Reflections and Red Eyes


    In its own time, everything must come to an end. A good book, your morning coffee, and unfortunately the Caffeinated College Student. While I have loved sharing my tips and tricks with you guys each week, the semester is coming to an end, and its time for me to move on to my next marketing class before I prepare for my graduation in the fall. Learning each of these weekly concepts (and learning more about those I was already familiar with) and being able to apply them each week through this blog-keeping assignment, has been so much fun for me. Its given me practical application, its given me a creative outlet that I otherwise wouldn't have had with my 16 credit with four 8 week courses semester, and its allowed me to grow my portfolio by graphics and content creation. Now, for the final time, let's take a coffee break. If, like me, you're burning the midnight oil, then you might want to give my Red Eye recipe a shot. It'll certainly keep your mind awake.


    I'm going to be honest-- I'm not a fan of Red Eyes. When I make coffee, I want to taste the roast, but I want the roast to be more of a compliment to the flavors and milk that I've added. I'm a sweet coffee girl, after all! But the key to liking coffee is that you don't just wake up one day and decide you like coffee-- you learn about it, you try different options and struggle through them until you find one you like, and then you branch out from there. Digital marketing, I've learned is a little bit like that-- you pick a concentration, such as social media or branding, and then you give it a shot and struggle through it until you determine that you either love it or hate it. With that said, I've been doing a lot of struggling over that this semester, and I think what I've decided is that what I enjoy the most, and enjoy learning about the most, is brand management. With this revelation, I want to spend the rest of our time together today discussing the struggles, the positives, and the ultimate growth I've experienced throughout this course.

Reflection Number 1
    I grew the most this semester in my technical knowledge of the concepts we learned. With many of the modules, I was familiar with the concept or program from my own research and self-teaching, because the only digital marketing course I've taken before this was Principles of marketing, which is more of a marketing overview than digital concentration. This course helped me to be able to gain a more textbook understanding of each program and be able to link the understanding to the performance. As in, I now know the reasons why I can get a software to work for me.



Reflection Number 2
    I struggled the most this semester with SEO and Google Ads. These were definitely the concepts I was the most unfamiliar with. I had no prior knowledge of either, and so I had to learn them from scratch for the assignments. While this isn't a bad thing, it is always more time consuming for me to learn about things without being able to see examples (tutorial videos are perfect for me). That is something that, in this course, simply isn't feasible which led to me working to grasp an understanding as best I could.

Reflection Number 3
    My biggest takeaway from this course is that practice really does make progress. I have to actively remind myself that I can't be perfect at everything, nor can I try to hold myself to that standard. I try to remember that I can only do the best I can, but I work hard to get as close to flawless on things as I can. Especially when it comes to design. Whether its graphics, a website, an email newsletter-- everything hinges on design, and I have learned throughout this course that there is no such thing as too much practice and that it might not be able to make perfect, but it can certainly push you down that continuous path to progress. For example, I use Canva every. single. day. I thoroughly enjoy using Canva to create flyers, documents, menus, social media posts, and so on. So much so that I actually thought that there was nothing else for me to learn about Canva. Then, I sit down to do my first post, "Canva and Cappuccinos," and find new information just on their privacy policies amongst the different paid versions of the software. Now, I actively seek out new things each day that I use it, because what I want most out of my future career is progress.

I have had so much fun with these weekly installments, and hope that I was able to help you out just a little bit in your search on ways to better your marketing skills. Now, for the last time...

Thanks for Reading, 
The Caffeinated College Student






 

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