Digital Marketing Management Internship @ Millenial Medical Oy

During my internship at Millenial Medical, I jumped feet first into the world of digital marketing. I did not expect to end up working for a company within the medical and aesthetic industry, or even having such a wide variety of responsibilities in the beginning, but it turned out to be an exciting opportunity to further develop myself and start developing all marketing activities from the ground up for a start-up with room for growth.

Millenial Medical is the distributor of several prestigious brands within the medical and aesthetic industry. They also have a studio in downtown Helsinki which provides treatments to consumers and a space for consultation and clinical training.

My responsibilities in a nutshell were to develop, maintain and manage all marketing activities for Millenial Medical Oy. In addition to this, I had the opportunity to develop and/or design multiple websites (including integration and management of e-commerce solutions, bookings systems and inventory management systems) for a variety of global brands with target markets ranging from Finland to all the Nordic countries.

I worked daily with our small team composed of professionals with decades of experience from the industry and sales, marketing, consultation etc. services and interns in other departments with lots of fresh ideas. Weekly meetings with the co-founder allowed the discussion of previous weeks’ results and the plans and strategy for the upcoming weeks. This internship position did not feel like an internship position, I had been given so many responsibilities which came along with multiple challenges (and several hours of after-work research and frantic Googling ?).

This was great, it allowed me to get a jump-start into the world of marketing and forced me to ensure I took every opportunity to improve my skills. And all of it was extremely interesting!

The company had not had much focus on prior digital marketing, but now it was time! This was exciting, as I got to set everything up and make ads for social media channels and events, work with bloggers and other influencers, manage several social media pages and setup collection of data and analyze data from several marketing campaigns which I was responsible for. The first week was spent setting up social media accounts, analytics accounts and tracking, ensuring I had all credentials and discussing plans for the next weeks.

I started making improvement plans for current sites, focusing on increasing available Calls-to-Action and ensuring our customers were happy. I worked with a third-party web-developer remotely to ensure our final product would be exactly what we wanted. I also designed and built a website for one of our lines of medical devices targeted at all Nordic countries with help from the same freelancer.

In between, I setup several campaigns on Facebook and Instagram which had cooperation from well-known bloggers. There was an event coming up, which was strategically important sales opportunity for the business as thousands of industry members would be attending. I edited advertising materials to be used at the event and ensured these were delivered to the right person. I also got to join the team at the big event, where my task was to keep track of all analytics and social media contacts during the day and generate possible sales leads by introducing consumers to our vast catalog of products and welcoming them to our booth. We also needed a new website which included a web-shop only accessible to industry professionals. I had minimal prior web-development experience. I started working on that as an extra project. Oh, and another site for another brand of products (at the end of my internship, I oversaw 7 sites, of which I had developed and designed 4 from scratch). And of course, daily social media interaction, managing campaigns, video and graphics editing and following the trickle of data coming in to see what needed improvement and what was being done correctly. This was what my first 3 weeks were like, I was busy, but I was enjoying the challenges and being able to see concrete results from my work. I have probably forgot to mention a bunch of other things which also happened. The rest of my time was similar, lots of interesting projects to work on and ensuring older tasks were also completed whilst continuing to manage and further optimize and develop over 9 social media channels and 7 websites.

I was working remotely, 95% of the time. I had bi-weekly meetings on-site and sometimes a Skype or Slack call with the co-founder to reflect on past activities and update plans. Most of my work was independent and I had to make strategic decisions daily and ensure that marketing and web operations were being developed and running smoothly. This meant that self-discipline was extremely important, and the position involved a lot of responsibility. It turned out to not be an issue for me but working remotely is not for everyone. I enjoy the additional responsibility, but sometimes it interferes with work-life balance as I now live in my own office. Usually I find it hard to stop working and my girlfriend is forced to drag me off of the PC late at night!

Driving engagement on social media platforms also turned out to be a bigger challenge than I thought. We had very little interaction with consumers on social media in the beginning, and it was a challenge to drive any interaction. Marketing content was being made primarily for SEO purposes. I think the engagement challenge was partially since I had no experience or history within the medical or aesthetic industry, so it was hard for me to understand the perspective of people I was focusing marketing efforts on. However, I had solid data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ad Manager’s tools and feedback from colleagues. This, along with some creativity, had allowed us to increase brand awareness, visitor counts, customer contacts and conversion rates. We had concrete development across all social media platforms and websites, which have also led to and assisted in sales. This is something that the company will continue to focus on.

I had the opportunity to jump into a challenging yet supportive environment, dealing with almost all aspects of digital marketing and web/e-commerce development during my internship at Millenial Medical. There was no shortage of things to do. If you ever have a similar opportunity, for any smaller start-up, I highly suggest it! I heard from friends that they had spent several months doing nothing during their internships at larger multinational corporations. This was not the case here, it was a fast-pace environment which truly provided opportunities for development.