What I’ve Learnt From My Digital Marketing Upskill Apprenticeship So Far

As Professional Apprenticeship’s Business Partnerships Manager I’m always having to think outside the box and come up with ideas to attract local businesses to take on apprentices! It’s true the saying, Sales and Marketing go hand in hand, as I work closely with the marketing team daily, getting involved in our marketing efforts to generate leads.

I’ve never had any formal training in marketing and having self-taught everything I knew (which turns out wasn’t actually that much) my knowledge was limited. I’ve always wondered would I benefit in my role and get better results if I were to scratch beneath the surface and really dive into the world of digital marketing?

The answer was in the level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship course we run at Professional Apprenticeships. We decided that upskilling me and developing my marketing knowledge would help us deliver better results through more effective and relevant strategies.

So, 3 months in, what have I learned and how has it changed how I work?

Copywriting

I’ve dabbled in blogging and have tried to write posts before, but never really know what made a good post, what to write or how to make it useful for marketing purposes. This session really opened my eyes to how to structure my posts, how to communicate effectively with readers, what language to use and how to use compelling words to trigger the right response.

I find myself more creative, and enjoying writing more, which encourages me to do more of it. This, in turn, is driving more traffic to our website as well as providing us with more content to repurpose for social media.

Search

We all know Google is the holy grail of search. It’s where we concentrate all of our efforts when we’re thinking about visibility and how easy we make it for our customers to find us. But there are loads of other places we can concentrate on to help ourselves be found online.

YouTube, Google Images and maps are all up there for search traffic, for example, so I find myself thinking of other media we can put out there to attract potential customers as they search.

Online Reputation

This is something I hadn’t really considered before. Of course, it’s common sense, but I hadn’t considered looking at how we’re perceived online and how it can have a massive impact on how we generate leads for the business.

Simple things like deciding what we want our reputation to be and then designing a strategy around this, setting goals and identifying the right platforms to help us achieve them is something I very much keep front of mind now, and drives much of the marketing activity we produce.

Moving Forward

I could probably go on and list a wealth of other things I’ve learned but in the interests of keeping my posts readable, interesting and relevant (as I’ve learned!) I will leave it to this top 3 which I’ve been able to put into practice straight away.

In terms of the rest of the course, I’m really looking forward to drilling into the analytics module so I can see the real return on our marketing efforts and measure what’s working so we can optimise our return on investment.

One of the things I love the most about learning through an apprenticeship is that everything I’m learning is not only relevant to my job but is giving me actionable real-life skills as I progress rather than just theoretical. I attend a classroom session once a month, have a monthly 1-1 with Yasin, my tutor and the rest of my learning is all done through things like reading, shadowing and online learning.

Sound good? If you are frustrated with ineffective marketing or have employees like me who have fallen into marketing and would like to boost the number of leads through digital, please complete the form below and we’ll be in touch to arrange a call to discuss how upskilling your team with an apprenticeship can help to grow your business.