My name is Daria and I am a final year student at The University of Melbourne, majoring in finance and marketing. I would like to share with you my exceptional experience at Startup2Life as a Marketing Assistant Intern. First of all, I’d like to say that I consider myself extremely lucky to have been given a chance to work for the Startup2Life founder, Anna C Mallon. My internship experience taught me so much that no other experience would have given me. It taught me about leadership, about the importance of networking, about multiple different marketing tools that I never knew about, I learned about managing a business in Singapore and I learned a lot about myself, too. I was lucky enough to even witness the amazing workshops led by Startup2Life from which I also learned a lot about what it is like being a startup. I met many interesting, wonderful and achieving people and I made a very good friend. All this in one internship! Frankly, I wouldn’t have gotten it all from anywhere else but from Startup2Life!
Being more specific, I’d love to share with you the marketing tools and tips l learned during my internship.
First, I learned about how to utilize multiple different software for multiple different purposes. For example, l got a chance to use the Consumer Relationship Management tool from Active Campaign where I created a newsletter for the company. Moreover, Anna was kind enough to even educate me on the many other tools for CRM which is very useful to know and which is not taught to us in the university. I also learned how to use Hootsuite for creating and scheduling Instagram and Facebook posts and for interacting with stakeholders. I also used apps like Keypass for accessing the company’s social media accounts without the password and Slack and Trello for communicating and managing the projects. Moreover, I learned how to take full advantage of Google Suite. Finally, I learned how to manage a YouTube channel which I’ve never done before and this was really great to learn about.
Second, I learned about the complexity of B2C and B2B marketing. One can say it’s simple: you just grow your exposure organically through following some tips of how to maximize the use of social media and blogs in marketing. There you’d read that you have to create a compelling story or to be very interactive and to make sure that your content is very interesting and useful and always on point to your target market and blah blah… but it is actually much more complex than that, especially for the kind of company that Startup2Life is. You can create a very useful, fun and interesting content and as a result become popular but you won’t generate any leads and all the time you spent working on your content marketing will not be compensated with the results. Meanwhile the strategy mentioned above would have successfully worked with a clothing company or a beauty products business, it doesn’t quite fit the type of company that Startup2Life is and if you want to be a good marketer you have to be flexible. You have to keep on learning and you have to know how to address different, complex scenarios. That is actually what I consider my key takeaway from working as a Marketing Assistant Intern for Startup2Life.
Third, meanwhile before coming here I already knew about many marketing terms like UVP, USP, SEO, consumer decision making process, semiotics and so on, I still learned about MANY useful tools like Drip Marketing, Consumer Persona and CRM tools which I had no idea about.
Fourth, I did a couple of researches for Startup2Life founder, Anna C Mallon. One of which was of a particular interest to me because it related to energy and during my research I learned a lot about opportunities and limitations in the global energy sector and about many amazing innovative startups that provide wonderful energy solutions for the future.
Lastly, I learned many things about Singapore’s Business World. This includes working culture, networking processes, some common culture related problems that companies face, about what stands behind the need in supporting startups by corporations, about the challenges that companies face in attracting startups and about the challenges that startups face in attracting the financial support from corporates. I also now know about so many more companies than I knew before which is also very important.
As a conclusion, I am very grateful to Anna C Mallon for making it possible for me to be on the team. Because the knowledge that I gained through this opportunity provided me with a great support in my journey to opening my own business. At Startup2Life I learned a lot about so many things that I find extremely useful to know for a young entrepreneur.
Written by:
Daria
Marketing Assistance Intern