The Playbook for Landing Your Dream Sports Marketing Job; Lindsey Archer’s Story

Zach:
All right, Lindsey, good to see you again. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s a real privilege to talk to you again and interview you and hear about your experience.

I know you were at UT a couple of years ago, and I know my students are going to get a lot out of hearing from you and your experience. So can you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself?

Lindsey:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk to you again today.

So my name is Lindsey Archer. I’m originally from just outside of Los Angeles, California. Baseball has pretty much been my whole world ever since I could walk, ever since I could play, going to Dodger games, watching my family play, my dad, my brother.

When it was time for college, I decided to come to the University of Tennessee. I wanted something really different from what I was used to where I grew up. I wanted a huge sports school, something that was just a completely different culture, which is definitely what I found here at UT.

My sophomore year, I applied for an internship with the then Tennessee Smokies as the marketing and community relations intern. I saw it, applied for it, interviewed, and ended up interning with them for four seasons while I was still in school.

Now I’m working full-time with them as the Community Relations and Social Media Manager.

Zach:
Can you tell us a little bit more about your career path and how you ended up in this role with the Smokies? A bit more detail around that.

Lindsey:
Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, when I first applied, it was the marketing and community relations internship. My job then was truly anything you could think of having to do with marketing, from scheduling the national anthems to pitching ideas for social media to planning our theme nights and our giveaways.

Then, on the community side, dealing with mascot events and really anything you can think of. “Other duties as assigned,” as they like to say.

After that season, I came back for another internship and was the Marketing and Community Relations Coordinator. So a very similar role, just a little bit more responsibility.

I started to get a little bit more into the social media aspect of it, actually planning the community relations events instead of just being the one attending. I was getting a little bit more comfortable and a little bit more responsibility each time.

Again, I came back for a third season, and it was the same thing there, Community Relations and Marketing Coordinator. So I was getting more and more responsibility each time while still being an intern. Obviously, I couldn’t work full-time while still in school.

Then finally, my fourth season, because I ended up having to do a fifth year in school, so my senior or “super senior” year of college, I was the Community Relations and Social Media Coordinator. That kind of set me up for my role now.

I had talks with my boss at the time, our GM at the time, about what my plan would look like once I graduated in May. So this kind of set me up for that.

This was more all-hands-on with social media. I was the one running all of the accounts, obviously with the help of others, while not full-time, but still having a hand in the promotions, marketing, and everything like that that I had been doing for previous seasons.

Then, when I graduated in May of 2024, I moved into what I am now, the Community Relations and Social Media Manager.

Zach:
So in that role now, what does a typical day look like for you?

You mentioned a lot of tasks there that you’ve done along the way, which is great to get a feel for those different roles. But for you now, what does a typical day look like?

Lindsey:
One of my favorite things about this job is that every single day is going to look different.

For example, on a game day, because we are a baseball team, our home games are a little bit more hectic than normal.

We’ll get here at 10 a.m. My number one job is to look over the social media plan for the day. I usually like to plan it out about a week in advance. On Monday, I’ll make the plan for the whole week when time allows for that.

So I’m going over exactly what my plan is for today, getting that first thing scheduled and sent out around 10 or 11 a.m., depending on our schedule, and then going through the two or three other things that I’ve already planned for the day and getting with our teams to make sure all of those are done.

We usually have a department head meeting sometime in the early afternoon to go through what our next three games are going to look like.

We have a six-day homestand, as we call them, so we’re playing home games six days in a row. We get all the department heads together and make sure everyone is in the loop as far as how ticket sales are looking this week, what corporate sponsors are going to be here, what promotional night we have going on, what’s getting posted on social, and what we need from everyone.

It’s really making sure that everyone is completely on the same page.

Then we move into more of our game-day tasks. That’s making sure the players have everything they need. Are we filming any content with our players or coaches today?

Part of my job is also coordinating with our media outlets, so radio or TV stations. Are they going to be there today? What players do they need? Is everyone set up for where they want to go?

Then there’s the logistical side of getting ready for the game. It’s also being up in the press box, making sure our graphics computer is loaded with today’s lineup and all of the lineup graphics and defensive graphics are put into the computers so that we’re ready to put on a really good show for the game.

