To improve WPI Venture Forum’s online marketing, we want to
first know what the Forum’s target market is. The three sets of WPI Venture
Forum customers are entrepreneurs, investors and
sponsors. Besides these three sets of customers, there are other groups of
people are also attached to the event, who are volunteers, WPI students, alumni’s
and faculties.
All these customers and related groups form a cycle. With
entrepreneurs coming to the event and presenting their ideas, investors come to
look for opportunities. The interactions between entrepreneurs and investors
provide sponsors platform to provide their services. High quality ideas will
keep attracting investors to come to the event. More sponsors will show up to
the event and offer help. As the event getting bigger, more volunteers, WPI
students and faculties will be involved. Better resources will come to WPI
Venture Forum where people will get better returns. So how to attract more and
higher quality entrepreneurs becomes very important in enlarging the forum’s influences.
To improve its online marketing, the first thing I want to
suggest is to re-design the website of the forum. The WPI Venture Forum home
page is only plain text page with no pictures and only three colors, black, red
and white. The home page looks unattractive but only informative. Also, in the first
page, people can’t see the topic of any events. I will suggest the website not
only list a link to the upcoming event data, but the topics and key note
presenters. Also, some pictures and animations will also raise people’s interests.
Another way to improve its online marketing is to improve
using social networks. As I said in the last paragraph, the home page needs to
be redesigned. I want to suggest adding social network links to the home page,
such as “Like us on Facebook” or tweets from Twitter. WPI Venture Forum does
have a Facebook page. But only 74 Likes! I even have more likes on my page. To
attract more Likes from people, especially from our target customer, entrepreneurs,
I suggest WPI post high quality blogs or tweets about opportunities and tips
for people, and of cause, news for WPI Venture Forum.
Another important strategy to adopt is to increase clicks to
the website. “Key Word” is important. If I search “entrepreneur”, I will get
MIT Enterprise Forum at five or six spot, but no WPI. If I search “entrepreneur
central Massachusetts”, I still can’t find WPI Venture Forum in the first page,
but Boston College and MIT get the first and second spot. If I search “entrepreneur
opportunity”, I can’t get WPI. To be found by people, WPI needs to improve its fundability.
I will suggest WPI not only improve its Venture Forum page, but also starts a
whole series Entrepreneur pages that provide not only the forum information,
but also quality news and opportunities and knowledge. With all these key
words, WPI Entrepreneur pages will be easier to find and traffic to the Forum
page will also increase.
Mengting, I like your suggestions! Basically, I have the same suggestions as yours. The first one you mention is redesign the webpage for WPI Venture Forum. I have the same feeling for you. The homepage for WPI Venture Forum is too simple, which can hardly interest audiences. My advice is to add a community for the entrepreneurs. Also, if I am an entrepreneur who suffer on WPI Venture Forum's webpage, I would also like to see some successful cases that the program helped for. The second suggestion you give is brilliant. In my blog, I pointed out the example of MIT-CHIEF. Finally, I totally agree with you that the keyword search is significantly affecting online marketing!
ReplyDeleteI like your research about WPI venture forum, especially the last paragraph. You are right, put effort on search engine would give it more chance to be seen by people not only who know WPI, but also who are not familiar with WPI venture forum or even WPI. And another interesting thing I found when I did research about WPI venture forum is that I found that other universities might also choose other name. For example, Harvard only use entrepreneurship in stead of venture. So I think WPI could add other key words to make itself more chances to be searched by Google.
ReplyDeleteGood thinking.
ReplyDeleteThere suggestions you proposed are very detailed recommandation. It's a good point.
I am inspired by redesign the website and "creating a new website for WPI VF" to offer series of presenter information, stories, pictures and topics. That's critical since the website design matters the ranking in search engines. And we have to admit the website of WPI VF right now doesn't appear professional and attractive.
Very good analysis, I like it.