I am a digital marketing apprentice working for a fund distribution service. I have the difficult job of creating and running social media, websites, email campaigns, and all other digital marketing strategies. The thing with fund distribution services is that the people we aim to contact and deal with, don’t particularly like us or what we do, for this reason, we aim to find their information and not the other way around. This makes it difficult for us to decide on a marketing strategy that will allow us to reach more people without spending unnecessary money, at the moment our main idea is to contact businesses with the information we receive from the fund managers we represent.

As an apprentice living the difficult life of trying to increase the traffic to the company website, to our social media, and increasing the number of people that open and click through our email campaigns. It is not easy but it is worth it if you like a challenge, I believe that not only is it useful I think it is needed not only because companies like ours are not liked by Financial Advisors but because even if a Financial Advisor practice does want to look for a fund distribution service it is ridiculously difficult to find their websites, mainly because they do not use keywords and phrases but direct fund managers do as do IFA’s so when searching for fund distribution services you are more likely to find these over what you are actually looking for.

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I believe that it is needed not only to increase the amount of traffic to their websites but also to increase the popularity of fund distribution services and our reputation. Not only should we be aiming to increase popularity using Google AdWords, social media platforms or even advertising space on search engines. In doing so it will mean that we may not need to go looking for clients but instead, they will be able to find us easier and will mean that we would not need to go looking for them instead they can look for us and we wouldn’t become the ‘pests’ that they believe we are.

Trying to create all the marketing strategies I listed above is more than just a job for ‘normal’ working hours it takes more than just sitting at a computer looking into stats of businesses similar to ours but not the same, this makes it harder to decipher whether the marketing strategies are effective or not. When you come up with an idea, which no matter how hard you try may come to you at anytime day or night you need to get it written down to inform your manager or the fund managers if need be. It isn’t easy work but when it succeeds it makes it worth it, to see a business succeed, a business you have worked hard to see succeed makes everything you have done whether that is during your apprenticeship or as a fully qualified digital marketing executive worthwhile.

So after all these, I believe that not only is it useful but it is one of the most rewarding areas of digital marketing as there is nearly no advertising or marketing, to see it succeed due to some of your own hard work is not just rewarding but it makes everything you have done in the past for the business worth it. As an apprentice there are a lot of struggles you will face, there will be obstacles that you will face and you may not be able to pass not on your own but with the help of your advisor, your line manager, and other professionals you can overcome them.