Zach:
It sounds like such an interesting job. As you said, it sounds like it changes every day.

I guess it probably helps to be a baseball fan. It’s not a requirement, maybe, but probably helpful.

Lindsey:
Yeah, it’s definitely not a requirement.

We’ve had interns come in who didn’t know what an intentional walk was or what a ground-rule double is. So it’s definitely not a requirement.

I think it helps me personally just because we do work really long hours, and that’s something that’s never bothered me because, at the end of the day, I get to come to a baseball stadium every day and watch a bunch of baseball games.

So it definitely helps.

Zach:
That’s great. It sounds like such a cool job.

You did a marketing major at UT, right?

Lindsey:
Yeah.

Zach:
What’s the part of your major and your bachelor’s that has turned out to be really useful for you in this role?

Lindsey:
I think just understanding that marketing as a whole is really broad and there are so many different goals that you have.

Part of what was helpful to me in school was learning how to do it for corporate businesses. More often than not, we were looking at really big companies, but they taught us a lot of useful skills that I could then implement into my job.

The way that we market is very different. It’s not necessarily all about the statistics.

But I think the most important thing that I learned was just how to pitch ideas and to be confident in what you want to do and what you’ve learned.

You can pitch any idea as long as you have the ideas behind it. Just be confident in what you’re trying to do.

Zach:
Are there any skills or tools that you wish you had learned when you were in school before you got there?

Lindsey:
Yeah. I think something that would have been cool to learn about, that I’m still trying to learn about now, is more of the paid marketing side of things.

It is a very specific thing that I wish I would have learned.

For example, for my job, we do a lot of social media, but I would love to have learned more about paid marketing in terms of radio ads and TV ads.

How do you target your audience? What’s the best way?

If our fans come in for one game and they give us their email, what kind of demographics should we be looking at to send them more information later?

Different things like that, where we can really target our audience based on retention, them coming back, and knowing what kind of time they had.

Zach:
Targeting is an important piece.

Are there things that you thought you understood while you were at university? Theoretically, these make sense, but then it’s actually turned out to be very different in the real world as you’ve gone into these roles?

Lindsey:
Honestly, just the concept of social media as a whole.

I really felt like, yeah, in theory, it’s a social platform. People post. You post once a day, maybe that’ll get you good content. You want to know what your followers want to see.

But especially coming from the business side of it, there’s so much more to it than that that I definitely did not fully understand until I really started getting into it.

There’s a whole system behind how many times a day you’re posting, what time it should go out, and what kind of reaction you’re hoping to get.

In theory, it seems a lot simpler. At least in my head, it was, “Yeah, you post because you want to show your friends,” or, as a business, “Yeah, you’re trying to grow.”

But I definitely learned quickly that there’s a lot more to it than that.

Zach:
In the schedule that you talked about, when you should post, what you should be posting at different times and on what days, is that data-driven?

Or is that just understanding locally within the team? How does that work?

Lindsey:
It’s kind of a little bit of everything.

There’s definitely data that goes into it, looking at when our followers are on the most. Facebook and Twitter can give us that data.

But it’s also just trying to understand your audience and knowing that if we’re targeting working professionals, they’re probably not necessarily going to see a post at 2 p.m. in the afternoon, versus putting a big post out at 5:30 or 6 once they’re home.

Right at five o’clock, everyone’s off work and they’re checking their phone.

So it’s kind of a mixture of both. We have maybe high school kids who are looking at our socials or college kids who are now on summer break, so we can be a little bit more lenient about what we’re putting out during the day.

But there are definitely some things that you have to interpret for your audience.

Zach:
Interesting.

What’s something that surprised you in your first few months when you got into a role, finished university, and got into a digital marketing role? What were some of the things that surprised you?

Lindsey:
I think what surprised me was how collaborative it truly is.

I knew that from being an intern and working with this department before, but I feel like sometimes you can get into a mindset of, “Yeah, this is my job, so I’m only focused on my job, and I know it’s up to me.”

But there are so many people that you work with, and at the end of the day, everyone has the same goal.

Everyone wants to grow our brand. Everyone wants fans to come to the game.

