Kimberly Ballard has been writing in one professional form or another for over 35 years. She has a BA in Communications and a minor in World Literature from the University of Alabama. She started out selling radio advertising for an FM radio station in Biloxi, MS, writing her own radio spots.
Kimberly worked as an account manager, copywriter, and media planner/buyer for two ad agencies in Miami, FL, and moonlighted at the ABC affiliate (WPLG) as a floor director and production assistant for a Top 10 media market news station. She freelanced TV and video production gigs, working behind the scenes on locally-produced Miami TV shows like the Don Shula Show. She also spent a great deal of time in the newsroom where she learned how decisions were made about the news and how it got on the air. This would later play an important role in her career as a writer.
She moved back to Alabama where she worked as the managing editor for a local business and lifestyle magazine and went on to work as a commercial producer for Huntsville’s WAAY (ABC) where she learned to edit video and produce TV commercials and PSAs.
She moved back to Florida in 1997. With a well-rounded background in broadcast production, news, print, ad agencies, magazine editorial, copywriting, and sales – she worked as the marketing director for a window film manufacturer in St. Petersburg, FL with an automotive, commercial and residential product line.
She was able to use diverse background to be involved in all aspects of advertising and marketing for the company, including writing and producing marketing videos, and supporting the sales teams with content and marketing literature. It was during this time that Kimberly landed a permanent editorial writing gig for the Detailers Digest and Mobile Tech News. She would go on to write for them for 14 years.
In 2006, Kimberly moved back to Huntsville for family reasons. After doing a variety of project work to test her ability to start her own business, in 2008, she took the leap to go out on her own with KimberlyWritesCreative.
Specializing in straight editorial at first, she wrote consistently for publications like the Chamber of Commerce Annual Guides and Initiatives magazine, the R&D Report owned by the Huntsville Times, Pulse published by Crestwood Hospital, EVENT Huntsville, and many others.
Still writing for the Detailers Digest and Mobile Tech News, a Boston-area detailer contacted her in 2010 about a project known as the Air Force One Detailing Team at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, led by Master detailer and detailing trainer, Renny Doyle. Doyle was well-known in the high-end automotive detailing industry and he asked Kimberly to write some press releases for detailers on the team in their local markets.
The response was overwhelming. Today, Doyle’s Detailing Success Network of hundreds of high-end, automotive detailers and paint correction specialists make up 50 percent of Kimberly’s writing work in the form of newsletters, PR, websites, and magazine articles in the automotive industry. She has also been building Wordpress websites and writing them since 2015.
Having written for the Huntsville Business Journal’s sister publication EVENT Huntsville for about ten years, Kimberly, who has felt for some time that Huntsville needed a small business-oriented magazine, was one of the first to jump onboard when the Huntsville Business Journal launched its maiden issue in June 2018.
Kimberly is best known for her editorial and copywriting versatility.