Archive for the ‘department’ tag
Unbranded Content Marketing
Everyone is all excited about content marketing.
While the tickertape parade and confetti may be over for the excitement about social media in business, there’s a cold, harsh reality hitting brands right about now: once you’re on social media and making yourself look busy, it’s all about the content. I’ve been a little sour on the fruits of this labor as of late (more on that right here: …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Content). Just yesterday, I saw a well-respected, known and loved brand post this to Facebook: "Like this post if you like contests." Really? Is the spring of fresh ideas that dry?
The trouble with branded content.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what has been troubling me with the majority of branded content. It’s something that is on my mind as I head off in three weeks to Content Marketing World 2012 (being put on by Joe Pulizzi and his team). It’s not that the vast majority of content is vapid of any insight. It’s not that it’s vanilla in its attempt to appeal to the masses. It’s not the thinly veiled marketing blather. It’s actually, the "branded" part of it. The truth is this: once the content is branded, it may be hard (very, very hard) to make it authentic.
There are some pearls.
Would we, as a marketing industry, say that this is true of every brand? No. The vast majority? It does feel that way. Why? Perhaps too many brands are confusing the power of content marketing with advertorial. There is a distinction and it’s a massive one. How valuable would this blog be if all it did was talk about the value and merits of Twist Image as a marketing agency? How valuable would this blog be if all it did was talk about how one marketing service was far superior to another one (and, it just so happens, that this superior service is one that we offer at Twist Image)? In the end, the content is self-serving – which is a world away from content that serves to add value.
The truth (it sometimes hurts).
Does this mean, that to be authentic a brand should promote the services of their competitors? No. Does this mean that a brand should do things that run contrary to their own brand narrative? No. It’s a new mindset that the brand will need to find. Instead of constantly looking for content that can be wrapped up in the brand, why not start looking at content within an unbranded mindset?
What does this look like?
Not every post on blog is about digital marketing. It traipses into different areas of conversation like business books, presentation skills, technology, personal development, culture, entertainment and more. As David Weinberger would say, these are small pieces loosely joined that cumulatively reinforce the philosophical DNA of how I think, how our business thinks and the way that we perceive work, in this day and age. If this blog is even somewhat successful, the feeling that you get – as a reader and active participant – is one that is unbranded. It provides value to you – first and foremost – and that value-chain links back into new business for Twist Image somewhere much further down the line. If content was supposed to be a direct response mechanism, it would be direct marketing (no need to call it content marketing).
The trouble is…
Content marketing looks, acts and feels very little like other marketing channels. It’s a much slower build and it requires a very specific and tactical skill-set that also looks nothing like the marketing departments that we have seen to date. In fact, they look much like editorial departments, which – historically – have been verboten for the advertising and marketing people to hang out in. Is this going to provide a massive challenge for brands moving forward? Absolutely. The lines have become fuzzy. The content we’re seeing being produced and shared through social media is unique – in and of itself – and so to think that we’re all going to close our eyes, make a wish and blow for this all to come to fruition is crazy. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear that the content marketing initiatives are being run out of the communications department of companies, and not the marketing department. What does that tell you?
Strategy first.
I’m really looking forward to Content Marketing World 2012. I’m hopeful that people much smarter than me will be able to demonstrate how these strategies are developed and – more importantly – how organizations (both brands and agencies) are being structured to produce content that is branded… but feels completely unbranded to the consumer.
It will be interesting.
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Life Is Messy. Work Is Messy. Share It All.
Last week, our company, Lion Brand Yarn Company, hosted a number of craft bloggers who were in town to attend the BlogHer conference. It was quite an impressive group of women. Juggling family and entrepreneurial ventures while staying fit and doing charitable work — I get tired just thinking about their lives!
But great accomplishment comes by a path that is has rough patches and is at times chaotic and unpredictable.
Courtesy Carrie Lundell. This Mama Makes Stuff.
Our marketing and design teams were so excited to have these people visit that we prepared for months, trying to create the perfect experience. Part of the schedule for their visit included a meeting and tour through the design department led by our creative director. She showed some of the highlights of an impressive body of work that includes both practical and off-the-charts artistic yarn creations.
