Ayrshire College make-up artists to learn the foundations of digital marketing
Make-Up Artistry students at Ayrshire College are to be taught digital marketing skills this year as part of their course.
With social media platforms proving to be a major business tool for make-up artists over the years, the SQA has revamped its HNC and HND Make-Up Artistry courses to introduce a new digital marketing unit.
One of Ayrshire College's make-up artistry lecturers, Alana Pignatiello, has experience of seeing her work blow up thanks to the help of social media.
Earlier this year, Alana began posting her transformations online - using make-up to turn herself into the likes of The Queen, Nicola Sturgeon and Captain Tom Moore. Alana's portrayal of Lewis Capaldi was seen and re-tweeted by the popular singer, and from there Alana was contacted by newspapers and TV programmes across the UK and Japan - appearing on ITV's flagship daytime programme 'This Morning' on 6 May and transforming herself into presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby live on air.
Now Alana will be one of the lecturers passing on her skills and experience to this year’s student cohort.
Alana said: "We started to use Instagram to engage with the students when we went into lockdown as this was a platform they all used. I posted on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and I was lucky that when I did my Lewis Capaldi make-up, he saw it and everything snowballed from there.
"All of our students use social media platforms and this unit will help them understand how to use it properly as a business tool to help promote their business.
"Most people go to artists' social media pages before their websites now, so it's important for the students to learn how to find their target audience and how to generate social media content, among other things. To get noticed on social media, the right people need to see it so it is important to tag the right people and use the right hashtags."
Ant & Dec were the latest celebrities to get Alana's transformation treatment this week. Now her attention turns back to teaching, with students set to return to Ayrshire College’s campuses from 22 September.
"Ant & Dec will be my last make-up for a while as my focus has had to shift to preparing for the year ahead. The whole experience was quite overwhelming as I never started doing it to be seen, I just wanted to engage my students and keep myself motivated and busy.
"Seeing the student’s reaction has been the best tonic for me through this whole lockdown. They are the ones I wanted to motivate and inspire, and I think it worked. If all that comes out of this is that they keep busy, push themselves to try new things and stay focused on their studies, then I am one very happy lecturer."
4 September 2020
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