Reflection on my learnings
According to Gibbs (1988) “It is not sufficient simply to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting upon this experience it may quickly be forgotten or its learning potential lost. It is from the feelings and thoughts emerging from this reflection that generalisations or concepts can be generated. And it is generalisations which enable new situations to be tackled effectively” The following is The Gibbs Reflective Cycle:
According to the above statement about learning experience, taking the course of Digital Marketing in Context at LJMU has allowed me to learn and put into practice, all of the concepts that we learn each class, as are the Wordpress development and it’s uses, email marketing through MailChimp, online video uses and social media management along with Online advertising and I think I was able to actually experience my learnings into the final assignment which, was creating a Wordpress page linked to a social media campaign basically.
In my case, I worked with my team members on creating a Wordpress for LJMU Teacher Training course given that one of our team member worked directly with this faculty. This made our work apparently easier given that, our team member knew all marketing guidelines and had promotional material that we could use for this particular assignment. But, as we continue our development of the web page, we had a bit of difficulties because we had to try an follow as closely as we could the real guidelines of LJMU in terms of color and typing and also the privacy issue, given that this was not a real webpage nor will it be so, we had to be extra careful so that everything was private and not risk a chance of being available for the public. But in the other hand, following lines made it as real as it could get, well the actual potential client, was actually our team member.
While creating the Wordpress site our group had a couple of problems figuring out how to make it look as what we had in mind, a site that followed LJMU marketing guidelines and finally we found the perfect theme that made it look very realist and we where very happy with the outcome.
As for the social media artefacts that were going to create and directly link to our Wordpress site, we decided we needed a campaign so, it would have a logic that would dictate what social media would actually be useful.
From this previous analysis I think the class was very useful in operational terms but having also the class of Digital Marketing Current and Emerging Technologies made it all have sense in theoretical and practical terms. With this knowledge, we decided we need to have Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and a Youtube Channel if our campaign was to be real and think of our very narrow and specify target, which where principally women that wanted a change of career.
We divided the work between the three of us, always supporting each other in any problems we might be having with our tasks so at the end we were all involved in creating each of the artefacts. To complete our assignment we did a mailing campaign too and we used MailChimp to do this, and definitely in my case I think that without the class dedicated to MailChimp, I wouldn’t have been able to even use the platform. I feel very optimistic that I will be using my new acquired Mailchimp knowledge in any of the campaigns that I’ll be involved with in the future.
Finishing our group assignment, we also created our own personal blogs which at first it sounded a bit silly given that we had already created a blog together nevertheless, it was very enriching because I decided to use an other platform which was wix.com even though “WordPress, the popular open source publishing platform, is being used in over 25 percent of all websites. That’s not just 25 percent of all those using a service but all websites. (According to http://smallbiztrends.com/2015/11/sites-on-wordpress.html) . I think it is a great platform to create simple, beautiful and exiting blogs and pages. I actually created a page for a small landscaping business which the owner really liked and considered making it the oficial web site. Also writing an informational and a marketing blog post push me to research the business and found really interesting facts about building, gardens, paving and more. So, it was a delight to write the blog posts and see the reaction of the owner of the company, always positive of course.
In conclusion, Digital Marketing in Context is a class that really introduces you to a new world: Digital
