Firstly, welcome! You’re about to spend a year learning about all the fundamentals of Digital Marketing. As you can imagine, that covers a lot of different areas and specialisms, and there will be many, many kinds of tasks for you to do. Do not despair though, we are here to guide you along the journey and give you practical tips on how to manage your workload. Let’s start.
What will I learn about on my digital marketing apprenticeship ?
Digital Marketing is a broad term that covers many areas, so we’ll break down a few of them for you here:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): SEO is something digital marketers work on to help a website or a page to rank higher in search engines.
- Social media, paid and organic: this covers the posts that business make on social media channels as well as ads which are paid for and targeted at specific audiences.
- Email marketing: you will learn how to create them and how to analyse the data in order to optimise your campaigns.
- Google Analytics: an important one, because it tells us all sorts of information about user behaviour, as well as indicating how well content is performing on a site.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg – but I’d like to turn your attention to other, more practical matters.
How will my digital marketing apprenticeship be assessed?
In a nutshell, you are assessed in four parts:
- Summative portfolio
- Synoptic project
- Employer reference
- End Point Assessment (EPA) Interview
The latter three come towards the end of your apprenticeship. Your portfolio is going to be important from now until the end. It summarises all the work you are about to do for the next 12 months, based around ‘competencies’. You can read about all 13 competencies here.
To summarise, you need to give evidence of all the work you do, demonstrating that you are learning the necessary skills to become a good digital marketer.
How do I make sure that I achieve all the competencies?
It may seem daunting to have to think about so many different skills at once. It can be hard to keep track of whether or not you’ve completed a competency, or whether one of your tasks fulfils more than one competency. Luckily, you will be provided with a competency checklist which looks like this.
Here’s what you do next.
- Ask your line manager to take half an hour to go through the list with you. They will be able to advise you on whether any given competency can be fulfilled in the role you are doing. They may be able to give you additional tasks to help you get there.
- If there are still gaps, ask them who on your team you could shadow. This will also count towards your Off The Job (OTJ). You will be learning a new skill and networking at the same time!
- As well as the checklist, you can use a competency tracker like this one. If you make time to update this weekly, it will keep you on track for hitting all those competencies!
- Make notes on all your relevant projects as you go. Even if you don’t write them up in your portfolio straight away, you will thank yourself when you have these to look back on to jog your memory.
- Do not leave your portfolio to the last minute! It may seem tempting. Put time in your diary each week to write up a little bit more. Take screenshots of your work. Just an hour or two to start with should be enough.
Any other tips for my apprenticeship?
Enjoy your apprenticeship! It’s an amazing opportunity and you’re surrounded by a bunch of talented people. You’re here to learn, as well as work, so ask all the questions.
Throughout the day, keep a list of questions that come up so you can ask your line manager the next day. You’ll find that people love to help, especially when it’s with something they are good at.
And finally, stay up to date on digital marketing trends by following reputable sources and thought leaders. It’s both interesting and useful.