Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
Electronic Marketing - Blog Report
1. Clever College Dating
Jenny Fletcher
Paolo Garcia
Joey Guevara
Almog Lotan
Maricarmen Pulido
Jill Siriratanapol
Samantha Velarde
2. “Not your average dating blog– we’re a better blog,
a clever blog. Just a bunch of no-name college
students writing about other college kids’ dating
woes, fashion dilemmas, and popular college
culture. Along the way, we’ll be chopping it up with
what’s on our mind and yours.”
3. PLANNING
• A Blog on “Clever College Dating”
– The Do’s and Don’ts
– Perspective from a guy or girl
• Why Did We Select This Topic?
– Interesting
– We’re knowledgeable about the topic
– Can give advice while being creative
• Dates on a budget, how to approach him or her, etc.
4. PLANNING
• Competitive positioning
– Allow college students to read, take note and put
words into action changing their everyday
encounters and romantic relationships.
• Target segments
– College students (ages 17-23)
• Value proposition
– “Provide first hand advice from personal
experiences from like-minded peers”
6. BLOG DESIGN AND FEATURE CONSIDERATIONS
• One column
• Full text for easy
reading
• Email Form for easy
following
• Recent posts /
Archives
– Stay on our blog
– Not hard to find
our other
content
• Facebook widget
• Pictures to stimulate
our imagination
7. CONTENT STRATEGY
• Content is unique and entertaining
• Written by different perspectives
• Practical advice from real life experiences
• Short, sweet, and to the point
• All content is relevant and search friendly
• Content revolves around keywords
8. RANGE
• Content range includes:
– date ideas
– relationship advice
– post-break up tips
– marriage advice
– single tips.
• Content is derived from personal experiences
9. OUR PROCESS
• Meetings each Monday and Wednesday before class
to brainstorm and discuss blog topics
• Assign certain topics to writers
• Goal of 2-3 Blog posts per week
• Peer review before publication of posts
• Sharing and promotion
10. SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
• Facebook has been our top referrer.
• StumbleUpon came second when used only twice.
• Competing with too many people on Twitter.
• Engagement with other bloggers hardly worked.
16. OVERALL ASSESSMENT
• What went well?
– Consistently Met 2x a week
– Maintained enthusiasm about the blog topic
– Diverse perspectives (single, married, dating)
• What would’ve we done differently?
– Stronger marketing early on
17. FUTURE PLANS
• Keep it visible
– Possible future blog post
– Possible resume enhancer
– Anybody looking for dating advice
This statement is taken from our blog home page and captures what exactly visitor's of the page are going to read about. We strive to be honest about who we are and what we are writing about.
Our topic is college dating. However we added in the word ‘clever’ to put a spin on it. As college students, we believe that we have a different and clever perspective on dating. Overall, the blog is about the do’s and don’ts of college dating. What a guy or girl should or shouldn’t do when they go on their first date, when they see that attractive someone in the classroom, how to act and how to feel when you’re in college and you’re dating. We also give readers ideas on date ideas on a budget. Being in college, many students do not have a huge income. Therefore our blog gives them date ideas on a budget. We chose this subject to write about because we felt that it would be an overall interesting subject amongst our peers. We wanted to stay interested as a group and continue to write with enthusiasm over the next couple weeks. We also chose this subject because we felt that each member in our group was knowledgeable about dating. All of the group members being in college turned the target into a college niche.
In terms of competitive positioning, our group decided that our blog would position itself as an easy access blog, easy to read and something that would be of interest to the readers because of our “cleverness”. We wanted to position our blog in the mind’s of the readers as fun but also honest. Our target segment aims at college students anywhere from the ages of 17-23 years. Our value proposition states that we want to provide first hand advice from personal experiences from like minded peers.
In Bus 118 we learned that a mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. For our project we focused on college dating. Here is a snapshot of the mindmap we drew up in one of our earlier meetings with our group. Some of the main tabs include:Marketing GoalsBlog DescriptionTrafficReader DescriptionNicheDesignCompetitionAsset InventoryRelevant Blog Questions
For our blog design we chose one column because it creates easy navigation and makes recent post easy to view. We decided to go for the “Full text” option rather than “summary” to parallel the one column functionality. One feature consideration that we considered for our blog is email signups (at the top right) to alert followers of new content and create loyalty. Another that we chose is “recent posts” and “archives” widget to allow viewers to easily find their favorite post or scroll through other titles which may catch their interest. “Archives” widget also allows new readers to easily browse our previous posts from a monthly basis. We added pictures to spice up our blog to help readers create an image in their head while reading various scenarios that we post about. Pictures also create an easy-reading vibe to our blog.
Content- Dating tips from college students This topic was agreed upon by the group because we all have experience in the dating field. Every person in the group contributed content from different perspectives and created a wide area of blog topics that our site hit. We tailored the website to make it known that our writers come from different backgrounds and that the content will be diverse within the dating field. What makes it unique is the fact that all of our content come from experiences that college students had.Blog post length- Short, sweet, and to the point Our blog posts are designed to be inviting towards the reader so that they are not overwhelmed with too much content. Given the genre of dating advice, we didn't want to seem too analytical and boring. We are offering content that is fun and unique.Labels and Tags:Relevant, search friendly, Labels and tags are designed to tie our blog posts together by creating mini-sections. This allows for our readers to easily search through our content for any specific post or term. This also helps in directing traffic to our site via tagging keywords that are popular search terms. Some examples are “swag, dating, college”.
