Learning Plan of Marketing Trainee Sophie from Northern Ireland

Hello & welcome to my first official blog, my name is Sophie and I’m a new marketing trainee being trained by Chartered Marketer Christine Watson from Watson & Co Chartered Marketing in Creative Space located on the 6th floor of Belfast Central Library.

My first project with Christine is working on Giphy for business. This supports the marketing of Carrickfergus Enterprise, By making gifs/stickers that they can use on their social media posts it enables them to show visually and creatively what they are offering and achieve company brand placement. Once their new Giphy channel is approved it will allow their clients, employees, bank of mentors and trainers, stakeholders and board members to add these branded gifs and stickers to their social media as well.

I first met Christine on a funded labour market partnership tourism academy where she trained a group of individuals aspiring to work in the travel and tourism industry on how to use canva to create brand logos, how to exhibit excellent customer service skills through completion of the WorldHost customer service training programme and  how to be great storytellers through Disney Pixar’s free course: “the art of storytelling”. I found all 3 of the training sessions by Christine extremely informational and entertaining.

Throughout my marketing traineeship I am going to be learning loads of helpful but also interesting things to help me with my career and life moving forward.

 

       Learning to do list:

Marketing/Digital Marketing/Social Media Marketing/Graphic Design:

• WordPress – to help me create more blogs and update websites
• SEO – search engine optimisation – to help me get online content ranked well therefore found more easily – I will be learning how to use a wordpress plug in called Yoast
• Giphy
• Canva
• How to do a marketing audit for a business
• How to improve/optimise social media channels for a business, initially I will focus on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google My Business, Twitter (now called X) and Threads by Instagram
• How to create social media posts for business
• How to grow an email marketing mailing list and craft email marketing campaigns
• How to upskill my photo and video content creation and editing skills
• How to audit and measure marketing performance

Giphy

I am learning how to navigate and use giphy – giphy is an amazing platform allowing you to create (or find!) gifs, clips and stickers to share on your social media stories or in your conversations. There are many tools you can use on giphy such as the lasso tool, helping you easily make your gif come to life. Giphy also has a youtube channel along with giphy support that can help answer all the questions that you may have when you want to start creating and uploading your giphy creations. My Trainer Christine Watson previously delivered an in person breakfast briefing called “Giphy for business” which included a detailed explanation on how to create your very own gifs using giphy, since Christine had previous knowledge surrounding giphy this helped me a lot when it came to me making my very first gifs and stickers.

Photography / Videography

With the traineeship I am also learning how to develop my video and photography skills which I find very interesting and fun. To upskill my photography and videography skills I am utilising Today at apple. By attending their free courses: video on iphone and photography on iphone I plan to learn how to get the best photos & videos for marketing purposes using the camera on my phone. The apple courses are held in the apple store in Victoria Square Belfast city centre and are easy to book. Christine also has some cool new photo/video equipment for me to learn with too and my fellow trainee Lapo from Florence is going to teach me how to use a DJI camera so that we can both teach Christine how to work the camera as well.

Go Succeed

I plan to attend as many relevant go succeed webinars as possible over the course of my traineeship, Go succeed provides amazing learning and advice for businesses through a catalogue of over 100 helpful webinars and events at any one time. These online webinars are fully funded by the UK Government so are free to attend. My Trainer Christine Watson hosts webinars on subjects such as Go Succeed in Marketing your start up business, Go Succeed in developing powerful marketing strategies, Go Succeed in leveraging linkedin for business, Finessing facebook for business and Canva.

Training Matchmaker

Training matchmaker is a website that seeks to inspire learning and offers signposts to loads of learning opportunities. The Training matchmaker.com website platform was founded by Chartered marketer Christine Watson who has over ten years experience as a Licensed trainer.

About me

My name is Sophie Bagchus (pronounced Bacchus), I am 16 but it is my birthday next month!. I’m from Northern Ireland and live about 40 minutes away from Belfast city. I have just received my GCSEs and decided college was not what I wanted to go into after finishing my GCSEs and a traineeship was better suited for my learning style. I have always had an interest in business however I’ve always found marketing was the area I’m most interested in. In my spare time I love everything to do with music – whether its simply listening to it or playing my electric guitar or my drumkit with my friends or by myself.