My Work Experience Week - Anna

Meeting the Growth Team

Today, I shadowed the Growth team: the ones at the forefront of the business. They are responsible for building excellent relationships with their clients, listening closely to their specific marketing needs, and developing strategies that will elevate the client’s business to the next level.

Before this work experience week, I thought I knew what this role entailed – simply look after your clients, right? However, the team at Reflect Digital proved how it is so much more than this. I learnt that adopting a human-centric approach is essential to their client-facing roles. For instance, by prioritising human experience, the team can build more authentic relationships with clients – ultimately growing a more valuable and trustful connection. In turn, this allows the Growth team to deliver more impactful marketing strategies that place the client’s goals, and their customers’ needs, at the forefront. Therefore, this role is not solely looking after clients. Rather, it involves understanding them on a granular level, ultimately leading to enhanced relationships, improved communication, and greater client satisfaction!

Following these insightful conversations, I joined Ellen, who set me the task of conducting a client’s competitor analysis. I examined social media presence across multiple platforms to identify a strong social media strategy that would elevate the client’s business. I assessed numerous aspects, including whether competitors utilised user-generated content or built an online community effectively. Interestingly, I spotted a pattern. Companies that performed best typically adopted a more human-centric approach. For example, several successful posts featured authentic storytelling, sharing real customer testimonials and showcasing the people behind the company. Thus, by understanding human behaviour and prioritising a human-centric approach, these companies were able to evoke emotions and create connections with their audience – ultimately leading to increased engagement.

Overall, my first day with Reflect Digital was spent with the forefront of the business: the Growth team. Through their insightful conversations and tasks, I learnt how a human-centric approach can fuel effective client management and guide marketing strategies towards success!

Delving into Paid 

Alongside shadowing more in Growth and completing another competitor analysis task, I spent today exploring the world of Paid Media. This is a digital marketing tactic that allows brands to promote their content using paid search results, display ads, and social media posts. Sandra – a Paid Media Analyst – taught me the ropes, showing me the extensive processes that go behind creating a successful paid campaign.

But where does Reflect Digital’s human-centric mindset come into this?

After posing this question, Sandra opened a document showing detailed customer personas, which are fictional representations of a company’s target audience. Crucially, these were enhanced by Nudge Theory. This theory draws on behavioural psychology to understand how individuals make decisions, incorporating peoples’ cognitive biases, heuristics, and decision-making tendencies.

This human-centric approach, which takes an extremely deep dive into human behaviour, has immense benefits for Paid Media strategies. It can lead to incredibly personalised advertising, ensuring advertising is delivered to the right audience at the right time, increasing the chance of engagement and conversion.

Let’s say you and I are interested in a product – an online digital marketing course. We both have different motivations. I am seeking professional development to advance my career, whereas you’re interested in having a greater impact on the brands you work with. By understanding behavioural psychology and creating distinct customer personas, marketers can create personalised messaging to address our specific motivations. I might get a message like: ‘’Ready for that next step? Advance your career with our 10-week course.’’ You may get ‘’Want to elevate your marketing? Boost your skills and have a greater impact with our 10-week course.’’  By segmenting us based on our behaviour, we receive more relevant adverts, leading to a higher likelihood of us engaging. Cool, right?

So, today taught me how Reflect Digital’s human-first mindset and strong understanding of human psychology leads to greater personalisation opportunities within Paid Media. This can lead to much greater engagement and conversion! 

Exploring In-House Marketing Processes

Today I spent the morning with Erin, working on Reflect Digital’s in-house marketing. Guess, what I learnt? Yes, even this is human-centric!

B2B marketing can often be detached from humans. It can be quite easy to assume that, because you’re targeting a business rather than a typical consumer, you need a completely different approach. But, at the end of the day, businesses remain made up of people – all of which are influenced by emotions and biases. It remains essential to build trust, demonstrate understanding, and show empathy. I wouldn’t pick an agency I didn’t trust or have an affinity towards, would you?

This is why prioritising people is inherently woven into Reflect Digital’s marketing strategy. Their Instagram uses that authentic storytelling I mentioned earlier – doing ‘meet the team’ posts and showcasing their culture to build a connection with their audience. Alongside this, they also acknowledge the nuances of different social media platforms. For instance, the content shared on LinkedIn, as opposed to Instagram, is more focussed on sharing knowledge with their community. They do this by sharing blog posts and showcasing upcoming events – such as their Brunch & Learn.

I am definitely getting the gist now… To build an effective digital strategy, you need to prioritise people. A greater understanding of these people then leads to greater performance!

Getting Scientific 

Today marked my last day at Reflect Digital, where I shadowed Ariane – the go-to behavioural science expert. Her role involves supporting the wider team implement behavioural frameworks into their work – such as constructing those detailed customer personas I mentioned before.

Shadowing her work really solidified my entire understanding of Reflect Digital’s mindset. It provided me with an excellent understanding of the underpinnings of what it truly means to be human-centric. Ultimately, it's all about taking a deeper dive into how psychology ultimately shapes our motivations, desires, and actions.

Without this knowledge, can marketing really be effective?

This question has been at the back of my mind throughout this week. Now, as my work experience has come to an end, I feel ready to answer it. Ultimately, to build an effective digital strategy, you must prioritise people. You must prioritise behavioural understanding in order to construct relevant, impactful, and elevated marketing strategies. 

Key Takeaways

• Human-centric marketing refers to prioritising the behaviours, needs, emotions, and preferences of a target audience. 
• This mindset can have varying outcomes. For example, within the Growth team it leads to enhanced relationships, improved communication, and more effective marketing strategies. Whereas, within Paid Media, it elevates personalisation capabilities and therefore better engagement. 
• Overall, this mindset is critical for constructing effective digital marketing strategies!

I would like to thank the entire team at Reflect Digital for an incredible week. I have learnt so much with you guys and look forward to seeing where this will take my career!