What’s Coming Next? New Media Marketing and the Impact It Will Have
Over the past four weeks, I've been on a thrilling adventure to boost my small business. What is this marvelous new journey? Learning about new media marketing! I started the course with little to no clue about properly marketing myself or my business. I knew I needed some guidance to be successful, and what better way to learn than diving into a career readiness class like New Media Marketing? During these four weeks, we've explored building a successful brand campaign from all sorts of angles.
We all have to start somewhere, and the best place is often from the outside looking in. Before I started spinning my wheels trying to gain clients and make people fans of a brand, I needed to figure out who I should be marketing to. The internet is filled with so many different types of people from all walks of life, and you’re never going to appeal to all of them. But guess what? You don’t need to! Sitting down and doing the research to narrow down my audience helped me gain a new perspective on what type of content and platforms I should focus on. Week one was all about this – figuring out who I'm talking to and why I want to reach them. I created three personas: a customer, a fan, and an influencer.
Once I nailed down who I was marketing to, it was time to pick an influencer to help meet my marketing goals. Choosing the best influencer for a company requires a lot of research. The company and the influencer need to fit together seamlessly so the influencer's fan group will naturally be attracted to the brand. In week two, I delved into researching different influencers, their social media metrics, the platforms they performed best on, the type of content their followers enjoyed, and how all these things would mesh with the brand. Plus, I figured out what a “fan” of my brand would look like.
After crunching all the numbers and choosing an influencer, it was time to pitch a plan. In week three, I developed a full campaign plan using S.M.A.R.T. goals for the company. This plan included those S.M.A.R.T. goals, a list of who in the company would be involved in the marketing campaign and what they would be doing, a pitch to the chosen influencer with a compensation plan, and an 18-month timeline outlining each step of my plan and the expected results.
And here we are at week four! This week, I'll be creating a measurement plan to ensure all my efforts and research are paying off. Although all this work is for a hypothetical company, I'm super excited to apply the practices I've learned over the past month to my own business. With high hopes for the future, I have to thank Dr. Sarah Skidmore for clearly articulating and explaining each step of this process, despite the challenges of conducting this training virtually.
