Jake is the Marketing Manager for Sweetwater Sound in Fort Wayne, IN. As the leader of marketing efforts for all businesses under the Sweetwater umbrella (eye care, car dealership, and aviation training to name a few!), Jake is constantly multitasking and pivoting from one business strategy to the next. Find out how to land a job in marketing and why you should always ask for more at your internship!
Transcript
Jake Pickett and I'm a marketing manager at Sweetwater So Sweetwater as a whole is a music retailer. Music, instrument, and technology retailer. My role is with the Sweet family of companies as we call it. It's very much like an agency position. It's a lot like a marketing, advertising agency position in that, I can bounce from one client or one company to the other throughout the day. Seasonally we have to put preference or prioritize according to what businesses may be in the certain season. A lot of flexibility on understanding who the audience is and identifying audiences or target consumers based on the type of business and the season it is. So, we use a balance of both what we call traditional and digital marketing tactics. So a lot of traditional advertising, some print, some direct mail, some out of home, even some video and TV, which kind of correlate with each other. But we also use quite a bit of digital. Social media, Facebook specifically. But we also have social media channels on just about any channel you can think of. We use a lot of search engine marketing and optimization and our websites themselves are marketing tools. We try to use them as inbound marketing tools. And where we differ is at an agency you would have that separation. You have an account manager, you have a traffic manager, you have a couple account coordinators, you have copywriters, creative directors, art directors. Well with a company like us, we run relatively lean and so I wear all those hats. Now I have a creative team. I have art directors and a creative directors that I can work with, but I find that I'm doing a lot more creative direction that I would at an agency. I'm doing quite a bit of the copywriting and editing, if someone else is writing it. But to get tot hat point there's a lot of strategy and thought that goes into it and I essentially set and lead those strategy meetings. And not just our team but the business leaders. So each of those businesses has a general manager, has a vice president that runs that business on the inside. And so we get their insight and their expertise on what they're seeing happening in their stores or in their market, and use that just as much as we use our own input.
Download transcript