If you are a college student or a recent graduate from a business school, have you considered an internship? The answer should be yes! According to LiveCareer, 95% of employers take candidate experience into consideration when hiring. Now that you’ve decided an internship is a must, the question is, what kind of internship?
Whether you’re thinking about marketing as a career, trying to market your startup, or don’t know what area of business you’d like to go into, interning with a marketing agency is valuable for many reasons. Check out this list of four benefits to a marketing agency internship.
1. Gain Knowledge
What do marketing agencies do? The answer depends on the type of agency, but it’s safe to say most agencies provide a variety of services. A few common and necessary services offered might be SEO, PPC and social media management.
An internship enables you to learn about a ton (and I mean a ton) of different components that go into a client’s marketing plans. Not only do you learn about what the services are, but you learn how to implement them and analyze the results as well.
2. Use Various Tools
Marketers measure the results of their work, such as the performance of a recent lead-gen offer or the amount of interactions a new blog post received. Tracking these numbers is essential to understanding if the strategy in place is producing the desired results. Luckily, many softwares can make this part of a marketers job easier. One is HubSpot, a leading platform that many marketers utilize to track these metrics and others — such as email performance.
3. Improve Communication Skills
Communicating is something we are always doing. Liking someone’s Instagram post or sharing a video on Facebook is now a form of communication! Marketing is no different. Marketers are constantly communicating, whether it’s with clients on a conference call, tweeting to influencers or responding to customer reviews.
Here are a few of my takeaways for communicating in the workplace:
- Ask questions! If you are confused about a task or need clarification about the goal of the project, make sure you speak up.
- Proofread more than you think. It also doesn’t hurt to have another set of eyes take a look at your work.
- Prepare for meetings. Time is valuable and you don’t want to make someone feel like they aren’t valued as you scramble to find that spreadsheet or infographic.
4. Build Your Network
We all know how important it is to build your network, but it can be daunting when you’re in school or recently graduated. Doing an internship can be a great way to start doing this. Your network can grow from your parent’s friends to your co-workers, managers and maybe even the CEO (depending on the size of your agency). You never know when you can be of help to them and vice versa.
When deciding on what internship you’d learn and grow from, remember these four points. Now go update your resumes and cover letters and land yourself an internship with a marketing agency!
Written by an intern at Madison Miles Media.