TheStudentZone.net Business and Marketing Plan
- 1. ! ! ! ! ! UTD TheStudentZone.net Market Plan Team 9 ! ! David Golynskiy Georgia Gottsacker Ricky Calderon Elin Briton ! ! ! MKT3300 Professor Strijnev 5/5/2013 ! ! ! ! ! !
- 2. !1 | P a g e 1. Executive Summary TheStudentZone.net is a website created by current UTD students for the purpose of becoming a cooperative online community and a useful tool for all past, present, and future students. The website will feature forums, classified advertisements, professor/class ratings, and a student expo page. This will allow students to share advice and experiences, network, organize, discuss, buy/sell/trade, and be creative by adding their own features to the website. Students would be able to suggest features or expose them in the student expo page. There are many talents hidden within our student body and there are is also a need for students seeking advice/info from others on campus. Not everyone has a bunch of friends on campus and not all friends may have the answers you need. Therefore, an online community made by the students, for the students can be an invaluable tool. Though these features may sound great to most students, the hardest part of getting this website to work is to attract and maintain active users. The problem is that our website provides a template for people to use, but it is up to the people to actually start using it. At the beginning, the website will be empty and usage may be scarce. We must create incentives for users and focus on improving students’ lives in order to be sustainable. However, if we can manage this, the beauty of running a community like this is that eventually it will become self-sustainable. TheStudentZone.net can be financially rewarding too. Ads can generate passive income with heavy online traffic. There are a few other ways to generate income: from donations, listing prices, memberships, lottery, challenges, etc. Capturing the college market can create opportunities for marketing contracts in the future. If the website expands to other campuses this can become very profitable.
- 3. !2 | P a g e ! 2. Company Description As a senior at UTD, David Golynskiy observed that a web community with freedom to exchange info would be very beneficial for all students and his fellow classmates confirmed these thoughts. After many positive responses, he decided to create TheStudenZone.net in August of 2012. The website has a big potential as it is run by students. This allows them total freedom from official UTD rules and freedom of expression. Nevertheless, certain ethical standards such as a no tolerance policy for cheating or academic dishonesty will still apply. The open source style of this website can allow students to expose their creativity and be noticed amongst other UTD students. In fact, one student has created a java application that optimizes schedules when choosing different classes. This saves a great deal of time. Other innovations like this can be posted onto the website and be accessed by anyone for free! The short-term goal for the site is to become self-sustained in terms of maintenance costs and usage. The long term plan for TheStudenZone.net is to expand nationwide. This site has the potential to capture the student market as well as become an invaluable tool for all. The upcoming generation has the ability to create and share their experiences/ideas unlike ever before. If the site functions as envisioned, amazing outcomes can come about. 3. Strategic Focus/Plan Mission Statement: The aim of TheStudentZone.net is to become a useful resource for past, current and future students of UTD to exchange advice, ideas, and experiences.
- 4. !3 | P a g e Accessibility to our site is of utmost importance to us, therefore in the near future we will focus on keeping membership free and make as little obligation as possible for our users. Goals: 1. To become a widely used and valuable resource for students 2. To effectively market, attract, and sustain actI've users. 3. Keep website free and allow full freedom of expression. 4. Maintain a degree of integrity and ethical standard. 5. To expand and capture the student market for profitability. 6. Outcompete the competion by providing a more personal and communal setting. Financial Goals 1. The website must become self-sustainable and cover its own maintenance fees. 2. Donation system should be established. 3. Revenue from non-student users needs to be generated. 4. Advertisement system for revenue established. 5. Investment fund required. 6. Creative sources of revenue implemented (lotteries, etc) 4. Situational Analysis Internal Assessment The Student Zone is a website specifically designed for the convenience of UTD students. It offers an environment for students to communicate throughout their college experience. Students are able to chat through forums or post classified ads to
- 5. !4 | P a g e satisfy their needs and wants. Although there are many UTD links associated with Facebook and Twitter, The Student Zone is its own network created to benefit the unmet needs and wants of all students. The website in general is not an innovative concept since there are many communities already in existence today. However, our core competency is that we have a student customized community. It allows us total freedom of expression and unlimited potential for growth. Some of our core competencies are: 1. Custom tailored UTD websites; by the students, for the students 2. Would integrate well with current web, digital, and mobile trend 3. Anyone can share/obtain information. 4. Free, no obligation membership. 5. Students are able to expose their talents. Amongst the listed advantages, if the student market is penetrated and a significant amount of members are collected, the community will also become selfsustainable. Due to the nature of the website, the students will be free to post/discuss and add to the website. As a result, the community will run itself as members contribute to help each other. The administrators will simply need to maintain order and cleanliness. Some of our weaknesses include: (1) small budget to work with, (2) gaining active members, (3) administrating the website to uphold standards of integrity, (4) web development skill, (5) personnel to manage the website as we cannot yet afford to pay anyone, (6) web security issues. External Analysis (Environmental forces)
