MarketReach Inc., an award-winning creative technology production shop, hosted Milford High School students and instructors to a “job shadowing” event at their Amherst Street Nashua headquarters.

Former MarketReach president Rod Griffith, who started the company twenty-five years ago, and who has taken a “side-role,” as chief client officer, conducted an orientation for the student guests, whose career interests ranged from business administration, marketing and finance, to video production, journalism and sports management.

Those students were Gavin Lawton, Colby Clark, Lexi Jones, Reilly Hanson, Kyle Forsely and Auryon Torrey.

After the presentation, the students broke off into job shadowing sessions, meeting with different MR personnel.

In his opening remarks, Griffith described some of MarketReach’s essential functions.

“We have a whole content writing team,” he said. “We do writing for websites, brochures, campaigns, speeches, presentations and videos. We work with executives to help them on their speeches. And right now, content is big, because the industry has built these marketing tools.”

Griffith talked about the advent of mass email distribution and how those emails identify the party receiving the email.

“And it’s not like there’s someone sitting there, hitting the ‘send’ button,” he explained. “There’s computers, that detect who to send those emails to, and at what time, who responded, who is on which list, did they go to the webinar, did they go to that trade show. Those [mechanisms] need to be fed content.”

Griffith underlined the immense need for content and articles and said there’s “a whole field dedicated to content management, which is trying to absorb and create and develop content.”

As the students took notes, Griffith suggested that what’s in textbooks, and what happens on the job can often be two different things.

“There’s a lot of other elements and factors involved,” he said. “We’re an agency, so we’re always responding to our clients with diverse requests. We’re different than a marketing department for a big company. When you’re marketing for a big company, you tend to work on one set of products. We have to work on dozens of different products from dozens of different companies.”

He called the atmosphere, “a challenging environment,” noting, “it’s not for everybody.”

“What’s exciting about it, things are always different,” he told the students. “Every day is different. There’s no two days alike. And you have to juggle things.”

Griffith’s enthusiasm was shared by the students, as he described everything at the firm comes together.

“Everybody here must work on a set of schedules,” he said. “We’re going to show you the tools and the software we use to track what people are working on. Everybody is responsible for reporting back to that system. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be profitable, frankly.”

The team-leading Griffith also spoke about the company’s value proposition, adding, “people’s attention spans are very small. So, you have to gel things down to one sentence.”

“Elevator pitches used to be 20-30 seconds,” he said. “Nowadays, people don’t have time for that. Now you’ve got 8-10 seconds to tell them one statement about your company. So MarketReach offers highly proven creative marketing services that enable are B2B technology clients to more effectively achieve strategic marketing goals.”

The students began writing more quickly, as the cadence with which Griffith spoke gained speed.

He illustrated the four different types of customers: consumers, businesses, non-profits and state and local governments.

“We help businesses reach other businesses,” he added, “which is often overlooked in education because consumer marketing is sexier – it’s all about the TV commercials to sell soda pop and cameras.”

Griffith also discussed managing events such as conferences and trade shows.

“When we first started, this is where our primary business was,” he said. “We have managed several hundred events over the years. Anywhere that a firm needs to communicate to their customers. There’s branding and graphics and we create ‘game show’ types of interactive presentations to encourage people at these trade shows to ask questions. And it’s not just a game – they’re actually learning something about your company and your products.”

Finally, there was the topic of product management. “It’s an enormous team that makes sure it all happens on time, on budget, basically,” he stated. “They are the people who communicate with the client, they represent our relationships with the client. They talk to the clients, collect their information, make sure that all the people in our company know exactly what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it, what the branding requirements are, what the messagings are for each of those products. They’re ultimately responsible for the quality and the delivery of what we do. As well as the profitability of what we do.”

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