As the Digital Marketing Coordinator for Worldly Strategies, not one day is ever repetitive or mundane. Worldly Strategies, a digital marketing agency started by a DePaul alum,

serves both small and medium sized businesses by utilizing the exponentially powerful realm of online marketing. The agency currently has over fifteen clients, while only having two employees–Becca Berkenstadt (the founder) and myself.

Becca and I meet weekly to discuss current projects and learn new techniques. The remainder of my work is done at home. Each meeting flies by as both of us are fully engaged in the tasks at hand and eager to learn new things. Some of the knowledge Becca has passed on to me includes: web design, search engine optimization, creating content calendars for social media, and setting up online ads. After some detailed note taking and much question asking, I add a new skill to my toolbox! I take this knowledge with me and carry out more client projects from home.

Something that continuously keeps me on my toes is the diversity of industries that our clients reside in. One moment I am crafting an Instagram post for Doug Bruno Girls Basketball Camp, and the next I am creating a business card for M. Martin & Co. Jewelers. This need to make a quick switch keeps me both engaged and always entertained.

“After some detailed note taking and much question asking, I add a new skill to my toolbox!”

Being a Digital Marketing Coordinator also means having various Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. With so many accounts, I forget I have a personal one of my own! Using social media is important to our clients because more likes and follows lead to more interactions and ultimately increased transactions for their businesses. Managing social media is like an art and science. I test out new filters and types of posts then see how the followers react.

An unforgettable experience has been launching another one of Becca’s companies, Chicago Visitors Guide: an online magazine giving tourists and locals the inside scoop on all things Chicago. We hosted a launch party at Catalyst Ranch complete with raffle prizes, a storytelling video, and a delicious cake from Sweet Mandy B’s. We also handle all the marketing and article writing for Chicago Visitors Guide alongside a few other writers.

Over the past eight months at my internship, I have acquired so much knowledge and have been able to gain experience in the fast-paced real world of marketing. At Worldly Strategies, while some processes are the same, I never know what could be next–and I love that!

Caitlin was an intern with Mayer Alloys during the Fall 2017 MKT 393 class and continued her internship through the school year. 

What is it like to be a marketing intern at a metals company? Well from an intern at Mayer Alloys it can be quite different then working for some of your other marketing internships. Mayer Alloys is a Detroit based solder distributer who focuses on businesses to business solder sales, electronic recycling and metal scraping. Therefore I have to focus on business rather than individuals and the content that I put together is targeted towards other business. Mayer Alloys is a small business, we have about 10 employees but they do move a lot of business and outsource a lot of their distribution and marketing.

Some of my daily tasks include running the social media pages like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I also write blogs posts discussing the solder and recycling industry in order to help drive traffic to our website and therefore help to create leads and educate our customers on any solder or recycling questions they might have. I help manage their contacts and deals through their CRM system; Hubspot. I do also sit in on meeting where we discuss a marketing planning, including SEO and how to enhance their website, like adding pillar pages and CTA’s. Here is an example of a CTA ad that I made and a blog post:

Since Mayer Alloys is a small business I am having a very hands on role within the company. Because Mayer Alloys is small my role switches a lot from day to day depending on what needs to be done for the company. Although it is a lot of work I am learning so much and I believe I wouldn’t learn this much about marketing if I were at a large corporation. I can see the effect of everything I do and everything I post so it can be very rewarding. The metals industry is a very niche industry so there are always challenges trying to tap that market and figuring out what marketing techniques will reach our target audience.

Overall, being a marketing intern at a metals company is interesting and very hands on but a very rewarding experience. I have learned so much and I am more prepared for a job in the marketing world after I graduate!

Diving into the professional work environment, you must start somewhere. Although I’ve had previous exposure to the marketing industry working for another company independently, I’ve never worked in a professional office setting on a team, as a Sales and Marketing Analyst Intern.  The company I’m interning for is called Consolidated Concepts. It is part of a family of companies, under the name “Emerging,” that elevate restaurant and entertainment concepts to be among the top in the industry. Although I help all four companies under Emerging, I spend most of my time working for Consolidated Concepts, which optimizes supply chain for restaurants across the nation. The company employs around 100 people altogether but the office in Chicago, being very small, has only 20.

