Hi! I’m Alice (before you say it - yes, like Alice in Wonderland) and today is my first day as a Digital Marketing Assistant at Zync Digital. I’ve already enjoyed meeting the team and learning about our clients, so I’m really looking forward to making my own contribution to their work.
I finished university last year with a degree in Spanish and Translation which included a year in Spain, but I’ll try to avoid the dreaded “listen to how amazing my year abroad was!” spiel. I chose my degree because I’ve always had a real passion for writing and creativity and languages make for such varied degrees; during my four years I studied modules ranging from contemporary Hispanic cinema to the translation of children’s poetry. And translation, surprisingly, is not dissimilar to marketing. It’s all about making a text make sense to a new readership, in exactly the same way content must be tailored to a specific audience.
Noticing how much I enjoyed this aspect of the degree is partly what made me want to go into marketing (although perhaps it really started when eight-year-old me made a 20-slide PowerPoint presentation, complete with animations, in an attempt to convince my parents that I should have a horse). So after graduating and alongside gaining an online creative marketing qualification, I gained my first “proper” experience through two different volunteer roles. One involved managing social media accounts for a small vintage clothing store, and I loved creating posts for the company’s community of sustainable fashion enthusiasts. In the other, I wrote eBay listings for a charity furniture shop. Some of the donations were more exciting than others - nevertheless I liked the challenge of making the products sound appealing, even if some of them were the ugliest sofas you’ve ever seen.
I then completed a fairly brief - but valuable - few months as part of the Student Support team at a higher education institution. This was a great experience and I met some amazing people as well as learning a lot about the corporate world, but I knew that I wanted to utilise my creativity a little more. Like I said earlier, I simply enjoy writing - be it in the form of my personal blog, shorter social media posts or funny straplines. When I began a part-time freelance role producing copy for a client’s websites and socials, I realised that this was definitely something I wanted a career in.
So now I can’t wait to bring the skills I’ve developed over the past few years to a full-time position, and Zync’s ethos of “marketing for good” aligns so well with my own values. Their specialisation in social enterprises sets them apart from other agencies, and it will be extremely rewarding to know that my work is having some sort of positive impact on the world.