My first 3 months at MintTwist

I began my internship with MintTwist towards the end of October last year and astonishingly 3 months have since passed. Working in a team of incredibly knowledgeable individuals has been a blessing, as I have learned vast amounts in such a short space of time. After completing a psychology degree and only experiencing a few short months at a traditional advertising agency prior to arriving, it is safe to say that starting at MintTwist was a daunting prospect at first. After just a few days this feeling of apprehension soon faded as I got to know the marketing team better and began to build on my basic skill set. This blog post will shed some light on the experience of the past 3 months, what I have learned and what I am looking forward to.

MintTwist, the company

Joining a new company is always an intimidating prospect in any industry, but the team at MintTwist could not have been more welcome. There truly is a sense of community within the agency and this significantly eased the settling in process. The questions soon began to flow as I bombarded the likes of Mike and Colin with endless questions and enjoyed learning more with each response. Across the first few weeks, I began to learn the basics of SEO and PPC, with slight emphasis on the former. Of course, these are huge topics that are constantly in a state of flux. As a result, no one can ever truly understand everything but the marketing team here at MintTwist certainly come closer than most! Furthermore, I made substantial progress regarding my Excel skills, which is probably the most utilised programme in my working day. Initially I thought I had a fairly comprehensive grasp of the programme. How I was wrong. I am beginning to realise the sheer potential of the programme and hope to be able to harness this to great effect in the coming months. The most notable memory in this instance was my first breakthrough - mastering Mike’s favourite Excel formula, the VLOOKUP after numerous near misses! Additionally, there have been some extremely helpful workshops around various aspects of SEO which are hugely insightful. Much like Excel, Google AdWords has a plethora of features that can be utilised and these workshops helped me to understand the most significant ones such as KeyWord Planner and Google Analytics. These workshops are extremely comprehensive and I cannot recommend them enough. If you are interested in learning more, I would suggest booking a slot on one of our popular workshops.

Working in the Digital Marketing industry

The digital marketing industry in general is an extremely exciting place to be working at this current moment in time. Due to the speed of technological advancements in today’s society, the industry must also move at a rapid pace, so not to get left behind. Of course I am still learning a lot every day, however I sense that there will be no end point. I will constantly be learning as advancements are made and therein lies the reason I was eager to break into the industry. I will always be a work in progress. More specifically, working for an independent digital agency such as MintTwist comes with countless benefits. The main advantage in my eyes, is that the work is always varied. Both in terms of the diversity of our clients but also the specific work they require us to undertake (which can be incredibly wide ranging in a full-service digital agency such as MintTwist!). I have been fortunate enough to work on SEO, PPC, content marketing and social media advertising in order to deliver bespoke campaigns for each client. Furthermore, it is exciting to actually make a difference to certain smaller businesses, rather than providing minute benefits for a corporate behemoth.

Social benefits of MintTwist

Moving on, the social side of working at MintTwist has helped me significantly with regard to settling in. The Christmas party at Quaglinos, St James was one of my personal highlights thus far as we enjoyed a night out in one of London’s more suave establishments. Needless to say we fitted in seamlessly until Ben’s and Dmitri’s flamboyant dancing drew envious glances throughout the venue. I am looking forward to my first annual Brighton SEO event in April, which I have heard is both informative and eventful in equal measure. This is merely touching on the social side of life at MintTwist, but when asking for quotes to summarise working for the company, my colleague Ben hit the nail on the head. ‘The camaraderie is unmatched, a joke here and there keeps the place feeling more like a quirky pub than an office’ he quipped. Exactly, Ben!

Future of Digital Marketing

Finally, I would like to look to the upcoming year and the potential trends that could emerge within the digital marketing industry. Following discussion amongst the team, we came up with three aspects that would be high on the agenda of all digital marketers over the next 12 months. Firstly, programmatic advertising looks set to continue its growth in 2017 to become the principal method of trading digital display. It is not just an efficient and transparent tool for ad campaigns, it also gives marketers better control in each step of the process. Moreover, marketers can efficiently allocate their budgets and receive real-time analytics. There is also the opportunity to amend the campaign in real time, depending on feedback. Additionally, we agreed that voice operated search would have a far bigger impact in 2017 on the way we work than it had done in the previous 12 months. Voice-based queries are very different to written searches as they are generally made up of longer phrases. SEO executives will now have to focus on what customers actually mean when they are searching, rather than focusing on more simplistic short tail keywords. Everyone agreed that live streaming would also play a significant role in digital marketing strategies in 2017. Video is becoming increasingly popular with people of all ages now engaging with online video, rather than whatever is on television. Live streaming allows you to interact with customers in real-time – a huge opportunity to grow your online audience through Q & As or behind the scenes content. All in all, the first 3 months at MintTwist have absolutely flown by and it is only when you take a second to pause and reflect on what you have actually been part of, that you realise how much you have experienced. I have thoroughly enjoyed my first 3 months here and now truly feel part of a team. I would like to also take a minute to thank every employee (special mentions to the marketing team!) for helping me to settle in and feel welcomed. I look forward to what should be an exciting 2017 at MintTwist!