INDUSTRY PLACEMENT 2022: SPÉIRE

My time at Spéire helped me to further develop my marketing skills by applying them to a real life scenario.

I was delighted to have been successful in securing placement with Spéire when they were in the Rubicon. I chose this particular role at Spéire because I wanted to sharpen my digital marketing and I also wanted to learn more about how to deal with clients, CRM systems while also having the opportunity to collaborate with the creative team on side projects. In week one I started off with customer profiling. As part of this task I analysed existing data on Spéire’s customers and added my own insights to the data set such as their interests, values and traits which I discovered by looking at activity pages on social media. I paid particular attention to the content customers were sharing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and which of these platforms was the most popular.

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After awhile of going through their social media pages, I started to really learn a lot about both the individual customer but also Spéire’s target market as a whole. I did this through spotting patterns in data, for example: one of the insights I learned was that their customers really value authenticity and I noticed that a lot of middle-men/managers were of a certain age group and had similar interests such as community and socialising. I also learned where the customer spent their time online i.e. LinkedIn & Twitter. 

I used a spreadsheet containing data on the customers' social media links in order to research their demographics (name, age, gender, company role) and I also suggested some psychographics (values, interests, traits) that weren’t already included which I received some great feedback on. I then updated any invalid or new social media links. I could see how this would be an important piece of information with regards to planning marketing activities.

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From this information, I was able to create personas and anti-personas. Personas are profiles of the company's ideal customers which are used to gain insights on the target market. They are almost like characters in a book that you create from the relevant data collected. I split  the bank of customers into three personas and two anti-personas. Anti-personas on the other hand are the type of people the company wants to avoid. For example, because they are “low-ballers” or difficult to work with. I decided to use the method that Laura (the customer success manager who previously had held my role) had done last year, segmenting the customers into the middle-men, owners of a new/small business and owners of an established business as I felt it was the most efficient and concise way to do this. I used HubSpot’s Make My Persona to create these profiles. Some shared values and interests between these personas included authenticity, community, societal development and technology. This would later go on to be a great model for Spéire’s social media and PPC content. I also looked at the social media channels they used, what groups they were in, hashtags they used, pages they liked etc. which gave me further insight for the upcoming social media task.

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For the anti-personas, I collaborated with Laura who had hands-on experience dealing with problem customers. She suggested segmenting them into low-ballers or people who want to get the most for the least amount of money and the highly educated, resistant to change business owners. My findings were that a lot of the low-ballers had embarked on becoming self-employed and were generally uneducated on the world of web development which is why they didn’t understand the value of the service. The people who were resistant to change were usually highly skilled in one area, for example: Irish history, and although they were very educated people, they were set in their ways and not willing to take criticism. 

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These personas also then helped me in the next task: keyword research. Keyword research is the first part of creating a google ads PPC (pay per click) campaign and helps establish the groundwork before you draft a campaign into the application. First, I drafted up some key search terms that came to my own mind, then used the suggestions google offers under the search bar and Ubersuggest to find stronger keywords, with specific focus on the low hanging fruit (keywords with high average clicks and low competition). From there I inputted the keywords into Google Ads and drafted a PPC campaign for web development. Inputting my previous work on customer profiling into the target audience section and using googles suggestions on the ad preview generation page to optimise the ads  and how they would appear on screen as well as using calls to action like "get a quote now" and words like "quality".

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Finally, I created a content calendar from ideas brainstormed in meeting with my boss Stephen, Laura (customer success manager), outside social media freelancers and companies like Narration. From this, I created a meet the team post including key interests of staff to really bring across the people behind the business and their personalities.

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In conclusion, I would say that my time at Spéire gave me a taste of what it would be like to be part of a growing company in the web development industry. It helped me to develop my digital advertising, comunication, written and verbal communication and teamwork skills while allowing me to apply the knowledge, skills and competancies learned in my time at college with initiative and proactiveness.