How To Have A Successful Marketing Week

Ran by James Madison, Saint Joseph's University, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, and University of Washington

Friday, March 17, 2017
3:00pm

Since Bridgewater State University is a smaller chapter, I went to a seminar about how to have a successful marketing week hosted by 3 to 4 larger chapters and what better way to improve than learning from others. Some essentials to marketing week are listed below.

Essentials of Marketing Week

•   Having a purpose

•   Text messaging

•   Taking notes

•   Using email and LinkedIn

•   FOOD

You are marketing this event to college students. If you say there's food at an event, your turnout will be higher than if you didn’t have food. They also recommended reaching out to different majors. For example, have the graphics majors help with designs for t-shirts/flyers. Also extent invite to clubs and associations in all major and explain how this event would benefit them even though they are not business majors.

Planning Marketing Week

To start off, they all said that planning is the first and most important part of the event being successful. They suggested starting to plan marketing week at the end of the summer by building contact lists, picking a theme, promoting and building teamwork. Building a contact list consisted of building who you want to reach out to (like businesses and corporations) in and around your campus community to help sponsor some of the events/ speak at the events. Picking a theme involves coming up with a theme that can also be divided into subcategories so you can differentiate the different events throughout the week. You also want to plan teamwork building throughout the whole process of planning and delivering the event.  

Promoting Marketing Week

You want to start promoting your event two weeks out from when it happens. The speakers also recommended picking the week before the university's career fair. Why? one person asked. Because people are in the mindset of thinking about their future, also potential speakers of your marketing week could already be traveling to your university for the career fair. Take advantage of ads/posting on social media. Some promotional items they recommended for the event are T-shirts, banners, and flyers.

Fundraising Marketing Week

To throw a big event like this takes hard work, dedication and money. That’s right, food and t-shirts aren’t free (Hint: unless you get sponsors). Some good fundraisers that the speakers mentioned were: creating midterm and final care packages to sell to the parents during moving in week to send to their child during those weeks, going to restaurants and having 20% of the bill going to your organization or just ask for sponsorships. How do you just ask for sponsorships? Well the speakers said one of two things. Write a proposal or pitch it in an email to the company you wish to get sponsored by. The speakers said to write a proposal just stress that members are there best candidates (for jobs after college) and why it’s important and who you are impacting with helping your organization out.

Events During Marketing Week

The speakers stressed to know your demographic and fill the needs of them. So they suggested to send out a survey/poll to get an idea of what the population is looking for, for career development/marketing development. During this process make all members understand the process and volunteer for things they are interested in. The speakers recommended you differentiate what events you have during marketing week, so that other clubs and majors would be more likely to attend. Somethings they have done are as follows: networking banquet, LinkedIn headshots/critiques, alumni panel, etc. They stressed to always keep in contact with all companies/alumni that are willing to speak/present for your chapter.

To sum the seminar up, always have food at meetings and events, networking and staying connected to past speakers/ presenters is highly important and make it feel like a family not just a club/chapter. Also you never know until you ask, so reach out to the community. They probably would say yes to get their name out there to the college kids.