Welcome to my first blog post referring to the marketing seminar course that I have done for my Digital Marketing Program. It has been a wonderful journey so far, with a lot of learning and takeaways from this last three months.

The first and foremost, most of us had no idea that all the recruitment service is free for candidates. It was shared by Ms. Jillian Tishman on week 3, that all the recruiters are offering free service for the candidates. However, they do not work for free, rather they take their commissions from their clients – employers who have vacancies in the job market and looking for candidates to fill them. It was the seminar session with TDS, who are a recruitment agency based in Toronto. The week after, we were introduced with Mr. Matt Wilkie, the account director for Trevor Peter – a marketing agency that specifies “brand play” theme that associates with their expertise of getting a brand talk to their segments, engage more effectively and drive mass brand recall for its audiences. The initial sneak through was an office place which is also a music room with instruments all around – gave us all an idea of how the modern-day work environments are changing from past decade.

Trust is the biggest factor throughout the marketing industry today, and it is nothing different when it comes to combine the influencer marketing with any type of product or service. Influencers can shape and influence the whole ideology of a target segment by truthfully and effectively portraying what is to be portrayed by a campaign and said by that brand itself.

In order to make sure the influencers are doing what is right for a brand, Andrew McWhaw from #Paid, has mentioned one crucial factor that is needed to be changed –

• Creators vs. influencers in marketing

On Week 7, we got the opportunity to meet with Mr. Jay Aber, who is closely working with George Brown College. He is also the founder of DoubleClick – which is a Google company now. To begin with, he stated why digital marketing is a fun profession to work in. He thinks digital marketers are great problem solvers as they are tech savvy and possess good understanding on how the social and digital marketing trend is shifting now a days. They have a scope to be creative, can learn a lot from their on-job experience, and always can reinvent themselves with the tasks they do in their field.

On Week 9, we met Mr. Brian Walsh, the principal of the Structured Empathy – taking us to a brief interactive session about customer experience journey mapping technique and how we can understand the actual scenario behind the customer experience. He distinguished between a great product and a great engineer –

• Not necessarily a great engineer may serve a great product all the time.
• It is always about how we can create the best possible experience for a customer throughout the person’s journey from awareness to the purchase decision making.

He used an example of Sofia, a 6.5-year-old girl whose journey starts from checking in to a doctor’s chamber to getting an MRI done. He then focused on evaluating and prioritizing the moments that matter to the girl and the doctor’s chamber. The main goal was to address how we could meet those needs for Sofia, maybe we have uncovered an opportunity rather than an issue or is there some other roles or process that should be happening here.

The following week, we were privileged to have Mr. James Myrenech, who is the merchant success manager at Shopify and is a GBC alumnus himself. He introduced himself as a banker before he pursued a degree on strategic relationship marketing from George Brown. He didn’t see a future in retail banking, so he went ahead with something he always wanted to achieve. After graduating from GBC, he joined Shopify which is the biggest tech firm in Canada now. It has more than 800 thousand active merchants running their business in this platform with approximately $100 billion worth of sales through their operations. The Shopify support team deals with every type of business owner – from being a startup to an enterprise solution company. In a nutshell, Shopify gives the platform for businesses to start as a newbie, and then grow to an extent where they could eventually think of their own retail presence or even starting the brick & mortar strategy.

On the week 12, we were introduced to Josh Lyon, the vice president of Tokyo Smoke which is a sister concern of Canopy Growth. He is a motivational speaker, a challenge taker and an influencer to all of us with what he has achieved so far. His brief introduction about himself encompasses how enthusiastic he was about meeting new people, sitting for a cup of coffee, listening to them and in the end, taking the best out of any conversation. With immense growth opportunities coming in his way, he got an offer to work for MLSE – covering brands like Raptors and Blue Jays – giving him another huge opportunity to rise to the stature he was dreaming about. I feel like he is a winner and has a lot to learn from as he motivates people all around him to be a winner like him.

Overall, I would say this course has been an exceptional experience for me to know some very talented individuals from the current scene, and to know about their passion, dedication and motivation factors that’s thrives them to achieve their own success. I can summarize my journey as below –

• I have networked with Mr Jay Aber, Mr. Matt Wilkie and other through LinkedIn.
• I have joined company pages and career resources groups on Linkedin.
• I am keeping contact with them by commenting and liking their stories on Linkedin.
• The best tip to networking is to never stop exploring and always meet new people.
• LinkedIn is the best resource for job search.
• I did not do any volunteer work but did my internship on previous semester in a travel company.