Now on a typical day, the design department is cluttered with boxes of garments and yarn on their way to a photo shoot, partially knit sweaters, and test swatches of different color combinations strewn over tables. There would be strands of yarn on the floor, and books and magazines with inspirational images piled on every horizontal surface.
But the day our guests arrived we had spent a good bit of time cleaning up to present a pristine and organized space in which to display our work. About an hour before the bloggers arrived, I stopped by to chat with our creative director and see how the preparations were going.
“I’m so happy to be sharing our designs with other creative people,” she said. “But I’m also eager to get my space back to the way it was. We really can’t do our work in such a cleaned up space.”
Later, when we all went out to dinner together I asked one of the bloggers her impression of the visit. It seemed they had all been enjoying themselves as they tweeted scores of images from our branding store and garment collection, as well as a private hand-dying workshop we offered them in our education center.
“We really loved what we saw,” said Carrie, whose blog is called This Mama Makes Stuff, “But I was a little disappointed that it didn’t look like a real workspace. I know how messy my place gets when I’m crafting and I was hoping to see more of your behind the scenes creative process.”
Now considering everything I know about authenticity and transparency in social media, I’ve never really thought about the fact that those words meant going much farther than I imagined.
It made me think about Julia Child, and how she seamlessly moved from dropped food, knife cuts and other mishaps to finishing her recipes and creating delicious food. In those days of live television, there was no choice. Yet that is one of the reasons we found Julia Child so endearing. She was comfortable with the mistakes and the messiness, knowing that they were a real part of her craft.
It’s not so much that your readers want you to suffer or to be challenged, but they do want to know that you’re like them. Human. Imperfect. Otherwise, how could they ever hope to accomplish what you’re trying to share with them?
It was a great lesson. Lives are messy. Work is messy. People are inspired when they see something beautiful or when they read about a successful business. But the real lesson is in the ups and downs that got you there. Not only is the messiness nothing to be ashamed of, it’s what makes you believable, interesting, and like Julia Child, even loveable.
RELATED:
The Power of Vulnerability (Brene Brown at Ted Talks)
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Verizon close to closing its big spectrum deal with cable companies
Verizon may be close to sealing its spectrum deal with major cable companies, say sources close to the company’s negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.
The DOJ and FCC are currently vetting the purchase, and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division is likely to place some strict conditions on the arrangement, according to three anonymous sources who spoke to Reuters. The department “had significant concerns about the anticompetitive potential of key features of the proposed agreement,” one of the sources said.
Verizon first announced its intention to buy the spectrum in December. The acquisition includes 122 wireless services licenses from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks.
While the extra spectrum would allow Verizon to give its wireless customers faster data service, the matter has stirred up quite a bit of controversy among Verizon’s competitors. T-Mobile, for example, asked the DOJ to kill the deal altogether back in February, arguing that allowing the deal to go through would give Verizon an “excessive concentration” of spectrum, which in turn could stifle competition.
Antitrust regulators have some of the same concerns, especially around Verizon and Comcast cross-marketing each other’s products. In the adjusted deal, FiOS cross-marketing in particular would be prohibited.
The DOJ has been probing the acquisition since it was announced in December 2011. The spectrum Verizon is trying to buy was originally licensed by the government to promote additional competition in the wireless service market.
Filed under: deals 
Mintigo’s new customer search engine … “the web will be your CRM”
Imagine a search engine that isn’t for finding fascinating facts about the Indian Ocean. Not for learning how much methane cows produce globally. And not for following the latest antics of someone named Kardashian.
Imagine, instead a search engine for customers — your customers.
That’s exactly what Mintigo has built, and will be unveiling shortly. The company has already helped UK communications company Orange double conversions. And working with Mintigo generated a 600 percent return on investment for lead-generation company Marketo.
I spoke to Mintigo chief executive Jacob Sharma to find out how.
“The concept of a customer search engine is very new, very unique,” Sharma says, “You’ve got Data.com and Hoovers, but they’re not really targeted … just names, really.”
Instead, Mintigo’s vision is to replace those “old-fashioned databases” with the web. Literally.
“The web will be your CRM,” Sharma told me. “The web is your database.”
Mintigo starts by profiling you and your marketing needs, as well as a target industry or demographic. Then, after checking if your campaign is business-to-business or business-to-consumer, the online system asks for examples of good customers.
