Marketing

Kelly Neal:  I have posted comments on Group #1, 2 & 4~ Project manager, setup one of the FB pages, wrote the intro and part of the reflection.

Mike Burks:  I have posted comments on Group #1,2, and 4 ~ Setup FB page, wrote and compiled information for report, created tables and graphics for presentation.I wrote the Marketing Activities and Results and part of the reflection. 

Spencer Matheny: I have posted comments on Group #1, 2, and 4 ~ Setup FB page, sent marketing information to printer, wrote and compiled information for report.

Organizing Adult and Community Education Programs

Marketing Paper

Mike Burks, Spencer Matheny, Kelly Neal

Ball State University

Introduction

            It is important that our group keeps our target audience in mind while creating our marketing, as well as our workshop.  By remembering to “First, make sure your programs, and the faculty who teach them, are truly focused on and interested in adults and their needs” (Sevier, p. 26).  After carefully selecting material for our workshop, we wanted to make sure information about our event was spread out to our target audience.  The marketing campaign of any activity can be a crucial component in the success, or failure of said event.  Our group investigated multiple avenues in which to reach out to the community and inform them of the Big Read. 

            Our first form of Marketing was to create a flyer that was specific to our workshop that will be held at Glad Tidings Church on Tuesday the 20^th of October at 6:30pm.  We wanted to keep the flyer simple, keeping with the flames to tie in to the theme of Bradbury’s book.  Information is placed in an easy to read position, and special quotes from Bradbury are used to be thought provoking, and hook the viewer’s interests.

Another goal for the group was to not only inform members of the community about our workshop at Glad Tidings, we also wanted to be able to reach out to the community and spread the word of the Big Read in general.  Our theory was that even though someone may not be able to attend our event, the may be able to take part in other groups projects.  To do this we created a Facebook page for the Big Read Muncie lead by Group #3.

Marketing Strategies

            As a class, we have to realize we are marketing for an educational program and not an organization. Before we can focus on who we are marketing, it is good to know all of the skill sets that each group member has to contribute for the marketing. Who is a good public speaker, who is good at finding companies, who can create flyers/posters (Burkhart, 1995)? According to Sevier, we need to focus on direct marketing and not brand marketing because we are looking for a response from the community (Sevier, 2002). For our strategy, we went with traditional styles as well as trending styles. We wanted individuals in the community to have something to hold, to see with their eyes, and to have something they can keep. So that’s why we went with the flyer. With that, they have something they can look back on. To add onto the traditional style we used and are still using word of mouth. Every chance our group can get by spreading the word we take advantage of every opportunity with friends and family. We also wanted to use a trending style of marketing for the younger generation of the community. With this we thought Facebook would be the best route. We created a Facebook page so that people could be friends with us and look for information on our workshop as well as The Big Read website.

Budget

            Budgeting is one of the most important aspects in any type of planning whether it would be an event, organization, program etc., and it must be monitored thoroughly. Budgeting is, “a process of planning the future operations of an organization and systematically comparing those plans with actual results,” (Galbraith & Sisco, 1997). For this assignment, we were supposed to reach out to 100 people throughout the community. As a group we made a goal to double that and reach out to 200. We partnered with IFS to have them print off our flyers for us and they charged us ten cents a page, which came out to an even $20. This is our only specific budget item but when we get into the workshop assignment, there will be more we have to monitor. We used Facebook as well, so there was no cost to that.

Marketing activities and results

To get the word out about our Big Read workshop we used several marketing strategies.  We were not sure at first, which strategies would work best. We wanted to find different ways to get the word out and make our workshop desirable for people in the community to come to. The first step we had to take was to establish what the most feasible options for us to use. After a lot of thought we realized we can use Integrity Fulfillment Services to print off flyers for us to pass out and give to our partners and the people of the community, use Facebook to reach out to the younger members of the community, and use word of mouth to our friends and family to tell them about the workshop.  The graph in Picture 1a explains what methods we used in our advertising strategies.

Picture 1a

For the flyers, we tried to use the “Affective” portion of the graph. This means we wanted to change someone’s feeling about our particular product (Lavidge, 2000). We also needed to provide facts and announcements about The Big Read to make the community member aware of the workshop. This adheres to the “Cognitive” aspect of the graph. We believe these were the best strategies to use based on the demographics and our workshop.

