After finishing my A levels, I worked as an administrator for a year at my family's steel stockholding business and was considering my options with my A level qualifications in English and Art when I saw an advertisement for an apprenticeship in digital marketing with Vividink. I applied, went to the interview and got the position in January 2020, just as the pandemic was starting!
When I finished my apprenticeship in 2021, I was promoted to Social media account executive, where I get to exercise my creative muscles and organisational skills, looking after our clients' social media accounts and campaigns.
Working with the team, we always make sure we understand our clients' particular goals and objectives for their business, and my role begins with discussing specific campaign ideas for their social media channels and identifying areas of interest that we can use to draw in new followers and promote sharing. Over and above campaign and messaging objectives, I am always considering how to increase our clients' share of voice, driving up follower numbers and building follower networks to increase engagement and visibility.
Creating campaigns and content means a lot of writing and graphics work, and it's the graphics I enjoy the most, but this year I will be live on-site for the first time, managing real-time social media output for a large outdoor event, and I'm really looking forward to that!
That's easy - feedback. Either from our clients' thank us for driving up sales, bookings, followers and enquiries, or from the metrics themselves. The great advantage of social media, compared to traditional forms of communication, is the incredible detail you get about how many people have seen a message, reacted to it, shared it and acted on it. So when I see a jump in follower numbers for a client, or and increase in the reach of their messages, I know I'm doing the right things. The main disadvantage of social media is it's a stream, and you have to keep it full and flowing the whole time - I know how to do this!
That's a hard question to answer, as 2021 has been an unusual year, and I've been working mostly from home, but I think being trusted to work independently and to be able to exercise creativity every day are big plusses. We're a small company, so there's not much hierarchy, every idea is considered on its merits, and we rely on each other to check we're all doing the best we can for our clients. It's been a bit of an 'in at the deep end' experience, but I've learnt so much in the last 12 months.