In May, I began my Marketing Internship at Botanic in Opelika. I’ve been exposed to many areas of marketing and PR, and have gotten to work on a variety of projects to promote events, products, and build the overall brand of Botanic. My supervisor and mentor has been an incredible resource, and has created an environment where I consistently learn and grow as a professional. While I have been at Botanic for several months now, there are always new opportunities to grow in strategic social media content, website design, graphic design and event promotion. 

At the start of this internship, some of my main job responsibilities included taking pictures for use in the newsletter, on the website, and on social media, creating content calendars, scheduling social media posts, and pulling social media analytics. When taking photos, my supervisor and I would collaborate on a shot list prior to the event or shoot day. Generally, photography is something I am confident in but the dark and very yellow toned lighting in the dining areas brought its own set of challenges both while shooting and in editing. Initially, it was frustrating for me when photos were turning out blurry, grainy, and dark but after some trial and error, I learned how to work around the less than ideal lighting. I learned to use windows and natural lighting to my advantage by positioning my back towards the window, and ended up with better quality photos overall. 

In addition to capturing various types of content, I create monthly content calendars and strategically schedule social media posts. My general process when creating content calendars starts with pulling a list of any special events, musicians, or menu changes we will be having throughout the month. After I create that list, I strategize the number of posts each week as a starting point. Throughout the busy fall season, different events and announcements popped up that required posting, and therefore forced a lot of flexibility and movement within my planned calendar. In October specifically, we had a different event each week so the social media content required a lot of strategy to ensure each event was successfully promoted to reach the target audience and ultimately lead to the maximum number of sales possible. Generally, we found success when posting about an event 2-3 times throughout the 4 weeks leading up to the event. 

At the end of each month, I pull social media analytics for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Resy, Trip Advisor, Yelp, Google, Mailchimp, and the website. Some of the highlights from these social media analytics include the top posts from the month in overall reach, comments, likes, and shares as well as number of clicks on the website, new reviews on each platform, and click and open rates from the newsletter on Mailchimp. At first, it took some searching to find where each specific number was listed within the individual platform’s analytics page. Now, I have been able to familiarize myself with the back end of each platform and have learned how to manipulate the time constraints and other parameters of each statistic to best serve our purpose. Throughout September, the reach on our Instagram was up 50.5%, our Mailchimp subscriber count broke 13,000, and we maintained all 4 and 5 star reviews (Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor) throughout the month!

Overall, my first internship experience has been positive and full of hands-on learning. I was exposed to different situations involving graphic design, website design, social media content creation, and photography and I am looking forward to applying these skills in my future internships & jobs.