust offers some of the same benefits as acquiring additional team support.

“I would say [Dust] could be like an extension of your team. It could be as useful, as fast, as polite. I’m surprised by the human-like tone of the conversation. It doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a bot.”

Overall, Valentine’s experiences with Dust in her lead marketing role exemplify AI’s ability to help people adapt to challenging work constraints, including unfamiliar tasks and limited support.

Thanks to Dust, Valentine gained a sense of pride by achieving new milestones in her career, even accomplishing feats that seemed impossible to her in the past. Because of Dust’s accessibility, Valentine was able to use AI to simplify and empower her own workflow and even encourage its adoption by other teams, bringing greater efficiency to her company overall.

Dust empowers you to do anything:

“You have access to anything. You can be a developer, a designer, a scriptwriter, or anything else as long as you are willing to know about it. There are no limits.”