Range of Content:Range of content is dating/relationship advice from the perspective of college students. We hit various sub-genres so that our readers were kept entertained with our offering. This helped distinguish our blog as unique in that we don't just blog about bland dating topics and offer general advice. We chose to build off of personal experiences that our writers have and incorporate personality into the blogs. Such examples are “The difference between a Fling and a Keeper”, “Yo Chill out on the Swag Tip”
Our process:Meet every Monday and Wednesday to discuss and brainstorm possible blog topics. We originally set a goal of 2-3 blogs per week. As time progressed, we began posting more the set goal as we got more comfortable with blog topics. Individuals wrote rough drafts and sent them to our Editor-in-Chief for final editing before being posted. This ensured that our content was error-free and consistent. Once the post has been created, we all play a part in promoting the newly created content.
Facebook alone was our highest ranking referrer. It accounted for around half our total views. StumbleUpon was second ranked referrer and allowed us to promote our blog to people seeking to find information of interest that is relevant to them and what they are looking for. Being able to figure out stumbleupon and being able to use it was awesome because it was something different that some of us where not familiar with. Twitter was a major disappointment; we were combating with too many related tweets that our tweets would go unnoticed. Hash tagging proved ineffective as there were too many tagging #dating or similar keywords and our tweets would breeze by unnoticed in one second.
We mainly used: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Stumbleupon as social media tools. Believe it or not one of our group members did not have Facebook so she had to create a account for the class. Some of us had to create StumbleUpon accounts to keep up with the class and for this project. We had active members posting on Twitter and we created a Facebook page just for our blog. We emailed the URL To friends and family who did not have access to social media, and that way we can make them aware of our site.We promoted our blog at first only using Facebook to spam our friends and family, we also and emailed other people our URL that did not have Facebook. We created a twitter account to post and promote our blog and used Tweet Deckto manage our twitter accounts as well as Buffer to auto-schedule posts. Then we used bitly.com to track our Twitter views which were not as strong as our StumbleUpon views—which we only implemented twice. This brief usage would’ve gained larger results if we were to use it since day one. It managed to categorize our posts and easily share them with viewers on a larger scale.
Notes: All of our group mates utilized mostly Facebook in order to spread the word about our blog. This is shown above with 1,147 views from Facebook alone. The second highest referrer is the ucrbus118.wordpress.com at 156. Later in the game we utilized StumbleUpon which brought us the third largest amount of views at 72.
Notes:We had a total of 2,32 views of all time, with 236 views today (Monday, March 12th, 3:13am Universal Time). On our busiest day, March 5, 2012 we had 385 views. On that day, we had 278 views on our homepage alone with our post “The Difference Between a Fling and a Keeper” being second at 56 views.
Notes: Our most popular post was our homepage at 1,092 views because most of us referenced the blog directly on Facebook and Twitter accounts by posting the URL. The second most popular post was actually our “About Us” page at 119 views, I guess they just want to see what we’re about! Third most popular post was “The Difference Between a Fling and a Keeper”—personally, I saw a lot of traffic on this post on my Facebook more so than any other post. It was probably the subject that was the most interesting and controversial. (I will go into further detail when speaking in front of the class). Since our posts are relevant to college life and dating, all of our other posts see a moderate amount of traffic from 90-20 views per post.
Notes: Even though we had the majority of our visitors coming from the U.S. (1,601 views), we did get some international hits with 43 views from the U.K.Personal Awareness/Word-of-Mouth: (from friends)Jill: Funny because it’s trueJenny: We had a good topic; something that people would actually read. Interested because it is relatable. Honesty in blog posts concerning relationships.Sam: Joked and asked if I were going to relationship problems or if my biological clock were ticking. A friend from out of town opened our blog in class (SDSU) and his classmates were asking about it.
What went well - We were able to consistently meet before class for an hour each Monday and Wednesday. Also, the blog topic we were talking about allowed for creative blog posts throughout the quarter. With our diverse point of views in regards to dating we had an amazing range of topics to discuss. We would have started marketing more effectively on social media platforms. We could have a schedule to share blogs on StumbleUpon and Facebook as that seems to be our main sources of traffic. StumbleUpon is a great source of steady traffic as it categorizes and exposes our blogs to traffic that can increase exponentially.
Our plan going forward:We are going to keep the blog live if anyone feels inclined to add to it in the future. Perhaps one of the members in our group will go through a weird experience and have the need to post about it. Because we were able to use WordPress in comparison to other blog sites like Blogger or Tumblr, we believe that it has a more professional touch to it. Any of the members may use the blog as a future reference to blogging or internet marketing. We think that by keeping the blog up and live we will be able to not only give people looking for dating advice but use it to our own discretion.
