What do you learn in digital marketing and communications?

The power of social media

I was working at a British travel company called Holiday Extras when companies were only just starting to use social media to promote their products. I was working as a Digital Marketing and Communications professional, under the title of Content Assistant and Online Search Marketer, so my job was to find opportunities to promote products and, as well as general content writing and digital marketing and communications tasks similar to those mentioned in the above roles, I took charge of social media for our theatre break brand Show & Stay. One of my greatest accomplishments in the role was organising a social and blog promotion with the self-proclaimed Queen of Twitter - @Queen_UK (who stopped their account when Queen Elizabeth died but continued as @Charles_HRH). This account was a parody of the Queen of England at the time the late Elizabeth II, it was funny, contemporary and had a million followers whilst following no-one (remember, this was the early days of social) and 850,000 followers on Facebook. I saw an opportunity. We had a play coming out at the time called The Audience with Helen Mirren playing the Queen – and she had also played the Queen in the 2006 film The Queen. I thought it would be perfect to have the Queen (of Twitter) reviewing a film about The Queen starring the actress who had played The Queen. My managers were sceptical because this was a very new medium and a very new way to promote a product. I managed to convince my manager and the Head of Theatre to let me run with this promotion. After they had agreed, I negotiated the Queen’s representative (who kept his identity anonymous, so I don’t know who I made a deal with to this day) down from £400 to £200 + free tickets and expenses. The Queen wrote a blog about the play, linked through to our site in the resulting blog post review and it was the highest driver of organic search traffic to the website that month.

Self-Belief

Early on in my Digital Marketing and Communications career I was invited to an interview at Dyson. It was for a Content Writing position, and it was one of the quickest interviews I had ever been offered. I was excited to go to their head office which felt futuristic and had a small display of Dyson devices and inventions in the building. At the interview I ticked all the boxes, but then the interviewers were concerned that I might have trouble translating the often complex, scientific content. Their doubt became my doubt, and from that point in the interview I believed that I wasn’t good enough. I shook hands and left believing that I wouldn’t get this particular Digital Marketing and Communications job. So did they. Spoiler: I didn’t get the job.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Afterwards I realised how important self-belief is in the role. There’s a common perception that women will read a job description, tick 8 out of 10 boxes and not apply for a job because they believe that they aren’t qualified enough. Men will tick 7 out of 10 boxes and they will apply anyway, and they might well end up with the job. Since then, I have worked on my confidence, projecting it until it became real. At a later job at Monarch Airlines, a British Airline, where I worked for their holiday company branch I, as someone who loves cycling, offered to take on a project to advertise Majorca cycling holidays and my colleagues doubted my ability to do this. Likely because I was female. Likely subconsciously, and each of their doubts probably reinforced the other’s. I backed down, but then straight after wrote my boss an email demonstrating my cycling knowledge. I got the project and saw it through.

SEO can be slow

I mention Holiday Extras again, but the two years I spent there, my first Digital Marketing and Communications job out of University, I learnt some excellent marketing skills which set me in good stead to propel my career. I learnt how to do SEO, which in a nutshell, is following the keywords that people already use to search for a product. Organic SEO traffic can be a real boost to a website – it’s a technique which is both so obvious and so clever, but it takes time. This was one thing Holiday Extras did really well. But it’s a slow process especially when you are using Google Ads. Most people don’t understand SEO, even though it can be an asset for any Digital Marketing and Communications professional. I have been told so many times to “do that SEO thing you do”. My method for Google Ads is to pick 2 or 3 keywords, create Ads featuring them, spend a small amount of money to see how they do, then find the one or two did that did the best, and create a couple more ads based on those. See how they do and build it out that way. People’s expectations are that you come in and click your fingers like Mary Poppins and suddenly everything is different, but it really takes time.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this please subscribe for more Marketing and Communications tips and tricks.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.