3 Awesome techniques That Will Land you Any Marketing Internship
Even if you’re unqualified
Landing a good marketing internship position ain’t easy. Trust me, I would know. Earlier this year I submitted over 80 intern applications for intern positions at various companies. I didn’t get so much as a single callback or an email reply. Don’t feel bad for me, I was eventually able to land a summer job. Plus, now I no longer fear the prospect of rejection.
It can be especially hard to land an internship if you have no prior experience in a marketing job, which is likely the case if you’re a freshman in college like I was. However, I had already undertaken a number of internships over the years. So why couldn’t I get so much as a single interview?
What I didn’t know at the time was that lots of people are applying for the same positions; Companies can sometimes get over a hundred applications for a single position with the recruiters spending an average of 6 seconds scanning a resume and it can be very hard to stand out from the crowd as a young job seeker, even with ample experience.
I eventually came to realise the big mistake I made when applying for jobs was focusing on the meagre internship experience I had had and thinking that was my unique selling point. But in reality, I wasn’t any different from any other applicant. In the eyes of the labour market, I was a commodity.
De-commoditize your labour
“You don’t want to be a commodity! A commoditized product is anything that has little value and is easily replaceable.
Companies are looking for someone who can solve a problem. Job requirements exist so that companies can weed out bad candidates. Like Raghav Haran said in a similar blog post “If you can prove to them that you can solve their problem, you instantly decommoditize yourself, and none of those things on paper matter as much”.
So how do you prove to them that you can solve their problem? Here are 3 techniques with examples.
1. The “Pre-Interview Project”
This is all about doing the job before you get the job. The process goes like this:
- First, select a few jobs you are most interested in.
- Find out what you’d be doing in those jobs.
- Do a project related to those activities required of the Job.
- Send your project in along with your application.
Although the list is oversimplified, it should give you a general idea of what to do. Raghav wrote an in-depth article on Medium explaining the process of how you can do this, as well as providing email templates. I highly recommend you read it. Nevertheless, there are a number of ways you can do this, here are a few examples:
- If it’s an event marketing job, create and distribute flyers for the said event on advertising boards in your local town.
- If it’s a digital marketing position, you could create a landing page for one of the company’s marketing campaigns.
- If it’s a social media marketing position, you could create content as well as graphics for the company to use on social media.
- If it’s a content marketing position, you could write a business blog post for the company.
2. The Marketing Assessment
This involves creating a report analysing various marketing campaigns undertaken by the company, assessing their effectiveness and evaluating their consequences and making recommendations on how they could be improved.
It could even be in the form of a proposal where you analyze their existing campaigns and pitch a new strategy that they’re not currently doing and outlining how you would execute this strategy as part of your role in the company.
Make sure that your assessment is in context to the business you’re applying to and not a general analysis of useful strategies. A marketing assessment is only as valuable as the quality of its insights. Before you start, be sure to do a ton of research about the company. The more researched the report, the more valuable insights you will have.
If the conclusions you derive from your analysis are obvious, then it probably isn’t valuable.
Doing this will show the hiring manager that you have a good understanding of their company’s marketing activities. But it also shows them that this person took the time and effort to research the company they’re applying to. Such effort is always appreciated, if not rewarded and will instantly make you stand out from a pool of candidates.
Providing Value Gets You Noticed
Lloyd Alexander, a digital marketer from Toronto wrote an in-depth case study on how a local company called Volley, can grow by making their product more addictive. He wasn’t even applying for a job at the company, but that didn’t stop the CEO of the company from mentioning him in a tweet.
Remember when I said I finally landed an internship after a ton rejections.
When I had applied to SkipTheDishes the summer had already begun, I had no expectation of getting the job because it was a sales position and I had no sales experience. So I took my own advice and decided to do something different rather than just sending in a standard resume. I created a Buyer Persona and a sales strategy reports with my own customised sales pitches. I got an offer a week later.
A few notes on this
- Be concise, what you create should not be unnecessarily long or they won’t read it. A good yardstick is to determine length by the value it holds.
- choose the format you use wisely. A power point presentation may lend itself better to the report if you are presenting lots of visual data for example.
- Don’t be afraid to be wrong about the company, I certainly was. it’s okay to make mistakes, you aren’t expected to know more about the company than the people who work there.
- But rather focus on writing to the best of your knowledge and where possible use data to drive your analysis and proposals. Remember you want to show that you can be a valuable asset to the company.
3. Acquire a customer for them
This is self-explanatory, find a way to acquire a customer for the company, write a blog post showing off how you did it and link to it as part of your job application.
This can be one of the more complex things to do may not be viable for most jobs (It’s more applicable for B2B than B2C companies) However, it is very much possible and will almost certainly land you the job if you’re able to pull it off.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this so if you want to do this, you gotta think outside the box.
It’s best to focus on a singular company you intend on working at to do this for, as it can be a very time-consuming process.
When Raghav was applying for a business development role at Kiip, He pitched a few companies on forming partnerships with them and introduced them to the biz dev team. unsurprisingly he got an offer from Kiip to join their team shortly after he did this.
Quality > Quantity
One note of advice. There are plenty of companies that have very low standards for who they hire. If you’re finding it tough to land an internship at a company you want to work for, don’t immediately settle for one of these companies.
You’re probably not going to learn much doing an internship at a company that will literally accept anyone. Instead, focus on de-commoditizing your ability using the techniques I’ve outlined to show that you can be a valuable asset to the company.
This is what I did and the value I gained from my internship at SkiptheDishes was invaluable.
Remember you will be competing with tens if not hundreds of other job seekers for any position, if you want a good internship, you gotta earn it.
Focus On Providing Value
Don’t do what I did and apply to 80 different companies! Focus on a small number of jobs, find out what it takes to get those jobs, then act accordingly. This is a far more effective method as with many things in life when it comes to job application process Quality > Quantity.
You are much more likely to get an offer if you are creative, tailor your job application to each individual company you apply to, but most importantly if you go the extra mile and do something for the company that will make you stand out.
In doing so, you are creating value first, before asking for it. Value is often reciprocated, meaning that even if you don’t get an offer from the company you applied to because you provided value for them, the recruiter will be more inclined to refer you to another company.
