Advertising and Promotion for Ask Grads Application

This article discusses the advertising and promotion strategy for Ask Grads, an online platform for recently graduated students who are actively looking for jobs. It includes target audience, brand campaign goal, media consumption behavior, media platforms, channels, budget distribution, and calendar of activities.

Running head: Advertising and Promotion
Advertising and Promotion
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1Advertising and Promotion
Table of Contents
Introduction and Brand Positioning.................................................................................................2
Discussion........................................................................................................................................2
1. Target audience........................................................................................................................2
2. Brand Campaign goal..............................................................................................................4
3. Targetaudiencemediaconsumptionbehavior – typeofmedia&platforms..................................4
5. Channels, platformandselection.............................................................................................12
6. The budget distribution..........................................................................................................12
7. Calendar of activities.............................................................................................................13
8. KPI Estimation......................................................................................................................15
9. Result projection....................................................................................................................16
10. Visual & Creatives Samples................................................................................................17
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................19

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Introduction and Brand Positioning
A new product application Ask Grads is a subject of our project. One of the main goal is to
place the product on the market and determine the best promotion strategy for it. Being created
by students from College LaSalle, Ask Grads is an online platform that has been oriented for the
recently graduated students who are actively looking for jobs. It is an application that enables the
employees and employers to get connected directly. It is a platform where opportunity is being
provided to the students to acquire a level of experience in working as a staff for different
companies either as a freelancer for online jobs or part-time job too. Those graduated students
will post their projects and CV on the Ask Grads platform in order to display their willingness to
work.
Discussion
1. Target audience
A target audience is the demographic of people that are most likely to be interested in
your product or service.1 Thus, for advertising Ask Grads, it's imperative to determine who its
“target audience” is, and how to reach them. It is important to reach many people at the same
time, so we need to be focused on certain criteria. There are demographic, psychographic,
geographic and behavior response segments. According to the purpose of the product we
determine our key partners, costumers and mentors as a third side in the employer-employee
relationships.
 Key Partners (Offer Services)
The major key partners are the Students, who are recently graduated and are actively looking for
acquiring experience and to make money. They could be from any education institutions that are
seeking for employment. As demographic criteria: the age from 18 to 35 years old with low
1Small Business ,SUSAN WARD July 17, 2017

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income, who are recent graduates (college or university diploma); new professionals. For
psychographic determination, it shall be proactive person, interested in real feedback (positive or
negative), self-motivated and self-employed. Also, geographically we are interested in covering
the Montreal and surroundings. Their behavior criteria are seeking for professional experience,
to understand the market and to create portfolio. We are going to spread the information among
students at different education institutions from where we will get our main audience.
 Costumers (Buy Services)
The people who seek for low cost services profession will also be one of our key target
audiences. Basically, it can be anyone, who needs to find a work. The idea is, they can post their
offers directly on Ask Grads platform and could get connected with the grads that have their
portfolios and CVs on the site. To consider Demographic, it would be 35 years old and above,
low / medium income, low education, women / men. Psychographic- price driver person,
interested in providing real feedbacks (positive or negative), no service provider contacts /
connections. Geographic criteria would be Montreal and surroundings. Behavior Response-
Online services consume.
 Mentors (Tutors)
Professors / Teachers with a great experience on certain fields who will mentor the Key Partners
(no experience) on their service offers will also be our target audience. The main idea for
involving such specialists is to help the recent graduated students to perform their work
correctly. Also, mentors can share with their experience and guide the new workers.
Demographic- 40 years and older, medium to high income, with high education and experience
professional. Psychographic- volunteer worker, comfortable lifestyle. Geographic-Montreal and
surroundings. Behavior Response- seeks to aide young professionals
Based on the type of target audience the advertising activities will be performed both online
and offline relevantly to accumulate the potential key partners. In order to use the application,