I think it was surprising, in the best way, to know that everyone is ready to help.

If I need a post about tickets and I need help copywriting, I can go to our Director of Sales and we can work together on what exactly the message should be.

We have our graphic designer and our production manager.

So it’s a very, very collaborative effort. While I am the Social Media Manager, it’s not necessarily all up to me.

Zach:
So I guess going in, you maybe thought, “It’s going to be all on me. I’ve got to perform.”

But actually, there are a lot of people there to support you and work together in a collaborative effort.

I think probably a lot of people feel that pressure going into those first roles in particular. “It’s just going to be all on me.”

Having a team is just so helpful.

The projects that you did during your degree, and you talked a little bit about the internships as well, how did those help get you ready for a full-time role with the Smokies?

Lindsey:
I think the biggest thing that the projects did for me was, as I mentioned before, just working as a team.

It’s such a great skill to have, to know how to collaborate with others, which seems so simple and so obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t have that skill. It definitely makes a difference.

Just being able to learn how to work in a group and talk to each other, understand each other’s ideas, maybe you don’t agree with them, but still being able to work to find a solution, I think was definitely the most beneficial thing that I learned.

One project specifically that stood out was in my marketing research class. I believe it was my fourth year, my senior year.

We got to do a project where we basically picked a company, figured out their problems based on research, targeted our audiences, and figured out what the best solution would be.

That was a really interesting thing to get to look at.

Coincidentally, our project ended up being for MLB, so it worked out fantastically for what I’m doing.

It was really cool to be able to put all of our heads together, dive into figuring out what the problem was with this major company, and then work to find a solution based on the research that we’d gathered.

Zach:
That’s great.

So the project on MLB, how did that come about? Was that something that you were able to choose as a team, or did that just get assigned to you?

Lindsey:
It was one of those where you were assigned random teams and everyone just kind of threw out ideas.

It was probably me, I don’t even remember, saying, “Hey, what about MLB? They’re a pretty big company.”

We had a few other big sports fans in our group as well, so we all agreed that would be something we were interested in.

Thankfully, our professor approved it. So our professor was like, “Yeah, sounds great,” and there we were doing research on MLB.

It worked out fantastically in my favor.

Zach:
It’s so great.

I think having those classes where you can choose the project and choose the company, if it’s something that you’re interested in, you really care about, maybe even an area that you want to work in later, it just helps so much with that motivation.

Especially if you can agree on it with other group members. Everybody’s maybe a little bit more motivated.

You touched on it a little bit before about how you guys choose content and what content to post.

Is there some more detail there around how you decide what content to use?

Do you have a content calendar or schedule? You’re using some data to inform that, but what does that look like?

Is there intuition involved? Do you come up with an idea, wake up in the middle of the night, grab a notepad and write down all your ideas?

How does that happen?

Lindsey:
I do have a social media content calendar.

It’s just a Google Sheet that basically has every single day of the month. Each tab is a month, and then we have all of our social platforms along the side.

There, I’m able to put the time in and what post is going on.

Then I have dropdown menus for who in the marketing department is responsible for creating or helping with this content, so that everyone can be exactly on the same page about what’s getting posted and when.

In terms of figuring out what exactly is going to get posted, there are a few different things that go into it.

There’s the corporate side of things where it’s like, “Okay, we have these sponsorship posts. These have been sold. They need to go out at this certain time on this certain day, this many times a week.”

So we have to make sure we’re getting those in.

Then there’s the sales side of it, which is making sure that we’re selling tickets. We’re promoting our group areas or different ticket packages and making sure our fans are informed that way, so we’re helping out our sales department.

Then you have the promotions that are going on.

For example, this next week, July 25th is Christmas in July Night, and then we have our Wrestling Night on that Sunday.

Now that we’re about a week out, we’re starting to promote those. There’ll be a video that gets made. We’re doing giveaways. We’re doing post-game entertainment.

I usually start to promote those about a week before, given that we usually are home every other week.

Just last week, we were promoting our Marvel Night. So now we can switch gears in this time that the team is on the road.

So there’s the promotional side of things.