- 6. !5 | P a g e The Student Zone is similar to Craigslist; simple yet effective. The entire site is available for both desktop and mobile devices. Since it is a website, someone has to pay for it. As a group, we have decided that the best way to solve this issue is by making it a non-profit organization that accepts donations in order to keep the site up and running. The only competitive forces would be Facebook and Twitter associated UTD links that share similar qualities of The Student Zone. ! Craigslist as a competitor is too broad for our UTD community. It also carries the stigma that it is unsafe and risky to meet people off of Craigslist. Meeting others from UTD reduces this stigma because users know it is a fellow student in your community. Facebook also acts as competitor to us; however Facebook is designed to be an email-style conversation. Facebook cannot consolidate one categorized discussion. Each topic needs a new, separate page. Furthermore, Facebook cannot be searched internally for messages/topics, one can only search for pages and people already in existence. These disadvantages render Facebook extremely inconvenient to the unmet needs of UTD students. College Confidential and RateMyProfessor.org also are competitors, but they lack in personalization and don’t have much discussion about specific classes that each professor teaches. Our main threat is the student body. If we do not convey the proper message when marketing this website, it may not catch on with students. Currently, students figure out one way or another to meet their needs. Our website would make it more convenient. If not, then we will not be able to maintain membership. Other threats come from our competition (Facebook, RateMyProfessor.org, College Confidential) improving upon what they have. If they change their sites to meet the needs that we
- 7. !6 | P a g e are addressing then they may win over the student market since they already have a significant established share. 5. Market-Product Focus Market Analysis/ Target Market (What market segments have the best potential?) The strongest market segment would be current UTD students and alumni. Segments within the student body include: 1. International Students: segment to their needs and community 2. Transfer Students 3. Prospective Students 4. Current Students 5. UTD Alumni Each segment will have a section on the website. The international student segment will have a dedicated subset of current student forums. ! Product Market Grid Legend: P= Primary Market, S= Secondary Market Market Segment Current Student Classified P Blog Recent Graduate P Less recent Alumni S P P P Prospective Student ! Forums S S P
- 8. !7 | P a g e ! ! ! ! ! ! ! As the product market grid suggests, for all parts of our website the current students are our primary concern. Prospective students will tend you use more of the forums for informational purposes. Recent graduates and alumni will tend to you use the classifieds and forums section. Target Market Perception/Position The UTD Student zone strives to be regarded as the most useful student community by offering resources as dedicated and relevant to UTD as possible. A perception map has been created to map us against our competitors based on dedication to UTD and how useful the source is (refer to external analysis for more info on competition).
- 9. !8 | P a g e ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 6. Market Program Product Pitch/Strategy Most college students are active online using sites such as Facebook, Craigslist and RateMyProfessor.com in order to meet their wants and needs and obtain information about their school. However, these sites are limited in their effectiveness due to the overwhelming amount of users and lack of real knowledge of the campus and its students. What we are introducing is a new social media site, created specifically to consolidate the best features of popular sites into one for the UT Dallas student. We love the idea of creating a place where students can come
- 10. !9 | P a g e together to help other students. This is why we operate on the slogan “From one Comet to another”. Promotion Because one of the largest issues we have with TheStudentZone.net is a lack of user ship, we need to make our student body aware of our site. We plan to do this in a number of ways, mainly through partnering with familiar, established businesses. We will arrange deals with on-campus restaurants as well as the Pub. An example would be a 10% off coupon with online registration. We believe that incentives along these lines will be highly attractive to our target market. Also, we plan to partner with other companies whose target market consists of college students. Companies like Jimmy John’s and Off-Campus books are constantly looking for new ways to appeal to the college market, and we believe that an association with them will lend legitimacy to our site. Place We plan on advertising in local newspapers as well as in the on-campus newspaper. Also, we plan on posting flyers throughout the campus. More specifically, we intend to target the following locations: the Student Union, Student Services Building, Activity Center, Library, and all on-campus housing. This will increase our number of users by a small amount, but hopefully will spark conversations that allow our website to grow in popularity. We are also going to post flyers at popular offcampus locations to target our commuting students and recent graduates. Some of these places include Starbucks and Fuzzy’s Tacos, among other locations. Another place where we intend to post flyers would be at off-campus apartments such as the McCallum Apartments.
- 11. !10 | P a g e Finances Since the website is free to use, we will function in more of a non-profit mode at first; Relying upon start up investors and donations. Below is a breakdown of costs and revenue streams combined with projections: 1st Year Projection Costs 5th Year Projection Web Dev. $1,200 $200 Moderation $1,000 $2,500 $160 $20 $6,500 $1,000 $120 $120 $8,980 $3,840 Domain Advertising Security Total 1st Year Projection Revenue 5th Year Projection Ads $100 $8,000 Job Posts $100 $1,200 Affiliate Mkt. $0 $10,000 Donations $0 $500 $200 $30,500 Total ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
- 12. !11 | P a g e ! Profits Projected ! ! Revenue - Cost = Profit 1st Year Projection $200 $8,980 -$8,780 5th Year Projection $30,500 $3,840 $26,000 ! ! Appendix A. Organization and Key Personnel ! Organization The responsibilities to run the website will be distributed amongst our group. All proceedings will be overseen by the founder of the site including all financials. All other responsibilities or jobs will be contracted out as necessary. ! Founder Advisor Moderator Advertising ! Founder: David Golynskiy Advisor: Elin Britton Moderator: Ricky Calderon Head of Advertising: Georgia Gottsacker Web Developer: Josh Haman Web Developer
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