HeadRed Work Placement Summary

My time at HeadRed has drawn to a close and it has been an enjoyable and eye opening experience into the working world.  12 Months has definitely flown by. I’m firstly very grateful and thankful that HeadRed gave me this opportunity, 12 months ago, having had no prior experience before working here.

My first encounter with digital marketing came in my second year at university, having studied a direct and digital marketing module that focussed on developing a digital marketing proposal. This module played a major influence, in my decision to pursue this marketing avenue as a potential career.

My intentions from the beginning were, to secure a local placement with a local firm. My reason behind this was that I wanted to be heavily involved and feel like my work was having an impact. I felt by working with a smaller firm I would be given more responsibilities and opportunities, as opposed to working in a larger firm, where you can sometimes get forgotten in the crowd as an intern.

I really wanted to learn and explore the different digital marketing strategies and help implement them. E.g SEO, Content marketing, Social Media marketing and Pay per click advertising. HeadRed were very welcoming and are the number one digital marketing agency in Coventry. I was also persuaded by the fact that a previous student from my university had a great experience working with the company. That showed me that the company had an interest in developing young talent.

I therefore felt HeadRed was the perfect stepping stone to kick start my marketing career.

It wouldn’t be justified enough, if I just identified one particular skill I’ve learnt, as I’ve learnt a variety of new things during my time here.

However, I would say my analytical skills have improved drastically, through the use of Google Analytics and AWR cloud. I used these two platforms on a regular basis, but mainly when writing my client marketing reports. Using these platforms allowed me to develop a detailed analysis on each client’s performance and come to reasonable and justified conclusions, on what steps to take going forward.

Sometimes I forget how much I’ve learnt since I’ve been here, the time has just gone so quickly. I’m grateful for all that I have learnt here at HeadRed; and now feel it is the right time to move on and challenge myself even more.  I’m very grateful for this opportunity as I’ve learnt so much about myself as well as my character going forward.

I believe the most important thing for me, is to see that I’ve grown as a person. Before starting my placement, I had never worked in a full time job, 8 hours a day, and 5 days a week. This was definitely something new to me, so it took some time for me to settle into the routine.

I think the biggest positive that I will take away from this great experience is a new instilled work ethic.

There have been many tasks that I’ve worked on, however I would say I thoroughly enjoyed working on Facebook adverts using advert manger.  During the creation of these ads, I was able to see how important customer segmentation and targeting was, in regards to getting the right individuals to sign up. Learning about social media analytics and understanding how posts are tracked and measured was also very interesting to learn about.

I believe this experience has been vital to my career growth and very eye opening. I definitely feel more confident going into my last year at university, now I have this practical experience under my belt.  Most of all, I’ve discovered an area of digital marketing that I can see a future career in (Social Media Management) and that I have a keen interest to learn more about.

I would like to say a huge thank you to the Directors Liam and Phil, for giving me this opportunity. I would also like to thank my Digital Marketing Manager Hannah for helping me with my training and development during my time here, as well as the rest of the digital marketing team.