My Experience of Remote Working with Purpol Marketing – the New Way to Intern Kaitlin Sugrue
When I was first thinking about getting involved in an internship, I never expected it to be in the new world of working from home. After finishing my 2nd year in Marketing and preparing for my final year in study, I had a goal of gaining some experience in the field of Marketing. So, I planned to take part in the summer internship scheme that my university (University of the West of England) had set up, and due to current events, they changed all internships to remote working. I was very lucky to have had the pleasure of working with Denise O’Leary at her company Purpol Marketing for 8 weeks. During this time, I’ve learnt a great deal in marketing strategy, understanding client needs, social media, communication skills and presentation + delivery.
My major project through this internship was to create an online course based on Denise’s book, Winner: How to Win Business Awards. To make sure the course is complimentary to the book rather than another version of it, I took some information from Denise’s earlier work about winning awards. I also planned to add a way for the learners to slowly build the basis of their award entries throughout the course. In my starting week, Denise let me access a few of her courses, which included: Magnificent Marketing, Digitally Marketing your way to recovery, The better way to bid and Triumphant Tender Documents. These gave a great insight into the tasks her company does and the thought and work that goes into making these courses. I learnt how she plans her courses out to give out the maximum amount of learning and the branding/layout that is consistent across Purpol Marketing’s learning platform.
After reading her book, Winner: How to Win Business Awards, and finishing the courses, I set to work on compiling all the information that was needed in the content of the course. This was completed by taking the main points from the book and adding in other information from earlier and more recent advice. I started creating the main structure of the course through the platform, Thinkific, which was easy to use after a bit of practice and added visual learning infographics to aid in the learning. I also created some of these learning infographics to Denise’s other courses to give a visual learning to support the videos already included.
Finally, I had a go at the marketing platform, Mailchimp, which is where I created a few email marketing campaigns for the Winner online course. I created visual prompts from Canva, the graphic design platform, which detailed what the course was about, the main points of content included and how this course can help provide the tools for those to become winners! This was hugely useful for me in the future when creating marketing campaigns through email as I know the basics of the platform and the best way to layout the benefits in a visually pleasing way.
Denise has provided me with a lot of skills and expertise that I can take with me into my last year of study and future career in marketing. This internship has been my first experience into this field, and I am massively grateful that Denise chose me to work with her over the last 2 months. She has provided me with bucket loads of advice and a fantastic look into what her company is involved in day to day. Always either an email, phone call or zoom meeting away, even though we never met in person, I felt she was there with me the whole time if I needed any help with anything. My experience with this remote internship scheme has been greatly valuable to me and I want to thank Denise for all the effort and time she has put aside for me and the other interns. I am greatly appreciative of this experience and would highly recommend those choosing a company to intern with, to choose Purpol Marketing.
