Marketing+Strategy

=__Marketing Strategy__=

Our group put together this marketing strategy for UTM Women's Center, as a way to analyze the organization and find out the best ways in which to advertise to their target market.

Know Yourself, Know Your Market

The UTM Women’s Centre (UTM WC) mission statement is as follows:

**//“To promote women’s rights and issues at the UTM campus through intentional education, workshops, events and activities.”//**

The UTM WC’s has several operational objectives that fall under one chief objective: to promote women’s rights and issues at the UTM campus. To achieve these, they coordinate and organize workshops as well as events and activities targeting women’s issues, to provide referral and educational resources to UTM students dealing with women’s issues, aim to provide a safe space to support women’s unique and shared lived experiences, run on an anti-oppression framework.

UTM WC is a UTSU levy group concerned with education and counseling regarding issues surrounding women and men. They feel that their services empower those who use them. Those who use them, as well as those they would like to use them, are their target market. They define their target as “female and male UTM students between 15 and 50 years of age.” Race, income and general demographics do not influence the level of service any individual achieves, as each individual has a unique situation. Geographically, they are concerned with UTM campus, however welcome questions from non UTM students.

Have you ever heard of the UTM WC? What gender do they entertain? Your answer to this question likely highlights their main problem: image. The UTM WC is incorrectly viewed as a place exclusively for women. Because of this, male membership and interaction is extremely low and resources are not fully utilized. Another problem is promotion. Those informal, beneficial events they conduct are often unseen by the general student population due to poor advertising and a lack of campus presence. The fact that they are a student club without generating revenue partly causes this problem. Understanding their needs is a key step in solving their problems. They need to cost effectively inform their target market of the ‘free’ services they offer. As they cannot afford to pay employees, they operate solely with student volunteers who are simultaneously balancing academics. This factor divides the time and attention the club needs to be properly promoted and operated.

Solving these problems is by no stretch impossible. Organisations such as the UTM WC must understand the power of online advertising on Social Networks and the traffic flow of popular webpages. Web based ads need to be created, rigorously promoting their services, however not harassing potential clients either. Offering rewards such as food discount codes or free coffees in return for filling out an online survey is another way to boost promotion. UTM WC must be prepared to spend some money on promotion and depending on their budget, and may have to consider re allocating money to foster long run success. UTM WC should also look into acquiring a new office location, or if impossible, boosting the physical presence of their current location. The UTM Residence Council has an extremely strong online presence, UTM WC would benefit from collaborating with them on events, whereby UTM Residence Council will pull them into their online presence at residence, allowing UTM WC to expand to over 800 first years. The Marketing Mix (The Pour Ps) allows organisations to develop an effective marketing plan, and consist of these four topics: **P**roduct and service, **P**rice, **P**lacement and **P**romotion.

Product and service, what exactly do you want to sell to your consumers? As you are not receiving money for your service, this makes it a little more area to think about. Their product is information, and they are begging to give it away. This product is beneficial to many, however many of them will never accept it. They must recognize that when dealing with it. Price is simple. Zero dollars and zero cents. Placement, where and in by what means will your product be acquired by others? To acquire services users have to meet at the centre, however for clients to receive goods such a pens and other insignificant but slightly desired object Promotion, UTM WC needs to realize that this is not done enough online, and is stranded in methods that were effectively formerly, before the start up of Social Networking. Advertising on sites like Facebok, Twitter and LinkdIn makes an excellent companion to their traditional methods of flyer distribution and public announcements at events.

2. **Strategic analysis**

When designing a marketing strategy, one must have a strategic analysis planned so to be prepared for further developments, and to be equipt to deal with complications that may arise. For the UTM Women’s Center, we investigated into the weakness of their operation and any opportunities available to aid those weaknesses through our marketing plan.

