Work experience - Rhona

Rhona joined the team for a remote working two week placement to focus on Digital Marketing.

• 05 November 2020
• By Maria Bell
•  Work Experience

During the October holidays I spent two weeks doing work experience with Mesomorphic. I plan to do business with marketing when I leave school and this work experience has been really helpful with making my decision. I have been mainly working with Maria as she is the person who does most of the background business elements such as marketing, HR and finance, which is what I was interested in.

Work experience during Covid times was very different because everything was done online. On the first day, I was given a work email, I downloaded Slack (a communication app that the Mesomorphic team use) and had my first call with Maria. We discussed a contract which explained what was expected of me and I filled in what I expected from the Mesomorphic team.

User Profiles

During the first couple of days I worked on so many things that I had never even heard of before I began my work experience which was really good as it helped me to understand more of what is done in businesses. I worked on user profiles which is what the business uses to understand what kind of people are using their company. User profiles include information like age, gender, employment, devices etc. This is important to the business as it helps them to target their audience better. 

Buyers Journey

What I also worked on was buyer journeys which is the process someone goes through before they commit to the business. The stages of the buyers journey are; awareness, interest, consideration, conversion and retention. The first stage is identifying how the person became aware of the company. Was it through social media adverts? Friends sharing posts? The second stage, interest, is when the person looks more into the company because they are interested. This could possibly be through visiting the company website. Consideration is the stage where the person considers using the company for whatever purposes. This could be for work experience or they want to use the service. Conversion is when the person decides to use the company. This could be because they have a sale. Retention is the final stage once the person has already been with the company and now the company keeps in touch with their past customers and tries to build strong relationships with them.

This has been really useful to learn about because I had never heard of either user profiles or buyers journeys before. 

SMART Goals

We then worked on creating some SMART goals for the company. One of the things I really enjoyed about working with Mesomorphic was that the things I was working on had a purpose and were used to help the company. The SMART goals we made were created so that there are company goals and there is a clear path on how to achieve them. 

Keywords

I then did research on keywords which are the words that people put into the search bar when they are looking for something. For example, the first thing that comes up if someone were to type up “Shetland software development company” is Mesomorphic’s website. 

Social Automation

Another topic I researched was automation for social media which is when a tool is used to help businesses run their social media accounts. This tool can be useful when the company doesn’t have a lot of time to run their accounts. One possible feature is uploading posts automatically. 

Chats with Friends of Mesomorphic

I also had some talks with people from other companies which really helped me to see how different businesses use the tools that I had been learning a bit about already. I got to see how they would use them in a real life setting which was very useful. They were all done online which actually worked really well! Maria organised the calls and we spoke with Gill Wilson from the company ButteredHost and we spoke with Rene Looper from the company Tuminds. The talks were very helpful in seeing how the stuff I had learned was applied to different businesses. 

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager allows companies to easily sort their website tags and helps them to improve their website so that more people will be interested. I researched more information about Google Tag Manager and me and Maria got started on trying to use it. Google Tag Manager can help increase the speed of your website, help debug it and can error check for you. 

Infographics

Me and Maria created an infographic which is an image that has information on it. We had to think about the most important information to put in it as the information presented has to be short and interesting. We worked to make it as appealing to the eye as possible to draw people’s attention and to keep them engaged. The team helped by giving really useful feedback. 

During my work experience I didn’t speak with just Maria, I spoke with every person on the team to find out more about their work. It was really interesting to find out what everyone does and how they all work together as a team. Even though it is all done through the internet, there is definitely a familial feel with the Mesomorphic team, and they have no problems with someone joining in for work experience. I definitely felt as though I was one of the team members.

A big thank you to Maria for working with me so much over the past two weeks, it’s been a really worthwhile experience! Working with Mesomorphic has really opened my eyes as to what actually happens behind the scenes of a business and I had a really great time working there.