My name is Luke and I am Web Designer (Apprentice) at Feelgood Creative, Reading. I recently started the Digital Gum course for small businesses run by Louize Clark at Green Park, Reading. I am going so I can broaden my knowledge of Social Media, SEO and content writing as these are going to be part of my job role at Feelgood Creative. The course is one day a week and runs for four weeks. The class consists of a small group (6-8 people) and encourages lots of discussion, question asking and working together. There are variety of different business that attend the course, so lots of skill sharing takes place. Over the four weeks we will be learning:

• A digital audit of your business
• Social media marketing, how it’s used in business and how to win new customers
• New apps used by the digital community to win new customers
• How to use video in small business to find your voice
• What are Augmented and Virtual Reality and how can we use them?
• SEO – why should we care?
• Web management skills

Day one

On day one we went through what we will be covering over the 4 weeks and then introduced ourselves properly to make sure everyone felt comfortable. Our first task was to create a customer persona, someone who you are trying to sell your products or services to. We had to really bring this person to life giving them a name, age and job, how they communicate and their likes and dislikes.

Then we moved on to a brief social media overview and how we would use our customer persona to choose which social platforms to share on. The next bit we discussed was writing content that would connect with our customer. I learnt that just listing our sales messages was not enough. We had to make it something they will be interested in.

I am really looking forward to the rest of the three weeks and discovering more about social media and SEO. Next week we will be going through social media in more detail and focussing on how to use the various platforms effectively. We will also be reviewing the homework we have been set…which is to write a blog post that demonstrates we understand how to write good content!

Find out how week two went next week.

Luke
Web Designer