A marketing internship: what to learn in the first month

A marketing internship is short and the temptation is to spend it demonstrating competence. The more useful project is to learn how the organisation decides things, because that is the part you cannot learn later and the part that makes everything else interpretable.

The tools are the smallest part

Every tool in marketing can be learned in a week. What takes longer is knowing which number the team trusts, who has to approve a claim, why the last campaign was considered a failure, and what the organisation is afraid of. Those are the assets you keep.

What to establish in the first fortnight

1. How work is approved. Who signs off copy, who signs off a claim, who signs off spend. The chain is usually longer than the org chart suggests.
2. Which numbers are trusted. Every team has a disputed metric. Find out which one, because reporting into it will get you into trouble.
3. What was tried and failed. The most valuable conversation you can have, and the one nobody volunteers. Ask a person who has been there longer than a year.
4. What the audience actually is. Not the persona document — ask which customer conversation the team remembers, and why.
5. What the organisation’s constraint is. Budget, capacity, approval speed or appetite for risk. It explains most decisions that otherwise look irrational.

The work you should try to do

Write something that ships. One page, one email, one post that actually goes out, with a review and a correction. A shipped piece that was criticised teaches more than ten that stayed in drafts.

Read a claim and check it. Take a live page and establish whether its claims are supported. This is the exercise that most reliably impresses, because it is the thing teams know they should do and rarely do. The method is in advertising claims and substantiation.

Measure something honestly. Take one piece of work and establish what it did, with its limits stated. The approach is in measuring marketing honestly.

Talk to a customer. Where permitted, and where the team does it already. A single conversation about why someone bought changes how the rest of the copy reads.

What not to do

Redesign something nobody asked you to redesign. It is the commonest intern contribution and the least welcome, because it usually costs someone else’s time to review and is judged on taste.

Propose a strategy in week two. A strategy written before understanding the constraint is a list of things the organisation already thought of, in different words.

Optimise a metric that is not the one they care about. A rise in a number nobody watches reads as a misunderstanding of the job, and it is harder to recover from than a slow start.

Leaving with something portable

Write up one project properly before you finish, in the form described in a marketing portfolio. The internship ends; the case is what you keep, and writing it while the details are fresh is much easier than reconstructing it later.

Ask for a reference at the end of the placement rather than months later, and ask the person who supervised your actual work rather than the most senior person you met.

How to be useful before you are good

The fastest way to become useful is to take work off someone else that they do not enjoy: assembling a report, checking a list, proofreading, updating a page. It is unglamorous and it is how an intern acquires the context that makes better work possible.

The second way is to ask for the constraint before starting a task. “What does good look like for this, and what must not change” removes most of the rework, and asking it signals that you understand the work has a context.

Feedback, and how to get it

Ask after specific work rather than in general. “Was the structure right on that page” produces an answer; “any feedback” produces politeness. And ask soon, because feedback given a fortnight later is reconstructed rather than remembered.

Where the feedback is negative, write down the specific thing rather than the feeling. The pattern across several pieces of feedback is the thing to fix, and the pattern is only visible if you kept the notes.

The end of the placement

Leave with three things: a written reference, a case you documented yourself, and one person who would take your call. Those three outlast everything else, and all of them require asking rather than hoping.

The habits that outlast the placement

Three habits transfer to any marketing role and are each acquired in a month rather than a year. Write the claim and its basis together, so the pair never separates. State the limit of a result in the same breath as the result. And keep a note of what you learned from each piece of work, because the pattern is only visible across several.

None of them is a skill in a tool, and each is the thing that makes the tool work well.

If the internship is unpaid

The legal position depends on where the work happens, and the conditions are set out in unpaid internships and the law. The placement obligations are the same either way: a named supervisor, a written description of the work, and confirmation of what you completed.

Where the arrangement is unpaid, ask early what the organisation will provide at the end, because a reference and a written record of the work are the parts that carry forward and they cost the organisation nothing to give.