My name is Melina and I am a student from France who is just starting out the exciting field of marketing.  This year, I had the opportunity to do my internship at Obergine, an award-winning online marketing agency located in the beautiful city of Oxford. During my three months, I was immersed in the real world of marketing and I still do not believe how much I have learnt and improved.  I am aware that I still have much to learn about marketing but I am proud to share with you the most important things that I learned during my internship. 

Whatever people say, content is still king 

Absolutely, yes!  This is probably the most important thing that I have learned during my internship.  Users are overloaded by a huge amount of information delivered to their computers, tablets and mobile phones. One of the best ways to attract the attention of consumers is to create content that is useful for them. You should aim to deliver content that will brighten up their life with an amusing and entertaining content like Buzzfeed website or with an educational content able to answer to their questions and improve their daily life.

Target your audience

The first thing that you should do to create a good content is to learn about your customers. What are their profiles, their values, their interests, their hobbies and most importantly, their needs and their problems? What are they looking for online? 

To achieve this, during my internship I have audited content for various companies to find the topics that will interest their customers and analysed the kinds of content created by their competitors on social media and in their blogs. I have also discovered some useful tools like Buzzsumo and Google Alerts that help you to track all the content that is created about a topic.  This is essential to understand your consumers and then create content that will interest, engage, and excite them.

Don’t Forget the Design:  A picture's worth a thousand words

Nobody can deny the power of pictures and the ability that they have to transmit messages to consumers. A good example of this is the growing popularity of infographics, stories crafted around data represented by charts; graphics and shapes to present the information clearly and help consumers’ understanding. 

But content alone is unfortunately not enough: you need to add a little pinch of design! It is the first thing the users see and it should be attractive to induce them to go further in the article. You can deliver great content but if it is not well presented, you can be sure that it won’t be read.

For e-commerce, the first step to a good product description is to learn about the product
One of the big projects during my internship has been to create content for an e-commerce website called Stars & Spots. This means writing the descriptions of all the bags sold by the company. To begin with it was difficult, simply because I could not find inspiration to describe the products and I didn’t know why! 

I realised that the reason I could not describe the bags simply was because I did not know them. So my advice is if you want to write a good description of a product, first get to know the product better, collect information about it, test it and turn it inside out. After that, you can be sure you will find the right words to describe the products. 

How do you optimise your content for search engines without being an expert?

When I began my internship at Obergine I had already learnt about Search Engine Optimization , or SEO, strategy at university but it was difficult to understand what this means in real world. By getting involved with SEO work I learnt that you can improve SEO and the visibility of your website on the search engines by doing very simple things.  
What does SEO mean? 
SEO is a set of techniques, strategies and actions that help to increase the visibility of your website in the search engine results. 

To go a little further, the search engines have robots that analyse each page on a website using many criteria to assess them. Some of these criteria include the content’s relevance to a searcher’s query, how many ads are on the page, and the how many trustworthy links point to that website. Websites then appear on the search engine results pages for relevant searches, ranked by these criteria. The goal for everyone when performing SEO is to improve their rankings for relevant terms by improving how search engines rate them according to their criteria.

Some Simple Steps For Optimisation

The first thing to know is that your SEO strategy is closely related to your content. So when you write content you have to both think about what your customers would like to read and how to write efficient content in term of SEO strategy. So to optimize your SEO strategy, you can begin by working on your content.

First, it is better to use simple words and create short sentences that can be easily understood by consumers. It is also important that your content is coherent, meaning creating articles or blogposts with topics related to you and your customers. You should also structure your content around keywords, add different levels of headings to structure your text like title H1, H2, H3 and do not be afraid to add a lot of synonyms associated to the keywords in your content. 

To improve the popularity of your website, you can build a lot of relevant links around your website, for example links from the press or renowned bloggers related to your industry. If you create links in your content, try to integrate them in a natural way with the creation of a short sentence, for example “find out more about SEO strategy”

Finally, if you would like to have a good position on the search engine it is important to not forget to write unique Meta information for each page of your website. This information is not visible by users but is used by the robots of the search engines. Meta information is data that must describe objectively and quickly each page of the website. For example, your Meta title and Meta description on a page should not exceed respectively 68 and 155 characters and should contain the keywords you are targeting with that page. 

On Twitter, Follow to be Followed

If you want to grow your community on Twitter, the best practice remains the oldest acquisition strategy on Twitter: “follow to be followed”.  Identify and target influential people related to your activity and follow them. This gives you the opportunity to be noticed so they follow you back.
To find the right people to follow, that is those who potentially would be interested in your products you can use the advanced search on Twitter. You can enter hashtags or keywords, for example #webmarketing, and find out who uses them.  With the advanced search you can also choose which  words you would like to see, or just as importantly not see, on people’s accounts.  You can also filter by languages, countries or find people people close to your location.

In addition, if you are a bit clever you can analyse the Twitter account of your competitors, find the interesting people they follow and then follow them. 
When finding people to follow using this technique, look for people who have more followers than people they follow but not too many more. If the ratio is close to one that tells you that somebody tends to follow people who follow them. 

Conclusion

I have tried to present a small glimpse of what I have learnt during my internship at Obergine, but I have seen, learnt and understood so much that it is impossible to summarise everything in just one article.
More than a professional experience I lived a real human experience and I have realised why I chose to work in marketing. Not just because I am curious, because I love working on several projects at the same time, and because I enjoy being creative, but also because when you a team works together, shares their ideas, helps each other, and reaches goals together you understand that good marketing isn’t result of one person but of many. Good ideas emerge from the combinations of people’s point of view and ideas. Obergine is a multicultural team and the mix of backgrounds and personalities contributes to bring freshness and originality in the work carried out by the company