Week 7 at Purpol Marketing Elizabeth Davenport

So here we are again! 7 weeks into my internship with Purpol, which means I am over half way- it’s scary how quickly time goes but fortunately those 7 weeks have been filled with new experiences, new and new learning curves, so I really can’t complain!

This week started off with some more whitepaper work as I was keen to get back on track with it all. This involved, first and foremost, creating shorter, blog-style counterparts to accompany the longer papers I wrote last week; one about using new technology to aid your customer acquisition strategy and another on whether the 7 P’s still play a valid role in modern marketing. I must admit, I found these papers particularly difficult to condense as each section seemed entirely relevant and necessary. Now that I’m much more at ease with the writing process, I find my whitepapers are becoming longer, more detailed and littered with all the fancy marketing jargon I was unfamiliar with before my internship, which is great to see how much I’ve taken on board.

The next paper I’ve begun asks the question, how can you build a stand out brand? This was an interesting one as there is, of course, no correct answer; what works for one company may not work for another. I started by looking at why it’s necessary for your brand to stand out and built on my research from there. Alongside some quite obvious suggestions- get online, be original and so on- my research threw up some more interesting ways to stand out, including highlighting reviews and testimonials, webinars (they’re the new blogging!) and offering better value than your competitors but not necessarily through pricing.

The week was also kicked off with a new project from Denise, in advance of our next team meeting later this month. The task involves our fantastic Magnificent Marketing course and the creation of some video content, which is certainly not something I’m an expert in. But my mind was put at ease once I discovered the wealth of online animation programs that are out there and most of them aimed at beginners like myself.

I started the project by getting the content together first. The purpose of any visual content is to communicate a message so I figured that was the most important thing to get right. I’ll probably return to it and tweak it as I go, but it’s good to have an initial base to work with. I’ve also compiled a short report on the programs available online, noting their pricing, features etc. as this will not only help me choose which one to use for my project, but will also be a handy resource for future company activity.

Next week is set to be a great balance between the creativity of producing video content and the continued work of researching and finalizing whitepapers. I’ve also set some personal goals that I hope to achieve by this time next week: one, to compile a physical portfolio of all the work I’ve done so far with Purpol and two, to film a vlog for my next weekly update, so stay tuned for that!