Episode 54: Marketing YOU: Selling your Internship Story
Episode Descriptor
In this episode, Kelly Callahan-Poe is joined by former intern—and now full-time colleague—Imogen Stephens to unpack how to turn your internship into career momentum. From building a “Batman utility belt” of hard and soft skills to crafting a personal brand statement that sets you apart, they share practical tips for boosting your resume, standing out on LinkedIn, and talking confidently about your experience.
Episode Recap
In this episode, Kelly Callahan-Poe sits down with her former intern, Imogen Stephens, to talk about transforming an internship into a powerful career launchpad. They discuss why internships are more than just résumé fillers—they’re opportunities to test-drive your career path, build real-world skills, and grow your professional network. Imogen shares how her own internship experience confirmed her interest in agency life, uncovered hidden skills, and helped her become the “go-to” person in specific areas, making her stand out to future employers.
The conversation dives into how to capture and showcase your internship experience—whether your work was client-facing or behind the scenes—and translate it into compelling LinkedIn updates, targeted resume bullets, and a personal brand statement you can confidently share in interviews. Kelly and Imogen also explore how to differentiate yourself in a crowded job market, from creating a professional LinkedIn profile that acts as your digital billboard to designing a resume that wins the six-second scan. Packed with actionable tips, this episode is a must-listen for any student or young professional ready to sell their internship story and market themselves with intention.
Episode Transcript
Episode 54: Marketing YOU: Selling your Internship Story
Kelly Callahan-Poe
Welcome to Two Marketing Moms, the podcast with real world advice for young professionals building careers in marketing and advertising. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe, and today’s episode is called Marketing YOU: Selling Your Internship Story. If you’re wondering how to stand out on LinkedIn, boost your resume or talk confidently about your experience, this one’s for you. Joining me is Imogen Stephens, my former intern and now full-time colleague. Let’s dive in, Imogen. We know internships are important, but why do they really matter?
Imogen Stephens
There’re a few reasons, and I’m sure we’ll go over all of them today, but one obvious one is it just helps you clarify your career direction, discover what lights you up and what doesn’t it. It can also give you content for your resume, so you can land that full time position after it, and you can beef up your LinkedIn so people can discover you. And the internship also helps you grow your network and reputation, and will ultimately help you make those connections, earn references and open the door for the future.
Kelly
I like that. I think too many students treat internships like a check box of something they need to do, and not really a launch pad in terms of taking advantage of all the things that you will learn in an internship. And I think number one interns take that real world classroom experience and they put it in the real world, and you have real outcomes, and that’s something that you can talk about on your resume, and we’re going to talk about that in a couple minutes. But really, to me, the more important thing is really building those hard skills which are kind of like the tools and the platforms and the soft skills which are harder, you kind of already have, you have them or you don’t, things like communication and collaboration that matter. And Amos Gelb is runs the Washington Media Institute, and he co-hosted a podcast that we did together called Professionalism for Interns— he calls it your Batman Utility Belt. It’s this idea of you got your Batman utility belt, and your goal is to add on as many different skills to your tool belt, because you never know what skills you might need to pull out. You know, whatever the project or the goal I need Excel, I need Canva, I need this. I need that. And so, I love that analogy, because it’s a really, a great way for interns to kind of think about how important the internships are in terms of the skills that they’re learning and how they can apply them. Any other thoughts?
Imogen
Your LinkedIn is sort of your Girl Scouts Badge. And you kind of get a badge every time you earn a skill. But I like the utility belt for the application because it’s something you need to keep leveraging, whereas I think a Girl Scout Badge is check mark you did it, which is that LinkedIn component of the internship,
Kelly
And you get a little badge, I like that. So, what do you think is the most underrated benefit of an internship?
Imogen
I think it’s professional development. And I think that’s something that a lot of students don’t want to admit because they’d like to think it’s intuitive. But when you’re in your undergraduate classes, that’s not something you get to really exercise too much when you’re talking with your peers in a group project, you’re not communicating the same way you would in a professional workplace setting. And so, learning how to communicate effectively within those professional teams and also internally and then externally when you’re client facing is super important, and proving to an employer that you can be trusted to be professional and effectively communicate the needs and deliverables will take you far when you have to go in that next step and actually do it.
Kelly
I love that. I would also add the friends that you make and the relationships that you start to build, I think that’s important too, right? So, tell me, when you worked with me as an intern at Williams Whittle, how did that help you kind of test drive your career path?
Imogen
So at least in my undergraduate experience, I think the professors really frame marketing as either you go agency side, or you go in-house. And a lot of the examples and project prompts we get are from that in-house perspective. So, I was left a little curious about what really agency life entailed, and so when I could intern with you at Williams Whittle, that was the perfect opportunity to explore that a little more, and I found that I was actually really drawn to the dynamic pace and how you touch a variety of different clients, and just the dynamic nature of sometimes you’re doing the creative, sometimes you’re doing media buying, and you’re all over the place, and I enjoy that environment. So, it sorts of confirmed my curiosities and that this is the path I wanted to go on. I wanted to share a quick story of my roommate who had sort of an opposite experience, but she was a business major studying entrepreneurship, and she did a on an internship in Amsterdam and for a social media company, came back and decided she did not even want to be a business major. So even if it confirms that this is not your path, that’s just as valuable as confirming you’re on the right track.
Kelly
Let’s capture the internship experience. And so right after your internship ends, but before you forget everything, what you really need to do is kind of reflect on what you did, what you achieved, and the skills that you’ve gained. You need to identify one key challenge you overcame and what you learned. You need to name one success that you’re proud of and why it mattered. And I think on the hard and soft skills, sometimes that’s hard to think about yourself in terms of, what did I really gain during this internship? The hard skills are easy, but the soft skills are harder to capture. And so, I recommend asking your internship manager, your coworkers, other interns, and even friends and family, because they’ll tell you if you’re if your leadership material, or if you’re a strong writer or presenter, for example, and people may be recommending you on LinkedIn, and that’s another place to look at as well. And there’s a lot of online skills assessments that are out there. Some are free, and some not so much. And the one that I have done, personally, that my sons have also done, is called the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation, and they have an online skills assessment. It’s not testing your interests or your personality traits or an IQ test. It’s really an actual skills assessment. And what they say is, is that people’s natural abilities remain stable, really, throughout your life. But it tests everything from kind of your basic knowledge of vocabulary and math to manual dexterity, to spatial recognition. And that’s really where I found out that my number one skill is ideation. So, I’m obviously in the right in the in the right career. And my sons took it in high school, and I recommend doing it for kids in high school as well, maybe junior year or for sure, by the senior year, because they really found it helpful in clarifying what majors they should focus on and majors and minors to pursue based on their strengths and interests. And so that’s kind of where I would start in terms of capturing the internship experience. Are there any hard and soft skills that you gained from your internship experience that surprised you, Imogen?
Imogen
Yeah, I gained a lot, and I feel like some of them I didn’t realize I had gained until I was starting to work full time, and I was like, oh, I’m calling back on this. And I didn’t even realize, but some of them were obvious, and you might know, going into your internship, this company uses HubSpot, I will probably learn how to do that. I’m an Excel intern, I’m going to learn how to build out a data table. But there’s some things that might come your way that you are skilled at, and you won’t have the chance if you don’t take them up on it. So, Kelly kind of pushed me into a few skills, which I’m grateful for. But at Williams Whittle, I was asked to write text notification or SMS copy for one of our clients, and I discovered I had a natural knack for it and received a lot of positive feedback internally and from the client. Granted, this was pre ChatGPT days, so the chat might be able to do it better now, but I became specifically asked and requested to do similar projects like that going forward and from that client. And so that kind of became my thing within Williams Whittle that I could do copy well, I could be trusted to execute there. Similarly, I found that I was pretty good at transforming our data metrics. With any campaign, there’s going to be metrics to show how successful it was, and we often show that back to the client show our value. And so, I found I was pretty good at transforming that into tables or even written sentences and being able to report that back to the client. So those are two skills that going into my internship, weren’t even on my radar, but now they’re things that I sort of advertise as my skill set in my job.
Kelly
Absolutely. And I think that’s one thing that’s really important when you talk about an internship, you kind of want to be known for something, and so you became known as basically like a data analyst, because you had that ability to take raw data, charts and graphs and interpret them in beautiful graphs that really help people understand (our clients), understand what that data means. And the idea of becoming excellent at writing SMS texts really kind of also translated into social media, copy, right, and other forms of copy. So, a lot of those things, you became the go to person for a lot of different areas and so that’s important for your internship, is how can you be the go-to person for XYZ?
And that’s important to think about as you’re doing your internship, and then kind of looking back, what was I the go to person for, and then kind of amplifying that, right? So, let’s talk about how you build those key points that you’re going to highlight for your internship and use them on LinkedIn and for your resume. And so, what I recommend is that you write down, from the internship that you just completed, write down three to four different bullets using action verbs. What did you do? What did you achieve, and what skills did you build?
So, let’s move on to the fun part, the stuff that I love the most, which is about defining your personal brand. And so, we’ve looked back at your internship experience, and now it’s time to kind of look forward and define your personal brand. I feel like in our industry, especially as a marketer, you really must treat yourself as a brand. You’re your own client when you’re thinking about your professional life, right? And Fast Company calls it the “CEO of me”, and so why is building a personal brand important? Imogen, do you have some thoughts?
Imogen
Well, it not only makes you more confident going into these interviews, and you’re confident in your values because you have this statement that you can pull out and show people, but it also shows other people that you know what your skill set is and you’re ready to dive in at the ask.
Kelly
I like that. So, the next step is really to write your personal brand statement. And I think it should be one sentence, 10 words or less. This is your personal billboard that, because people can’t remember much more than that, right? So, what is that one thing that you offer that no one else does or that makes you unique? And let me give you three examples from my job of three things that I use when I talk about what makes you unique. So, on the advertising side, I say I help nonprofits tell stories that move people to act. For my podcast, the Two Marketing Moms Podcast, I say I guide marketers with 50 plus episodes to accelerate career growth. I also talk about the book reviews that I do, and I say I distill key insights from 80 plus business books and podcasts. So those are some ideas of your personal brands statement, and it takes a while, and it’s challenging to write something in 10 words or less, but it’s something that you want to be able to recite in an interview, and be able to recite from heart, and you want to be able to utilize that in all of your social media, your resume, etc.
So, you know the next step is really to prove it. You’ve got your brand statement. Your brand is just words, unless you back it up, and so you must show the support points for that statement that you’ve come up with. So, what is the evidence that you live up to that brand statement? Is it projects or campaigns that you worked on, results, metrics or impact that could be engagement and open rates and reach and that sort of thing, supervisor feedback or testimonials or quotes, you know, of course, links to portfolios, white papers or published work. And so, your resume and your LinkedIn profile should reflect this proof. So, make sure that each bullet point supports your personal brand.
There was a quote about there’s a quote that said, “decide who you are and bleed it”. And I love that quote because even though it’s a little graphic, it helps you to understand that that personal brand is really kind of who you are, and it’s going to change and evolve over time. But that really helps you with your focus area, for your resume, for LinkedIn, for your social media presence, and when you talk about yourself and when you promote yourself.
Can you give any examples of internship experiences that turned into great resume bullets for you?
Imogen
Yeah, I have quite a few, and I tried to diversify them a little, so I’ll share my top four. So, the first one is analyze campaign performance using Google Analytics and created summary reports for client presentations. And if you’re using one of these platforms or software like Google Analytics or HubSpot, be sure to name it, because they’re going to be scanning to see if you can seamlessly start using the platforms they’re using. Another one is organized shared project folders, improving team workflow and asset access, assisted in developing and scheduling weekly social media content, contributing to 25% increase in engagement, and then it became requested by client for compelling SMS copywriting.
Kelly
Perfect. So that that’s very helpful. I think one of the challenges a lot of students feel like their internship experience might be more behind the scenes. And so how could, how do interns kind of talk about their experience when it’s really behind the scenes ground work?
Imogen
Yeah, I think it’s important to just draw the connection from what you’re doing behind the scenes to what became client facing or the deliverable. So, I know at Williams Whittle a lot of times we would have to do some research on prospective clients to prepare us or learn about competitors and have the best-informed material before we go in and pitch. So, an example for that could be built out detailed competitor research that shaped the client’s campaign pitch. So that last part is showing how what you did behind the scenes came forward.
Another one is if you had positive feedback. I know we touched a little on that earlier, but if you don’t have those deliverables, you’re not posting on social media, you don’t have those metrics to pull, use that positive feedback, so received direct praise from client for engaging copy was requested, and was requested by name, for follow up projects due to strong execution. And then my last little tip is not all the impact is external. So. You’re doing more of those internal operations or just keeping the team on track and organized, you can say things like created templates that streamlined reporting, saving the Team X hours weekly, and you may be able to make up that hours you can guesstimate, because that’s not something you’re necessarily going to be testing in an internship. But or similarly organized campaign assets in SharePoint, improving access and team coordination. So just showing how those behind-the-scenes things manifest to the final product. I think that’s fine, if you have that.
Kelly
That makes a lot of sense. Well, let’s close this out with connecting the dots. You know, how do we make it easy for employers to see your value? And we’re going to talk first about LinkedIn. And I like to think of LinkedIn as, you know, your digital billboard, right? So, the most important thing is your about section that has your one-line personal branding statement, right? And then, of course, under your experience, you need, under each job that you have, you have to make sure, or internship, that you have three to four bullet points with your action or results, your action of what you did with an action verb, and then the support points that showed any that showed you did it. You can also include any media. Upload examples or links to the work. And then making sure that your photo is professionally shot. I do see a lot of recent grads having the picture of themselves in their in their graduation outfit, and I think that doesn’t necessarily position you as a future employee of a company. You don’t want to be known as a student anymore. You want to be known as a professional. So, it should be professionally shot. It should be close in of your face with a, you know, nice, generic background, etc., and a good shot. And then your background that’s above your photo is also very important, because it also should highlight your personal branding in some, some way, shape or form. So, I might highlight, when I worked at Williams Whittle, I talked about our tagline ideas that generate change for nonprofits. And I might integrate, you know, my podcast logo as well with that. But you know, it would be good for students to show themselves during a meeting or presenting or doing something action, you know, action oriented, not just necessarily like a skyline of where they’re going to college, right? And so, I think there’s a lot of opportunities on LinkedIn that students can use to make their digital billboard really represent their brand. It’s easy to scan. It’s clean, and it’s not going to include everything that you have on your resume, right? It’s an abbreviated version of what’s on your resume. Any other thoughts on LinkedIn?
Imogen
I’m just glad you brought up the sort of background of LinkedIn. I feel like that’s wasted real estate for a lot of people. And even if you don’t have that action shot of you presenting a pitch, you can customize that template. I know Kelly’s done that through the year. She has her podcast, and then Williams Whittle or, like you said, the tagline. If you don’t have a full-fledged, developed brand, you can also put your contact information or a couple adjectives that you want to be known for, organized strategist. So, play with that and have it be a compliment to your small bio, because people might not even get past your bio and start looking at your experience if they’re not impressed with what’s up top.
Kelly
That’s true and some good points. So, let’s move on to the resume. And I looked this up because I thought about, you know, piles of resumes that I get in and so for any job that I might post, I could get anywhere from 75 to 200 resumes. That’s a lot of resumes to go through for an employer. So how do you make your resume stand out? And the stat that I found is that employers spend an average of six seconds reviewing your resume. That is very little time. So how do you stand out? And so that’s really important for interns or even young professionals, to think about, how can you win the six second scan, right? And so, for me, that is a strong headline, your branding statement, your clean layout, prioritizing relevant experience. You probably need to be able to use basic keywords in case there’s an AI scan, right? You probably need to have a resume that’s targeted at that job and position. Don’t forget your cover letter, right? Use consistent action driven bullet points. And you know, at this stage of the game, if you’re starting out, your resume really should just be one page, so try to keep it to one page. Page. I have some other thoughts. But what are your thoughts on the resume and winning the six second scan?
Imogen
I think the biggest thing is, you know, you want to organize it so it’s easy for them to find those key points. If they’re only looking at it for six seconds. You don’t want three of them for to be the employee, potential employer looking for your education to see what your Bachelor’s is in. And I know there’s a lot of beautiful resume templates out there on Canva, but I’ve found from college, and just general advice is usually those boring looking ones do the best because you’re not distracted by all the embellishments. They’re looking only at the text of the things you want them to see.
Kelly
I want to argue against that point. Okay, specifically for advertising and marketing, our job is to be creative, right? And so, I like the four-color resumes. I like seeing a photo of the potential person that I might bring on my team. I think it’s differentiating. I like it when people are branding their resume with a color scheme, right? Or they’re organizing it in such a way that it makes it visually appealing to me. That shows that they can see just like you would in an advertising and look in an ad, they can see and understand what’s clean, not just black and white. So, for me, personally, I’m all for the four-color resume with the photo, but a lot of people will tell you no, and a lot of colleges will tell you no, especially because the AI is trying to pull out only the words and that sort of thing. But I think for advertising, you may want to think a little bit differently, or maybe you have different resumes for different types of things. So, I think that’s kind of an added thing that I would look at considering what, what you’re applying for.
Imogen
And Kelly, as an employer, and someone who reviews these resumes, what are your thoughts on having personal interests and GPA for those fresh grads and people still in their undergrad?
Kelly
It’s funny because I was talking to my sons about this, I don’t really care about your interests, sorry, and I don’t care about your GPA I and I don’t necessarily care where you went to school. I know that sounds crazy, a lot of people do if you’re going to apply for a job at a big bank or a major consulting firm, they do. It really depends on where you go. If you’re going to an amazing college, of course, you should highlight that. Do you need to show your GPA? And I mean, unless it’s a 4.0 above, I wouldn’t show it. No one’s going to ask you what your GPA is. I’ve never been asked what my GPA was and you also asked about interests, unless your interests really kind of are related to what it is that you’re doing. So, for example, I’m in advertising, but I also have my podcast that’s relevant, and I also read business books for fun, and review them. That’s relevant, right? But if it’s not relevant, I feel like that’s kind of wasted space. Now, does it mean that you can’t mention these interests if they work during an interview to demonstrate that you’re a fully rounded person, right? But I don’t think there’s space or time on a resume where, in those six seconds that you’d want to waste your time having, get someone get, you know, hooked up on some interest that you might have.
Imogen
I know I’ve reviewed a few friends resumes, and it will be like, oh, in my free time, I do yoga. Unless you’re applying to a yoga company, I don’t think they need to know.
Kelly
Yeah, all right. Well, that’s it for today’s episode of Two Marketing Moms. I hope this helped you see your internship not as a one-time experience, but as a building block for your brand and your personal future. To learn more about this topic, please check out twomarketingmoms.com we have another episode called Developing Your Personal brand, Episode 17, that may be worth checking out. And if you want to share your personal branding statement, tag me on LinkedIn or on to marketing moms Instagram account and let me know. And we’d love to see it and maybe even give you some input until next time, keep marking yourself with intention.