When it has at least 150, the software will analyze the list for commonalities — creating what the company calls a unique CustomerDNA for your campaign.
In B2B campaigns, CustomerDNA includes factors such as how the company markets, what the size of the sales department is versus marketing, what technologies they use online, social network activity, IT department size, and more. Consumer-based campaigns are more focused on social networks: data that consumers have allowed to be publicly available on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks.
Once the software has identified your needs, the process is all automated.
“We crawl almost the entire web to find similar companies,” Sharma told me. “And then we leverage CustomerDNA to find the most matching companies.”
To do so, Mintigo leverages big data, social networks, and the web. For each project and each client, the company re-crawls websites from its cloud-based servers, which the company says ensures data freshness.
“It’s time consuming and resource consuming, but the outcome is quality,” says Sharma.
And, I might add, it reduces potential privacy issues related to keeping and storing private information.
The outcome of the process?
A list of qualified leads: either target companies, with contact names and information, or consumers … also with contact information. Meaning that your sales force is starting with an unfair advantage: They know who is more likely to want, need, and pay for the products or services you sell.
According to Sharma, “we’re the only solution that we know that does this very cleanly, in a very automated way.”
If this works as well at scale as it has in Mintigo’s tests, the software could almost be a license to print money.
Image credit: Olly/ShutterStock, Dietmar Hoepfl/ShutterStock, Leo Blanchette/ShutterStock
Filed under: cloud, enterprise, search 
Online Testing and Optimization: 4 factors to choosing a testing platform
All online testing platforms are not created equal.
This is because no organizations and testing programs are created the same. You need a testing platform that fits the individual needs of your organization.
With the numerous tools available, it can seem like a daunting task. But, keeping a few considerations in mind could help you significantly narrow down the options.
In a recent MarketingSherpa (our sister company) article, “A/B Testing: How a landing page test yielded a 6% increase in leads,” Todd Barrow, Development Manager, MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingExperiments), suggested four factors you should consider when choosing a testing platform for your organization: cost, IT requirements, support and technology ecosystem.
Because a testing platform is so important to an organization’s testing program, I spoke with Todd and Jessica McGraw, Senior Technical Manager, MECLABS, to learn more about these four factors.
Factor #1: Cost
The cost of online testing platforms ranges from free to thousands of dollars. But, even free tools come with hidden costs.
That’s why you must consider both the cost of the software itself as well as your own costs of implementation. The time and resources of both the marketing and IT departments are limited.
The less expensive tools may come with less support, and would then require more involvement from your development team.
“For instance, Test&Target™ costs a lot, but you get a lot of support, and they’ll tell you exactly how to set everything up. Whereas, say, with Google [Website Optimizer], you get no support, and you have set everything up. So, either way, there’s a cost in either the support itself or for some developer or expert,” explains Todd.
Factor #2: Support
There is a wide variety of support levels for testing platforms. Many free platforms offer little to no support, outside of basic instructions on their websites. Some expensive platforms provide unlimited support, which, in many cases, includes a personal account rep.
A number of platforms will even give you a choice of different support packages, so you can base the support level on your organization’s individual needs.
Based on your internal IT resources, you may only require a basic support package with delayed email support. If you have little to no resources available, you may need a platform that provides an account manager to have the dedicated support you’ll require.
And, if your IT team has the resources to be heavily involved, a free tool with step-by-step instructions, FAQ and forums could work well for you. You might never miss having a contact person if you have a highly involved IT department.
Todd explains his decision based on support, “When I’m looking at what platform I want to choose and I have an idea that one of the free ones will require an expert, I find out if I have a resource like that or a resource that has the time I need to run the number of tests I want. Then, if I don’t, I would choose different option, one that only requires Dev [development by the IT department] one time or one that will walk you through everything and hold my hand.”
Factor #3: IT requirements and resources
As you can see from the support factor, another big factor is based on what IT resources you have, and what they’re capable of doing.
Your first obstacle could be whether or not Marketing has the authorization to even make those changes.
“There are a lot of companies out there that their IT teams own everything, and they won’t allow you to install some weird tool that will scan your entire site or let you make changes because they want to control it,” Jessica says.
On the other side, you could be fortunate to have the IT resources and buy-in to give Marketing complete control. Jessica described an example using a MECLABS Research Partner with which she worked.
