I just finished taking this course in Toronto, down at the new Brainstation Location on Front and Spadina at the Well. I was very excited to take this course as I've never taken a marketing course. In fact I've never even taken a business course! Apparently I was the first artist they've had taking this course.  

My professors were Kirin Sennik and Lavanya Kalesswaran.  They were both really great! Both are professionals in the Marketing field, so all their knowledge is very current and relevant.  The course consisted of 8 weeks, with the last week being for presenting the final project.  What really drew me to the course was this final project. The final project was to take a look at the digital marketing efforts of a current brand and improve them using what we learnt in this class. This felt like a perfect opportunity to improve my own current digital marketing efforts as an illustrator. 

This was the class structure:

1. Introduction to Digital Marketing
2. Content
3. SEO
4. Paid Search
5. Google Analytics
6. Social Media
7. Email Marketing
8. Project Showcase and next steps

I live close by, so I would bike down in excitement up across Bremner and up Spadina everyday at 18:00 with the thoughts of learning something new. It's that excitement of learning something new that one constantly needs to stay energised and fresh in your career! Ofcourse I was sad when it was ended, but also motivated to apply everything I learnt to my own business. 

My final project was so involved, and the feedback was so thorough that I'm instantly able to apply all I learned to help me improve my business instantly. In fact, I'm so excited about what I learned that I haven't been able to stop talking to people about it, even going as far as giving them marketing advice!  

I would recommend anyone to take this course, if you can in person, because there's somethign about involving yourself physically and emotionally in the learning process that helps deepen understanding and retention. 

Some of the top things I personally learned..

• Understanding who I was as a brand
• Understanding my purpose and who I was doing this for
• Creating goals with real achievable monetary results
• Utilizing SEO and Keywords to make smart content decisions
• Understand what Social Media Platform is for what audience and purpose
• The marketing life cycle and how it applies to all of this
• Understanding my competition and how to seperate myself from them.

 I would especially recommend artists in toronto to take this course, garaunteed you'll get better at what you do.

Part of this post is a testimonial that I wrote for my Creative Coach Murielle Marie.

In October 2023 I was in a desperate state. Completely blocked. A million ideas were fighting for attention in my mind, and not one was converting into action. It was a creative coma of some sort. I couldn’t move in any direction, there were too many possibilities. I knew I needed help. I interviewed a few creative coaches before I got to Murielle. Right away, I felt she would be the right one, and though it was a big investment for me, I did not hesitate… my creative sink had to be unclogged (Or I would end up sinking). And so session by session, things unravelled. Murielle was brilliant in listening and actively dismantling the problems I had. We had a focused session every 2 weeks, zoning in on a specific problem. And then I would go off and put those ideas into action. In the next session, we would talk about it, and then discuss a new problem. As each session progressed, a new roadblock was removed and the horizon got clearer and clearer, and my excitement and potential increased. Today, I still fee rejuvenated and confident about what’s to come. I can assureedly say that I’m the master of my own destiny, and it’s up to me to continue the momentum of the wind that Murielle has provided to my creative sails.

The biggest thing that I overcame was getting stuck in a rut of overthinking and over analyzing. I can now recognise when I'm in this siutation and instead of just thinking about it, take action. Action is the key. Only action lead to a different way of thinking. You cannot solve thought problems with thought! Most of thinking consists of hyphotheses based on assumption. For real results you need experimentation.  Also when you act, it's a more wholistic way of thinking, that involves your whole body and your emotions.  Over the upcoming weeks I can talk more and more about all I learnt in this course, this is just the first session that I'm summarizing!