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the grads will need to pay registration fees and fill in the profile. Ask Grads is targeting people
with proper demographics, in relevance to their location, interest in doing the work as well as
overall behavior. Its objective is to provide service to students at compatible and affordable rates
which will be provided by experienced professors or teachers.
2. Brand Campaign goal
According to the general goal of our promotion campaign, the media objective is-
awareness. The new application needs to be presented to wide audiences. Also, it is necessary to
introduce the options that this product will be providing. We are launching Ask Grads
application. Thus, our stage in conversion channel is awareness. Despite that product have
several competitors that are well known in the society, we need to introduce the advantages and
benefits of the application as compared to the others. The uniqueness of Ask Grads is its
orientation on resent graduated students. The official web site of Ask Grads has an action
position in a conversional channel. The special button will call key partners and customers to do
an action in term of registration, paying fees and creating the profile. The customers will have a
specific option where to place the job offer and where to place the description of the tasks.
Marketing objectives are helping us to provide the right direction to meet our goals. 2To place the
product on the market and present Ask Grads in front of the audience, we need to introduce this
platform both online and offline. We established our strengths and weaknesses compare to our
competitors, and our marketing objectives will fit in to our business objectives. During the first
year we would like to open around one thousand key partners’ profiles and get five hundred
customers’ job offers.
3. Targetaudiencemediaconsumptionbehavior – typeofmedia&platforms
ConsumerBarometer
2Win marketing strategy p. 1

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Based on the surveys we looked up on Googlesearch, we have found that, as presented in
the picture below, internet is the first place where people look for information. People are
digitally-heavy. And also, people entertain on internet. They find it fun, and convenient. To sum
up, internet is the best place to reach a large number of customers.
Most of the people uses search engine to make a purchase decision online. The second and third
most used online sources are on brand or retailer website.

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For offline sources,37 out of 100 percent people aged from 25 to 34 make a purchase decision
through research Engine-store (brand and retailer). About 19 percent people discuss withfamily,
friends and their colleagues, 23 percent of them discuss with other people. To sum up, the brand
that has physical store gets most peopleattention.
To be more specific, for online channel, the majority of the online users uses internet very often.
They use internet on a daily basis.

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KeyPartners (18-35)
- Access to the Internet and visit social media daily
SocialMedia

8Advertising and Promotion
KeyPartners (18-35)
- Access to the Internet and visit social media through mobile phones.
Customers (35 andover)
- From the age 35-49, they use social media through computers
- From the age 55 and over, they mostly use social media through television
Platforms
KeyPartners (18-35)
- According to the social media platforms ranking chart, Facebook is the most used.
CanadianMediaUsageTrends
1. DEVICES
- Smart Speakers are the latest new devices.

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Reference: https://iabcanada.com/research/cmust/2017 CMUST -TotalCanadaReport page 3
-Car Connectivity, Smart TV and Smart Speakers are devices with the strongest prospect for
growth. These devices are projected to be a significant source of new, incremental time spent
counts with the Internet medium.
-Magazines –With the exception of Magazines, French Canadians are heavier users of media
than theTotal Canadians.

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2.
Reference: https://iabcanada.com/research/cmust/2017 CMUST – TotalCanadaReport page 4
TV has the highest percentage of weekly reach and highest weekly minutes, around 1000- 2500
weekly minutes. Moreover, TV users who are 55 years old and older spend more time on
watching TV.
3.

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Reference: https://iabcanada.com/research/cmust/2017 CMUST – TotalCanadaReport page 3
Among all the genders, women spend more time on watching TV.
4. The communication strategy – tactics to be used
Medias Tactics
TypeofMedias
(P-O-E-M)
PublicRelation /
Online PressRelease Owned
SocialMedia SMO Owned
SocialMedia SMO Owned
Offline MetroAdvertisement Paid
Offline
College /
UniversityAdvertisement Paid
SocialMedia SponsoredPosts Paid
Offline
College /
UniversityAdvertisement Paid
OftheSpecificMedia CampaignGoal
Alwaysthesame
ConversionFunnelGoal GeneralGoal
Awareness Awareness
Awareness Awareness
Awareness Awareness
Awareness Awareness
Awareness Awareness
Awareness Awareness
Conversion Awareness