“They got their IT on board, and the IT team went through and installed the code that was needed on every single page throughout their site so Marketing could control everything within the (testing platform).”
This is why it’s so important to bring IT into the conversation before a testing platform is selected. It might require some compromise on both sides to find the right tool, but you won’t know until you determine the IT resources available to Marketing.
Jessica continues, “Then, sometimes, [companies' IT teams] don’t have the resources to go in and make every change.”
You will need to know if the testing platform is something Marketing can own completely, or will you have to rely on IT for each change.
If this is the case, and you plan to run a significant amount of tests, then a platform that requires extensive work from IT for each test is probably not right for your organization.
You also have to consider the level of expertise the tool will require. Some might provide a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWG) editor, so that even a marketer with limited Web development knowledge can do basic layout changes. Others might need complex HTML coding for each change on each page.
Factor #4: Technology ecosystem
The last factor takes into account how the potential platforms will impact your current Web platform. While you don’t have to worry too much about a platform being completely incompatible, you do need to consider whether you have the resources to change the system so that your technology ecosystem works in harmony, says Todd.
Jessica elaborated, “It’s how much effort you want to put into making that platform work with your current [Web] platform — which is part of your evaluation process — because there’s always another platform out there that is easier to install or set up.”
Todd brought up another Research Partner example based on Jessica’s comment.
“They had a specific platform and already had their own account. But, to do the test we wanted to do, we had to change the way they used the testing platform, and because their IT resources were limited, they had a hard time doing that so we could then do our test.”
Have a thorough conversation with IT
It all really comes down to the goals of your testing program and whether you have the resources you need to implement them. And, you won’t be able to determine those things without sitting down with your IT team.
“If you can narrow it down to two or three (testing tools), that’s fantastic. Because then you’ve put enough time and effort into it to really know what you’re looking for in the testing tool. Granted, you haven’t necessarily seen the IT side of it, but now I know the feature list that’s important to Marketing,” Jessica says.
Todd adds to this, “Without having that clear objective of what you want to get out of it, it makes for a more random conversation.”
With your objective and features list in hand, you can then sit down with your IT team to determine what’s possible and what’s not based on the resources available. Then, you can work out what online testing program will best fit your company’s specific needs and wants.
For more information about specific platforms, visit the MarketingExperiments blog quick guide to 8 testing platforms.
Related Resources:
Optimization 101: How to get real results from A/B testing
Online Testing and Optimization: ROI your test results by considering effect size
Samsung’s Q2 2012 Earnings: Smartphone Business Propels $41.5B In Revenues, $5.9B In Profits
Samsung has just reported its Q2 2012 earnings, and it would seem that the Korean electronics giant is still the king of mobile, with an operating profit of $5.9 billion for the period, up 79 percent year over year.
Of course, the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note have plenty to do with that, considering the fact that Samsung predicted it would sell 10 million Galaxy S III units by July. And that’s just what it did.
The company reported $41.5 billion in revenues, which is up about $1.5 billion from last quarter, and up 21 percent year over year.
Samsung is killing it in the TV department, though the company does report that demand stays relatively the same year over year. Even still, the company has increased shipments and profitability, and demand for LED TVs in emerging markets helped “Samsung increase its portion of LED TV sales from the mid 60-percent range to a mid 80-percent share, quarter-on-quarter,” according to the release.
Memory chips and processors were down a bit from last year, but the real shining star was the phone business, which brought in $3.64 billion in profit.
How to Run Marketing Team Meetings That Don’t Suck
Meetings suck. They’re time for people to avoid doing actual work, stare blankly at each other, throw in generic comments to look like they’re paying attention, and if you’re lucky, maybe come out with some wicked notebook doodles.
Is that how people perceive your marketing meetings? I hope not, because they don’t actually have to be that way.
You could turn it into something that’s actually useful by — you guessed it — creating compelling content! (Oh my gosh, inbound marketing concepts work in real life, too!) Because the thing is, as your team grows, it really is important for everyone to get in a room together and talk about what they’ve been working on in their corner of the world. So to ensure those marketing meetings aren’t blocks of time your team dreads, take these tips for how to make marketing team meetings truly useful for your employees.
