My Internship at Office Supplies Ireland

Hi, my name is Jamie and on the 2nd of January this year I started my internship at Office Supplies Ireland. Four months later, my internship here is coming to an end. I've learned a lot of valuable skills here at OSI and gained valuable experience. 

Social Media

My first few weeks at Office Supplies Ireland I primarily focused on running their social media channels. I was given the login to OSI's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages. Before I started posting to these platforms I failiarised myself with OSI's usual posting pattern to each platform. My first ever post was a 'Happy New Year' post to wish OSI's customers well heading into 2023.

The quality in the graphics used in my posts throughout my time at Office Supplies increased over time. 

After my first post, I decided I wanted to learn how to create my own graphics for Office Supplies instead of downloading free images off of Google. For the rest of my time here, I decided to use the free online photo editing platform called Photopea. It's like a free version of Photoshop and was really easy to use. I downloaded free fonts to use in my posts and you can see these same fonts used in all of the Office Supplies Ireland's post throughout my time here. 

Above is my first ever image I posted promoting a product. I downloaded the image off the Office Supplies Ireland website and turned it into a PNG file. I then added the fonts I downloaded. I also turned the OSI logo into a PNG file and added it to the image. I used a consistent theme throughout my time at Office Supplies Ireland. I used the same font for most of my posts, and nearly every post had a PNG product image and PNG logo image. 

Above is another graphic I created. Here I experimented with Drop Shadow on the images, and also added an array of images of products sold at OSI at the bottom of the image, in a banner style. 

Promoting products wasn't the only thing I done on the social media channels. I also created promotional graphics for other things, such as OSI's other social platforms. See graphic below. 

Towards the end of my stay here, the graphics got a lot better. I decided to change the color scheme I was using and make the posts look more lively and fun. See some other graphics I created and posted below:

I also came up with relevant hastags which I included in most of my posts. Hashtags would be relevant to what the post is about. 

I noticed posts about Special Days or Big Events always got more interactions than posts promoting products. It was always interesting to check the insights of what was and what wasn't performing well on the different Social Media platforms. 

For Instagram, I tried to post more about Special Days and Events rather than promoting products. On Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I promoted the products a lot more. 

Blogs

Posting to Social Media isn't the only thing I done at Office Supplies Ireland. While here, I also learned how to upload blogs to their website. At first it was a lot to take in but over time I quickly learned how to do it. To post a blog, I used the platform known as Evo Admin. Here, I would create a thumbnail for the blog, come up with a URL Key anda title. I would then write a piece on whatever the blog was about. I would try to include as many images as possible. I also learned how to hyperlink text. This involved linking products sold on the OSI website to text included in my blog. Differnet blog posts I made include a St. Patrick's Day blog, National Cereal Day blog and more. 

I really enjoyed researching National Days to see what I could make blog posts about. Making blogs gave me a break from social media and other tasks I carried out which I will talk about also. 

Here is a link to the St. Patricks Day Blog I created.

Email Marketing

My favorite thing I learned at Office Supplies Ireland is email marketing. I was shown in my second or third week at OSI how to create an email. I used a platform called Cube Marketing. Making emails are really difficult and time consuming but over time I became pretty good at it. There was a lot of template swapping and changing. Each week I came up with a new theme for the email, as I sent one a week. Different themes I used include Desking products, Seating Products, Technology products, St. Patricks Day deals, Featured Product of the Month, Sales of the Month and much more. 

After I had a theme and template chosen, I then chose the products I would include. To add a product to an email, I learned that I had to go to the suppliers catalogue and type in the product code. Once that's done, the product would load into the email with it's former price. Then, I had to update the current price and also add the correct product URL to link the product from it's website.

I sent the email each week to over 4,500 contacts. At the end of the week, I would check the email report. The email report included insights. These insights include the amount of links clicked and total unsubscribes. 

The emails I sent had a lot of links clicked. A lot of them had 100+ links clicked. The unsubscribe rate was always low also.

Above is a thumbnail image I created for my 'Seating' email. I created an image each week for the emails and the dimensions of the image had to be 1920 x 1080.

Google Ads

A big part of my internship was Google Ads. Office Supplies Ireland already had some running campaigns and I was tasked to make some tweaks/edits throughout my time here. 

I always made sure the optimisation scores for each ad was 100% and also made sure the ad strength for each ad was always either 'good' or 'excellent' and avoided 'average' or 'poor'. 

Throughout my time here I also sat in on calls with Google Ad Strategists. These calls were very informative and helped me learn about the different tools on the Google Ads platform. 

I was also able to create my own trial campaign ad. It was interesting to see how it was running over time and to see how many clicks it got. 

Google Ads was a big part of my internship as I had never really done any work on it prior to my time at Office Supplies Ireland

End

Overall I'm really happy with my time at Office Supplies Ireland. I gained really valuable skills and experience at Office Supplies Ireland and met some great people. The things I learned about Email Marketing, Google Ads and posting to Social Media in general will really help me in my future career and I am forever grateful for this wonderful opportunity! The people here were very nice and helpful!