Every student often wonders “will I ever use this information again?” while sitting in their college classes. After being in that position for years and landing my first internship, I can assure you that it all comes back in the real world. Here are four concepts that I learned in school that were mirrored in my internship.

1. The importance of inbound marketing - As customers have gained more power in the marketplace, it has caused a shift in the way companies do business. Companies now must provide value to a customer’s search to solve a specific issue, rather than push their brand and make a consumer decide immediately. At Ball Systems, I continued to learn how to make content messages more customer-centric by thinking about what they need in a certain situation to solve their unique problems.
2. The importance of buyer personas - The process of creating buyer personas and why to make them is mentioned in school enough to get an understanding of what they are, but not to see them in action. While at Ball Systems I was able to gain a deeper understanding of how crucial buyer personas are for directing various types of content to prospects. For example, the topic of a blog post may be more valuable for a buyer persona that has a management role, so the article would be geared towards their interests and problems.
3. External effects on business - The external factors that affect business are listed in every marketing textbook and can easily be applied to a pretend company. During my internship I was able to experience firsthand about how external factors such as the political/legal environment affect marketing. For example, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was released earlier this year it brought profound effects to marketing that companies did not initially predict. At Ball Systems I was able to see that some content management systems’ analytics algorithms were thrown off, providing skewed results that impacted the reporting process.
4. Social Media’s growing role in marketing - All areas of business are experiencing how influential social media can be. I was able to see how powerful social media could be for generating leads. For example, a paid LinkedIn campaign provided a way to market to a segmented group of people who would fit Ball Systems’ buyer personas. This proved that quality is better than quantity. Due to the ability to segment specifically, users who responded to the ad were already more qualified than if the ad reached hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn users.

Overall, my marketing courses in school have provided me with a great foundation for my internship with Ball Systems. My understanding general business proved important when understanding external influences and marketing specific lessons provided an early insight into buyer personas and inbound marketing.

Read more from our engineering intern this summer.