Hiring a Marketing Intern – What they’re good for and where to find them

1.  Don’t hire a marketing intern if you are a perfectionist and don’t want to manage them. 

You are going to have to manage this person. They are not a magical chief marketing officer. This is often their first experience producing work for a client. They can’t come in, manage themselves and just magically create things that will absolutely meet your expectations. There are lots of things they can do. Operating as a chief marketing officer without supervision is probably not one of them.

Because you’re a perfectionist, you need someone who has a keen attention to detail and the ability to really read you. 

Internships are an entry-level experience, so interns often just don’t have that level of intuition yet. If you don’t want to manage an intern and expect them to just know what to do, don’t hire one. 

2. Don’t hire an intern if you do not have the patience to groom someone, mentor someone or teach someone how to work. 

You are mentoring your interns. You are in a leadership position, helping them learn how to work, manage their time and be an employee because so many of them don’t know. If you’re lucky they’ve had work experience like waiting tables, working at the dry cleaners or babysitting.

But to be real, most of the kids who apply for internships with my company have never had a job EVER. I have fired more interns than any other position in my company in the last 17 years. Because, I repeat, they have literally never had a job before. They do not understand what an employer expects.  So, you will have to coach them through this learning-to-work situation most of the time.

You are mentoring your interns. You are in a leadership position, helping them learn how to work, manage their time and be Things like showing up? Yeah, I know. It’s crazy to think I would expect you to come to work. I actually do. This is a thing I have had to explain and teach some interns. But when I hire an intern I know that’s part of what I’m signing up for (and try to guard against in the interview process).

Hiring marketing interns can be a real win-win.

You’re helping young people become professionals.

Design students can’t really get a job until they have work to show, so you are giving them an opportunity to show prospective employers they can do this work. Also, working for a client is a lot different than working for your teacher. You are teaching them what it’s going to be like in the design world by giving them this opportunity.

Most of my interns are social media and tech natives.

We’ve hired many writing interns from the MU School of Journalism in our town. Those students have been excellent thinkers and writers very well equipped to handle social media and newsletters.

Social media interns will do better if they’re hanging out in your office and experiencing your organization’s culture. Giving them the experience of being in the office and working with other people is valuable.

If you’re an organization who isn’t accustomed to remote workers, a remote internship will not be as valuable of an experience for either party. Writing about an organization you don’t know isn’t easy. And trying to chase around your fellow staff members for information while working remotely is even harder.

Social media interns work best when given clear parameters and identity guidelines.

1. Explain what you want out of social posts, how many per month? What should they sound like? Do you have preferences for graphics or videos?
2. Create clear deadlines.
3. Establish a clear process for review. 
4. Let your intern know what you like and don’t like because, through that review process, they’re going to learn how to do the job for you well. 
5. Consider having your intern write social posts for the future and then schedule them. Then you don’t have to worry about it. You can do the same thing with your blog posts, event promotions or press releases.

Photography can be a great intern project because they have a specific assignment. Most photography projects are pretty straightforward. 

I hired an intern a few years ago to take photos of the city we live in on behalf of CoMoGives, our local year-end online giving campaign. The Community Foundation of Central Missouri powers the campaign and MayeCreate helps promote it. We needed photos of our community and our intern did an amazing job capturing it.

Our interns have also done a great job of taking headshots of our website and client websites. 

I have had far less luck with videography. Videography has so many more moving parts than photography. The projects were more difficult for interns to tackle.

I’m in the web design world, and I have trained my fair share of interns to do routine website updates. Routine updates are great intern level tasks.

I have also worked with clients who have had interns finish out the websites we started building for them. This has resulted in mixed outcomes.

If it’s a routine task like adding  products, photos or staff members you’re probably golden. But you do need to train them.

When I say train them, I mean show them exactly how to do it and format it to look like the rest of the site. Otherwise it doesn’t work right and your once professional site feels all discombobulated. Then everyone is frustrated.

Interns are not as amazing for BUILDING websites. 

Unfortunately, many web development students don’t come out of college 100% ready to do their jobs because the skills they’re learning change so rapidly. They just haven’t built enough sites to know what they don’t know. And if they are working solo they don’t have someone to guide them. This makes it difficult to hire an intern to build your website.

Case in point, I was an intern hired to develop a website for a company fresh out of college in 2003. I could design a website and build it but certainly I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I designed a website with 100 pages, and I didn’t have a template where I could change the navigation in just one spot. When they decided to rename the pages of their site, I had to change the page names on 100 different pages. Lesson learned. I feel sorry for the next person who had to update that website and deal with my lack of experience.

Don’t do that to yourself. Make sure your intern has the skills you need for the projects you’re going to produce.

Here’s the deal. Many college programs now require internship experience for their students to graduate, which is wonderful. It makes those students more equipped to move out into the working world and have a successful first job.

Look for the degree programs producing the type of skills you need in an intern. Then, reach out to the professors, especially the academic advisors, because they are the people nurturing and guiding the students. Oftentimes, they can refer one or two people to potentially hire as an intern. You can also look for a professor or faculty member teaching a class that would potentially produce the types of skills you want out of your intern. 

Ask at your local high school or tradschool for clubs or classes teaching marketing and design skills.

If you don’t have a college in your town, you could look at high school classes, trade schools or clubs that might yield the types of skills you’re looking for. The school leaders, counselors or teachers may be able to connect you with students looking for internship experiences.

Start looking in early Spring.