Pre-assignment meeting; September 2023
I attended my first Annual General Meeting (AGM), and networking session. I was looking forward to experiencing being in an environment that allows businesspeople to converse with each other about their companies. This AGM was specific to the borough of Spelthorne and focused on the Spelthorne Business Forum (SBF). I was expecting it to be formal, but the opposite approach was taken, and it was interesting. It made me consider if this was a post-Covid approach. I was able to talk to several business founders and learn the history of their companies. It was insightful to see how easily they communicated with each other about potentially working together. I also spoke with the new Digital Marketer on the SBF team, a fairly recent graduate like me, about her experience and how it helped her land her role.
Assignment: September 2023 - Day 1
DAY 1 My first day was an introduction to the foundations of marketing. I understood what the 4 Ps were (price, product, promotion, and place) and how they were significant factors in marketing. In the early stages of developing a brand, consistency is key; consistency conveys professionalism as well as actually assisting clients and customers to recognise offerings, and to stay engaged and interested. I also learnt what my own strengths were and how I could use them to my benefit if I wanted to pursue a career in this field. For example, my age would mean I am quite current, and my location in London would mean thousands of companies and their vacancies were accessible to me. I learnt areas I could work on such as building a network of contacts.
Day 2
Today I learnt about events. I learnt about the role of the online platform Eventbrite. We were creating an event for a bike company based in the London borough of Hounslow. Creating an event was fairly simple, however, there were many intricacies in formatting the campaign. First, I filled out the basic information regarding the event such as date, time, and location, and then I proceeded to go to content and enter headlines and sub-headings to appeal to customers as well as including a description. This email campaign was created in advance; it was scheduled to be sent out over the weekend when audiences were receptive. Scheduled for 1/10; Results: 59.5% open 2.7% click through rate (CTR).
Day 3
I received an introduction to social media for business today after which I felt confident about today’s task using Facebook. For a bike company, I created an event on Facebook, firstly duplicating a similar past event to maintain consistency. Having updated the event with the new details it was crucial to copy the correct ticket URL from Eventbrite (whilst not logged into it) so customers could purchase tickets directly. The event was then created. I resized an image using the Microsoft Paint tool. The size was altered by changing the number of pixels of the width/height. To combat the URL being used as a link being too long, I used tools in tinyurl.com. I had the option to produce a shortened one that could be renamed to something memorable that could be used for the campaign, and other activity on digital platforms. I was introduced to Twitter which was fairly similar to Facebook. Content (text, images, hashtags, polls, and GIFs) is used to increase interaction with users and potential customers. Through joining groups, campaigns were posted out to many different local and sporting groups to promote the event.
Day 4 and 5
Today I travelled to Ealing to have some pictures taken of me in front of the town hall in preparation for building my professional profile on LinkedIn. All images of interns and staff of the agency will be taken in the same location maintaining consistency and immediately linking us. To practice introducing myself in an informal situation and engaging with the community I took the opportunity to support the local Macmillan Coffee Morning. I independently worked on remote desk research later to discover further ways for businesses to find opportunities using online databases and used the data to then create a spreadsheet of opportunities in Excel. On Day 5 I learnt about managing websites through WordPress.com, which enabled me to manage everything in detail such as editing and creating content, tagging, and inserting images. I also learnt about the importance of maintaining an image library. I understood terms I had heard of before but not quite known the definition of, such as ‘search engine optimisation’ (SEO), ‘front page’ and ‘parent