This summer, during my internship with Marketing Strategy Solutions, I gained a comprehensive understanding of inbound marketing and marketing techniques in a variety of assigned tasks.
The first task I completed as a summer intern was earning my Inbound Marketing Certification in HubSpot.
I took notes of the terms and definitions I learned during the certification process which helped tremendously with remembering the aspects that are crucial to inbound marketing. The most valuable thing I learned while earning my certification, is understanding and appealing to your customers and their specific needs. Because inbound marketing appeals to a particular and niche audience, it is vital to understand exactly what your customers need and how to market your services/products to them.
Developing buyer’s personas, utilizing audience segmentations, and setting SMART goals are just some of the tools that a business should utilize to build a strong foundation of loyalty and good relationships with customers.
The objective of the project I was assigned was to review and synthesize infographics to fit into one narrative about how businesses can optimize their potential in each part of the buyer’s journey.
I began by reviewing and familiarizing myself with every infographic provided to me as well as refreshing myself with the buyer’s journey and a potential customer’s mindset during every stage. I then found an infographic template on Canva that fit my vision for what I wanted the summary to look like. I wanted it to have a “timeline” type of format. The reason for this is that I wanted to outline all the important steps a business should take to appeal to each step of the buyer’s journey. I broke it down into 4 parts: awareness, consideration, decision, and purchase/promotion. Under each category, I explained what a business should do to attract potential customers, increase engagement, drive loyalty in existing customers, and more.
Now this is where the infographics that I reviewed before come in. I didn’t use all of them in my summary because not all of them were relevant to my goal. Some were also more relevant than others, and those were the ones I utilized the most. I played around with the fonts, colors, font sizes, and more so that the presentation could look clean and even. This entire project, from looking over the original infographics to the end, took about 2 weeks. This was a rather simple and fun task to complete.
The last task I completed was drafting a conclusion slide for a carousel post on LinkedIn.
This task also involved synthesizing information into one concise piece. For this task, I decided to take the most important points of the previous slides and put them into a quick one to two-sentence summary. I didn’t want to be repetitive with any of the previous information, but I also wanted it to be engaging and make sense in the context of the rest of the presentation. The goal was for the last slide to be a nice “wrap-up” of what the viewer saw in the previous slides. I also added a short link to the Marketing Strategy Solutions page so that the viewers of the carousel have somewhere to go for more information.
Overall these projects and tasks were a great introduction to the world of inbound marketing and helped me build a strong, basic foundation of what success looks like and the best strategies to use to achieve it. These tasks and projects taught me a great deal about inbound marketing but also challenged me to take my ideas and bring them together in a way that is clear and effective.