1 hour in Marketing, packed within a day of work experience

The week of discovering new digital tools and jumping into ‘the business world’ was an eye-opener. Being my first ever experience of using social media and utilizing my creativity as part of work, was so enjoyable that I ended up volunteering to work every Wednesday afternoon.

So now looking back to my personal experience, I knew I wanted to do the same, to offer some sort of support or guidance for other young students finding their way in life. The opportunity to offer the insights of my job role, Digital Marketing, popped up recently and I took it INSTANTLY! Sharing the day-to-day role in Digital Marketing is hard to show, as one day you could be creating pages for a website, and the next day attending an event. The variety of opportunities to network and constantly gain new insights into the fast-pace role is what Digital Marketing is all about.

I was offered an hour to mentor a young lady who was on her day of work experience, gaining insights into HR, Finance, Marketing and more. As it was my first time in mentoring, I decided that providing the chance to create a video clip and create a social media post would be the best option for Ellie to get the ins and outs of Digital Marketing.

Video clip
We initially started producing a short clip on a digital tool called Lumen5, it’s a short number of slides with images and text that can be used as Ads around the Saïd Business School Tv screens or via social media platforms.

To begin with, we went through the brand guidelines of the school. To promote any organisations work, you must have some sort of brand image, so people recognise who you are i.e. by communicating in a specific tone of voice. We then inserted the scripted text, to which some slides were automatically generated. Now, this is where the fun started. We could insert images from the event (Map the System – Global Final 2019) and play around with the layout and the position of the text. This may sound easy but it’s quite fiddly, in the way you don’t want the text to override the image itself.

As Ellie’s first try, the clip looked great! I was impressed by how quick she picked things up (see above)!

Social media post

After the amazing try of producing a clip on Lumen5, I thought we could give a go at creating a post for social media. We began with HootSuite, a digital tool that allows organisations to schedule posts for all social media platforms. Which was a shock to Ellie, as she always thought all social media posts were published live. Though this can be the case sometimes when ‘live-tweeting’.

We began with Ellie’s interests and what she would typically see on Twitter, we then used this idea to draft a post on Hootsuite for our Twitter account @SkollCentre. Expressing the key message of the post with the use of hashtags, @ holders, URL links and use of media. Creating this ‘rich’ twitter post while being within the 280 characters. Once happy with the draft, we both asked ourselves, would we find this post interesting? Does the post stand out? When answered yes that’s when we decided to schedule the post.

The experience in shadowing Ellie producing some amazing content in such little time, was rewarding. Spending an hour sharing insights in Digital Marketing to a young student, who came out with a newly learned skill. Made me want to carry on providing support to young people on their journey of finding their ideal job.

Written by:
Daniela Cazan, Digital Marketing Apprentice, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Saïd Business School.