This year the UTM Women’s Center acquired 150 members, yet they would like that number to be higher as not every member attends each meeting or event. Due to the fact that only a small percent of the campus signed up to become a member, the organizations presence around campus is not as alive as they would like it to be. Both of these weaknesses, in turn are caused by the fact that the advertising and marketing for UTM Women’s Center is lacking and thus it is difficult to get the attention of a large share of the student body. The weaknesses we were made aware of, each influence one another in a circular fashion. Therefore the major weaknesses of this group can be resolved through the creation of a better marketing strategy.

There are many opportunities for the UTM Women’s Center to become more active and present on campus, thus aquiring more members and aiding their image with students. Through an online advertising campaign (which will be discussed further later), including an updated website, facebook advertisements, facebook welcome page, banner ad, and a twitter background, the opportunities to showcase what UTM Women’s Center is about are great.

Porters 5 force analysis is a good way to understand the market you will be getting into as an advertiser and marketer. Due to the fact that UTM Women’s Center is a non-profit group on campus, which services students needs, brings awareness to women’s issues and puts on fundraising events, the bargaining power of suppliers or customers, and the threat of new entrants is not an issue that needs further analysis. However, the threat of substitute products or competitive rivalry within their industry is a concern. There are numerous other groups on the Universities campus that create competition. If a student is a member of another club or group on campus, then it lessens the chance that they will join UTM Women’s Center. The most threatening are groups which have a similar theme or goals to the Women’s Center.

As previously stated, the Women’s Center wishes to attract all students including women and men in the undergraduate degree, therefore all clubs or groups on campus are competition. The students most likely to join the Women’s Center are those looking for support, those wanting to feel part of a community, or those who just want to be part of discussing and aiding women’s issues. The main competition then, are groups trying to attract the same type of student that the Women’s Center is trying to attract. The groups we have identified as attracting similar students, are the Women and Gender Studies Action Group, Spirituality, Awareness and Self-Development group, and OUT @ UTM. These groups have similar services and support which could detract attention, and thus new members from the Women’s Center. Another competition may be that students can get support for women’s issues through social communities online. Which is why a website with an online forum is part of the marketing strategy for UTM Women’s Center, so to combat any other avenues that might devalue the benefits of this group.

**3.** **Set marketing objectives**

The reason for creating marketing objectives is so to have a detailed explanation of what you wish to accomplish as a marketing team, during the term of a campaign. One you have set marketing objectives, it will be easier to figure out how you will accomplish these goals, and also how you will measure the success of the campaign once it is complete. These marketing objectives must be SMART = specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based.

For the UTM Women’s Center, the SMART marketing objectives that we created are; to achieve a membership quota of 20% higher than is currently being achieved for the following school year beginning in September, and for 5% of those new members to be males, to increase fundraising revenue by 15% during the following school year, and to achieve better online brand awareness for all students which will be measurable through members social networking involvement on the groups Facebook, Twitter, and website forums.

The desired outcomes of this marketing plan are mainly to get more members to not only sign-up, but to attend meetings, come out to events, and aid in fundraising. Once more members become actively involved with the Women’s Center we believe it will make the group more recognizable on campus, which is another important goal that we wish to reach through this marketing strategy. Lastly, once there are more members and presence on campus the hope is that events and fundraising can become much larger and more elaborate as more involvement will create more opportunities, and more people aiding in creating great events.

Once these marketing objectives of gaining 20% more membership, 15% greater revenue in fundraising, and creating better online brand awareness, are achieved, then the marketing strategy we have created will be deemed successful. The goal is that by September 2011 the awareness of UTM Women’s Center will be much greater due to the execution of the online marketing strategy discussed here, and that will in turn affect the number of members signing up for this group, and the involvement in the group will be increased.

**4. Generate strategies and Tactics for achieving objectives**
The UTM Women’s Center is an organization that supports women and men emotionally. It is an organization on campus that is not very well known so our group aims to spread knowledge of the organization so people who are searching for people with the same interests can more easily connect on campus and online.