A lot of my time involves researching new restaurant chains in which our supply chain optimization can be implemented. While searching for leads, I can be creative. Aside from looking in our data bases, there are numerous news sites or blogs that mention chains that align with our lead qualification criteria. We also discovered that we can get leads through alert messages which warns us of restaurant chains that are emerging, growing, merging, etc. Utilizing these alerts, has allowed us to place the ones that meet our criteria into a trigger-event campaign. This essentially means placing the customer into a specific email workflow, depending on whether they are a client or potential client. We use Marketo as the marketing automation software which helps send these email-triggered-events and it creates the workflows to engage customers and prospects. The process is efficient because it reaches over 200 leads every couple of weeks with one click of a button, while rest of the process is automated until a lead becomes qualified. Then, it’s up to the Sales Representative to take that qualified lead.

I’m working on another major project directly with the President of Emerging. We are putting together a blog that educates and inspires restaurant operators and C-Level Executives in areas such as real estate, data intelligence, cost reduction, and beverage education. The goal of this blog is not only to become the leader in educating emerging restaurants, but to gain more leads and obviously boost business. Along with writing white papers for the blog and interviewing c-level executives, I am learning about the marketing automation process for blogs as well. We are using HubSpot as our blogging platform. HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close business. I can’t wait to see what new business our blog brings in.

How big is your company?
Former NCAA and Olympians athletes, Jilyne Higgins and Libby Ludlow founded ZGiRLS. Since 2012, dozens of interns, five board members, and two-full times employees have joined our company. In spite of our small team size, our impact on the world is immeasurable!

What’s your title?
I’m an Ambassador Community Captain. It’s a brand new marketing
role that I created alongside the leadership team. My focus is
activating and engaging our Ambassador team of Olympic and
professional athletes. Each individual represents and supports the
organization in unique way. Collectively, they are core to moving the
ball forward for the next generation of girls.

Can you share more about your day-to-day activities?
Building a nationwide community of all-star athletes takes a mix of
consistent and valuable digital and personal touches. On a daily
basis, I interact with potential and current ZGiRLS ambassadors on our social media channels (@gozgirls) with likes and comments . It is an easy way to casually start conversations as well as make our team members feel special. Beyond social media, I use texting and emailing to ask our ambassadors to
complete activities such as taking over our Instagram story or
participating in a webinar, as they all have committed to a monthly
investment of five to 60 minutes of engagement with our ZGiRLS
network. Once a week the founder and I work one-on-one to develop
strategy, initiatives and evaluate my execution; in the meetings, she
empowers me continue to creative ways of bringing people together.

Can you reflect on your internship? What are you learning?
There was a huge learning curve, because we created the role
together from scratch and started the ambassador program with a
blank slate. It has been rewarding to have autonomy to shape the
future of our ambassador community. First I was tasked with designing
and iterating a scalable process to recruit, activate and engage
athletes. Within five months, I grew the team from 20 inactive
ambassadors to over 30 engaged members of the team, which has
contributed to girls signing up for our Summer Adventure Camp. Being
deeply involved in the movement has led me to realize the power of
mobilizing women and girls make a positive change.

Trust me, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. My role falls under the Local Media department, whose basic function is to negotiate TV and Radio airtime for our clients’ commercials. Some of RPA’s clients include Honda, Acura, La-Z-Boy, Dole Fruit, and apartments.com.

In my position, I assist the Local Media Negotiators with the execution and maintenance of media schedules. After a schedule is negotiated and ordered with a station, the best-case scenario is that everything runs exactly as it was ordered. However, there are reasons the TV or radio station sometimes cannot air the spot. A few examples of why this would happen are scheduling changes, breaking news, a rain-out or overtime during a sporting event, a new special being added to the schedule, a program getting cancelled, or even the station overselling the time slot. The station will come back with their best “makegood”.  A “makegood” is an offer where the station will make the spot purchased (that is unable to air as ordered) good in another program and/or time-slot with equal or better ratings. One responsibility of my job is to negotiate and reject or approve makegoods. For example, the Local Media Negotiator purchases a 30-second spot in the Big Bang Theory to air in May. As May approaches, the TV station changes their schedule and sees that The Big Bang Theory may not be airing that week. The station would send a makegood for Modern Family. In this situation, I would pull Nielsen demographic ratings and consider the client’s marketing objectives to make sure that Modern Family targets the same or a better audience than The Big Bang Theory. If it does, the makegood will be accepted. If it does not, the station will send me a new makegood for evaluation.