Components of Every Successful Marketing Team Meeting
Whether your marketing team meeting is a weekly event or a monthly one, this section will explain the content that should be there every single time. We also recommend creating a slide deck for each meeting that you project for the entire team to see so you can all follow along with each agenda item.
Set an Agenda
Speaking of agendas, set one. You should have a dedicated agenda slide for every meeting laying out three things:
- What will be discussed in today’s meeting
- Who will be leading each discussion
- How much time is allotted for each discussion
Take a look at one of our recent marketing team meeting agenda slides, for example:
Breaking out who is talking, the topic they’re covering, and how much time they have to discuss it will help prevent the meeting from getting derailed and prevent people from delving into unproductive conversations that are best had at another time and place.
Review Important Metrics
Next, do a quick review of your most important marketing metrics. These shouldn’t be niche metrics, like email unsubscribe rate, social media reach, or blog subscriber growth; save those for your monthly meetings where you review month-over-month progress. These should be the metrics your marketing team is measured on. In other words, at the end of the month, what metrics will tell you whether the marketing team succeeded?
While every business will likely review something different depending on their business model, here are some ideas for you:
- Leads waterfall
- Sales waterfall
- Volume of marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
- Paid vs. organic leads breakdown
- Website traffic
The point of reviewing your team’s important metrics is that they’re what you’re measured on as an overall marketing team. And if you don’t all know how you’re faring as the month progresses, individual contributors can’t do anything to step up and help your team’s numbers improve.
A Bit of Education
Marketing meetings should be a healthy mix of state-of-the-union content, and educational content. Each week, have a couple team members present briefly about interesting projects they’ve been working on. This serves two purposes: it lets people know what their team members do all day; plus, they get to learn something new!
Think about it … wouldn’t it be interesting for a blogger to learn a little bit about a PPC experiment? Or for a social media intern to learn about the results of the latest email A/B test? Sharing lessons from projects helps everyone expand their knowledge base, sidestep landmines if a project backfired, and implement effective new techniques that they never knew worked. Boom, everyone leaves your weekly meeting a smarter, better marketer!
Big Wins
A little bit of recognition is a good thing. Set aside a couple of minutes — come on, you can’t find 5 minutes? — to showcase some of the amazing things team members or the department as a whole have accomplished. This could be anything from press coverage, speaking engagements, engaging with power players on social media, a smash hit blog post, an email that received unprecedented click-through rates … you get the point. It’s easy to harp on where you’re falling behind, but a little cheerleading can help rally your team and remind them just how successful they can be when they put their mind to it.
Solicit Help
Everyone should have the opportunity to solicit help from team members during your marketing team meetings. The larger your team gets, the easier it is to work in silos — but everyone has their own little super powers that sometimes go unnoticed. If there is a platform during every meeting for employees to share (if they need it) something they need a little help with, you may find others pipe up with a simple solution or resource that solves the problem.
There should also be a few minutes built into each presentation for a little feedback. If someone is presenting on the progress of an ongoing project, part of “soliciting help” may be getting feedback on what steps to take next. Is this project still worth pursuing? How should we measure the success of this project? Does anyone have a solution to a major roadblock?
So while there should be a few minutes at the end of each meeting dedicated solely to giving employees the floor to solicit help, time for feedback should be built into presentations if the presenter needs it.
Components to Add to Your Monthly Marketing Team Meeting
Monthly marketing team meetings might be slightly different than weekly team meetings, because many marketing departments run on monthly cycles. That means in addition to everything from the previous section, at the beginning of each month you have last month’s numbers to review and the current month’s goals to discuss. Here are a few things you should consider adding to the agenda during your monthly marketing meeting:
Review Last Month’s Numbers
You know those marketing metrics you decided to measure and review in the first section? The ones that noted your team’s progress throughout the month? Now’s the time to see whether you hit your goals or not! If you hit your goals, do two things: celebrate, and explain exactly why you hit those goals. That second one is critical. Someone should explain what marketing activities strongly contributed to you hitting, say, your leads goal. That way you can repeat those activities this month!
The Nitty Gritty Retrospective
Your monthly meeting should also contain a review of the projects each employee (or if you’re a larger marketing department, each team) worked on last month, plus the results they’ve seen. This is good for a few reasons. First, it keeps everyone accountable knowing that each month they need to stand up in front of their colleagues and explain just what they do all day. Second, everyone gets to learn from what everyone else worked on and become generally better marketers. Third, it helps everyone identify how individual teams are faring, and what projects they’re doing to improve their own metrics.
