Hard truths:
Ever since I told my mates at school that I was going to work with my dad doing marketing work experience, I’ve had hundreds and thousands of messages from all of my biggest fans begging me to spill its ever so dirty secrets
The first thing you find out is that it’s not multimillionaires in suits doing class A’s, it’s just a normal job, only with a genuinely interesting and friendly atmosphere. The people I interacted with in my work experience at the marketing optimist had an underlying nerdiness and enthusiasm for the job they love, it was lovely to see.
Let’s experience some marketing!
Networking is most likely the first thing you will be made to do in marketing work experience. You will become very familiar with linkedin within a matter of minutes, at least that’s what my “business mogul” of a dad made me do (self proclaimed). Linkedin is a wonderful social media that connects you to other people either looking for work or looking for employees.
While it may be highly dominated by a generation of people uninteresting to most, it is in fact very helpful for business and work related issues. This is also where a lot of job opportunities will come from.
Search engine optimization:
You might be shown the nitty gritty of blog writing and the be all and end all of SEO and “keyword searches”, with the use of moz. One of my dads wonderful employees showed me the “behind the scenes” of a website. It can make your page bloom like a rose or neglected like most of my dads cooking.
The secret is to find the most popular terms for the month, relating to what you are writing. Then litter them throughout your page. The one I’m using is “marketing work experience”, ha bet you never even knew.
Marketing is a cruel world; you will obtain rankings based on how well you used your key phrase in terms of recognisability for your page compared to other websites. These weird things called crawlers do this, they scan pages and tell you if you did a good job. (don’t ask me).
Blog writing:
Your next step, (now you vaguely know what you’re doing with SEO), will most likely be blog writing.
The trick is to balance pleasing search engines using your keyword phrase, like “marketing work experience”, but also trying to keep the user happy so readers actually enjoy the blog. Signalling to search engines via optimisation is trickier than you would first expect.
In terms of the creation of websites for a blog or for whatever other reason, I used elementor. Elementor is definitely a tool that people with actual talent use. As much as my dad’s lovely employee tried to explain, I had no clue what was going on.
Working with clients:
Different clients have different ideas for what they want for their business, (if you have any grasp of what marketing is then you should know that already). Me and my dad found this out as we hit the roads of Leeds in search for somewhere for his client to have a photoshoot. The next day we traveled about an hour to north yorkshire and filmed interviews for another client called multiply. We also spent hours in an office typing.
The key point here is that marketing is not be a two dimensional area of work. It can have you doing a triple somersault or have you sat posting pictures of yourself in Leeds corn exchange on linkedin for a bit of exposure.
When doing marketing work experience, you will sit in zoom meetings with people up to 3x your age which is an experience that is definitely… an experience. However it is something that I believe most people are incredibly used to now after lockdown so it shouldn’t be too big of a hurdle for anyone with a laptop and the ability to pretend not to be bored.
Social media:
Turns out social media can be boring after all! Your marketing work experience should show you the ropes of creating reports on the analytics of your clients pages, what works in terms of the algorithm and how to create graphics for particular posts. I say “boring” in jest as I actually found this part of my marketing work experience quite interesting seeing how different techniques affect the performance of posts and pages.
Clients want posts ready around a month in advance so a lot of posts are complete in short succession. This means a quite monotonous task as you begin running out of “inventive” words to describe a beanbag.
For some reason my little monkey brain thinks it’s actually quite exciting to see what makes numbers go up and down, yes maybe that’s a bit weird and childish but hopefully someone can relate to that.
Editing:
Marketing includes a lot of promotional videos for clients so in turn a lot of editing. In your marketing work experience you should expect to learn at the very least the basics of your editing software of choice. Luckily I came into this area knowing a decent amount about how to edit.
A key point to take away from this is that you cannot edit in the way you want when you’re in the magical world of marketing work experience. Your editing has to include non-copyrighted music if needed and look as formal as possible, no flashy swirly thingymabobs with funny text flying on screen, although in my opinion that would make for good brand exposure. Of course this could depend on what the client is requesting, what their brand is about, and what the lead in your marketing work experience wants you to do.
Summary:
Marketing work experience will most likely not be what you would expect. There are so many different aspects to keep track of, from editing, to filming, to posting on social media, to creating a blog, to Zoom meetings, to reading graphs, search engine optimization etc…
Yes, it goes on and on. Surprisingly though, I actually really enjoyed my marketing work experience. Whether that was due to the context of my dads lovely employees and getting to show off to my dad by showing him just how inept he is at his job compared to me (joking of course). Or whether it was due to actually enjoying marketing, not too sure on that side of things yet but if you are in the same position as me and looking at marketing work experience as an option, but not fully convinced, it’s not for old and boring people, try it, it’s alright.
