I am a senior college athlete, running for our cross country team at Belmont University. Because I love and required to live healthy, for my social media campaign, I decided to blog on the topic of cooking for college students. I named the site “Your College Cookbook.” When entering this class, I was not fully sure what it would be like. After the project was explained to me, the competitive spirit in me was ignited!
Before knowing about the project, I really just wanted to understand social media’s takeover of today’s marketing. Marketing being my major, I really wanted to be well versed in social media and learn the best ways to utilize it for marketing. This class did that and so much more for me! I was also able to gain real world experience by having to create a blog from scratch and organically generate interest and subscribers! It seems a bit cut throat, but that is what the real world is like. I also wanted to look into pursuing social media marketing as a profession for later in life. I am not too sure what field of marketing I’d like to go into but social media marketing is definitely something on my radar.
In reflection to complete my SWOT Analysis, I identify each level regarding my own campaign below:
Strengths-
I was very consistent with my postings and knew this would help earn the trust of my subscribers. Because of this, every day at 10 am I would post on my socials and post my blog. I also found that staying consistent with my message across all my socials would lead to brand loyalty. I made sure my viewers were aware that my blog was aimed at giving college aged students recipes and healthy living tips! I also was very creative with my recipe choices which I believe many of my viewers enjoyed and kept them coming back.
Weaknesses-
When beginning this campaign, I thought that my blog topic would be appealing to all college students but I did begin to realize that not everyone is interested in eating healthy. This led to a limited target market. When I originally started my blog, I had a plan to list off the prices of the ingredients I used. I did not end up doing this. I think if I had done it, my subscribers would have been more aware of how inexpensive the recipes were. I also would occasionally ask for viewer interaction on social media posts but struggled to gain any outside of my family. If I had received greater interaction I may have been able to bring in more viewers.
Opportunities-
I constantly received messages from other food blogs asking questions about my site and if I’d like to collaborate with them. This could have been an opportunity to widen my reach if the campaign was longer. I also was able to market my blog site on my friend’s Belmont cross country site! Being a part of the team and many runners wanting to eat healthy, they were very interested in my site and what I had to offer.
Threats-
Pinterest could have been a great site for me to enter because many people go to Pinterest looking for recipes but I could not gain traction and generate viewers because of the already saturated market. I had a similar problem with Twitter because many people do not necessarily go to Twitter for recipes, just for quick news. Another threat was how MailChimp classified emails. When newsletter would be sent out, it would be classified as a “promotion” email and wouldn’t be seen in the inbox. I believe this kept me from getting higher open rates and click-throughs.
I’ll end with my class takeaways and a picture of myself working on one of my recipes. I truly enjoyed this project. It has left me with many tools that I will definitely use in my future career.
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