For example, if you have a social media team, this is their opportunity to report on the success of every single social network they manage. How is their reach faring? How much traffic are those networks sending to your site? How many leads are being generated? Why are some networks more successful than others? Because your weekly meetings focus on more high-level, team-based metrics, a monthly meeting is a good opportunity to do a deep dive into the channels and metrics that enable the entire team to meet its goals.
How You’ll Meet This Month’s Goals
After the retrospective, each employee or team should also present on their individual goals for the month, and how exactly they will meet those goals. This is not the time to be generic. Teams should explain, point by point, everything they’ll be doing during the month to meet the metrics they’re measured by. For example, let’s say the email marketing team is responsible for driving more reconversions this month. What exactly will they do to, well, do that? Well, that slide might have some initiatives like A/B test email copy with and without a P.S., an offers analysis to determine which offers convert at the highest rate, list segmentation experiments, tailoring lead generation offers to align more closely with personas to improve CTR … the list could, and should, go on.
This is also a critical time in your meeting for feedback. Build in time during every presentation — at least 5 minutes, more if you find you need it after a few meetings — for each team to solicit feedback on their proposed projects. This will help individual teams from getting derailed on projects that might not help them meet their goals, or perhaps other members of the marketing team have fantastic ideas that the teams hadn’t even thought of yet!
Tips for Making Everyone Love You
Now that you know the content to include in your marketing team meetings, let’s discuss a few ways to make those meetings run smoothly. These are the types of things that, despite useful content, can make or break the usefulness of any marketing meeting:
- Keep it on time. That means you start on time, you end on time, and individual presentations do not go over their budgeted time. I know it’s hard, especially when there’s a good discussion going on, but have a timekeeper who lets presenters know when they’re coming up to the end of their allotted time. If you’re vigilant about this, people will start to self-edit their presentation, and meeting-goers will self-censor their comments, only contributing what truly needs to be said.
- Don’t allow computers. Said the internet marketing company. Seriously though, only the meeting coordinator should have a computer to pull up the agenda and presentations. If others bring their laptops, you’ll find people can’t help but check their emails, get little bits of work done, and chat online, no matter how riveting the presentations are.
- Give me a break. Your weekly meeting may only be 30 or 60 minutes, but your monthly meeting could take a lot longer. In that case, build in time for people to get up, stretch their legs, go to the bathroom, get coffee, whatever. You’ll start losing people’s attention otherwise.
- End every meeting with action items. Whatever you talked about during your meeting should be revisited briefly at the end of the meeting, preferably by the meeting coordinator. If you spend 20 minutes talking about how to solve your lead shortage problem at the beginning of your 90-minute meeting, there’s a good chance some of the to-dos and initiatives trickled out of people’s minds. Make sure there’s someone taking notes throughout the meeting, and allot 5 minutes at the end of every meeting to review what people should start doing once they walk out of that meeting room.
How do you keep your marketing meetings useful, instead of a waste of time? What do you think should be excluded from marketing meetings?
Image credit: Charles Williams
Apple App Store Hits 650,000 Apps: 250,000 Designed For iPad, $5.5B Paid Out To Devs
On its Q3 earnings call, Apple announced that there are over 650,000 apps on the Apple App Store, up from 600K in April of this year. Apple exec Peter Oppenheimer also mentioned that 250,000 of those apps were developed specifically for iPad.
Perhaps more importantly to you hungry entrepreneurs, Apple paid out approximately $5.5 billion to developers. This is a huge jump from the $4 billion figure Apple reported in April.
iOS 6 — with its deep Facebook integration — and the new iPhone, which is expected in September, should only bolster these numbers.
To get a little perspective, Google’s most recent numbers in the Google Play department are at 600,000 apps. That number is from June, and Google has been slowly closing in on Apple, so it’s possible that the two app stores are pretty neck and neck.
Four Reasons You Should Hire a Marketing Intern
A guest post by Tara Jackson of EduTrek.
Hiring an intern to assist with marketing can be a cost-effective way to give your business a competitive edge.
What can a marketing intern bring to your business?
