-: 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.