Another aspect of my role is processing the media billing. After the schedules run, RPA needs to pay the TV and radio stations.  One of my responsibilities is to make sure everything ran correctly and within client guidelines before payments are processed.  Sometimes the stations will remove spots or makegood spots without approval. In those cases, I communicate with the stations to find out what happened and if it can still be approved for payment. These are some of my major tasks; however, I have other tasks as assigned as well.

Before starting at RPA, I didn’t know a lot about how the advertising world operates aside from what I learned watching Mad Men. My role has allowed me to learn a lot about how the industry works and get hands on experience doing work that keeps the agency successfully operating, rather than busy work or intern projects that never see the light of day. The culture is laid-back and everyone is very approachable with any questions. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time at RPA and I’m proud of the work that the agency makes for our clients. It’s pretty cool knowing that your agency was responsible every time you see a Honda ad!

I encourage other Marketing majors to branch out from current notions of marketing roles and to try something new – I’m definitely glad I did!

When you are looking for an internship, do you immediately glance over the job description and quietly in your head read, “grunt work?” Well, I did. I knew that if I applied for my first internship, I should just anticipate going on plenty of coffee runs and doing things that had little to nothing to do with the field I was interested in. Once I walked into UPshow, seeing that it was a laid-back start-up company with a social media mural on disply right when you walk into the office and white picnic tables instead of real tables, I realized that I might be wrong about my assumption.

The day I was hired, I was given the title, “Client Success Manager.” Such a prestigious label for a freshly hired intern! With only 25 people working for UPshow, I just assumed they didn’t already have that position filled so I gladly took the fancy title. The first few weeks at UPshow, I was given the tasks of creating spotlights and surveys for our clients. The spotlights are for their televisions in their bars that highlight certain events they host, such as Trivia Night or Happy Hour. I would go and creep around on the specific bar or restaurants’ social media pages to find out what events they are not utilizing for our spotlight feature. Then I would create the spotlight and apply it to their televisions right from my laptop in the office.

After a short while, I was told to “scrap that” and start doing something else. I showed a slight interest in learning data analytics, so my boss wanted me to get started right away! I was given all the tools to figure out the data for each client and how they are doing each day, week, month, and year with our product. I now create leaderboards and case studies for certain clients that we want to, “tell the best story” to in order to keep them as a regular client. These are clients that want to see how UPshow is benefitting them. A leaderboard is for a client that has multiple locations or branches, and I create a presentation with each of their data analytics. A case study is for singular clients that want to see their data in terms of the past 3 months and 6 months, as well as overall data. Basically, all this data is showing our clients that we can get them more customers into their venues, and this will lend itself to increasing their sales.

What I have taken from this internship is that a start-up is a lot of work. Each individual working for UPshow wears multiple hats. Everyone needs to be skilled in how to manage roughly each aspect of the company. Each of us should know how to create social media content, create accounts, package and ship boxes, data analytics, customer service, and of course, knowing how to use the product. I have learned about the more creative side to marketing, where I had to create spotlights on Canva. I also had to learn the more numbers focused portion of marketing with all the data analytics. I have even learned about some tools that businesses use in order to keep their company running, such as, Sales Force. This internship has helped me understand marketing a little better, and how it encompasses many different aspects of sales.

Signature Branding is a high-end merchandising solutions company for artists, musicians and music festivals. They focus on delivering product that has high quality material and visual art that captures the client’s vision, while offering better revenue generation opportunities for the clients. They carry a competitive advantage from creating product from low cost strategies but consistently delivering the best possible solutions. The company believes that when fans have better merchandise from artists, more sincere and long term relationships are built with the artists.

As social media marketing intern at Signature Branding I have the responsibility to create original posts on all social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, analyze the engagement and sales that correlate with posts that I create promoting the product.

