Author Archives: schootstra

Broadening your target market (an italian and greek restaurant in one)

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This recipe is meant for cooks that have been working in the kitchen for quite some while. It is about adding more flavors to your food:

Your website is performing to your expectation. It has a clear target market and knows how to attract them. How to further improve?

To answer this question, let us take the example of the social networking website LinkedIn. Their mission is fairly simple; they connect the world’s professionals. They do their jobs well. Extremely well. Founded in 2003, they currently posses a network of 238 million users and generate a revenue of $972 million. Not bad.

Starting on September 2013, LinkedIn broadens its target market. Not only professionals can make use of their services, but also professionals-to-be. Now prospective students in search of the best university for them can look on the University Pages section within LinkedIn. Here they can find current students of their university of interest, and can see in what fields they work in.

By doing so LinkedIn will not only target high-school students, but also their tuition-paying-parents. These parents can be new customers as some of them will not be professionals and will be new to the website. LinkedIn is killing two birds with one stone.

Thereby, LinkedIn is introducing their prospected target market earlier to their site. High-school students will get familiar with LinkedIn and will keep their accounts for later in their carriers.

Personally, I believe this new target market will be a great success. First of all, they attracting the generation that will become their future target market. Additionally, they are involving parents of teens, who can in turn also be new potential customers. LinkedIn can also think about partnering with university ranking websites such as www.topuniversities.com, www.shanghairanking.com and www.qs.com. The site will also strengthen ties with learning institutions. These will have a higher chance of becoming premium customers, as they will be actively looked for.  It also motivates universities, schools and other learning organisations that are not yet active on LinkedIn to create an account.

To who will you sell next?

Your marketing chef

Message from your marketing chef

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I am writing this blog for the course Emarketing (comm464) at the Sauder School of Business. Sitting in my first lecture of Paul Cubbon, I realized how I thought for many years I was pretty familiar with the online world, while in fact I know so little…

This is the time to learn more. In my blog I will take you from who I am right now, a marketing student that knows how to work on her macbook and except for facebook does not use online-media, to where I want to be. Good question Emma: “Where do you want to be?”.

Let me give you a little background information. I am a dutch exchange student. English is not my native language (yes, feel free to comment on my posts if you spot any grammar mistakes!). Back home I work for a big company that organizes business trips and team building events around Holland, called Mister Rotterdam. Although they have 5 offices around Holland; they do actively engage in social media.

A year ago I got a call from a friend that asked my if I wanted to work for this company. As I consider myself to be a pretty social person; my main though was “with what kind of people will I work with”. After looking at their website, I decided to take a look at their facebook page (the only social media page they were on), and I saw their last post was from half a year ago. During my job interview I mentioned to my boss that I was so surprised about their non-exciting social media campaign. He said he had no clue how to approach it and asked me to help him with it. I said YES!

But I knew little as well…

Back to the question: “Where do I want to be?”. I want to be able to use social media in such a way that I come back home and launch an extremely successful online marketing campaign for Mister Rotterdam. I want to turn my YES into action. Let me take you on this journey.

My added value: my creativity, international mindset and good analytical viewpoint. For the upcoming four months, and probably longer, I will give advise, updates and tips on e-marketing. Your job? CRITICIZE ME!

Your trip advisor and marketing-chef, Emma