Digital Marketing Direction: "The Student Project" The Five Year Plan & Finance

By Erica Wenham, Tuesday 30 April 2013.

Digital Technologies For Marketing (Week 28)

The Five Year Plan

Year 1 (2014)

During the first year of launching The Student Project, the focus will be on ensuring the website is user friendly with all online functions working efficiently and effectively. In addition to this, continuous research will be implemented during 2014 to gain an insight into the consumer mind and how we can adapt and improve to create a more user-friendly experience online.

Marketing: Email Marketing and Social Media (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) will be the forefront focus in our online marketing campaign. Additional social media networks will be eventually introduced at a later stage. According to Hitwise (May, 2013), Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are currently dominating the social media empire gaining a total market share of 83.27% alone*.

* Facebook: Total Visits – 1,945,916,857. Visit Shares – 56.91%. Rank (April 2013) – 1^st

YouTube: Total Visits – 847,552,721. Visit Shares – 24.79%. Rank (April 2013) – 2^nd

Twitter: Total Visits – 53,703,058. Visit Shares – 1.57%. Rank (April 2013) – 3^rd

(Rank, April 2013 – Pinterest (4^th), Yahoo! Answers (5^th), LinkedIn (6^th), Google+ (7^th), Tumblr (8^th), Tagged (9^th), Reddit (10^th))

Objective: 10,000 successful job partnerships created through The Student Project*.

* - Lasting the duration of over one month or on full completion of one-off project.

Year 2 (2015)

The second year of business for The Student Project will focus on building partnerships with universities across the United Kingdom to help gain awareness of our website and the benefits it can offer in terms of experience for students in relation to their specific degree. This will be achieved by hosting workshops and seminars at designated universities providing a face-to-face interaction and “human voice” to our website.

An end-of-year assessment will be analysed on an annual basis, using the econometrics tool. This will give The Student Project an opportunity to gain an insight into the success rate of each quarter by identifying the amount of website visitors, current student profiles, current employer profiles, successful partnerships made and how well various marketing campaigns have performed.

Marketing: Emphasis will be focused on how we can engage with all consumer target markets.

Objective: 20,000 successful job partnerships created through The Student Project*.

* - Lasting the duration of over one month or on full completion of one-off project.

Year 3 (2016)

• Introduce affiliate programmes
• Focus on university reps around the UK to promote The Student ProjectRegular seminars and workshops on how The Student Project can benefit students, what can be achieved etc.

Objective: 40,000 successful job partnerships created through The Student Project*.

* - Lasting the duration of over one month or on full completion of one-off project.

Year 4 (2017)

• Focus on the development and design of the mobile app homepage and additional pages, due to be launched at a later stage
•  Focus on advertising within new digital marketing technologies and other methods of advertising

Objective: 70,000 successful job partnerships created through The Student Project*.

* - Lasting the duration of over one month or on full completion of one-off project.

Year 5 (2018)

• The launch of The Student Project mobile app

 Objective: 100,000 successful job partnerships created through The Student Project*.

* - Lasting the duration of over one month or on full completion of one-off project.

Finance

·         You ask yourself, how will the site make money when it does not charge a fee for either the student or the employer to advertise their profile?

·         Students are currently struggling to find work in this economy and are in need of money, especially considering the recent increase in university fees.

·         The student project simply takes only 10% of their earnings. Comparing this to recruitment agencies, this is a small fraction in comparison.

·         For example, say a student works only 5 hours a week at £5.00 per hour. This is a total of £25.00. Our fee would only work out to be £2.50. That is the price of one cheap pint down the local pub. There are no other hidden fees or charges. Doesn’t seem a lot does it?

·         However, just at my university alone there are over 8,000 students, NOT including the rest of the UK!

·         If 8,000 students do only 5 hours per week at only £5.00 per hour, that is set to make The Student Project an income of £20,000 in one week alone. Per year that works out to £1.04 million a year… for only one university! According to theindependent.co.uk (2012), the UK has over 4.5m small businesses.

·         Employers will then pay the student through our website to ensure our fee is paid. We will then deduct our fee and pay the student’s wages into their bank account. Simple.