Hi everyone,
My name is Fredrik Ekman and I am a third year communication science student, for about a week now.
After two months of looking for an internship position in Amsterdam, mainly via LinkedIn, I have started my position as an EMEA marketing intern for Workiva, at the end of February 2022. Workiva is an IT-company based in Ames, Iowa, United States of America and they have been expanding in the EMEA (European, Middle east, Africa) market for three years. Over 5,300 organizations worldwide are using Workiva’s solutions which mainly revolve around facilitating annual reporting processes. More precisely, Workiva offers a cloud-based platform that facilitates various reporting processes, such as ESG-reporting, SEC-reporting, etc., and allows team collaboration those projects/processes in real time. Prior to my application to the internship position at Workiva, I have never heard of the market, let alone of the company. Therefore, I was quite keen on getting to know the field better and increase my marketing knowledge right from the beginning.
Throughout my internship I have gotten more insights in different fields of marketing than I would have expected. At the beginning I was mostly involved in supervising and tweaking the German landing page of the company and managing translations of datasheets and other documents that would be uploaded on the webpage. Initially I was cohesively working with a tool called ‘Smartling’ with which we implanted the changes in translation on the company’s different landing pages. Additionally, I was in contact with a translation agency that translated PDF files such as datasheets and collaterals, which were then uploaded on the related webpages by myself.
However, after a while I got involved in digital marketing activities as well. In April 2022, a digital marketeer joined our EMEA marketing team in the Amsterdam office. As he initiated a lot of new campaigns, I offered to help him on these projects because I wanted to gain insights in the field of digital marketing and broaden the variety of my day-to-day tasks. At the beginning he assigned me to work on a paid search project for our corporate reporting campaign. More precisely, he instructed me to come up with German key words that potential prospects would type in a search engine which would then show them our website as the first result. I needed to come up with terms related to the specific webpage that we were marketing and research the monthly search volume of those terms. The search volume of a keyword refers to the number of times a certain key word is being searched for in a certain amount of time. In combination with this task, the digital marketeer also assigned me to write descriptions that would appear beneath the chosen key words. As I was writing down the key words and descriptions in an excel sheet, I improved my excel skills by being taught short cuts and translation formulas for instance.
In general, I learned a lot throughout my five months at Workiva and as I have been offered a contract extension which I accepted, I look forward to working together with the team for another five months and expand my professional network as well as my work related skills in general.