Interning at DIOKOS has taught me much about the importance and challenges of marketing. As someone who majors in finance, most of the work involves analysing the numbers from already established companies and finding any trends in the balance sheets and income statements. However, we were never taught how to work and analyse small businesses and startups. It was hard to find trends or give advice to a company with little resources or numbers. Essentially, interning at a startup requires us to start from scratch, building a model, brand and strategies.
Going under the title as a content marketing intern, a lot of the work involves building the brand name and reaching out to the target audience. Our overall goal at the company was to build a profitable and sustainable internship program that would bring students from around the world to Korea to gain work experience. A lot of work would be required with meetings discussing what to implement into the program and doing market research to view how other companies operate to allow us to remain competitive. Danny Han, the CEO of our company is very attentive to our work progress and catered our work based on our base knowledge, majors and strengths. Those with strong social media backgrounds were set in charge of posting on our linkedin and instagram pages. I was allocated the task of marketing and sales strategies in which I would research and apply the best methods to grow the company and reach out to the consumers.
I was tasked with prioritising simple action tasks that could be easily implemented into the internship program that could attract more followers, likes and overall traction. Discussing how to advertise using different strategies applied by larger companies when they were startups. Creating timelines to give the interns a sense of structure and progression. Created graphs to show the growth of our social media platforms and pitched ideas that we could use in order to gain greater interest and traction. And finally created visual diagrams to allow for individuals to better process the information.
After analysing, researching and pitching ideas for several days, I began to learn about the many challenges and struggles of marketing. It is a draining process that requires a creative mind, endurance and vast amount of market research. I gained a lot of experience working for a company and applying real life strategies into our business plan to gain traction. It was an opportunity that will be invaluable for my career in the future and I thank Danny for giving me the opportunity to develop and hone my skills to new heights.
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