Surviving a social media apprenticeship at an inbound marketing agency

Getting the chance to work with an inbound marketing agency like Six & Flow has been an amazing experience. An apprenticeship gets you used to the real world of work, but introduces it to you slowly. I also have The Juice Academy and Total People to thank for that.

Most of my friends are on their three month summer holidays right now. As you can imagine, I envy them quite a bit, but then I think three years down the line, they will have a degree with no work experience, whereas I will have no degree but three years work experience. It’s up to you which you think is more important!

It can take 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. Make sure social media management is helping your brand. Read our blog: 'How to boost your brand reputation with social media management.'

My role in an inbound marketing agency

As you can guess, I mainly focus on social media as my title is ‘social media apprentice.’ However, as we're still only a small inbound marketing agency, everyone helps out where they can, even if it isn’t in line with their primary ‘role’ or ‘responsibility.’ My other tasks can include writing blogs, uploading website copy and going on the occasional Krispy Kreme run!

As an inbound marketing agency, we offer clients a whole package of services which include social, content, biddable and web design. We provide some of our current clients with the whole inbound marketing offering, but others just want a few services in particular.

Each month, I write a social plan for the whole month for certain clients. This saves time throughout the month, allowing us to do active outreach. So far I have mainly been doing outreach on Twitter and Quora, but it can also be done via email and LinkedIn. If someone is talking about one of our client’s products or services, I’ll start up a conversation and get the brand name out there. It has really been working, generating leads for clients simply from finding and joining in conversations, which is a great feeling. 

How The Juice Academy training has helped my work at Six & Flow 

Towards the start of our Juice Academy training, we had a lot of sessions on social media tools. As I was straight into work at a inbound marketing agency, writing and scheduling tweets for clients, I was working with it already, but there were always more things for me to learn, how to use Hootsuite for example.

Another one of our assignments was to make a flyer for one of our clients on graphic design software Canva. I already had experience using Canva at Six & Flow before the assignment was set, which was a massive help. It allowed me to get on with the assignment quickly and move onto the next one.

Many of the lessons, assignments and tasks that we've been given at The Juice Academy have helped out a lot with my work at an inbound marketing agency. For instance, we were set a group task to create a presentation on a new product, and pitch it to the client as a team on Google Hangouts. When The Juice Academy set the task, I had never heard of or used Google Hangouts before, but a week or two after the presentation, I heard it mentioned in the office.

Google Hangouts is used worldwide… even Barack Obama uses it! It's useful when you want to chat to a client, os speak to a prospect who is interested in what you do, because as well as hosting video chats, you can also share your screen. For example, during our task, we could show our PowerPoint presentation. 

Another group task we were set was to create a social media campaign. We picked a company out of a hat, and had to create a social media campaign with a particular budget in mind, We had to think about how we were going to create the campaign, what social channels we would use, and who would be our target audience.

During each session we have at The Juice Academy (which is every two weeks), they try and involve a guest speaker. One that I think everyone will remember was a hostage negotiator who used to be a police officer. From the moment he started speaking to when he finished, he had the whole room's attention. The stories he told were probably something that none of us had ever heard before. This helped with my work at Six & Flow as he taught us how to interact with people and be on their level. This is important whenever I'm in contact with a client, or even when I'm communicating within my own team.

Using HubSpot as a social media apprentice

Finally, we had to give a CRM presentation which counted towards our end grade. Being an active user of HubSpot made the presentation a lot easier for me. While preparing for the presentation, I researched the objectives of HubSpot's CRM, and what success with a CRM would look like for an inbound marketing agency. Once I presented that, I then showed how I would measure the success.

If you have any questions about our inbound marketing offering, get in contact with us. If you have any questions about surviving a social media apprenticeship, give me a tweet.

It can take 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. Make sure social media management is helping your brand. Read our blog: 'How to boost your brand reputation with social media management.'