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5. Channels, platformandselection- defend your choice. (Full details are in the excel file
“Media Plan)
In our media plan, we choose to use to focus on paid and owned media in both offline and
online communication to reach our key partners and customers. First of all, for owned media
platform, we will use our own Facebook andInstagram account, which allow us to promote ASK
GRADS freely to our friends without paying any fee. Moreover, we also can broaden our
customer network through likes, shares and hashtags inorder to raise everybody’s awareness and
call to action, which is click and access to the home page platform. Furthermore, we also release
a press release to raise awareness and inform everybody about our launching product via email
or Facebook’s messenger. At the same time, we conduct in paid media plat form as well. One
hand, we asked Coco Rocha to be our influencer since she has 1.200.000 followers with high
engagement rate in Instagram – 0.11% and in the other hand, we will have some metro,
dashboard advertisements and organize the “CareersMeet Up” in Colleges and Universities in
Montreal so that we will have a chance to contact, present ASK GRADS and get feedback from
the potential key partners in person.
6. The budget distribution

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About our budget, we have 5000$ in total. Since we have our own media platform, most
of our budget will spend in the influencer and metro advertisement, which costs us around 2000$
or up for each. It can be considered as 80% of our total budget. The other 20%, we will spend on
dash board, flyers as well as renting kiosk for the career meet up.
7. Calendar of activities
Task Name Duration Start Finish
Media Plan 59 days Thu 4/19/18 Tue 7/10/18
Public Relation / Online 12 days Thu 4/19/18 Fri 5/4/18
Identify the consumer database 5 days Thu 4/19/18 Wed 4/25/18
Send email 7 days Thu 4/26/18 Fri 5/4/18
Social Media 24 days Mon 5/7/18 Thu 6/7/18
Develop content for Facebook 10 days Mon 5/7/18 Fri 5/18/18
Approve Content 2 days Mon 5/21/18 Tue 5/22/18
Develop Facebook Ads 12 days Wed 5/23/18 Thu 6/7/18
Social Media 22 days Thu 4/26/18 Fri 5/25/18
Develop content for Instagram 12 days Thu 4/26/18 Fri 5/11/18
Approve Content 3 days Mon 5/14/18 Wed 5/16/18
Develop Instagram Ads 7 days Thu 5/17/18 Fri 5/25/18
Offline 32 days Mon 5/28/18 Tue 7/10/18
Develop content for metro 15 days Mon 5/28/18 Fri 6/15/18
Sent for approval 2 days Mon 6/18/18 Tue 6/19/18

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Launch metro ads 15 days Wed 6/20/18 Tue 7/10/18
Develop posters and Billboards 20 days Mon 5/28/18 Fri 6/22/18
Sent for approval 2 days Mon 6/25/18 Tue 6/26/18
launch posters and billboards 6 days Wed 6/27/18 Wed 7/4/18
Social Media 10 days Thu 4/26/18 Wed 5/9/18
Discuss content with the influencer 1 day Thu 4/26/18 Thu 4/26/18
Discuss Remuneration 1 day Fri 4/27/18 Fri 4/27/18
Develop content for promotion 3 days Mon 4/30/18 Wed 5/2/18
Launch the content 5 days Thu 5/3/18 Wed 5/9/18
Offline 26 days Thu 5/10/18 Thu 6/14/18
Visit colleges and Universities 7 days Thu 5/10/18 Fri 5/18/18
communicate with candidates 7 days Mon 5/21/18 Tue 5/29/18
Identify the potential candidates 7 days Wed 5/30/18 Thu 6/7/18
Follow up on the target candidates 5 days Fri 6/8/18 Thu 6/14/18