1. Social Media Savvy
If your business doesn’t have a Twitter or Facebook account, bring a marketing student on board. Social media sites are now marketing powerhouses, says Rhonda Abrams, president of The Planning Shop and author of a popular business column for USA Today. After hiring marketing interns, she has exponentially increased her social media presence, which means she can easily reach out to potential clients and keep current clients better in the loop.
Marketing students are learning how to best use social media tools in their classes. By bringing students on board, they’ll save you the time and energy of having to teach yourself these new skills. With their social media knowledge, marketing interns will have a better grasp of what strategies you should pursue online.
2. Spirit! They’ve Got Spirit! Yes, They Do
Deborah Sweeney, CEO of My Corporation, says, “An intern is actively pursuing you because they believe in the industry you’re working in, in the services that you provide. They want to help your company, not hinder it, and are willing to go the distance in extra research and attention spent on projects.”
When you hire an intern, you know that she is working with your company because it specializes in a field the intern wants to
someday pursue. Your marketing intern has not accepted the position because she needs to put food on the table or pay bills. Your intern is there because she wants to be there. It’s not a stereotype that young people are more energetic and enthusiastic. They haven’t been working at the same job for the past decade, with stagnant and outdated skill sets. They’re not struggling to run a business. Marketing students have the passion that you started off with when you began your business, and that can offer a much needed injection of inspiration.
3. Word of Mouth Advertising
When your marketing intern has a positive experience at your business, he will become your brand’s advocate. He will tell his parents, friends, professors, anyone that will listen, about how great your company is. That means that you raise your profile and possibly gain more clients in the bargain.
Of course, you won’t get a brand advocate if all your intern does is get coffee and file paperwork. You have to be a mentor to him and teach the skills required for success in your field—skills that the student wouldn’t learn in class. Moreover, if the internship is onsite, make sure to provide the intern with everything he will need to fulfill the duties of the position. Also, set clear goals for the internship, so everyone involved knows what they’re getting into.
4. Future Employees
Today’s marketing intern could be tomorrow’s employee. The National Association of Colleges and Employers has consistently reported that 20-25% of new hires are sourced from the employer’s own internship program. It’s a statistic that makes sense. When you bring on an intern, you choose someone with the skill set you require as well as enthusiasm for the field. You choose an employee based on the same criteria.
So, why spend the resources and effort looking for someone outside of your office when your newest employee could be staring you right in the face? Your intern has the talents you’re looking for, and she obviously wants to be in this field. Bonus: You invest less time and money training an intern-turned-employee because she is already familiar with the position and company.
To find a marketing intern, approach your local college or university’s career services department. Staff members are accustomed to dealing with such requests, and they will help you navigate the paperwork and hiring process. You and the school will decide whether the internship will be paid or for college credit.
Before you contact the career services department, take some time to write out a detailed yet concise description of the intern’s duties. If all this sounds like a great deal of work, you’re right. Finding the right marketing intern will involve an investment of effort on your part. However, bringing in a young, passionate student will be well worth it for your business.
Tara Jackson is an education and career prep enthusiast for EduTrek.
(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Team of Young Successful Office Workers)
Apple releases the latest iOS 6 tester to developers
Apple released the latest test-version of its mobile operating system iOS 6 today, available to developers who will test and report bugs on its newest features.
The majority of the updates seem to be in the map app department. According to MacRumors, these include the ability to control the volume of the GPS navigator voice assistant, and to set the language in which the navigator dictates directions. Should you be in a country using the metric system, you can also change the map to show kilometers as opposed to miles miles. And developers are reporting more 3D-imaging as well as traffic and construction alerts.
This version is called Build 10A5355d and can be downloaded only if you own a developer account. Those hoping to get a sneak peek will have to wait as Apple is on a tear, taking down websites selling extra developer accounts.
Apple announced iOS 6 and the new maps app at its developer conference WWDC in June. The company says the mobile operating system will be released this fall, and has a bunch of shiny, new features such as Siri for iPad, Facebook integration, and FaceTime calls over cellular networks. FaceTime also popped up in this iOS 6 beta, as developers are now seeing “answer” and “decline” buttons for FaceTime calls.
Apple is holding its third quarter earnings call July 24, where we may hear a bit more about what’s to come. Check back for full coverage of the call on VentureBeat.
via MacRumors; Image via VentureBeat
