Content Marketing is Key

It is hard to believe that I have finished the fourth week of my marketing internship at Fulton & Roark! This past week Co-Founder Kevin Keller was away, making it just fellow intern Zack Schutt and myself in the Winston-Salem office. However, that did not mean we did not have anything to do. One of the lessons learned in my entrepreneurship class is the importance of having multiple sales channels. While one of our main goals is to drive e-commerce sales, I recently had the opportunity to speak with our retailers at brick and mortar stores to work on content marketing pieces.

This past week for the Fulton & Roark blog, I interviewed two of our retailers from two very different parts of the country to showcase how awesome their stores are and how happy we are to have them as retailers. Interviewing and just talking to people, in general, is an important skill that many avoid developing because of the anxiety around it. However, I do feel fortunate that I have had opportunities to develop this skill. This skill was really developed in my Foundations of Entrepreneurship class this past semester. For our semester-long project, we had to do market research on our business idea which meant my group had to work together to conduct 200 interviews and receive a variety of feedback on our idea.

While interviewing these two retailers were not as intense as interviewing 200 people, that was certainly great practice for interviewing strangers. Both of these interviews went incredibly well as I spoke to Jon and Christine of REVOLVR Menswear with stores in Bozeman, Montana and Bend, Oregon and Gary of M. Dumas & Sons in Charleston, South Carolina. During the interview we discussed trends in fashion, unique aspects of their store, and what they liked about Fulton & Roark. It was also interesting to hear how while both the stores have similar approaches and goals, things have to be done differently based on who they are targeting and also because of where they are geographically. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to these retails as not only did I learn lessons about style but they also helped me understand what running a local business is like.

Interviewing is a skill that while I always want to improve in, is something I felt very confident in, even leading up to these interviews. Conducting these interviews helped teach me a lot about content marketing. Coming into this internship, I understood content marketing as promoting your product or service through materials such as pictures, blogs about products, and videos. At this point in the internship, I have learned that this promotion can be even more subtle than I initially thought. Showcasing our retailers is great for the stores but also great for Fulton & Roark as it helps build credibility.

Being at Fulton & Roark, I have learned a lot of new things about marketing that have helped me feel better prepared for the future but some of the most important moments have been learning how to use the skills I already have in different ways. Interviewing and talking with retailers was one of these incredibly valuable experiences that I hope to hold onto along with all the other things I have learned this summer.

Written by Erik Schultz, #WakeEntrepreneur, Class of 2020