Navigating the World of Marketing: A Guide to Marketing Intern Positions and Responsibilities
The field of marketing is dynamic and ever-evolving, making it a popular choice for students and recent graduates seeking challenging and rewarding careers. A marketing internship offers invaluable hands-on experience, providing a glimpse into the multifaceted world of marketing and advertising. This article explores the responsibilities of a marketing intern, the qualities that make an ideal candidate, and how companies can create successful internship programs.
The Role of a Marketing Intern
A marketing intern supports a company's marketing efforts by contributing creative ideas and assisting in the implementation of marketing strategies. This role provides experience in how marketing teams function and how complex marketing strategies are devised and implemented. A Marketing Intern is responsible for undertaking various administrative tasks contributing to designing and implementing effective marketing strategies.
Key Responsibilities
As an intern, your responsibilities would be collaborating with our advertising and marketing team throughout our marketing campaigns. You will also be responsible for developing, expanding, and maintaining our company’s marketing channels. This internship would help you in acquiring the necessary marketing skills as well as knowledge of various marketing strategies. You will ultimately gain the experience required for entering any field related to marketing.
Specific duties may include:
- Content Creation: Creating and sharing engaging content, including text, images, and videos that promote the company’s brand. This may involve utilizing graphic design elements to create content that is appealing to a potential audience.
- Social Media Management: Responding to comments and direct messages on social media platforms with responses that generate positive correspondence. Monitoring engagement on platforms and interacting with requests on social media posts.
- Market Research: Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from marketing campaigns, providing KPIs for decision-making.
- Administrative Tasks: Supporting the marketing and communication team in daily administrative tasks.
- Campaign Assistance: Collaborating with the marketing team in all stages of marketing campaigns.
What Companies Should Offer
Any marketing internship needs to serve both the company and intern.
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- Exposure to different marketing disciplines: Marketing students often don’t know what they want to do until they try the different disciplines of marketing… so even if they aren’t a “graphic designer,” a brief introduction to the Adobe suite will expand their knowledge and equip them for future projects if the team ever needs something done fast.
- Challenging Projects: An intern who is not challenged often becomes disengaged. To prevent this, consider crafting an “intern project” that the intern turns to when they finish their core tasks, and can later use as part of their portfolio.
- Networking Opportunities: Take the intern to outside events to meet other people in the field. This could inspire them to pursue a certain path in marketing, invoke new outlooks on current processes, or connect them to the marketing world. Investing in their relationships now could benefit the company in the long-run.
- Independence: Teaching interns how to lead, develop, and even fail in their own projects will lead to immense growth.
- Hands-on Experience: Our internship program offers exposure to brand-side marketing, agency-side marketing, as well as hands-on experience in many areas of marketing.
Finding the Right Marketing Intern
Sourcing qualified candidates and then assessing both their capabilities and compatibility with the team can be difficult.
Where to Look
"It's very similar to sourcing for full-time candidates. Assuming most interns are new graduates, companies can capitalize on meeting prospects for internship positions at college or university job fairs. Job fairs are an excellent opportunity for candidates to make a first impression and for companies to assess if an interview should take place. Attending marketing-specific job fairs will help narrow down the candidate pool to marketing-focused, experienced, and passionate students. At the end of the day, job fairs maximize the quantity of candidates a company is exposed to in the shortest amount of time.
Firms can also find interns on college and university job boards. It may cost a small fee to post on the job board, but the more exposure the listing gets, the bigger the pool of applicants the company has to select from. When using online job listings, companies need to be honest about the intern’s tasks. Setting clear expectations up front will lead to the right candidate applying. often have young volunteers present at events or have their own student-run organizations. Conduct research about university organizations in your city to see if your company can speak in a class or meeting. This also applies to marketing focused fraternities like Pi Sigma Epsilon. Setup hosts SparkSouth - a marketing student conference where young marketers in Atlanta learn about brand, agency, and entrepreneurial paths from professional marketers. Referrals - Sometimes the best candidates come from a trusted source. When searching for an intern, post application inquiries to personal social media accounts or throughout the company to see if someone knows a qualified candidate.
What Makes an Ideal Intern Candidate
When looking for a marketing intern, or filling any marketing position, companies need to revisit their organizational values prior to crafting their interview questions. Candidates will have prepared answers for the most common interview questions, so it’s helpful to ask creative or unique interview questions to get the full measure of a candidate.
“We select our interns the same way we consider employees who are joining us full-time. Depending on the position the potential intern might do a face to face interview with multiple team members from our client management group to project management and creative. “If we have a fantastic intern, we'd like to offer them a full-time position at some point, so we take the interview process very seriously. There are important qualities for any marketing intern to possess - regardless of company:
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- Curiosity: A skill set can be taught to anyone… but a positive, eager, and curious mindset cannot. An internship is all about learning - so any intern must be innately motivated to learn. Encourage interviewees to ask questions, introduce them to multiple members of the team, and take note of how each candidate approaches opportunities and challenges.
- Leadership: A fresh perspective is a huge benefit of having an intern. However, gaining value from that fresh perspective requires interns to take initiative. Companies should look for a candidate who carries themselves well professionally and is not afraid to speak their mind in a respectful way, as these are indicators of leadership potential.
- General Marketing Knowledge: Since training an intern will already take time away from the team, building someone from the ground up will be even more exhausting - so be sure to hire someone who has a general understanding of marketing.
Creating a Successful Internship Program
Firms should only hire an intern if the company is:
- Clear about their business goals: If a business is considering hiring an unpaid intern to file paperwork or focus solely on spreadsheets, then the company is not giving the intern the best exposure to the business or marketing field. Companies should only hire a marketing intern if a mutual benefit exists. Determining whether or not that mutual benefit exists depends on companies knowing their goals for the quarter and having a clear vision on how the intern could fit into accomplishing those goals. Before hiring, companies should map out a specific strategy with objectives for the entire organization, and then have a discussion about how the intern can offer a new and fresh perspective on certain elements of that strategy.
- Able to accept the responsibility of training and guiding an intern through an internship program: An intern’s success or failure largely depends on the company’s commitment to investing the time and resources required to make the intern truly effective. Because it takes time to train and onboard an intern properly, it’s important to make sure he or she is the right cultural fit and could potentially stay full-time. An investment in a bad intern wastes the company’s time and resources - so make the search count. In order to utilize a marketing intern to their full potential, the firm should have a person dedicated to managing the intern. This person should be knowledgeable about business operations and able to effectively answer any questions posed by the intern. Since most interns are fresh out of school and new to the marketing industry, they should ease into their role with adequate oversight. Handing over complete responsibility of important tasks like managing the entire social media strategy or creative content creation to an inexperienced intern is a recipe for disaster.
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