Introduction
For this project, I decided to create my own business and build a marketing strategy for it. I call it Anonymous Advocates. This is a company centered around being the voice for college students, dealing with any possible frustrations in a course. For a fee, any college student enrolled can pay an advocate to communicate possible frustrations, via email or phone call. It solves issues of confrontation, while giving a nudge to possible dissatisfaction, without possibly making yourself a target in the classroom. This really supports the “why” function of a business that I feel like a wide variety of people could relate to, support, and be a part of. My business is a third party student advocate company, bringing an outside voice and acting as a facilitator/advocate for rising conflicts in the classrooms.
Messaging
ANSWER WHY
To not only bring notice of a not okay professor, but to find room for improvement to evolve as new students come in, the rise of technology, and faulty practices.
Different ways to learn.
Getting your money’s worth.
Not being cut off from growing as a person.
Letting students be a part of a learning experience despite their busy lives. Work. family. Other courses.
Increase in flexibility.
Everyone has had a bad or unfair experience with a professor, it is about finding peace, creating understanding, and prioritizing two sided communication to enhance fairness and care.
Make it an understanding that a professor is of service to you, not the other way around.
Bring notice to unfair treatment.
Finding a balance of humanity in treatment.
For Messages
Product: Communication services to settle discomfort or disputes unanimously
Features: Email, phone call, higher up call
Benefits: Flexibility in the classroom, better relationships, adapting to specific learning styles, no need to take the time, no need to communicate, protect identity and potential grade
Pain Points: Having the time, communicating, adapting to specific learning styles
A. Your ideal customer
Write a brief statement describing your ideal customer and what they want, are struggling with, or desire.
Ideal customers would consist of college students who take their education and personal treatment very seriously. The customer is constantly looking to obtain the correct resources, obtaining the results they want, while receiving decent behavior from their professors. A constant struggle in their mind is worrying how their input and personal relationships could impact the grading results they hope to achieve.
-Struggles with communicating efficiently
-Little available time to walk in to professor’s office to explain frustrations and confusion
B. Value
What is the most desirable result, outcome, or transformation they want help achieving?
-This customer is looking to receive acts of human decency from their professor.
-Negative treatment leads to a negative outlook, frustration, and possibly affects one’s grades at the outcome by the end of the semester.
-Having someone else voice their concerns can take all of the weight off their back, feel more relaxed, and voice concerns without fear of personal backlash.
-To feel at ease.
C. The benefits behind the outcome
What are the biggest reasons they want that outcome? What benefits do they ultimately desire that they will once they achieve that outcome? Why behind the why.
Why do they want to be treated decently by professors? A professor treating a student decently can allow the student to feel more at ease in the course, relieves pressure communicating in and out of class, and allows the student to focus on the curriculum, rather than the negative energy the professor gives off to the innocent student.
D. What they want to avoid
What is something you will help them avoid because they are fed up with it, worried about it happening, or it’s a primary thing holding them back?
-This service would allow the customer to avoid what some see as uncomfortable, hurtful, or possibly demeaning conversations with the professor.
-It keeps the student in the dark while still being able to voice their opinion and outlook on the course, without having the pressure of a professor’s perception potentially changing.
E. Vision
What is the change you want to see in the world or the vision you want to realize?
I want to see professor-student relationships completely evolve, not being influenced by constructive criticism or personal encounters. While also having professors be held accountable for how they treat their students. College students make sacrifices, pay, and choose to be here, professors need to be courteous to the needs and flexibility required by students.
F. Mission (The how)
How will you create that change or realize that vision of the future?
To re-center the focus of education on curriculum and catering to the needs of the student, rather than formatting learning opportunities solely to the benefit of the teacher.
G. Contribution
Why is this important to the world?
College students are the future of countless industries; processes and procedures need to cater to the needs of students, every learning experience should be personal and stick.
H. Reason Why?
Why is this important to you?
Throughout my experiences in education, no matter the level, elementary, middle school, high school, and university, I have had horrible experiences that were not on a curriculum based level, it felt completely personal. There is no mobility or flexibility with learning, it feels like a one style process is trying to be made.
