My internship at Marketing Works has been an incredible learning experience. I knew that I would leave the three-month job with increased knowledge of the marketing world, but I didn’t realize how much I would gain in a short amount of time. While the following four points are just the tip of the iceberg, they are some of the most valuable takeaways from my experience:
1. Social media marketing best practices are more complicated than they seem.
A primary responsibility of the internship is creating social media content for Marketing Works. The intern writes every tweet, Facebook and LinkedIn post every day. There’s much more to an effective post than it appears! Day of the week, time of the day, length of post, type of content, hashtag usage, and many other factors contribute to your page’s success. Insight from other team members and reading tons of online articles about how to optimize each post and platform helped me double my knowledge of social media best practices throughout my internship. See my blog posts 6 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Presence and 5 Twitter Practices to Adopt to learn more about social media practices.
2. Prioritizing, staying organized, and switching tasks is essential.
Keeping up with tasks is critical for the fast-paced atmosphere of the B2B marketing industry. There are so many time-sensitive client projects happening simultaneously, and important tasks can get thrown at you. My schedule could easily go from completely manageable to extremely hectic over the span of a day. Prioritizing becomes difficult when you have multiple projects that all need to be done around the same time. But staying calm, asking for help when you need it, switching tasks frequently and staying organized ensures that all projects receive attention and questions can be asked early on.
3. Writing blog posts is a lot of fun.
After being fully immersed in the B2B world, I have a new appreciation for blogs. Blogs are a critical part of the marketing world and can be immensely helpful for learning how to improve literally every aspect of your business. The writing style for a blog is brief and informal, and the form allows for creativity and flexibility. This is why this aspect of the internship was my favorite. I especially enjoyed when I could incorporate topical themes, such as Will, Kate & George.
4. Getting to know the team is enjoyable and helpful.
I’m very appreciative that part of the internship requires the intern to set up one-on-ones with the team to get to know everyone better. During this time I learned more about everyone’s strengths and life outside of work. Making an effort to remember the tidbits everyone mentioned in the individual meeting and throughout the day helped me to connect with everyone on a more human level, rather than just discussing spreadsheets and projects. The more I got to know the people around me, the more comfortable I was asking questions because I knew who to go to.
I would absolutely recommend the Marketing Works internship to anyone who wants to pursue marketing, public relations, or other related fields. I’m very appreciative for the experiences I’ve had here, and grateful to Marketing Works for providing me with the opportunity to be a part of the team for the past three months.