Can you believe Christmas is only a few days away? Well I can’t! This time last year I had just finished my personal statement and was applying to all the universities that I thought I wanted to go to. Yet here I am a year later, working at an inbound marketing agency in Manchester and I couldn’t be happier.
I genuinely think I made the right decision choosing an apprenticeship over university education. Most people say university days are the best days of their life, but I was never 100% set on going. Obviously I would have loved to have gone for the social life and meeting new people, but I know I wouldn’t do any work and would have just wanted to go out all the time.
I’m pretty sure that’s what first year is all about, but it could have been three years wasted down the drain when I could be making money and getting great experience instead, like I’m doing now at Six & Flow.
There’s been a lot of talk on Marketing Week recently about how having a degree in marketing isn’t particularly worth much, as marketing is such a fast-paced field of work that is constantly changing and adapting to keep up with the media and technology.
An apprenticeship is all about getting experience, finding out what you are good at and figuring out what kind of work you want do for the rest of your life. With the added benefit of getting paid as you learn, of course! By the time my friends have finished university, they might be in the same position that I was in three years ago, with a sizeable amount of debt that comes with a degree.
At Six & Flow, I know I will be getting a great deal of experience. Each quarter, everyone in the office has a one to one with Rich the managing director. He was stressing the point that even though I am here as a social media apprentice, I will spend time learning about each aspect of the inbound marketing agency. This means I will also be getting experience on the biddable and design side of the agency’s work, as well as social media marketing.
Working at an inbound marketing agency is especially fun at Christmas (and throughout the whole year, of course…) because we buy gifts for the clients, wrap them and send them off. We also get to receive gifts, which is obviously the best bit! Here’s a picture of us receiving our most recent gift, I may have got caught in the moment of opening it.
It’s also a pretty good time for office snacking. As I write this, Rich has just walked in with a dozen Krispy Kreme Christmas doughnuts, for the second time within a week. This morning Chris brought in a box of Heroes, and we’ve been having mince pie competitions too.
As I’ve mentioned, it is coming up to Christmas so everyone has been quite busy this week. We’ve been making sure we have enough content and posts going out over the Christmas period, as we’re all out of the office for a week and a half. I’ve been making sure that five clients all have posts going out at least once a day on social media. To do this, I share third party material that relates to the client I’m posting for, post new or old blogs of theirs, and provide information about the company.
One of my favourite parts of working at Six & Flow is that each week I am picking up more work and being set more tasks. I am also starting to work on different clients, which is exciting too. Due to this, I am using HubSpot a lot more to schedule social posts, because I am posting on behalf of a range of clients who use the software platform.
That’s all from me! I hope you all have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Working with a HubSpot partner agency can complement the technical side of the HubSpot software and introduce a hugely-effective inbound marketing campaign that can take your business to the next level of growth. If you would like more information, read our blog "How working with a HubSpot partner agency helps brands grow"