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Identify the consumer database
Send email
Develop content for Facebook
Approve Content
Develop facebook Ads
Develop content for Instagram
Approve Content
Develop Instagram Ads
Develop content for metro
Sent for approval
Launch metro ads
Develop posters and Billboards
Sent for approval
launch posters and billboards
Discuss content with the influencer
Discuss Remuneration
Develop content for promotion
Launch the content
Visit colleges and Universities
communicate with candidates
Identify the potential candidates
Follow up on the target candidates
19-Apr 8-Jun 28-Jul 16-Sep 5-Nov
8. KPI Estimation
Based on the media plan created, we believe there is a terrific opportunity for achieving our
target market in a way that in the future, it will generate conversion for purchase for the business.
While analyzing the online media plan drawn, particularly the owned media: Facebook and
Instagram page, we focus on a KPI of 5% of engagement rate (likes, shares, comments, repost –
for Instagram only). This percentage at first might seem elevated, but when analyzing the target
key partners and customers, we can understand that it is an achievable target since most of those
people spent a great portion of their time online on social media platforms, according to the
media consumption report that was discussed above. On regards of paid media, specifically the
Instagram page of Coco Rocha, the KPI is around 0.11% which is in accordance to her current
engagement rate on Instagram page.
On regards to the offline media plan, the metro ad`s, college and university dashboards and
career`s meet up, the KPIs is around 100 student’s subscriptions expected after every event. We

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believe that is an achievable target since the strategy is to publish those adds on the months of
April, August and December which are the months when the students finalizes their semester;
winter, summer and autumn respectively. At those times, there are higher changes for Ask Grads
to achieve high success on the engagement program, but on the other hand, the advertisement
won’t be limited to those dates, we plan on advertising from February to December, with higher
focus on the months mentioned above.
9. Result projection
The main purpose of the advertisement is to raise awareness for Ask Grads company. As the
result from the media plan, it will reach the audience through many channels both online and
offline platforms. Through social media sponsored posts, the existence of the service and
application is likely to be recognized by the people since they will engage in the social post
activity of the influencer, who is Coco Rocha, such as likes, shares and comments on Facebook,
except shares will not be available on Instagram. The key performance indicators of the
sponsored are to reach 5% of the total influencer’s audience through each channel. The amount
in number would be approximately 5-6k. Moreover, Ask Grads have created their own media
through the social media to increase their popularity as well. Also, the offline media has radically
affect the result of the projection through many ways such as public relation and online email,
metro ads, college and universities dashboard, and college and universities career meet ups. The
expected return from the advertisement at the metro, college and universities dashboard would
be unknown since the sample population is very big to measure. However, the college &
universities career meet-ups will be a great opportunity to reach another level of the conversion
funnel. The expectation from the career meet-ups will be the registrations of the target audience,
who is the student. The key performance indicator for this event is to register at least 100 people.

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10. Visual & Creatives Samples
According to the owned media on Facebook and Instagram, we seek to create an attractive
visual advertisement for the target audience. The creative for the posts will be the image for
social media, and the printed image for the metro advertisement. The message divided into two
sections since Ask Grads has two target customers. The main target customer is the key partner
(recent graduate students). The second is the customer (people in all age who need to hire
graduate students.) The main aim of the message is to convince the audience to show interest and
learn more about the application by searching for the homepage platform (website). So, the Ask
grads company will increase more awareness, and there will be a high chance that some
particular graduate students to register for the portfolio on the homepage. For example, we create
an image by putting the message “hire recent graduate students”, and “find the talents you need.”
On the bottom of the image, there is a website that allow them to seek for more information.
Through offline, there will be the printed image for the metro, which intent to raise an awareness
for Ask Grads by simply ask them to contact the homepage. Last but certainly not the least, there
will be the college and universities’ career meet-ups that would be initiate meeting with the
target audiences. The main aim of the meet up is to convince the target audience for the
subscription. The message is to register it within the specific period to get additional promotion.

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Bibliography
1. https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-a-target-audience-2295567
2. http://www.winmarketing.co.uk/marketing-strategy/marketing-objectives/