MY EXPERIENCE AS A NOLIA ROOTS INTERN

For seven months I worked for Shelly Hughes, as a Nolia Roots marketing intern. Throughout this time I grew as a graphic designer, social media strategist, business leader, and marketing student. I was encouraged from the start to create my own path within Nolia and build out the Nolia Roots marketing strategy. I failed multiple times, and I beat myself up for not seeing instant ROI on my efforts. But most importantly – I learned what works, and what doesn’t work within the marketing industry. 

Where do we start? The hard skills, or the soft skills I developed over the past seven months? First of all – thank you Shelly for teaching me the terminology of what hard and soft skills are!

Let’s start soft.

Over the past seven months, Nolia expanded and brought in another marketing intern. This expansion promoted me to act as Nolias lead marketing intern. Within this role, I was responsible for onboarding our new intern. I created zoom calls where I would share my screen and teach her the many factors of how Nolia Roots runs – such as using asana, emailing clients, planning socials, etc… This opportunity allowed me to put into action the leadership skills I have developed throughout my time at Miami University and within extracurriculars. 

While the majority of my efforts were internal with Nolia Roots branding, I completed multiple client projects as well. Working with Nolia clients allowed me to develop professional communication skills. This includes meeting with clients on zoom to discuss ideas, as well as emailing back and forth to stay up to date on projects. The professionalism I gained over the course of working with Nolia is something I will take with me in my future career endeavors.

Did I mention my boss had a baby in the middle of my internship? Let’s talk about adaptability. After around 3 months of being an intern for Nolia, I was pushed to manage Nolia Roots social media (beyond the typical intern level.) This included content planning, posting on socials (IG, FB, Linkedin), creating email blasts, writing blog posts, etc… As a full-time college student, I had to shift my schedule and test my time management skills. I adapted from being able to contact my boss at any point with questions or concerns to putting my best foot forward, and trusting my instinct. This was a challenge that I learned so much from and I truly cannot thank Shelly enough for trusting me.

Speaking of my boss – Shelly Hughes started her business a little over a year ago. With that being said, Nolia is still blossoming into what it is today and what it will be in the future. Throughout my time as an intern, Nolia went through a complete rebrand. During that re-brand, I developed extreme communication and collaboration skills. I constantly communicated with Shelly and the Nolia team to share what I think would work/not work within this rebrand. Well, let me back up for a second. Before we even started this rebrand, I collaborated with Shelly to act as a business consultant to help her discover what this rebrand would entail. This was truly one of the coolest moments I have had during my internship.

Let’s talk about hard skills.

I brought on a new client! Through my social media efforts, Nolia Roots gained a new client. I wrote a blog post in Squarespace about branded photoshoots. Within this blog post, I created a free branded photoshoot template in Canva that was then promoted through a form. This form was created in Active Campaign, and used as a way to increase email subscribers. Through posting the branded photoshoot blog on various socials, a cosmetic company reached out to us to do a branded photoshoot. It is not often interns get the opportunity to actually make an impact on a business. Once again – thank you, Shelly!

Through my efforts and assigned tasks, I became extremely familiar with key marketing tools such as SemRush, ActiveCampaign, Facebook Business Suite, Later.com, Asana, Microsoft Powerpoint, and Squarespace. Shelly was a great mentor and put me in the position to learn and grow with these tools. Since learning essential marketing software tools – I have built out my own profile (emersonmcmanus.com), re-built my Dads website (while teaching him how to use and leverage SemRush for his business), performed SEO and website audits for my client in my senior capstone class, and lastly – added *excuse my language* a crap ton of skills to my resume and company interviews.

Lastly,

I know I have already thanked Shelly for everything I learned in seven months. But truly – Shelly was the mentor I needed when I felt so stuck with what path I wanted to take in my early career. She exposed me to challenges I didn’t think I would face as an intern. She allowed me to be creative. She pushed me to find skills I didn’t know I had. She allowed me to use tools I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to use. And lastly, she shaped me into a better leader and a better marketing professional.

Thank you Shelly and thank you Nolia Roots.

Emerson