Understanding something in a real-world environment is often a very different experience to learning about it in a classroom. Over the summer, Manor Marketing was joined by a student studying in her final year of her degree. This is her experience.

Prior to my placement at Manor Marketing, my perception of marketing was that from which I had read in a textbook or seen in advertising campaigns. Studying marketing as part of my degree, I soon realised that what I had learnt for my exams was not as easily applicable to real-world situations.

My biggest lesson was how difficult it was to write social media posts on behalf of a company. Particularly for companies in the broadcast industry, which I can’t say I had a large amount of previous knowledge on. Deducing the most important information from a freshly sent out PR and reducing that into so few characters that it could fit in a tweet was challenging. Finding the appropriate image, link, hashtags, tags, when to shorten the links, how to sound professional yet concise were all entirely new challenges new for me. Realising that you could not post in the same style of writing on all forms of social media, that there are different audiences on Twitter as opposed to LinkedIn, and many other considerations I was having to undertake unexpectedly made the task at hand much more difficult than I had anticipated. Although this was the area in which I was proved most wrong, there were many other aspects of marketing that I previously had no idea about.

Learning how to design on Canva, understanding MailChimp, getting to grips with Social Sprout and finally using Dropbox were all programs that I had either not used before or had not even heard of. Who knew that marketing required such a high level of computer knowledge? (Most likely everyone who is successful in the marketing industry). It turned out that I applied very little of my university course during my time with Manor, as marketing is a far more practical discipline than can be taught in a lecture hall. What became very apparent very quickly was the high level of communication necessary always. Working with clients required not only clear communication, but a really good rapport to get the right message delivered to the customers. It would not be possible to get out a good PR or marketing campaign without understanding exactly the message that the client wants to convey.

There were other things I experienced which I hadn’t considered previously, such as how different it is working in a small office compared to the stereotypical large corporate office (which by the way I much prefer, I once did some work experience in a large office and I didn’t see a single person drink tea or coffee the whole week, were they machines?) and how complex the broadcasting industry is. I commend anyone who can not only understand what the new products and solutions are, but are the ones developing them. I learnt a great deal, but I am still not even close to understanding the complex processes.

Overall, I could not be more thankful to Jennie and the team for teaching me so much during my time at Manor Marketing, I truly believe I now have a far better understanding of the marketing industry, and hope to work within the industry once I have completed my degree.