Purpose Statement
My purpose is to re-center the focus of education so that needs and flexibility measures can be met, in order to help those struggling to adapt to specific learning environments/professor treatment. So that fair treatment is given and the pressure is relieved, focusing on what matters, effectively learning the curriculum of the course.
Imagine a world Template
Imagine a world where your potential grade is not impacted by your personal relationship with your professor and your needs are listened to. I’m dedicated to making that happen by advocating for students butting heads with professors.
Elevator Pitch Template
I help students who have received unfair treatment from power hungry professors to be able to focus on curriculum rather than personal relationships with their professors, without them having to do it themselves, so that they can voice their opinion and make use of the time they are sacrificing.
Competitors
-Websites that provide information/feedback on how to effectively communicate with professors. -Free articles.
-Could drop the class/switch (to avoid)
-Work through it anyways
Disadvantages: take the time, have the patience, formulate wording, potentially more work, struggle through the course for months with no change
How can you stand out?
We are offering services to communicate for them, at a reasonable rate, while operating independently from universities to rid of university bias.
-Turnover time.
-Within 24 hour turnover: contacting professor and feedback to the student
-Prices
-$8.99 for an email, $14.99 for a call, $21.99 to a higher up
-Higher quality→ higher cost
-Doing the work for them
-Protecting their professor-student relationships/identity
Core Values
-Compassion
-Discipline
-Improvements
Funnel: the strategy behind the website
Starts with Bait: Attraction, attract the person, get their attention, come to us
Changing Stranger→ customer→ partner
Pain points of customers for Anonymous Advocates:
-Availability (because of job, kids, sports, life choices, other commitments): they do not have time to go into their professor’s office to voice concerns, they have to go from place to place, their day is packed.
-Relaxing
-Staying awake
-Communication: (voicing concerns clearly)
-Sleeping
-Clarity
-Keeping up with coursework/adapting to classrooms
Solve/Bait (how can we solve these pain points):
-Take matter into our own hands, pass responsibility from them to us
-Keep identity safe and do the communicating for them
-Quick turnover/resolutions
-Promote and partner with tutoring websites (someone struggling in a classroom with the professor is going to need tutoring guidance, which can also reduce the amount of teacher-student interaction)
-Personal
-Finding common ground with professor once understanding their context
Delivery
-Specific instructions to really understand what we do
-First time free Trial
-Coupons to loyal customers using the services back to back semesters
-Social media contests
-Ambassadors
-Personal social media posts (acting like a normal person, not professional like Slim Jim)
-Free consultation call
-Advise a specific service through a short survey to understand their situation
-Quick rollover time
-Display and illustrate direct stories on the website (of someone who used our services and saw a difference)
-Public displays of association with student friendly orgs (ratemyprofessor, chegg, etc)
-Friendly employees
-Personal on the phone→ knowing someone on a first name basis
-licensing/communications specialists/professionals
Click funnels
Value Ladders-Increases value as you go down
Bottom ▽:
-A free consultation to see if our services are worth your time and energy. $0.00
-Qualifications are met, the customer may be interested.
-An email sent to the professor by our service team, illustrating concerns. $8.99
-Advocates give a call to the professor, diagnosing frustrations voice to voice to the professor, from students in the classroom. $14.99
-Further research is done and communication measures are taken to the limit, calling someone of higher authority, voicing concerns to a direct source that will get the message across. $21.99
Top △:
Specials: Back to back discount: utilizing services one semester after the other, specific percent off.
Funnel
More Details
START
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Starts with an ad: Facebook ads, Instagram, Involvement and presence on Student first organizations: For instance: Chegg offers many initial coupons and trials with each order, having a discount could lead to potential clientele to our website.
