In 2021, Chloe Earl received a bachelor’s degree in communication studies with a concentration in public relations, and a minor in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“I was always passionate about social media and marketing communications,” said Chloe. “Throughout college, I took three internships based in Charlotte to build my experience on my portfolio.”

During her first internship for a small startup, Chloe learned how to create a website, schedule and create social media content, write blog posts, use WordPress, build an online following through strategic social media engagement, and more. During her next two internships, both at small digital marketing agencies, she was given more experience developing social media brand strategies on Instagram and TikTok, and the latter internship offered her the opportunity to share career advice and inspirational posts through the company’s Instagram account.

Expanding into the digital marketing world

Chloe’s internships helped her accrue plenty of social media experience to supplement the knowledge she gained during her university years. But there was still more she wanted to know about digital marketing — a lot more.

“I decided I wanted to learn more about social media analytics,” said Chloe. “Once I learned the art and technique of creating content, I became curious about how to track one’s social media presence. I wanted to better understand KPIs, learn how to gain followers, and get experience with tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads.”

This desire to dig deeper into digital marketing analytics prompted Chloe to enroll in The Digital Marketing Boot Camp at UNC-Chapel Hill — and today, she couldn’t be more grateful for this decision. “It’s mind-blowing to see the amount of material that I learned in six months as opposed to my time in college,” shared Chloe.

From the start, Chloe enjoyed how the classroom experience allowed her to connect with other people and bounce ideas off from other classmates. On Mondays and Wednesdays, classes started at around 6:00 p.m., so Chloe would wake up at 8:00 a.m. and complete the majority of her internship work. With shorter classes on Saturdays, Chloe used her extra time to attend office hours and ensure she completely understood the previous week’s material.

Learning digital marketing material through an automation project

One of Chloe’s favorite boot camp projects focused on marketing automation. Her team was tasked with developing the complete user experience journey for a furniture company. If a user purchased a table from the retailer, Chloe’s team would then develop the full map of that purchase experience.

“Let’s say the user sees a paid ad for the table on Facebook,” explained Chloe. “They click on the ad and are brought to the main company website, which leads to two options. The user can either completely leave the site without purchasing the table, or they can click on the rewards page to get discounts which they can use to complete the purchase.”

Next, Chloe’s team had to determine user behaviors and attributes. With Facebook Ads Manager, she could enter an audience of males between ages 25 and 50 to determine income levels, behaviors, and personality types. With this information, her team could customize the Facebook ad appearing for that particular user, and track click-through rates to understand how well the ad was performing.

Building soft skills to enhance her career

In addition to gaining new technical skills through homework and project work, Chloe was able to develop her presentation skills throughout the boot camp. “Even though I’m a communications major, public speaking has always been something I struggled with,” said Chloe. “As a Content Marketing Specialist, there are times when I have to give clients deliverables on how to improve their social media and email marketing tactics. The boot camp helped me gain confidence and learn how to present these deliverables through group presentations and our final project.”

Chloe’s boot camp experience also helped her sharpen her teamwork and time management skills, which are invaluable assets in any professional environment — especially in the deadline-driven digital marketing world.

Toward the end of her time in the boot camp, Chloe reached out to Enventys Partners, a product development, crowdfunding, and e-commerce marketing firm. “I applied there because the responsibilities in the job post matched much of what I had been doing all throughout the boot camp,” mentioned Chloe.

Chloe started at Enventys as a Content Marketing Specialist performing a number of key tasks, including writing backer updates for various clients and posting them to Kickstarter or Indiegogo, as well as monitoring clients’ Facebook channels and analyzing social media metrics. About three months later, she received the opportunity to both assist the email marketing team in building and scheduling emails in MailChimp and analyze campaign results by monitoring click-through rates and overall conversions. While Chloe was relatively new to email marketing, she leaned on her past experiences using Google Analytics and MailChimp in the boot camp — and was able to hit the ground running.

Looking forward, Chloe anticipates continuing her social media work in a Content Marketing Supervisor or director position. Chloe is also eager to bring her content to larger audiences and is working to improve the copy editing and marketing skills gained through her internships, the boot camp, and her current job to reach the next level of her digital marketing career.

If you’re looking to make your career dreams a reality, try UNC-Chapel Hill Boot Camps in coding, data analytics, digital marketing, tech project management, and product management.