Indiana Daily Student
Creative Marketing Team Manager
Indiana University. Bloomington. B10 Campus. Student News.
Indiana University. Bloomington. B10 Campus. Student News.
The Indiana Daily Student is IU’s student-run newspaper, reporting on all things IU, Bloomington and state and national news at times.
During my sophomore year in college, I saw a message in a media group chat that the IDS marketing team was hiring, applied with barely any media experience at that point and the rest is history. I stayed on staff for the rest of my college experience, being promoted to manager my senior year.
This job taught me a plethora of skills. I learned and familiarized myself with Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Sharepoint and Outlook and website design through SNWorks. Aside from platforms, I also learned about event marketing through spearheading the biannual IDS Housing Fair campaign each semester, professional communication through daily inbox management and advertising partner collaborations and content creation for a professional brand like the IDS.
Busy season for the creative team at the IDS took place at the start of every academic semester in preparation for the biannual IDS Housing Fair. It begins with the planning stage. A large aspect of the planning stage is garnering local business sponsors, which I acquired through cold-emailing and calling a little over a month prior to the fair. I learned and honed my professional communication skills through this process and got introduced to some of my favorite Bloomington brands!
The second stage is the execution stage. As manager, I created and executed a schedule of content over the course of a month before the fair with a mix of fair sponsor and vendor posts, save-the-date informative graphics and short-form video content promoting the fair itself. This task strengthened my team communication skills as I served as liaison between marketing and design in ensuring creative materials are designed and comply with fair information.
Finally, the last stage is after the fair, where analytics are collected. I created a form collecting demographics on the fair attendees through Google Forms and creatively displayed that information in an easy-to-read fashion via Microsoft Excel formulas and charts. This helped the marketing team learn which platforms to focus their advertising on versus others and also helped housing companies learn how to better cater to IU student’s needs.
Content creation didn’t just stop at the IDS Housing Fair. The IDS brand was just beginning its content creation journey when I joined as a sophomore and when I left, making TikToks and Instagram Reels were a weekly activity. I even showed up on my friends’ For You Pages every once in a while. This allowed me to get comfortable in man-on-the-street style videos, especially with college students who often did not want to get on camera. Aside from camera skills, I also got to experiment with CapCut in clipping together 30-second to 1-minute videos of engaging content that spoke to the IDS brand of being for the students.
You can’t have a newspaper without some writing right? Another facet of my role on the creative marketing team was writing press releases on IDS-related news. I consider myself a natural storyteller as someone in the media industry. However, press releases were not telling a story, they were telling the facts. I learned and honed my professional writing style and tone that was not too long-winded and included just the right amount of details on IDS occurrences.