Then there is the intuition side, where it’s like, “Hey, I’ve seen this trend going around and obviously it’s getting a lot of traction. How can we recreate this to fit our brand and put it out to our audience while also reaching new people who are following this trend?”

There are a lot of different moving parts to it.

But intuition is definitely great.

Knowing, again, if we post a group area at 6 p.m., people just got off work. Are they really wanting to call and spend money? Probably not.

Maybe during the day when they’re at work, that’s something they’d be interested in, versus a trendy thing that may be more targeted at the younger audience who’s off work at 5 p.m. and they just want to go and scroll.

That would be a good time to put out something that’s been trending.

Zach:
Okay. What platforms are you guys focusing on most?

Lindsey:
Our main ones are Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok, and then we’ve started to grow our YouTube a little bit more.

Then LinkedIn, when applicable, for things that we’re doing in the community.

Zach:
You talked about targeting too.

The platform that you’re using, that you’re posting to, is that target-dependent? Are you trying to reach a specific audience on a specific platform?

Lindsey:
Yeah, more or less.

On Instagram, I would say we definitely go more for the baseball fans and stick really to our baseball brand.

There you’ll see more player content, player highlights, player posts, rather than a video of our luxury-level suite group area.

Versus Twitter, we’re going to go pretty video-focused because that seems to be what is usually going on Twitter. It’s a lot of videos. People want to watch stuff.

So no matter what it is, we tend to go with videos.

Facebook is kind of all-out on anything we want to post. That’s more of our older demographic, typically.

That’s when we’re targeting the parents or the grandparents who want to take their whole family out to a game. That’s when we’re going to hit the group areas.

Businesses are on Facebook a lot too, so maybe they want to do a corporate event. We target our group areas, our ticket plans, corporate events, stuff like that on Facebook.

TikTok is kind of all out the window when it comes to all of that.

TikTok is very much, “Let’s just put out a funny video that we think would be a hit,” or a highlight that was really good.

We’re not doing a lot of promoting for our games or our ticket plans on TikTok. It’s more growing our brand awareness.

Zach:
Has that changed over time, how you’re using those platforms? Does that shift at different times?

Lindsey:
Yeah, more or less.

I think it’s been kind of a gradual shift.

We didn’t start our TikTok account until my third season in 2023.

We were a little bit, I wouldn’t say behind in terms of Minor League Baseball being on TikTok, but in terms of the whole TikTok wave, 2023 was definitely already in full force.

So we jumped in there and tried to hit the ground running.

That changed our marketing strategy there because before it was, “Let’s just put all content on all platforms,” which we tried at first.

But TikTok is such a broad thing. It’s such a broad market.

They’re not necessarily only showing your post to people in Knoxville, which is true of all platforms as well, but I feel like TikTok even more is going to put your content out to who knows where.

So we realized pretty quickly that it probably wasn’t going to be the best place to sell tickets necessarily.

Versus Twitter or Facebook, where you can put a link exactly in the copy and caption of your post. That’s a great way to get clicks and a great way to get people to find their way to your website.

Zach:
Are there tools that you’re using to publish to multiple platforms at the same time, or do you just go to those individual platforms with the content when you’re ready?

Lindsey:
I use a website called Loomly.

I’ve tried a couple of different ones. This is the one I’m sticking with as of now. It’s been working pretty well.

You can connect as many platforms, really, as you want. They have Pinterest on there, LinkedIn, things that we don’t necessarily always use.

At least for me, I can schedule out unlimited posts.

There are times when maybe I get a four-day weekend here and there when the team’s on the road. I can go in and schedule everything through Sunday on Thursday night so that I don’t have to worry about it.

But it’s really great because you can put it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all at the same time and schedule it.

Then you can change things individually in another screen so that they’re still on-brand with each platform.

It makes it a lot easier to be able to upload things at once, schedule them, and know that they’re going to go out when you want them to.

Zach:
That’s great.

Does that have the community management aspect of social media built into it as well?

When people are commenting or tagging you guys, can you reply to that within the platform, within that tool?

Lindsey:
This one doesn’t have the ability to reply, but you can leave a first comment on it when you’re posting it, or you can tag people through that.

All of the commenting would have to be separate.

But it does give us data on our community as well. It’ll tell you how many comments you got on your post, how many likes, and then you can put it all into this one platform of Loomly.