Additionally, I audit social media pages for clients, competitor’s companies, festivals, artists and musicians that the company would like to work with in the future. I interact on those pages and share the page’s content to create engagement. One of the most important day-to-day tasks for the social media marketing intern is to keep up with current trends, lineup releases, new art, and new songs from musicians. When everything can be connected, it is easier to tag the pages in a post drawing more attention from outsiders and people who do not “Like” Signature Brandings page, but like pages that Signature Branding has interacted with.

This post was on Signature Brandings page, it shared another company’s article off their Facebook page that discussed a music festival and musicians that Signature Branding would like to work with in the future. On Signature Branding’s post I was able to tag that music festival and artist from the article, and connect them to our current client’s music festival where the same artist played at in 2016, bringing together our current clients and future clients while also still promoting our brand. Being aware of these connections helps Signature Brandings page become more exposed to different audiences within similar demographics. It is a way of online cross-promotion.

I also have been getting more involved in photoshoots, collection releases and information about upcoming projects. The more involvement I have in these internal projects, I am able to communicate about these upcoming releases on social media. The more that is communicated about the company on social media platforms, we are able to build more relationships with customers, clients and clients fans. For example, Signature Branding is releasing “collection one” at an event the company organized. The event includes a panel of Chicago natives that work in the streetwear, art, fashion and music industries and will discuss the intersection between music, art and fashion. Leading up to the event, I have created posts that talk about the panelists and focused on individual talents each panelist has, then connected it to their relationship with Signature Branding.

           I enjoy everything I do at Signature Branding. I am interested in the music, fashion and art industry and enjoy exploring new music, artists and festivals. This intern ship is helping me network and broaden my knowledge about music, genres, artists and festivals. I am learning about companies, brands, artists, and musicians all over the United States I have never heard of. I have freedom to engage and interact with companies, musicians, artists and festivals I enjoy while also promoting Signature Brandings products. One thing I love about Signature Branding is the sincerity, determination and creative design behind every product. I have stickers, prints and clothing from Signature Branding that I love, not only do I get to learn about all these people and companies in the industry, I get to promote a product I sincerely love.

The company I work for is MK Zubes. It is an online women’s clothing company that specializes in modest clothing for Muslim women. The company wants to provide these women with fashionable choices for dressing modestly. Though mainly targeted to Muslim women, the clothing is on trend and fashionable and can therefore be worn and appreciated by any woman. The store operates mainly online, but throughout the year puts up booths at fairs and events to
increase sales and grow its customer base.

I am a digital marketing intern. This means that I help with the company’s social media and online presence. I work with the analytics of the social media accounts and website (checking how many page visitors an Instagram post brings in, and if a promotion posted on social media brings in sales). I also help photograph products for social media posts and create graphic images to announce sales and convey the company’s message. Lastly, I help organize the company’s website, and also work to make banner images for the homepage and product images and details.

Most of my work is done remotely. I am given product to photograph by my boss and must send them to her to be approved. She also sends me messages asking to make graphic images to post on social media or resize and edit images to make them into banners. I have access to the back end of the site, allowing me to see what Instagram posts work to bring in customers to the site. I meet with my boss once a week to plan out the weeks marketing plan and to make sure we are on the same page and are on track. My boss often uses this time to tell me what work of mine she likes and doesn’t like, allowing me to make changes and improve.

The company is small, only including 15 employees in total. Though many employees live in the Chicago area, some live in other parts of the country and therefore most communication is done online. Once a week, the marketing team holds a Google hangout so that we can all talk about the projects we are working on and what needs to be done. Communication with other teams is typically done through Slack. The small size of the company makes communicating much easier than if this were a company with many employees.

This internship has been a great experience for me overall. I have come to find that I want to peruse a more creative aspect of marketing. This internship allows me to do just that. I have the opportunity to work with both analytics and design, which is an experience I do not think I would get at another company. Furthermore, I am interested in fashion and style so I enjoy working for a clothing company.

Another main reason why I like working for this company and why I have had such a positive experience is because I work for and with wonderful people. I work with powerful, hardworking women who are consistently inspiring me and empowering me to work harder every day.