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MenuHow can I reach out to engineering colleges and ask their students to signup for my product?
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You can do this organically + reaching target customers will be slow. You can do this by speaking to local college Marketing groups. Many engineering students attend these talks. Contact Marketing Deans at colleges to work out details.
A better way is to either use Facebook Ads or Traffic Oxygen (which allows creating audiences across many networks, including Facebook + many others).
Facebook Ads are very cheap.
If your budget can't support this, likely your project as many bigger problems.
You can also start a Kickstarter project.
You'll find out very quickly if people are interested, via Kickstarter comments + funding... or lack of funding...
Marketing to students is a great way to launch a business - but it has challenges.
1 - Students have no money so what you offer needs to be extremely good value.
2 - If you sign a student to your service, they will be with you for life. So it's a great time to get engagement and follow them through their careers.
I have done several student-oriented marketing projects and here are some suggestions which could work for your project.
1 - get yourself in to face to face meetings with the careers team at universities. Tell the permanent staff about your service ask them if they would agree to be in a case study.
2 - Go and meet the engineering companies recruiters who hire graduates. Check that they would value what you offer. Ask them if they would agree to be in a case study.
3 - Recruit a few students who use your service and get great jobs with engineering companies. Write a case study.
4 - Find the groups / networks where engineering students hang out. Ask your student case study people to add you into the groups.
5 - Offer an awesome up-sell for every student who recruits a friend e.g. one on one coaching, preferential listing on the site when hiring engineering firms view candidates.
6 - Offer an awesome up-sell for every engineering firm who reads a student's bio and experience via your platform.
Numbers 5 & 6 are where you can generate 'virality" or "growth hacking" using tools to improve your brand reach and product visibility.
Reach out to their professors and to their department chairs/deans. These people want their students to succeed and will promote your service to their students.
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I just opened a small, upscale, boutique style hair salon. Any ideas on how to market?
I have no experience with salons, but marketing is my thing. So I'll give you some suggestions of what to think about, followed by what to do. Do you have clients already (let's say from your working days at another salon)? If so, you can start profiling them. You can ask them to fill out a form in exchange for a free gift (maybe one of those creams you use in the salon), or an entry to a raffle (where the prize is valuable). In the profiling, you want to look out for which neighborhoods they live in, what kinds of activities they like to do, what kinds of social events they love to do, and their occupations. Then, using each of those profile data, you can market to more prospects who share the same characteristics. For example, - You can set aside a budget to send flyers to specific neighborhoods. In order to get people into the door, maybe you can offer a certain procedure for free in exchange for opportunities to win new regular customers. (You could theoretically do this with Groupon too, but you have less control of who comes into your door) - You could set up joint venture relationships with organizations like ball room dancing schools, professional associations, etc. You could offer an exclusive discount with those groups to entice potential customers to try out your service. More opportunities for you to win regular customers. - With certain demographic data, you can probably make the same offer by advertising on Facebook. If you target specific enough, you can get the price of acquiring the lead to be pretty cheap. You would have to figure out your typical lifetime value of your customers before deciding whether advertising on Facebook would be worthwhile. One last thing, you can offer gifts for your existing customers if they refer you people. If you have any more questions, I'm happy to chat with you. Hit me up on this platform.SL
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For proper sales and marketing alignment, and for the success of your bottom line, you must have a plan in place. How to Start Your Content Strategy The framework of a content marketing strategy is fairly straight forward: - Who are you targeting? What are their needs? - How are you going to reach them? (Attract new and nurture existing) - What content do you have now to get started? - What is your plan to develop and share more - How will you measure your efforts 1. Personas Take some time to consider who you are targeting. Are they male or female? Does it matter? Do they have a career? Children? Are they affluent? Coupon cutters? What are their goals? What happens if they do not reach them? Is their a monetary penalty for them? Will meeting this goal further their career? Will it make them happy? Clearly defining your targeted personas will save you a lot of time, energy, and money as you continue your business. 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It is a starting point to get you thinking about how to plan content. To get a specific content marketing plan designed for your brand, I need to interview you and understand your goals, personas, and timeline. 5. Analytics Finally, how are you going to measure your work? Remember when we set up our goals earlier? Were you specific in identifying how many leads you want to generate? “Get more leads” is a horrible strategy, better is “Gain 50 new leads by September 1st” or “increase from 6% conversion rate to 12% conversion rate” These types of goals are easily measured and tracked. Do you have a mechanism in place to measure, monitor, and gauge your efforts? Further, do you have the right people on your team to help you know what is working and what is not? Can you explain why certain marketing dollars are generating a return on your investment while others fall flat? Final Thoughts Just like runners know the course of the race before they start, your brand should know the route you will take to your finish line. Having a strong content marketing strategy in place will ensure your team is setup for success. I'm happy to help and provide more specifics. All the best, -ShaunSN
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About to launch our new eCommerce website selling well priced unique watches. What is the best initial marketing strategy to use with minimal cost?
Here are some answers for you that I believe will help you. 1. You should implement a long term and short term strategy right at the beginning. What I mean is that there are essential parts to your marketing like SEO and content marketing that you need to implement right in the beginning, but will take a while to filter through, but these are essential if you want to have organic traffic. That would be L-T. The best for Short term for a newly launched site is ad's. Word of warning though. Know your customers demographics such as age, income, education etc, know your competitors demographics and then find the platform (such as social media channels) where your ideal customer is based on those researched demographics and then roll out targeted ad's for them. 2. You have to implement social media strategies right from the beginning of course, based on your demographic research. 3. Get busy Blogging - start with content marketing now. 4. Sweepstakes - start a giveaway to get traction with clients and create awareness. 5. Make sure you collect emails as these are like gold dust for future email marketing. 6. Video marketing is essential for competitive retail space and very powerful to get found on search engines like Google. Prior to me launching my digital marketing business 5 years ago, I built an online retail business and made many expensive mistakes. And they can be costly if not implemented correctly from the beginning. So in summary: SEO - very important, Ad's, Social Media, Sweepstakes, Blogging, Video & email marketing. I trust this will assist you. Let me know if you wish to have a call to discuss these or have follow up questions. Regards KennethKT
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