The end of my first week has approached and it has gone so fast! The apprenticeship with The De La Warr Pavilion was just as I expected, even better than I imagined it would be. The apprenticeship offered is a great scheme, where I do my work experience with the Pavilion and training every other week with DV8 Sussex in Brighton. I am surprised how much I was able to do within my first week including using Facebook and Twitter Analytics, creating my own posts on Facebook and scheduling posts for event pages. I even got to attend my first work event for the launch of Bexhill Fm. This excited me of what there is available to me in the coming weeks and all the other aspects of digital marketing I will learn and tasks I will perform along the way.

My week started on Tuesday where I was given a tour of the building where I was introduced to everyone and given all the interesting facts about its history and what goes on day to day. Along the way I met everyone in Box office, production, the Café and general management. The first thing I really liked about the Pavilion was their welcoming atmosphere and how I was introduced to not only my colleagues within my department and office, but everyone who works within the building to get an understanding of all the different job roles within the business.

After the tour I was introduced to everyone in my department and I was given a desk for the day. I was shown a spreadsheet to be updated weekly which keeps track of all the upcoming live events. The spreadsheet hadn’t been updated in a while, so I was put in charge of this to re-vamp it and add all the new and upcoming events onto it. With a bit of re-designing and added information I learnt how important the information was to the decisions regarding the marketing of the events. I got logged onto DLWP’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and worked my way through the analytics of posts which had been made. This is where I evaluated how many people were reached, number of likes, comments, shares, but also looking further into the information and looking at demographics, times and the progress of activity through the weeks to see if there were changes from their followers on each of their social media accounts. I can evaluate on-goings week on week and also insert sales and targets to see how successful the digital marketing is going. This tells me what needs doing and what events are selling. I was very pleased when Ollie and Dominika said this would be my regular job which I can input  into the meetings every Tuesday morning.

The second day started with more spreadsheets and analysis of data. After making sure my spreadsheet was updated, I then started to add listings online. This was something I had never done or heard of before, so was exciting to find out other ways of marketing an event online. I was also shown how boosted posts work on Facebook and how the analytics go further into detail of how well the posts are doing.

Today I also had a meeting with DV8 Sussex, where we discussed my training which would take place in their Brighton premises starting in August. I was given a breakdown of all the modules I will be learning to do with Digital Marketing. I am so excited to learn about all these different features within digital marketing, some I heard of but also some I didn’t know which is exciting to me to learn more about it. By the time I knew it, it was 5:30 and time to go home, the day had gone by so fast!

The next day of work, and lots of new tasks to complete. I was asked to add a column onto my existing spreadsheet to keep track of the @dlwp_boxoffice activity including new followers, mentions and retweets as well as top tweets which gained the most impressions and activity to see what their followers are interested in seeing. As well as this I researched into the upcoming family programme so I can target audiences with more understanding. which should have a greater impact.

I also added the upcoming events onto more local listing networks such as netmums, kids to do, whats on in East Sussex and many more.

The end of the week was here, I couldn’t believe how fast it had gone! Today I reached out to audiences of the upcoming family shows. It was nice to focus on particular live events and reach out to specific audiences to understand what they are looking for. I started by researching and joining various family Facebook groups of which I would suggest the event to. This involved me posting my first Facebook post for the De La Warr Pavilion to advertise the new Summer Family Programme. I enjoyed drafting ideas out for posts and tweets and researching online for any resources which could be attached to show behind the scenes or rehearsals of the shows to give the audience an insight of what they would see.

There was a new event ready for release and sale for the Monday, and Laura went through the events directive with me and showed me how to upload new events onto the website. This involved all the features to do with scheduling posts and archiving information onto the website. When I was told I would do this myself for the next event, I was pleased about how much responsibly I am already handing which excites me for what is in store for me here in the next coming weeks.

To end the day I did my own scheduled post. I created an event page on Facebook with all the information from the directive I was given, and scheduled it to be released on the Monday. I have really enjoyed all the tasks I have completed in my first week of working at the De La Warr and I am very interested and excited to learn lots more about the Digital Marketing Role.

I would definitely recommend everyone finishing college to consider doing an apprenticeship. If University isn’t for you or you don’t need to go for your dream job, earning while learning and doing what you love to do straight away is the best idea! You even get a diploma with the training at the end of the first year and I couldn’t recommend it enough. It was the best decision I have made.

Tara Neville  Digital Marketing Apprentice

PS: I will be writing further updates on my time with the Pavilion on this blog .

Tara Neville came to the De La Warr Pavilion via DV8 Sussex.

Posted by Ryan Coleman on Monday 10 October 2016