Today we’d like to introduce you to Alessandra Madrid.
Hi Alessandra, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My career path has been anything but linear, and I think that’s actually what makes it interesting.
I studied at Trinity University, and after graduation I moved to New Orleans, which was equal parts adventure and education. Working in agency environments there introduced me to the world of marketing from the ground up, and around that same time I started building my own presence on social media. What began as personal content creation quietly became one of the most formative parts of my career. It taught me the platforms from the inside out, as a creator first not just a strategist.
Eventually I made my way to Houston, where I joined an agency managing large-scale campaigns for major P&G brands like Olay and Tide. Working with budgets and brand standards at that level sharpened everything like my process, my attention to detail, the way I think about strategy.
From there I transitioned in-house to Mattress Firm and Sleep.com, which is where I really hit my stride. I loved that role the work, the team, the pace. When I was laid off two years in, it was genuinely a hard moment. But it also turned out to be the push I needed.
I took everything I had built, the agency experience, the in-house perspective, the content creator instincts and started working for myself as a social media and influencer marketing consultant. That was the beginning of everything, and I haven’t looked back.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Honestly? No. And I think most people in this industry would say the same.
Marketing and social media especially has always had an identity problem. It looks easy from the outside, which means it’s one of the few professions where everyone assumes they already know how to do your job. I’ve sat in rooms with decision-makers who watched their nephew’s TikTok go viral once and suddenly had very strong opinions about content strategy. That’s a specific kind of exhausting.
There’s also the compensation piece. For a long time, social media wasn’t treated as the revenue-driving, brand-building discipline that it actually is. It was an afterthought, something to hand off to the youngest person in the room because they were “on their phone anyway.” Fighting for a seat at the table, and for budgets that reflected the actual value of the work, was a constant uphill battle early in my career.
Becoming a business owner added a whole new layer to that. Suddenly I wasn’t just advocating for the discipline I was advocating for myself. I’ve had to learn, sometimes the hard way, how to put a real price on my expertise and hold that line. “Can you just throw up one more post today?” or “Why aren’t we viral yet?” are sentences I know very well. Learning to respond to those with confidence instead of just absorbing them took time. But it’s made me a much better consultant and a much better business partner to my clients.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I run a boutique social media and influencer marketing consultancy. Day to day, that means I’m building content strategies, managing brand voices, running influencer campaigns, and creating the kind of content that actually stops people mid-scroll. My clients range from Texas food and hospitality brands to wellness businesses to emerging consumer brands.
What I specialize in is the intersection of strategy and storytelling. Anyone can post. What I do is build a cohesive brand presence that has a point of view, a voice, and a reason for people to keep coming back.
I’m also a content creator myself with over 600,000 likes on TikTok so I understand the platforms not just as a strategist, but as someone who lives and works in them every day. That dual perspective is something that really sets me apart.
What I’m most proud of is the longevity of my client relationships and the trust that comes with them. I’m not an agency churning through accounts. I’m a partner who’s genuinely invested in my clients’ growth and they feel that.
What sets me apart, beyond the experience, is that I actually care about the work. I have a decade-plus of experience spanning agency life, large corporate brands, in-house marketing, and now independent consulting. I’ve managed multi-million dollar budgets for P&G brands and built scrappy, high-performing strategies for small businesses. I know how to operate at every level and I genuinely LOVE the space, on and off the clock.
But the work I’m most excited about right now is a little different. I’m currently partnered with a major national organization creating evergreen advocacy content. It is work that’s meant to inform, mobilize, and matter. It’s pointed me toward something I didn’t have language for earlier in my career: I want to do work I love and work that has real impact. Not just impact on someone’s bottom line but impact on people’s lives, their rights, their communities. I think that’s the direction I’m headed.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
The layoff from Mattress Firm was, on paper, bad luck. A job I loved, a team I was invested in, gone through no fault of my own. And in the moment, it felt that way. But that “bad luck” is the entire reason my current work exists. It forced my hand in the best possible way. I’m not sure I ever would have bet on myself the way I needed to if I hadn’t been pushed.
So I’ve learned to be careful about labeling things too quickly.
There’s also been genuine good luck as well, being in the right city (shoutout to H-town) at the right time, meeting the right people, a client referral that opened a door I didn’t even know was there. I don’t want to pretend those moments were all strategy and hustle. Timing matters. Who you happen to be standing next to matters.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe: luck creates the opening, and preparation determines whether you can walk through it. Every “lucky” break I’ve had, I was ready for because of the many years of experience I had built, the relationships I had invested in, and the work I had put in long before anyone was paying attention.
The unlucky moments? They’ve all taught me something I needed to know. About resilience, about my own value, about what I actually want to build.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alessandramadrid.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsalessandramadrid/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alessandramadrid/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsalessandramadrid
