Justin Dorgan, BAS Digital Marketing class of 2021
Describe your role at Singletrack Cycles and Perpetual Motion.
I have been working at Singletrack Cycles as a Sales Lead for the last four years and I have been working as Amazon Account and Marketing Specialist for an outdoor rep company called Perpetual Motion for just over a year. At Singletrack Cycles, I am responsible for running the sales floor which includes being the guide for the customer, answering questions, completing sales, making sure the shop looks appealing, and providing the best customer service and experience.
At Perpetual Motion, I manage the Amazon accounts of the companies we represent. These companies include Gregory Backpacks, K2 Inline Skates, K2 Ice Skates, Atlas Snowshoes, and Tubbs Snowshoes. I upload the products, photos, I draft the bullet points and product descriptions, A+ content, run ads, fix issues, manage marketing budgets, and create marketplace pages.
Working at Singletrack Cycles has helped me see how much impact social media and running ads in the right places can have in bringing people to our shop. We have customers from all over the King County area. Many of them found us through looking online for a bike shop and seeing our bike shop appear at the top of the search engine. Above all, the importance of making our business known is essential to the success of our business.
The work that I do at Perpetual Motion in managing accounts and advertising helps me grow my skills in Excel, managing databases, uploading products, analyzing consumer behavior through data, forecasting, making marketing plans, online customer service, and finding creative ways to appeal to target markets.
Can you share a highlight of your work?
At Perpetual Motion, I have learned and accomplished a lot. I think the biggest highlight of my work so far was creating a brand store for Gregory packs on Amazon. In addition, I have also created smaller brand stores for the other companies I manage on Amazon.
While I have contributed many different things on Amazon, the brand stores are probably the most noticeable. These pages are mini-online stores within the Amazon website. The benefit of having a brand store in Amazon is that Amazon provides consumer behavior data. This includes how many times people have clicked on a certain link or page, how many sales have been made on the page, and how much traffic there has been on the site.
From the data provided by Amazon, I noticed that the main page on the brand store has made more sales than any other page on the store. In fact, this tells us that the first page they see is crucial in order to engage customers and attract more sales.
How have you applied your education at Bellevue College to your roles?
The skills and information I have learned in my marketing classes at Bellevue College I have been able to use at work every day. I am constantly looking at consumer and sales data to influence my decisions on how the product I am representing will appeal to my target consumer. This is similar to how we lay out the sales floor at Singletrack Cycles. We display our products in specific locations based on the consumer behavior. Just like how online retailers position their featured product on their front page or how they lay out their website to lead the consumer to a purchase.
At Bellevue College, I learned to take a systematic approach to marketing rather than jumping into a marketing campaign. To get more attention, a brand not only has to be seen but it also needs to engage the consumer. This means we must think of ways to make the brands unique, different, and better than the rest of the competition. In order to succeed, I need to research and figure out the best way to appeal to the target consumer more than the competitors. Brand awareness is one thing, but unless I show why our brands are different and better, we will not see the sales we could potentially have.
How has the Digital Marketing program prepared you for career success?
The education I received at Bellevue College has helped me prepare for the digital marketing industry. In my classes I have learned to adapt to changing markets, and I have been able to be creative and to think outside the box.
Marketing 102: Introduction to Digital Marketing Platforms was one of the most recent classes that I have taken that was spot on in terms of relevance in the field. I remember finishing a project where we had to come up with a marketing plan based on what the consumer was looking for. We did our research and went step-by-step through the process. These plans can get very detailed which is important because with marketing there is not a guaranteed successful outcome. The market constantly changes which is why it is so important to look at a campaign from many angles and gather the most up-to-date data relevant to the campaign/idea.
In the project, we set goals for sales, engagement, and conversion. Once we had finished the project, presented and turned it in, I wondered if I would see something like this in the industry. Sure enough, I got in a meeting a week later with the sales and marketing team at K2 discussing their new line of inline skates, ad campaigns, target audiences, goals, and other things that I had learned and used. It was amazing to see that I will use all the work from my group project in my career. I know I am on the road to success. Overall, I learned how to make a marketing plan efficiently and feel confident in my abilities to help businesses thrive in this era of digital marketing because of the education I have received at Bellevue College.
Can you share a goal or big milestone you are working on?
At this moment, the outdoor industry is thriving. I am currently working on making sure that we can capitalize on our sales during this time. Many people are buying gear so they can escape the walls of their home and get out while socially distancing. I am working on marketing campaigns and will be working to better appeal to the needs of the consumer. With fewer people going into stores, I want to bring the store to them. I want to make the brand stores not only a place to showcase our products but to help the consumer make their decisions based on their interests and needs. On a broader scale, I want to help businesses differentiate themselves from the rest of their competition by helping them expand to reach different markets around the world.
Last Updated October 8, 2020