MediaCast Identity
Who is the audience?
The audience of this blog is specifically the media students that attend Mcast Art and Design, but it will also be accessible to all the students, lecturers and staff that are interested in this subject.
What is the brief?
The brief is to create an interesting, creative and easy to use blog for the MediaCast. Since MediaCast is still quite new, the brief also requires detailed research about the audience in order for us to create the blog that this audience needs. Apart from the actual creation of the blog, which includes banners, color schemes and overall design, the brief also includes marketing the final blog to the audience.
Market Research
Since MediaCast is still quite new, we had to conduct our own research to understand what market we were working on.In order for us to do this, we conducted interviews, and questionnaires and gave them to some of the media students. From the results we obtained, we realized that the our market was quite diverse, but the fact that they were all media students put them under one category and gave them all something in common. Apart from understanding our audience , we also understood what they would like form the blog, and what they were expecting from us. Basically this research helped us focus on what is essential for the blog and what is irrelevant.
Marketing
The marketing research starts from researching to understand your market’s needs and how you can reach these needs. A good way to conduct research is by actually speaking to your market and get familiar with what they want and what they are looking for. One can accomplish this by the use of questionnaires, surveys and interviews. After understanding the audience, one has to create a marketing plan, which is essential for a successful marketing strategy. Deb Roberts, an expert in product marketing said that ‘ A marketing plan is good for focusing your energy towards the right actions that will deliver on what you want to accomplish’. The reason for creating a marketing plan is to make general things more specific, and this means that the client and the market will have a clear view of what you are offering them .Whilst creating the marketing plan, one has to keep in mind a number of important factors , like, the available markets, other competitors and budget for the marketing sector. Many big companies use the term 8 P’s to represent what they should be concerned about, these are :
- Price - The amount of money needed to buy products
- Product - The actual product
- Promotion (advertising)- Getting the product known
- Placement - Where the product is located
- People - Represent the business
- Physical environment - The ambiance, mood, or tone of the environment
- Process - How do people obtain your product
- Packaging - How the product will be protected
Obviously these are more relevant to tactile products, but even though this brief is to create an interactive product, some of these elements are still important. The actual plan has to be:
- Clear- this means that everything should be stated clearly.
- Quantifiable - meaning the outcome of every step is explained, so that monitoring can be done.
- Focused - revolving around only important topics and not straying to other irrelevant subjects.
- Realistic - every part should be achievable, it is useless to make a plan for something impossible.
Another important part to a marketing plan is to create targets, for example setting a particular number of people( form your market) that you have to reach.
The actual marketing can be done in various different styles, the main two are traditional or internet/online marketing. Traditional marketing has been used for many many years. This type of marketing includes flyers, posters, prints on newspaper and magazines, billboards and other tactile media. Nowadays, experts say that internet marketing is much more powerful. Internet marketing, or online marketing is much more widely spread, this means that more people will know about your product. Social networks are a perfect place where one can place his product so an entire society of people that otherwise would have little chance of coming across it , especially when it is in another country.
Confidentiality
Privacy and confidentiality are things that we have to take into consideration as we are building this blog.When you post something on the internet such as websites, blogs, mailing lists, or chat rooms, you generally give up the rights to the content and any expectation of privacy or confidentiality. In most countries, anything you post to a public space can be saved, duplicated, distributed, and published, even years later, by anyone in the same way as a photograph taken in a public space like a city park, even though this is technically a crime.
For one section of the blog, we have planned to create an archive for the works of the media students to showcase. To ensure that we are safe, this will be done by asking the students if they would like to showcase their work , and to sign a release form.
Technical Considerations
As we are creating this blog, we have to keep in mind that we not building a website. This means that we may be limited to the functions that we can insert in it. Another important thing to keep in mind is that we are not professionals. When we are planning we have to plan things that we are capable of producing, and not something that is impossible for us to create.
