"Marketing Plans and Tips"

Presented by BethMcGough, ProQuest

Creating a marketing plan:
- Align with your strategic plan or other initiatives
- Be strategic rather than reactive
- Determine resources needed
- Avoid last minute projects
- Transparency
- Find out what works

Elements of the marketing plan:

1. Goals – specific, measurable, audience specific, relevant & reachable, time bound (e.g. increase student usage of Makerspace by 25% before December 2015)

2. Strategies – roadmap or approach to reach your goal (increasing student awareness)

3. Tactics/Activities – specific elements of strategy, activities, action-oriented (Tweet 3x week w/photo). Evaluate tactics at least monthly. Did tactics work?  What did you learn?  How can it be applied to next time period?  Make adjustments to plan.

4. Budget

5. Evaluation

Incorporating social media into your plan: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linked In, and Pinterest are the top 5 sites. (For Teens: Snapchat, Tumblr.) Don't forget emerging sites, and remember your targeted audience.  Social media can be both a strategy and a tactic. 

The presenter recommends social media ads as inexpensive, able to be targeted to be audience-specific, easy to measure with analytics, and easy to change. She notes that news from pages (vs. individual users) now show up less often in Facebook than they used to.

Facebook ads: located in the right side of newsfeed or the newsfeed. Possible goals: send people to website, boost posts, promote page, increase attendance. Can target by location, university, demographics.  Images are critical (e.g. smiling faces, cats, dogs, nostalgia.) Include a call to action (can be formatted as a button) Ads can be limited to specific school, specific age range, etc.

Facebook also has a “boost post” option.