Six months in, we look at what impact the Watertight Digital Marketing Apprenticeship has had on Co- and how the key takeaways have helped us develop our Marketing Strategy.

What is the apprenticeship

The Apprenticeship is a 12-15 month program with 1 day a month spent learning with other apprentices. Through the rest of the month, there are webinars for both apprentices and managers to ask questions, watch talks from marketing specialists, and further content from outside the formal training. The apprentice and manager are assigned a personal tutor who will help guide you through the course checking your skills and work is being completed and to answer any questions.

The first six months focus on the training and concepts of marketing with an exam to show evidence for this. The second six months focus on furthering that knowledge and creating a portfolio of digital marketing projects that have been completed. The final three months look at formal assessments and showcasing the knowledge and skills the apprentice has learned on the course. Throughout the training, resource packs are provided to guide the marketing through exercises and assignments that can be implemented directly to the business.

With the Digital Marketing of Co- we were starting from scratch and needing something that could support the entire process rather than a quick fix to get quick results. The program is specifically aimed at providing actionable tasks that can be implemented on a monthly basis to build up the marketing and processes for the business.

Touchpoint Leaks

The programme starts with identifying steps in the customer journey from awareness of your business through interest in the service or product, trial, adoption and ending with becoming a loyal customer.

It then gets you to identify where your marketing could be letting you down is by using the “Touchpoint Leaks”, the places where you lose potential customers as they go through the journey. As a result, we have highlighted areas where we needed to prioritize our attention so that we could solve the issues and prevent leads from falling through the gaps.

baseline marketing activity

From this you build up a baseline or marketing activity. The baseline needs to be something that is manageable and that can be repeated each month. As accountants for small businesses, we want to be able to have content that is timely, relevant, and valuable.

This doesn’t mean we can’t do any other marketing it just means that there is a minimum amount of work done each month to keep the Digital Marketing regular and avoiding a yo-yo effect. Creating a schedule on a spreadsheet can help you visually see what needs to be done each month and how often and keep you on track to meet targets for your marketing activities.

Techniques to measure the success

There are numerous ways to measure how our efforts have worked. The first and most obvious is using Google Analytics. This has shown early parts of the customer journey looking at site traffic, what pages users are looking at, where they navigate to through the site, and how long they spend there. Allowing us to alter layouts and resources on the pages.

The other key areas for us to measure our social media engagement and how many people are seeing each post. For this, we are using both Hootsuite for general data as well as the individual Social Media sites to get a specific breakdown of engagement which can then be compared to previous months.

How has the experience been

This training has been really useful for guiding us through the process from the start and being provided with the tools and knowledge to make an impact on the business. Weekly webinars, personal tutor meetings, and the Facebook group have created a community of support for any questions, issues, and guidance for Co-. The monthly Masterclasses are in small groups which allow you never to be left behind and get you involved regularly. Within Co- this has given me more sense of responsibility and impact as I can regularly see the difference being made in this short period of time.