You can put different filters on it to find out what’s hitting where.

You can label everything.

I have a whole list of labels in there for every single post. So I can say whether it’s sales-driven, corporate, promotional, a player post, anything like that. Maybe it’s a random holiday.

Then I can sort it by the group and know, “Okay, our sales posts do this well while our corporate posts are doing this well.”

Zach:
You’re talking metrics now.

What are some of the ways that you guys measure success?

For you, particularly in your role, you want to be able to show, “I’m doing my job well,” but it’s also, “Hey, look, this is what’s happening for the business on these platforms.”

What are some of the metrics that you guys are using, and how are you measuring the success of what you’re doing on social media?

Lindsey:
This is a great question because it’s honestly something that we talk about a lot.

One thing that I think is probably the hardest thing about working in social media is there’s really no correlation between the effort you put into a post and the result that you’re going to get.

That’s something that I’ve really been grappling with and coming to terms with in these last two years of running it.

It’s really hard to measure success.

You can go simply based off likes and comments and interactions, which are all great. You obviously want to see those numbers doing really well.

But I think the thing that I focus on most personally is our follower growth over time.

I have a monthly tracker that I’ll use because I know that maybe on this random Tuesday no one’s checking Twitter, and that’s why there are 10 likes on something, versus another one yesterday had 200.

But just knowing that at least over the month we’re gradually increasing followers each day, each week, each month is something that I would say is successful as a whole, rather than going by each and every post and hoping that one is going to get a good reaction.

Zach:
This may be beyond your role in particular, but maybe you work in a team with other people to do this.

Are you guys measuring conversions through ticket sales from social media?

Do you know every game or every month how many ticket sales have come from social media activity?

Lindsey:
We can’t measure exactly how many tickets come specifically from there, but we do look at link clicks a lot.

Pretty much any post that goes out, if it’s about a promotional night or a specific night in particular that we’re promoting, the ticket link is always in the caption.

So we can look at that and say, “150 people clicked this link yesterday.”

But there’s no way to know if they bought the ticket.

So we kind of all share in the success, I guess you could say, with our sales department.

If we get 6,000 fans out to the ballpark on a Saturday night, is it because we had a really great theme night and that’s why they’re coming?

Or did our sales team do an amazing job and call everyone and cold call and get the sales there?

Did they see a social media post and that’s why they’re there?

We do send out surveys at the end of every homestand and say, “Hey, how did you hear about us? What made you want to buy tickets?”

But usually we just take it as a team success to know that we had a lot of people at the ballpark.

Zach:
It’s a particularly difficult thing to measure.

I think conversions from any digital channel for service-based businesses, event-based or entertainment-based businesses are pretty tricky to measure.

I think your ticket sales, having come to a game here pretty recently, maybe go through a different website, if I remember correctly. It’s not through your site. I feel like it was through maybe Minor League Baseball.

Lindsey:
Yes.

Zach:
So that’s really hard to look at.

If it was your own website and you’re selling through there, you can track those conversions from where you acquired them from, but it’s harder to do through somebody else’s site.

So that makes sense.

You talked about not being able to see a correlation necessarily between effort and success on social media and the work that you do.

Is there a post or campaign that you’ve worked on that performed better than you thought it would? Are there any lessons that you learned from that?

Lindsey:
Absolutely.

The first thing that comes to mind, when I say the correlation between effort and success, is that you can put your all into a video.

When we rebranded to the Knoxville Smokies, we were full force.

We spent days, weeks, months working on these videos, and they did great. Don’t get me wrong.

Our announcement video was fantastic. It got maybe 100,000 views on TikTok, which is phenomenal, and it got a thousand or something likes on Instagram.

But then, on the flip side, one day our grounds crew is messing with the plate and they’re stamping the ground.

I go out and take a three-second video and it got a million views on TikTok.

That’s our only one-million-view TikTok.

It’s like, “Okay, that’s phenomenal, and I’m so glad, but really? This three-second video is the one that blew up and not this one that we’re putting so, so much effort into?”

It’s obviously great to see the success on any video, no matter what.

But I think it honestly just taught me that there’s nothing wrong with those three-second videos.

