Reflective Piece

Between September and April, I took the Digital Sales and Social CRM module as part of my in Digital Marketing and Sales. Throughout this time, I got to explore how companies manage their sales processes and relationships with customers, something really important for anyone looking to work in marketing.

In the second semester, we started learning about positioning, what it is, how to do it properly and the different strategies involved. One example we looked at was SuperValu's big rebrand. They shifted from being seen as a low-price, less appealing supermarket to something more premium and quality-driven. They did this by moving away from promoting own-brand products, which are often linked with being cheap, and instead introduced “The New SuperValu Range.” This helped encourage customers to trust the brand without thinking they were compromising on quality. 

We also dove into social publishing, how it’s changed, how to plan for it and how to create content that really works. We explored what types of content perform best and why and learned how SEO and SMO (search and social optimization) help marketers hit their goals. One key takeaway was how dominant video content has become.
For one of our projects, we had to create a video ad. I went for something personal and emotional, inspired by those heartfelt Christmas ads. The campaign, “Tastes of the World” for Lidl, focused on how food can help reconnect people to their roots, even when they’re far from home. I had the change to create an ad from storyboarding and filming to editing. I didn’t expect editing to take so much effort, but it’s where the story really came together.

We later covered content mapping, the e-marketing mix, and how to measure the effectiveness of campaigns. We also looked at brand elements and internal branding, basically all the elements that help build and maintain strong brand value over time.

Finally, our final project was a Sales Report that I decided to base on the Lidl ad campaign created previously. This included market analysis (from the perspective of an immigrant audience), forecasting, strategy planning, promotional mix, budgeting and performance controls.