Casla Conversations... with Hannah Melia, Head of Marketing at Citrine Informatics

Millie Hurst, 24th September 2025

Hannah Melia started life as a scientist – after completing a degree in Material Science from Cambridge, her career took her to Germany and America, back to Cambridge, and ultimately to Sheffield. Her career has involved lots of different roles and industries, and reflects an ability to adapt and overcome challenges. Currently Head of Marketing at Citrine Informatics, an AI SaaS company in Silicon Valley providing software to the chemicals and materials industry, Hannah knows how to make an effective marketing strategy.

During our conversation, Hannah shared her approach to some marketing fundamentals in a clear, concise way that we think you’ll find helpful. We met Hannah when she attended Casla’s B2B Marketing Drinks & Discussion event in March, and it was great to talk in more depth. ‘In marketing, it's important to be humble and realise that you're not marketing to yourself,’ she says. ‘Don't assume that what you like is what your target buyers would like. It's better to look at the data, do the research, and figure out what they want.’

What’s your career journey been like so far?

‘I moved to Germany soon after graduating – I had a German boyfriend who I was determined to marry, so I learnt German and got myself a job in project management in Germany. Then the boyfriend proposed, and we moved to America because he was doing a PhD over there.’

Hannah wanted to go into the automotive industry, but the job market was tough, and she was only two years out of uni, so she worked as a consultant. She later co-founded a company in financial marketing, which got a deal with Citibank, potentially worth $12 million. ‘But then my husband got a job as a fellow at Cambridge back in our old college, and couldn't really tell him no,’ she says.

So Hannah moved back to Britain, leaving the company she co-founded, and went into materials software. She started as a salesperson but found that the product she was selling could be sold to a wider market if it had support to do that.

‘It was an EdTech product, and I created teaching materials and training materials to show how the product could be used in a wider market. That led to a 200% increase in sales in my territory, so then I was asked to do the same thing globally,’ she explains. ‘I created an online repository of teaching materials and I formed a community, with up to 20,000 academics worldwide, where they contributed their teaching resources as well.’

Hannah went on to become product manager, while also taking on responsibility for marketing. In 2019, her employer was sold to a big company, so Hannah took the opportunity to extend her kitchen and decided to contact a small startup (Citrine Informatics) that was doing AI for materials, to see if they wanted a product manager. They hired Hannah as a consultant to help them set up a marketing function. ‘Citrine is full of lovely people and is doing really interesting stuff,’ she says.

What was a key turning point?

One turning point that stands out was when she couldn’t get a job in the automotive industry in America. ‘It was really scary. I thought I'd walk into a manufacturing job after doing an undergraduate degree in science and a postgraduate qualification in manufacturing management at Cambridge, but it just wasn't happening.

‘Selling myself as a consultant made me realise that I could do that and made me much more confident. So I knew that whatever happens, I have skills, I have tenacity, and I can make money if I need to – which means that you can be much more picky and confident about jobs in the future.’

Where do you start with a marketing strategy?

Hannah emphasises the importance of a) having a set of messages for each stakeholder in a business, for example, the customer, employees, investors, government or regulatory stakeholders, and b) analysing the needs and wants of each stakeholder in order to generate those messages and c) not forgetting the personal motivations.

Hannah makes a Rubik’s cube-style spreadsheet encompassing all stakeholders and the messaging for each of them, the stage they are at in the buyer journey, and potentially the different market verticals. I hadn’t heard someone break it down so clearly, and found Hannah’s methodical, focused approach really interesting.

‘I would try and figure out what message we need to give to our employees so that they feel confident that our company is doing well, that they've got a career here, that they can enjoy it and stay with us,’ Hannah says. ‘Then, how do we market to the investors to explain what our vision is, where we're going, and how confident they can be about our company?’

Hannah breaks the stakeholders into those four categories, then gathers as much information as possible about their needs, from both a personal perspective and a business perspective.

‘When doing the analysis for an EdTech product, I found out that one of the most important things for lecturers is that they don't want to look out at a sea of bored faces. That doesn't make them feel happy about their day, right?

‘They want engaged students, and they want a way to engage their students easily. That's not a learning outcome, it's not a thing that might be measured by the university, but it's really important to them personally.

‘So if we imagine a grid of stakeholders, we imagine then another axis of different stages in their buying process – consideration, intent, awareness, and so on. Thinking about what messages we want to convey to them at these different stages. Also, if you've got different market verticals, then your grid gets another dimension.’

The next step is thinking about how to get these messages to these people, and which channels people go to at which stages in the buying cycle and which stakeholders go to which channels.

‘I might be running different campaigns on LinkedIn for awareness and targeting different messages to different seniorities of people within my target market verticals. I then create a marketing calendar that uses those different channels, hits the different market verticals and conveys those different messages.’

Can you tell us about how you create a product roadmap?

Hannah uses the metaphor of two jars when explaining a roadmap – one full of Rolos and Smarties, and another with oats and peas. ‘You need the oats and peas, they represent fundamental infrastructure in the software. On the other side, sweeties are things that marketing can use, something that is visual that can be screenshotted and put on the website, or something that the sales team are excited about and want to go and tell people about.

‘You've got to make sure that you've got a well-balanced diet,’ says Hannah. ‘The other thing that you've got to think about is what leads on to what, so sometimes you might do things not in order of priority of need, but because you know that if you do this thing, which you know might be over in the oats and peas jar, it opens up lots of different things on the sweetie jar in the future.’ For example, this could be updating your CRM or doing some market research.

Hannah says it’s also crucial to understand what you’re doing now, in terms of marketing efforts. If you have a list of all the needs and wants, the things that affect the buying cycle for the product on one axis, and on the other axis, you ask your customers for some feedback, you can be more efficient with resources.

‘It sometimes turns out that we’re meeting expectations in some of the important areas, so we can pull back resources from that area and instead work on another one. So putting together a roadmap is an art form, and it all starts with the needs of the customer.’

What's working in marketing right now?

‘Webinars are really working for us. The webinars are good not only as lead generation, but also in the consideration phase,’ says Hannah. ‘I can see that people who attend a webinar are more likely to be in closed sales than people that don't attend a webinar.’

Casla recently held a webinar to bring B2B professionals in Sheffield together with those in our twin city, Bochum. It was a great way to share knowledge and experience alongside our in-person events and build connections.

Last great piece of B2B content that you saw?

Hannah said she was really captured by something Mailmodo sent her recently – they’re an email marketing platform built for engagement, allowing you to send surveys where you don’t have to click away from the email.

Favourite marketing buzzword (that you secretly love)?

‘FAB. Features, advantages, benefits. I use it all the time because I have a technical team of data engineers and software engineers, and I need to explain that I can’t sell features, I have to sell advantages and benefits.

‘For example, a car has a new light bulb as the headlamp, and that's the new feature. The advantage is that it lights up the street further. The benefit to me, as a mum that drives my son to scout explorers at nine o'clock at night in the rain, is that I've got more chance of stopping if something comes on the road, and I can keep my son safe.’

Tool you can’t live without?

‘It's starting to be Gamma, which is an AI tool, and it's always been Excel. Canva is super, too. At Casla’s round table discussion event, I was asking about what AI tools everyone was using, and I watched a webinar that showed off some different marketing tools that were really interesting, including Gamma.’

Biggest marketing myth?

‘Everyone thinks marketing is easy. That’s the biggest marketing myth. Most people in marketing are female and so it’s perceived as easy. I’ve regularly been the only female on the senior leadership team. It’s seen as that touchy-feely easy stuff that women can do, but it is actually really data-driven.’