There’s nothing wrong with just getting content of anything and everything.

I took a video of our scoreboard here because it’s massive, it’s the shape of Tennessee, and it’s a really cool feature.

I took a 10-second video and it got 400,000 views on TikTok.

Versus we edited this creation-of-Covenant-Health-Park 30-minute video, and we took a snippet of it for TikTok and it got maybe a couple thousand views.

So it’s definitely hard to understand that, “Yeah, I’m going to give my all for this and maybe it’s not going to perform.”

But I think the biggest thing I learned was your brand is what’s important.

The people who are watching our TikToks and following us are probably following us because we’re a baseball team at the end of the day.

So posting stuff like them working on the field and our scoreboard is going to get more interactions than maybe something random that we’re doing behind the scenes.

It also made me realize that people really don’t know what we do here necessarily.

They don’t know the things that go into their favorite sport.

We posted a video of us pulling the tarp, which we have to do if it rains. We pull the whole thing over and cover the infield.

That got a lot of traction on TikTok, with comments saying, “What is happening? Why are they doing this?”

Then you have baseball fans saying, “Yeah, I’ve pulled tarp. That’s not very fun.”

So just knowing that when you’re posting things on-brand, it’s going to get people who follow you to see it, but it also has that potential to expand your following and get those new people in.

Zach:
It’s so hard to know what the recipe for success is, right?

Some of the totally unexpected posts about the plate or the tarp pulling, and that’s the thing that gets the most hits.

Do you find that disheartening at all when you’re working on these bigger projects?

Lindsey:
Absolutely.

It is definitely a very difficult thing to have to realize.

Like I said, you can truly, truly give your all for this one video, and then it’s like, “Hey, why did this get 30 likes?”

You just don’t know.

I have no idea why.

I think it’s a phenomenal video. The caption’s funny. It’s on-brand. Then it just flops, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

If there was a perfect recipe for success, every account would have a million followers.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have figured it out, and we definitely do our best to try to do that as well.

But yeah, it can be really disheartening to know, “Hey, I just had this great idea. I think it’s going to do phenomenal,” and it just doesn’t.

Zach:
It’s so hard to know why it doesn’t work.

I think it’s probably easy to see why the scoreboard was successful. That is a beautiful scoreboard.

When I was at the game, I was taking pictures of the scoreboard and sending them to my family members who also live in Tennessee.

Especially when the sky is still lit and the background of the scoreboard is black and it’s got the new Smokies logo on it. It’s a great shot.

Such a cool scoreboard in the shape of the state of Tennessee.

What are some of the hard skills, maybe we could call them that, things like design or analytics or copywriting, that you use most often in your role now?

Lindsey:
I do a little bit of all of it, to be honest.

Copywriting is definitely a really important thing because more or less every single video that you post is going to have a caption. Every single graphic that you post, every photo, it’s all going to have a caption.

There’s definitely a lot of learning that goes into that as far as when do you want to be funny?

When do you want to say something kind of out of pocket, maybe to get comments?

Or when are you just really trying to drive a point? When are you just clear and to the point?

“Hey, this is our group area. It’s really cool. Buy tickets. Call us here.”

So copywriting is definitely a big thing.

We use Photoshop a lot too, our whole Adobe suite.

While we do have a graphic designer on the team, I’m a lot of times making graphics as well.

Then also really all of it, taking photos and really any hard skill you can think of. We all try to do as much as we can.

Zach:
You seem to me to have had this almost meteoric rise within the Smokies.

You came in as an intern and then, within a couple of years, you’re Social Media Manager with a lot of responsibility, working within teams.

Are there soft skills that you feel have been critical for that success?

It could be communication, or you talked about working in teams earlier. What are some of those soft skills?

Lindsey:
I think you hit it on the head.

Teamwork and communication are definitely the absolute biggest things.

Knowing that they can put you in any team and knowing that you’re going to contribute, you’re going to be able to work with whoever is around you to create a good idea, is such a big thing.

Then just open communication and knowing that maybe I don’t understand something, so I need to go ask about it.

There’s no point in trying to figure it out, waste time, and do it wrong when there’s someone you know has the answer.

