This summer, I was the Digital Marketing Intern at Ulta Beauty in their Ecommerce department! In addition to many intern-specific learning opportunities, I worked on a 10 week project centered around Ulta’s Digital Marketing Partnership Program. This program allows brands to use their media budgets targeting the Ulta 34 million active loyalty customers and modeled audiences from this. Throughout the summer we launched just over 70 campaigns with $3 million in ad spend. Each Brand Partner came with different objectives, goals, and expectations which kept us constantly busy and learning. Being a part of this program was an incredible opportunity to be able to experiment with building media plans on multiple channels (programmatic, social, affiliate, search, YouTube, etc.) to tackle determined objectives.
In addition to assisting with the DMPP, I created a weekly update for the program to keep all internal stakeholders, such as merchandising and analytics teams, aware of what campaigns are active, what launches are happening that month, and what due dates they might need to know. I also made case study decks from past campaigns to contextualize the program for brand partners considering launching a campaign. I also participated in rolling out the Buy Online Pinkup in Store initiative by sourcing and implementing utm tags for conversion pages as well as planning marketing efforts to support BOPIS.
Through my internship at Ulta Beauty, I learned a lot about retail and building consumer focused marketing. Retail is a fast moving industry and the beauty space kicks that into over drive, there’s always something new and exciting happening that we as marketers need to notice and capitalize on. I was also able to experience much more of account management than I have with more analytical roles in the past. And finally, being an Ulta intern has given me the opportunity to use enterprise thinking and fully understand how every project plays a part in the overall business.
Courtney Cheevers 