Belle Donato
This is a photo of me at Kamari Beach in Santorini, Greece from when I studied abroad last May!
About me!
I am a second year student in the honors college at Duquesne University. I am majoring in psychology and advertising/ public relations. I am taking this course to further investigate the realm of possibilities when it comes to advertising on digital platforms. As our world today becomes more technologically advanced, I find it very important to stay educated on technology to aid in jobs and reaching consumers.
After college, I am not exactly sure of the route I plan to take. My original major was psychology, and I recently changed my second one from communications to advertising and public relations. I felt as if this would give me a broader scope of jobs because the communications aspect was not the right fit for me. As of right now, my plan is to do something in the field of research. I have an internship this summer as a strategic researcher, and I am hoping that the hands on experience allows me to further narrow my interests.
When it comes to school work, I typically prefer to be organized and stay on top of things. This creates less stress for me. I use a planner to write things down; this is a way for me to mentally and physically sort out my life in school as well as my social life too. I like to be very busy, but it has always been very important to me to get my schoolwork done before I have fun.
Some of my accounts!
Linkden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabellamdonato/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_isabelladonato/
Fun facts about me!
In my free time, I love to shop, hangout with my friends and family, travel and exercise.
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. I live about 25 minutes from campus.
Things I hope to get out of class:
I would like to be more experienced using platforms (like SquareSpace) as a way to do digital marketing. I am not very educated in this aspect, but I find it very important to learn as our culture is surrounded by technology.
I am hoping to learn how to write properly on digital platforms. Even though this form of advertising is via social media; I think it is important to say the right things to your target audience.
I want to learn how to track behavior on digital advertisements. I am working at Sheetz this summer as a strategic research intern, and I believe that having this knowledge could be very beneficial to me.
Lessons I have learned in 2023
In the past year, I have not only learned a lot about myself, but I have learned a lot about the world around me. One thing in particular that I am taking into 2024 is to be brave and do what is best for me. Often times, fear of failure and opinions of others has turned me away from things. I learned that being brave and embracing that fear is often a better way to approach something that appears to be intimidating.
Blogs I made in this class
Display advertisements- is their only purpose to annoy users?
2 things I learned about my work, from Digital Analytics
I learned how to enter campaign information into Google Analytics to create a trackable link. This was a vital process to learn considering we made lots of social media posts and had to track things such as impressions and engagement rates. I plan to continue to make trackable links in the future for other classes and/ or internships. Just by looking at a URL I am able to differentiate and identify things like the campaign, source, medium, etc. It is important to be specific; capitalization and punctuation makes a big difference from one site to another!
Another thing that this course taught me was how to write a digital strategy. Before taking this course, I had heard of a digital strategy before, but I never really knew what it meant let alone how to write one. Now, I even wrote my own digital strategy on Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. The steps to writing a digital strategy are Client / Campaign Goals, Target audience definition and insights related to digital, Digital marketing insights and research, Competitive Summary / Example(s), Strategy summary, Messaging examples, Channels and tracking prioritization, and Next steps. These steps can vary from each digital strategy, but overall, they seem to cover the bases of all aspects.
