Hi everyone! Welcome to my life as a digital marketing intern for V5. I’m often asked what working as a V5 employee is like and now you get to read a bit into how that goes. V5 is a marketing and promotion company based out of Chicago specializing in event marketing, branding, and concerts. This large team of experts market mainly in the entertainment or nightlife industry. They market to thousands of people per day in order to invite them out to join their Latin-based events. Any top-rated Latin night in Chicago that you’ve ever heard of in the past 20 years, V5 nights are the way to go. The music that they play ranges from reggaeton, bachata, hip-hop, top 40’s and an EDM-reggaeton mix. If you haven’t checked out their events, you should give them a shot! The following is just a bit of what I would accomplish to help get the party started!

8am – 10am
I usually arrive at the office between 8 and 9am, depending on when my mom needs to get to work (since she’s my ride). I open my laptop and get to work. This week we have a major concert to host, Mariah Angeliq, at Mansion Nightclub. She’s a reggaeton artist and our fans love her! The upcoming week to her concert we push promotions as much as possible so that fans know that the event is happening and to come to our event. These first two hours I would work on opening emails, replying to them and making sure to prioritize all my tasks for the day. If there are not as many emails, I work on prioritizing a list for myself and making sure to send out messages to my team to ask for any tasks that may need to get added to my running list.

10am-12pm
From 10am to 11am and every hour on the hour, I would check Numa (our customer service outreach center) for any incoming messages and reply to them. This would be one of my daily tasks. Since I would already be on Numa, I would also send out birthday confirmation texts and when they responded, I would input them into our tracking section on google sheets. I would update the sheet by confirming or cancelling each reservation. This google sheet is used at the venues themselves when the bottle hosts, servers, and managers need to check how many reservations have been booked for the night. This task would take up to an hour or two of my time depending on how many reservations there were for the day and how many questions were asked throughout the night.

12pm-2pm
After confirmation texts have been sent out and guests have been tended to, I move on to some tedious but necessary work behind the scenes. During this time, I would go over the website, make sure all 15 events have been added to the site and all of them have the correct info on each flyer, landing page, and that every single link would work with all the correct information on them as well. This task would often take one to two hours. In addition to the main V5 page, I would check that the third-party service, Solo, has all the correct information along with the right links for each event that would be attached. This is one of the most important tasks I have because our source of information needs to be 100% accurate so that we have no unhappy customers. This is also important so that any V5 employee relaying information that they received from a manager correlate to that of the V5 website. It is very important that our “Google” so to speak is as accurate as any information we relay to our customers in the field.

2pm-3pm
Lunch, my favorite hour!

3pm-4pm
Back to work it is! From 3pm to 4pm I would focus on creating and sending out a newsletter through Mailchimp, a third-party service. Newsletters often take me 40 minutes to an hour, depending on if I would reuse a template, create my own, or have all the correct flyers for each event added to the email. In addition to creating the email itself, I would come up with catchy email headings.  The word FREE or the name of an artist, i.e., Mariah Angeliq, would always catch the audience’s attention. I know this because of the reports I would see on any of the newsletter headings in the past. Any title that had those headings would have the largest engagement compared to any regular heading that I would put.

4pm-5:30/6pm
Since I’m already in the groove of creating email headings, I would take this next hour to create a mass text to let our audience know about our weekly events. I often would get creative throughout the week and keep a notes page of catchy titles or sayings that have become famous and incorporate those sayings into these texts. Considering that I would have these on hand, it would only take me about 15-30 minutes to complete this task. The last 30 minutes to an hour I would make sure I had all the major priorities checked off my original list. I then would try and accomplish as much as possible before I leave for the day. Something that I would be able to finish in this time would be sending out a story post promoting this concert and our weekly events. Taking flyers, we already had, this task would generally take me about 10 to 20 minutes to add a song from our third-party app, Storybeat, and make the post look attractive and inviting. Every post would need to at least have the event title and above all else a link to the event itself. This would provide quicker and easier access to the event. I then would start to track how many tickets have been sold for the Mariah concert and any of our major events and boost events that have low ticket sales. Considering we have so many events, this would take me about an hour to do. I would start this task and most likely will have it rolled over into the next day. I would still have some tasks left under my belt, but this will have to wait till the next day.

Although we have had COVID-19 struggles in the world, most of us would not wear masks at the office unless we felt the need to. We would all have a day at the office like it was as normal as ever, while it felt as if the world was on fire outside. What would affect us more was the struggle of not filling up our venues. Throughout the pandemic, it forced V5 to limit how many guests were allowed at each venue. At the venues themselves, we would all wear masks, sanitize 24/7, and have plexiglass up every which way.

My time at V5 has given me a lot of real-world experience and I have really enjoyed working there. I received a taste of what it’s like mixing event planning and marketing. I knew that a lot of work was needed to get put into both, but I did not realize it was as much as I had seen. You can’t just plop a crowd of people in a bar and say have a party. You need to schedule DJs, write up a contract for artists, book flights, hotels, schedule staff, and much, much more. Working with all these amazing people has gotten me even more excited to join the marketing field! In addition to learning the back end of event marketing, I also learned the value of networking and connections. Many people get places because they “know people” and you can’t get to that place if you don’t network. No matter what industry you’re in, network, network, network! Well, thanks for joining me as a digital marketing intern and I hope you gained a mental image of what it takes to work at V5! Have a great day!