Working in a Datacentre – from an intern’s perspective

 For any graduate looking to attain employment and succeed in the workplace, it is expected that an internship is completed in order to understand the main drivers of how a  business operates as well as gaining an insight into what makes the industry tick and how to work with people in a professional environment. Having recently completed an MA in Marketing, I wanted to apply some of the key theoretical elements which I had learned in the classroom to the B2B technology industry.

When the opportunity arose to work at the LDeX Group, which provides datacentre, network and satellite services to different verticals including the media, financial and enterprise sectors, I was keen to find out what is required to market and promote these services and learn about the buyer and vendor cycles in the industry as well as to how best to try and align these in order to deliver on leads.
With this in mind, I would like to share some insights into what my internship entails and how I look forward to building on the skills, knowledge and experience that LDeX has equipped me with to progress in my future career.

Conducting industry research

One of the key tasks which I am expected to partake in is to conduct industry research and analysis, learning about key market trends and identifying key companies in our target verticals to target. Following this, the team would tailor campaigns based on these insights by getting relevant content out to our audiences in new and creative ways and at the appropriate times and set metrics as to how it is expected to perform. Having to report on these key findings in meetings has given me the confidence to not only gain analytical skills, but also to have the confidence to undertake a task from start to finish and to communicate the results internally to the team.
Being from Armenia, one of the biggest challenges for me was trying to overcome the language barrier by enriching my English vocabulary with terms and phrases which are used in the business environment. Working at LDeX has helped me push boundaries and learn different technical terms such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), cloud computing, streaming media, video encoding and Over the top (OTT).

Events

Over the course of my internship, I have had the opportunity to attend various marketing and technology expositions in London, namely Data Centre World, Cloud World Forum and the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference which took place in Earls Court in March of this year. I found these to be really interesting and got to partake in various seminars around how to overcome Distributed Denial of Service attacks, learning about company case studies and how to attract more leads through social media. As well as this, I had the opportunity to network with some of those working in the industry and learned about where our company was positioned in relation to our competitors.
As I’m from a marketing background, I naturally enjoyed the TFM&A conference as I got to learn about different marketing automation systems and how they can help businesses generate leads through automating menial tasks and helping businesses get on with what they do best. These events have given me the self-confidence to be able to communicate what our company does and how LDeX can help with business services. I certainly look forward to being able to attend more expositions and networking in the future.

Team Meetings

On a weekly basis, I am expected to participate in the team marketing meeting where we reflect on how our campaigns have been performing against performance metrics and brainstorm ways as to how we should align our prospective customers’ needs with our business objectives going forwards. This is quite a fun activity as everyone gets to take part and chat through their ideas about coming up with new and creative ways for content to be communicated to our different audiences. I feel that my contribution is taken into account and that it adds value to the business, helping me to build on my marketing knowledge and again build on my industry knowledge.

Customer service

A company’s website is often the first point of contact between an organisation and its relevant publics, so it is imperative to not only have all the key information that is needed on the website, but to have a web chat facility where any customer questions can be answered in real time. I share this task with my colleague and we both answer queries on a daily basis. Attention to detail, friendliness and information accuracy are key to this so that the organisation’s reputation for excellent customer service is maintained at all times.

Media monitoring and research

An exciting PR task which I undertake as part of the Marketing and Communications team is help out with media monitoring where I track where and when our articles and blogs have been published. This is essential in keeping track of what is being said about the company enabling the team to make sure that the all information written about the company is on message and on brand. Key publications which we have been featured in include TechWeekEurope, Data Centre Solutions, Data Center Dynamics, Bloomberg and Reuters to name but a few. I have also also been involved with identifying key publications across our different verticals which we should target, maintaining and updating databases.

Preparing Reports

Last but not least, something which I do both on a daily and weekly basis is produce analytics reports using Google Analytics which gives insights into statistics about web page visits and traffic. From this, the marketing team deduces where the peaks and troughs are and feeds this information back to the team.
In general, this internship has been very useful for me in not only learning what it is like to work in a high tech company, but I feel that the communications skills, industry knowledge and practical experience which I have gained will help open many doors for my future career path.
Armenuhi Ayvazyan, Marketing and Communications Intern at LDeX Group