Week 6 at Purpol Marketing by Elizabeth Davenport
Half way through my internship already and what better way to celebrate all we have achieved as a team than with a triumph at the Construction Enquirer Awards! You voted Purpol Marketing one of the Best Construction Suppliers to Work With in the under £25m category, so thank you everyone! The hard work and dedication of Denise and Gavin have already secured Purpol so many prestigious awards but I’m glad I was here for this one.
I kicked off this week by finishing some documents for the new client that I have been working with for a few weeks now. Last week I created a mailing campaign for them, and this week I was sourcing postal addresses of customers whom they intend to approach with promotional letters first. The concept of letter writing is definitely something that has become redundant in a tech-focused world of modern marketing so I was surprised and pleased to hear that this particular client wanted to reach out to customers with a simple letter in the post. As a route to market, letters show a personal touch, a great deal of effort and are more likely to stand out in a crowd of standardised emails!
My next tasks involved more competition entries, building on the ones I wrote last week. This time I was putting Purpol’s best foot forward for Small Business of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year 2017. As I mentioned earlier, Purpol have an excellent record of awards, including winning at the Women in Construction Awards 2016 and being a finalist at the Wiltshire Business of the Year Awards. This week alone, we have not only won at the Construction Enquirer Awards but Denise has been nominated in the prestigious Forward Ladies Awards- I think these types of nominations are particularly important as they prove that women really do have a place in the manufacturing and construction industries, teaching young girls that they should not be discouraged by professions largely dominated by men.
Later in the week I spent some time catching up on whitepapers. While I had admittedly enjoyed some time away from them, it wasn’t as difficult as I had expected to get back into writing, which goes to show how much practice can aid the learning process!
My first piece looked at how new technology can aid customer acquisition strategy. It was great to look beyond the ‘obvious’ choices of social media and smartphones, instead looking at the likes of ‘floating ads’ (they’re the new pop-ups, only mildly less annoying!) and PPC. My next paper looked at the validity of the 7 P’s in an increasingly developed and tech-focused world of marketing. While I was unfamiliar with them at first, it quickly became apparent that they formed the backbone of all marketing practice yet their relevance today is widely debated. This was a great whitepaper for practicing all those ‘balanced argument’ and ‘persuasive writing’ skills I learnt in GCSE English!
So to summarise, this week has taught me that firstly, letter-writing is not dead; secondly, you can never have too many awards; and most importantly, no matter how much time and effort whitepapers require, you always learn something new from them! Roll on week 7!