Since our workshop will be held on the south side of Muncie, we hoped to reach out to a lot of community members in that area with our flyer distribution. We posted signs up on telephone poles, put flyers on cars, and passed them out to people we saw walking. Passing them out on the sidewalks and at Wal-Mart seemed to be the most effective method of distributing the flyers. We were able to talk to the community members we were giving the flyers to. This allowed us to explain what The Big Read actually is and answer any questions they had about the workshop. One woman asked where the church was and we were able to give her directions.  We passed out 50 flyers altogether. We hope that the people we reached out to are willing to reach out to other people as well. We did not get any definitive answers on who will attend the workshop from this strategy, but we hope some people will attend based on the flyer. We also set up the rest of the flyers in Glad Tidings’ and the YMCA’s lobby areas.

The second method we used to market The Big Read was Social Network Marketing with a focus on Facebook. When someone hears about a gathering or wants to purchase something, they turn to the Internet to do more research on it (Yaakop, 2013). With this knowledge, group 3 created a Facebook page for people to add as a friend on Facebook as well as created a Big Read fan page for people to “Like” on Facebook. We figured this would be the strategy we should use that would get a lot of the people to our workshop. The picture below shows how many friends we have accumulated on our first Big Read Facebook page.

Picture 2a

In picture 2a you can see by the red circle we have friended and reached at least 196 people to date. We are hoping that each of these friends will spread the news about our workshop.  We believe Facebook to be a great asset to our marketing campaign. Our fan page has been doing really well. We just started it on October 4, 2015. When it was created, we invited all of our Facebook friends to join and “Like” us on Facebook. This strategy seemed to really work well with people our own age.  Within the first day we had over 40 likes. We got the community members to sign up for our page by inviting our personal friends on Facebook and posting about the page and The Big Read.

Picture 3a

In picture 3a it shows the rise in interest in the page since we invited people to like the page. If you notice, there is a drop in the likes of the page a day after we created the page.  This is because the first influx of community members was people we invited. To spike the graph again and get more members of the community to join and “Like” our pages, we are doing another day of inviting our friends, commenting, and posting to get the word out about our workshop. The numbers of people being invited are rising every day. We have a total of 196 people and 48 on both pages. This means we have reached 244 on Facebook alone. We hope to reach out to more.

Picture 4a

In picture 4a it shows the number of people we will reach out to after we have done all of our marketing. We can only talk to so many people that we know by word of mouth. We were able to reach around 25 people that were our closest friends and family. The flyers work well too, we will reach 50 people with the flyers. Facebook seemed to be the best option for us. We reached 210 people altogether on Facebook and 285 in all. Our hope is to get the word out to as many people as possible.  

Reflection      

Looking back on our marketing experience, I would say we have learned a lot. From the utilization of our time, to finding the best way to meet our target audience many areas were researched and explored.  We felt our marketing should be spent using online interactions as a way to promote The Big Read, but this cannot be the only interaction with our community.  Passing out flyers is beneficial because of the personal touch it has. It allows people to ask questions if they have any, and also gives the project faces to put to a cause. I believe there is a place for both of these methods of marketing for a campaign that needs to be put on in a short period of time. We will continue to use these strategies for other ventures that we will have in the future.  Advice that we would give would be to start your marketing as soon as you have a workshop plan.  The earlier you start getting the word out, the more likely you are to reach a larger target audience.

Table 1a

1	Purpose	To reach out to organizations around the Muncie area to promote The Big Read
2	Goal	To personally reach out to 200+ people about The Big Read and our Workshop
3	Strategy	Focus on group members’ skill sets and focus on organizational response
4	Activities	Created flyer and used Facebook to create profile page and fan page
5	Results	Have reached out to almost 50 people through flyers and 250+ people through Facebook
6	Budget	.10 x 200 pages = $20 for the flyers

References

Burkhart, J. (1995). Marketing workplace education to business. Denver, CO: CDE, Office of Adult Education, Colorado Dept. of Education.

Galbraith, M., & Sisco, B. (1997). Budgeting and Financing. In Administering successful programs for adults: Promoting excellence in adult, community, and continuing education (Original ed.). Malabar, Fla.: Krieger Pub.

Lavidge, R. J., & Steiner, G. A. (2000). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness. Advertising & Society Review, 1(1).

Sevier, R. (2002). Marketing Your Continuing Education Program. The Catalyst, pg.26.

Yaakop, A., Anuar, M. M., & Omar, K. (2013). Like it or not: issue of credibility in Facebook advertising. Asian Social Science, 9(3), p154.