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Leads them to the homepage: Offering what we do and what we offer and what we can change for you. Including: Company name, tagline, Logo/brand, Purpose, service territory, Color pallette, the process, videos, success stories. (Show they are in the right place)
↓
OPT IN PAGE: Sign up for emails: Hear success stories in email newsletters, offer a percentage off or free trial for their first use of the service. As well as joining the discussion pages and community that is Anonymous Advocates. It will make the students interested and not feel alone or the only one thinking something. Continue to show them success stories and efficiency of the service
OR
Create an account and collaborate with students around the world, offering discussion boards and activities to do. Polls. Tons of different ways to interact.
↓
Show success stories from the past, Invitations
Sales pages: Offering levels of services and rates.
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Customers buy into services and invitations from their community.
↓
Order placed.
↓
Thank You/Turnover/Results/Review
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Progress, adaptations, and a change of environment made in the classroom. All while keeping student-professor relationships stable, staying in your comfort zone, and an environment that you are comfortable in with good treatment.
↓
END/REPEAT
Ad Example
-Can be for Facebook, Instagram, and within partnered companies.
-Made into brochures, posters, etc.
Traffic: Built to generate leads and sales.
Generate through: Social media, Influencers, and partnering with specific companies
Social Media presence
Relevance/Engagement: A popular way companies are getting their name out there is their activity on social media. I believe that monitoring specific keywords (like college related topics) on things like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook would put us closer with our ideal audience. Also, being active on popular accounts, such as meme accounts, pop culture, other celebrities, would get our name out there and create impressions. In a sense, we would allow the person running our accounts to build a personality for the brand, but not in a professional manner. More in the sense of treating it like a personal, everyday account, showing emotion, funny comments, funny pictures, responses, and just being active in places on these websites that you typically would not suspect a business to be at.
Traffic Costs: This would be relatively inexpensive, you would just have to have an individual putting in the time, sticking their nose in every corner of social media, that is free impressions and creates a personality for ourselves. One that our customers can relate to.
Traffic Value: These impressions could be worth the value, Slim Jim has done a similar tactic to this and their accounts have grown immensely in the past 2 years. This could lead not only to a following, but also people checking out our services, website, and plenty of word-of-mouth.
Traffic Supply: Would be plentiful, but those reached may not always be ideal potential customers! This leads to...
Influencers
Relevance/Engagement: Reach out to influencers who have audiences that are mainly college aged students. This would allow us to sponsor their videos, where the influencer could talk about our services, what we can do, and the ease of the process. This would lead to a ton of engagement, because people trust influencers that they follow and know that if they are sponsored by something, that the influencer believes in the company.
Traffic Costs: Depending on their follower account, price could vary, starting small could be beneficial for pricing.
Traffic Value: This traffic would be very valuable and money well spent, because it focuses on a specific type of person, in our case this is someone who is in college and may need assistance.
Traffic Supply: With all of this engagement, it would be more centered towards our ideal customers, because with our choosing of influencer, we can decide what kind of audience we are looking to reach out to. So, it would be more focused in a sense.
Companies
Relevance/Engagement: Anonymous Advocates is a student focused company. Strategically partnering or collaborating with other student-focused companies would show our place in the industry, on the student’s side. Companies like Chegg (who offers cheaper textbooks to rent, easy services, tutoring, etc.), RateMyProfessor (who offers reviews of professors at each campus from students as well as a preview of their class), and others. Working with them would get our name there and reveal something to this perception that has not been introduced yet, a service that improves your classroom experience. There are plenty of loyal users of both of these, this engagement would be both positive and beneficial, leading to sales. In general, we are all looking to appeal to the same kind of person, which is why it would be worth it.
Traffic Costs: Costs would be a question mark, depending on the other companies level of activity in these deals.
Traffic Value/Supply: The value of working with these companies would be unmatched, because they already have the trust, respect, and loyalty of the people we are going for, if we can expand their focus from not just them, but us also, this would lead to engagement, followings, website activity, sales, and lead them through our funnels.
Email List-Content:
Including deals, promotions, events on campuses, jobs, internships, videos, feedback, and what is going on in our offices. Contents of the email sent out should be filled with things people want to see, especially young people. With our ideal customers being college students, internships, jobs, funny videos, promotions, and deals are contents that get their attention.
Response:
Leading to response and activity on our website.
