Student Internship Highlight: Lauren Cervera
Advertising graduate student Lauren Cervera recently finished a nine-month growth marketing internship with LoudCrowd, an Austin tech startup. LoudCrowd is a CRM software that analyzes customer insights for brands including Steve Madden, Gymshark, and Boohoo. Lauren enjoyed getting a taste of the tech world and “the ins and outs of growing a start-up organization” while learning how client brands leveraged their customer marketing and content.
When I asked Lauren about her main responsibilities during her time at LoudCrowd, she shared that:
On top of managing our social channels to build brand awareness, I created digital ads, marketing emails, and website copy. I learned Google ads to track monthly ad spend budgets and keywords for SEO and worked alongside the client strategist team to build case studies. Despite it being more business oriented I still got to be creative when it came to problem-solving, designing assets, and creating content for social!
Lauren believes that a strategic branding marketing course she took during her first semester at UT helped her in this role because it allowed her to learn about brand positioning. She said:
When working for a startup you have a lot of room to help develop and define the brand. I applied what I learned from the course to create a clear brand message for all departments to be on the same page when marketing the product that differentiated us from competitors.
Lauren’s favorite part of her internship was learning what it takes to be a product marketer by working one-on-one with LoudCrowd's CMO. She also enjoyed getting to work on a large team in an office setting. She loved being “a part of the office culture” and remains close with her former coworkers.
Additionally, Lauren shared how this internship served as an eye-opening experience and left her feeling more capable in areas that she would not have considered to be her strong suit. She told me that she never viewed herself as a writer and has historically been better with visual aspects. By the end of her internship, she was feeling differently about her writing skills.
Under this role, I was able to strengthen my writing skills by writing copy for the website, and digital ads, and researching articles about digital marketing to build the SEO content engine. I’m currently in the Texas Creative program and I’ve always wanted to be an art director, but now I’m leaning more towards copywriting with my newfound skill. I think being a versatile creative will help open more opportunities!
Lastly, Lauren had some advice to share with other students who are seeking internships. She advises other students to be open to all opportunities, even if they are not “exactly what you’re looking for,” because there is always the possibility of meeting new people and learning essential skills that will help you in the future.
