This semester in Marketing 470 we are doing something quite unique. The students are learning campaign management 'on the job' by acting as affiliates and driving traffic to the Restaurant.com (the company that sponsors my professorship) website. The students have picked two media channels, such as email, adwords, twitter, social media and blogs and have planned their campaigns and are now implementing. They will track the progress of their campaigns through landing pages and promotion codes that can be linked to their groups and get an idea of what it is like to run a campaign first hand.
This week I shared some of my project management tips with the class. Follow through, follow through, follow through is the main thing that my father always taught me and this principle really applies to project management. The students need to get information from personnel at R.com and are learning to follow up to make sure they meet their project goals. I emphasized that they need to complete the project in three weeks and although I put some 'slack time' in the schedule, another project management concept, they need to make sure they begin this week and then can measure the results of week one and make changes for week two, etc.
I also emphasized the importance of proofreading and checking the facts of every campaign. We had a guest speaker earlier in the semester that told us some 'war stories' about when things are not correct in marketing campaigns and the problems created by mistakes and how costly these mistakes can be. I encouraged each group to check their landing pages and make sure they look correct. Looks like the teams are up and running to a good start. Any other advice for our grads?
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Currently we are in our second week of our Restaurant.com campaign. We’ve chosen to use Google Adwords along with Exact Target email marketing services. Our campaigns consist of a March Madness theme with the NCAA Tournament, April Fool’s and an Easter campaign to finish the project. So far our NCAA tournament campaign has had success with Google Adwords as well as our themed Email encouraging customers to purchase gift certificates to watch their favorite teams at their favorite sports bars and restaurants. The April Fool’s campaign has just begun and we’re looking forward to seeing some of our results in class on March 31, 2011. This project has been very beneficial to us in giving everyone some real life experience in an Interactive Marketing project.
Our group enjoyed hearing the feedback that the representatives from Restaurant.com had to say about our ideas to drive traffic to their landing page. After two weeks of sending out our campaign we have learned plenty of real life experiences. We had some trouble in the beginning creating an ad that was accepted
by Restaurant.com. Through communication with Jason DeGeorge we both came up with a creative that we liked.
My design professors have also stressed the importance of proofreading and checking over everything. I have been told that if you are working for a design studio and produce a project with grammatical errors, you will be blamed and held responsible for that. I have been told about experiences in which this has happened, even though the designer did not write the copy.
Though we are marketing students, I think those same experiences still apply. The important point is: always proofread and double-check everything. Also, proofread and double-check whatever your teammates produce.
We are sad that the campaign for Restaurant.com is coming to en end. The project has been a great learning experience for us all. And we have realized the importance of adding "slack time" into a project.
Our Adwords campaign and blog have developed over the past couple of weeks. It seems like as each week progresses we develop new skills and have been able to see results in our sales.
Our group has enjoyed using google adwords and exact target to help drive traffic to our webpage. We have seen how both tools can effectively attract customers to restaurant.com and the positives and negatives of both media tools. It will be interesting to compare our methods to the rest of the class when the campaign ends.
Our campaign has been very successful so far, in that he have created more revenue than we thought we would. We ran a facebook photo contest and have effectively linked our facebook page to a landing page that has an ROI to date of about 300%. I have been disappointed though because we have not had much interaction on our page besides the contest submissions. Overall this project has helped me learn that is is much harder to engage a digital audience than i expected, even with a good call to action and relevant offers
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