To promote the organization, our group has chosen to utilize online advertising through social networking. Online advertising has an advantage of being low cost while still being able to reach a vast number of people. Seeing images in advertising online also helps to display visuals that will help people to remember the organization. (Quirk 27)

To improve the organizations brand awareness, we plan to improve the UTM Women Centre’s website. This will improve the usability of the website so viewers can more easily access the services that will be provided and be more aware of the events, what the organization is about, etc. In addition to the website improvements, we have also included social networking to spread knowledge of UTM Women’s Centre. The design of our wireframe is simple and clean with white space and accent colours. The background colour of a light gray was used because when speaking to coordinators of the UTM Women's Centre, they didn't want stereotypical female colours, thus a neutral hue was used. The UTM Women’s Centre logo provides a way to put a signature image to the organization. The wireframe incorporates a two-column layout to organize the content. The layout of the wireframe is straightforward for optimal usability for users with any amount of internet capabilities. The design includes Twitter in the sidebar, which allows nearly instantaneous updates and links the UTM Women’s Centre to social media.

Social networking is a form of social media which is “designed [for] sharing.” (Quirk 124) Our group mainly used Facebook and Twitter to promote the organization. Our designer has created a Facebook ad and Twitter ad that will help direct people to the UTM Women’s Centre website. Facebook is an ideal form of social networking because it allows us to create groups, and personalized page profiles. This assists in reaching our target audience, which are students at the UTM campus. Facebook provides opportunities to distribute information about the organization, events and direct people to the website. This social networking site also allows interaction with the organization and students. Facebook allows viewers to post feedback and connect with other students interested in the organization. The Facebook advertisement was created with consistent design elements as the UTM Women Centre’s Website. The logo is prominent in the advertisement, the words chosen to go on the advertisement are concise, as to provide knowledge of the organization without any ambiguity. The logo is the only graphic shown because the logo itself should be recognizable for the audience. This will lead the user to click on the advertisement to learn more about UTM Women’s Centre. The Facebook Welcome page has the same elements as the wireframe for the website. The same elements were chosen to demonstrate consistency and create a recognizable campaign. Also, the objectives of the UTM Women's Centre is placed on the Welcome page because it provides the audience a background knowledge of the centre. The welcome page has a stamp-like element that says, "Men & Women are Welcome!" which tells the target audience that the Women Centre is a place for both genders. As well, the heading "Visit Us" that identifies the location, office hour times and contact information is displayed to provide an offline action to the online interaction of the welcome page.

Twitter is another social networking website that allows people to connect to UTM Women’s Centre. It allows the organization to tweet quick up-to-the-minute updates, and promote other online aspects of the UTM Women’s Centre. As with the Facebook advertisements, the Twitter advertisement executes the same design elements as the UTM Women Centre’s Website. The reason in doing so is to maintain consistency in the campaign for the UTM Women's Centre. There is a lot of white space on the Twitter background because its main purpose is to display the basic information about the UTM Women's Centre, such as where it is located, office hour times and contact information.

In addition to creating advertisements for social networking websites, we also created a web banner. The web banner is animated to create engagement and interactivity. The colour scheme is kept the same as the other advertisements. One element that is different is the slogan, "Keeping Women's Rights Alive". The slogan is to familiarize the target audience the main objectives of the UTM Women's Centre and to act as an element of stickiness. The font for the slogan is different because it is to attract attention to our target audience. As well, the word "women" is segmented into two colours - "wo" in pink and "men" in blue. This is to suggest to the target audience that men are welcome to the Women's Centre, hence "men" is coloured in blue.

[Around Campus Promotion] In addition to online advertisements, we plan to promote the UTM Women’s Centre around campus to reach the demographic of students that do not regularly use online facilities, such as social networking. Flyers that promote the organization, with the same design elements as the online advertisements will also draw attention to the organization around campus.

We believe that our online marketing strategies will be successful because the goals we hope to reach are realistic and obtainable. We hope that the UTM Women's Centre will adopt some of the strategies we used for the upcoming school year to benefit the club and the UTM community.