You can go and communicate with them, understand exactly what your task is and how you should do it.

And just being open about what you want in terms of communication.

I was very clear from the beginning that baseball has always been my dream. It’s always been my passion.

This is something that I want to do, and anything that I can do to keep coming back and to do the best that I can, I want to do it.

Zach:
That teamwork piece is interesting.

One of the things I’ve noticed in teaching for a while is students either really hate group work or they love it.

Some of them really love it, and some of them really hate it.

But what you’re saying is it’s really important for a role in business.

I totally agree. It’s one of the reasons I keep doing it.

Do you find yourself working more in teams or more on your own? What does that balance look like?

Lindsey:
It’s definitely team-heavy.

I was the student in school as well who didn’t necessarily love a team project because there’s always the people who don’t pull their weight. That’s just the reality of life.

It happens here too.

There are just some people who maybe aren’t as comfortable with the project or maybe they don’t have any ideas.

But I think the biggest thing is just understanding how to deal with that situation when it arises.

That’s something I learned in school a lot, knowing you have a few options here.

You can suck it up and just do it. You can take that on and make sure that it gets done.

You can communicate with them and say, “Hey, are you not understanding what’s going on? Or do you just not want to be here? What’s going on?”

There are a few different roads that you can take, but understanding what works best for you and what your approach is is super beneficial.

Because, like I said, even here there are always going to be some people who just aren’t into this project and they don’t really have any ideas. Maybe they have other things that they want to be doing.

But we work in teams a lot.

So you just have to suck it up, honestly.

Maybe not the best advice, but you just have to understand that, at the end of the day, you all have the same goal.

No matter how you’re going to get there, you have to get there.

Whether you’re taking it on yourself or just saying, “Hey, what’s going on? Why aren’t you helping?” you just have to get there.

Zach:
Sometimes there are genuine reasons, right?

As a student, but also as an employee, sometimes people have health things that are going on or family things that are going on. They’re not able to contribute in the way that they want to.

So it’s not necessarily about desire. That’s the reality of it sometimes, isn’t it?

You have to pick up for other people.

For you as a Social Media Manager, are there roles there that you work very closely with, that you work with more consistently than others?

Lindsey:
Absolutely.

I work really closely with our Director of Marketing.

He oversees our graphic designer, our production manager and production intern, as well as our three other marketing interns.

We all work very closely.

When I say we have our content calendar, I have a dropdown menu of who’s in charge of what.

Just because I’m the Social Media Manager doesn’t mean I’m the one creating all the content necessarily.

It’s my job to schedule it and post it and make sure it all goes out.

But we have our production manager and interns, and they are the ones creating the videos, editing them, and filming them to go out at a certain time.

We have our graphic designer, who’s creating most, if not all, of the graphics that are going out.

We have our interns who are helping make TikToks. They’re making story graphics. They’re coming up with ideas.

So it really is a collaborative effort when you see our social media as a whole.

Zach:
A couple more questions on advice, thinking about your last couple of years and coming out of college a couple of years ago.

What’s one piece of advice that you would give either people finishing their bachelor’s this year or maybe professionals too who are looking to get into a marketing role, or maybe a digital marketing role specifically?

What’s one piece of advice that you might give folks like that?

Lindsey:
I would say, specifically for getting into a digital media role or social media role, really stay on top of the trends and the pop culture that’s happening.

Even just scrolling on social media, not only to see the trends but also to see what other people are posting.

My biggest thing is I’m always looking at other MLB or MiLB teams and seeing what they’re posting.

What do their graphics look like? What are their videos looking like? How is their content being received?

Because at the end of the day, almost everything’s been done.

No one has a groundbreaking idea that they’ve never seen before.

But looking at other people’s content and saying, “Oh, they put a really cool twist on this. How can we put our own twist on it?”

They’re seeing success, so I would say just learn off of each other.

Again, as MLB teams, yes, we all want our team to do the best, but as a whole, we’re growing the Minor League Baseball brand.

We’re all going to work together on it.

I think seeing what other relatively similar businesses are doing means you can learn from them, as well as staying on top of pop culture or trends.

The thing with trends is they go quickly.

Some stay forever, and some are gone in days.

