Bye for Now

A few months ago I reached out to Rebecca of Realise Agency with a proposal - to take me on as an intern. I was nearing the end of my honours degree in digital marketing and I was keen to gain some invaluable experience to take with me into the workplace or to simply enhance my CV for if I decided to continue in education. Either way, I was desperate to gain some hands on experience in digital marketing to compliment the theoretical knowledge I had gained throughout my studies.

Rebecca saw some potential in me so we discussed my proposal further. After looking through my CV and discussing how the internship would work for us both, she decided to take me on and here I am sat in the Realise office just a few months after my initial outreach. At the first point of contact I hadn't even received my results so I had to sell myself a little. Since then I've had them back, signed, sealed and delivered. I was awarded a first class honours degree! Looks like Rebecca's gamble to take me on paid off (if I do say so myself...)

Sitting here, It doesn't seem like more than 5 minutes ago that I was writing my first blog post for Realise, introducing myself and why I'm interning. Time has certainly flown by and it's actually reached the end of my 6 week placement! It's been a great experience but unfortunately the end is here...

So how was it?

My experience at Realise was great! I worked both in the Sutton Coldfield office and remotely. I live around an hours drive away so the offer of flexibility in working location really appealed to me. Working from home and working from the office both had their ups (being taken out for lunch at the Verdo Lounge being one!) and downs (traffic in and around Birmingham is a nightmare), but to experience two working environments in one placement certainly helped to make me more employable. Skills and qualities in flexibility, communication and time management all improved, to name a few.

It's safe to say Rebecca kept me extremely busy during my time here. I've worked on research, content creation, social media and SEO audits, general administration, social media management, marketing plans, search engine optimisation, user testing and more! I gained experience in projects both for Realise and a number of clients. Rebecca gave me the freedom to research fresh ideas, explore a number of tools and get on with tasks whilst also giving me training through one to one guidance and access to webinars on anything I wasn't sure about or wanted to learn further (a $99 keyword research workshop from Moz being one of the highlights!).

I've used new tools and software such as Trello, Moz, Buffer and Wordpress. I've been taken through social media marketing platforms such as Ad Manager in Facebook and been free to explore Google Analytics and relevant tools such as Keyword Planner. I've watched webinars on search engine optimisation, keyword planning and email marketing. They've proved to be fantastic resources and moving on I'll continue to seek out new webinars to continue learning about the ever changing digital marketing industry.

To summarise, this broad taster for digital marketing at Realise Agency has enabled me to learn a variety of new skills, polish up existing skills and implement them into live projects. This experience has also helped me clarify my preferential areas of digital marketing for a future career; social media management, search engine optimisation and content marketing. The freedom to explore and learn while having guidance for anything I was unsure of really worked well and allowed me to become a proactive self-starter. Thanks to Rebecca at Realise! I know we'll cross paths again in future.

Bye for now, Luke.