If you see something three days later, maybe you’ve already missed it.

So as much as I don’t want to just be sitting on my phone all day, every day, it is kind of my job to really understand what’s going on in the world.

What are people wanting to see right now so that we can join the conversation?

Zach:
For you as a Social Media Manager for a brand, how much time do you think of your day is spent just, I mean, you can’t really call it doomscrolling if you’re doing it for work, I guess.

Lindsey:
A lot.

The screen time is really, really high.

Zach:
How do you keep on top of it?

Obviously, you guys are on so many different platforms.

You’re probably following lots of other Minor League teams and Major League teams, but also other event or entertainment-based brands and just looking more generally for trends.

How do you keep on top of all of that?

Lindsey:
I definitely try to do my best to do everything.

I would say there’s probably at least 30 minutes of my day set aside to just look up the other teams, at least in our league.

Our league is just eight teams, so at least checking in on them, seeing what they’re doing, and then just following everyone on Twitter.

So just scrolling on our Twitter homepage and trying to see what people are doing.

But I also tell every single person in our office, we probably have 40 full-time and intern staff, probably once a week, “Hey, if you see anything funny on any platform, please send it to me.”

Even if you’re just scrolling at home at night and you see a funny TikTok, send it to the Smokies account so that I can see it.

It’s really a collaborative effort.

We know everyone is on social media at some point in the day on one of these platforms.

So I’m always saying, “Send me anything.”

If you’re walking around the ballpark and some fan is doing something funny, film it.

Just film it for 10 seconds and send it to me.

Because I can’t be everywhere at once.

I don’t want to spend 24 hours a day on my phone scrolling.

So trying to get everyone’s different opinions is really useful.

With these 40 people, there’s a wide range of ages. There are different people who like different platforms. People think certain things are funny.

Maybe one of the executives on our staff, who’s a dad to young kids, sees something and he’s like, “Hey, this Instagram post was funny.”

Then it’s like, “Okay, maybe we target the dads with something like this.”

Or maybe one of our interns who’s in college is like, “Wow, this TikTok was hilarious.”

So now we’re targeting our college audience with that kind of thing.

It’s really great to get all those different insights from our own little marketing pool, if you will.

Zach:
Okay, so Lindsey Archer is about to graduate from UT with her bachelor’s.

What would you tell her if she’s looking to get into a digital marketing role?

What advice would you have for her?

Lindsey:
I would say put yourself out there.

Apply, apply, apply.

There have been jobs that I applied for that I was definitely not qualified for, but at least just apply.

Even the practice of having to fix your résumé, go through the application, answer the questions at the bottom, and maybe hopefully get an interview and go through that process is valuable.

That’s definitely the biggest thing.

But I would also just say, say yes to everything.

Coming into this role, yes, I was the Marketing and Community Relations Intern, but I was doing everything.

I was hopping on the phones to sell tickets. I was meeting with corporate people if they needed an extra body. I’m pulling the tarp. I’m hanging signs.

Just be someone who will literally say yes to anything.

That way they know that they can always come to you because eventually they’re going to come to you with something that you’re interested in, and they know you’re going to say yes to it.

Then there you are, able to move in.

I think that’s been something that I would really attribute to my success here, just always being willing to do whatever is needed from me so that they understand that part of you and know, “If we need something done, we can count on Lindsey to do it.”

Whether she knows how to or not, or has done it before, she’ll get it done.

That’s something that I think, once it came time for me wanting this full-time role, I could say, “I’ve had all of this experience. You’ve seen me in a lot of different aspects. This is what I want to do. Is that a possibility?”

Zach:
That’s so great.

Be willing to say yes to a lot of different things, maybe even things that aren’t in the job description or in the role as it’s advertised.

That’s so great.

Where can people find out more about you or about the Smokies?

Lindsey:
You can find me on LinkedIn, Lindsey Archer, and on any social media platform we’re @SmokiesBaseball.

So if you want to send a DM there, I’ll be the one reading it.

If you ever want to reach out, you can find me there.

Zach:
All right, Lindsey, thank you so much for joining us today.

I really appreciate it. It’s great talking to you, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Lindsey:
Thank you so much for having me.