Dear Marketing Student — Side Project Case study
About
Website: dearmarketingstudent.com
Publication: https://medium.com/dear-marketing-student
“Dear Marketing Student” is an online publication or blog I created as side project, with the goal of learning and building digital marketing skills and to contribute meaningful value to myself and those who felt the very same pain point that I had.
This case study defines the problem I discovered, then outlines my approach and the process than I used to solve it. I will also go into detail on the challenges I faced in solving this problem as well as the key decisions I made and what I learned along the way. Finishing off with the end results.
After reading this case study, you can expect to gain a good understanding of:
- My level of competency in certain skills including content.
- My level of competency with certain software tools.
- My approach to problem-solving.
Preface
A few important notes before we begin
- Though there were many skills and techniques used in the course of doing this side project, from branding to copywriting to design. This case study will be mainly focused on the content creation aspects as these were the primary skills used.
- The project in this case study is still ongoing as of the time of writing this. However, this cases study will only look at the first two months of the project.
Summary
I discovered that there was no website that created and curated content specifically for a marketing student. I saw this was a personal pain or myself and others so I decided to do something about it.
After much time spent validating my idea through online research and interviews the ideal style look and format of the solution to the problem. I settled on a medium publication creating content covering marketing related news but, in an unconventional way.
I used several tools to aid my writing and research process including tools like trello, Quip, Grammarly, Photoshop and CoSchedule. The content creation process took an average of 10 Hrs per article. After 2 months I had published 7 articles with over 70 views total for the publication.
Problem
The concept of Dear Marketing student was conceived out of a desire to solve a personal pain I was having as a marketing student.
All the best articles and resources I’ve found that taught me something really useful about marketing that was directly relevant to me as a marketing student were basically stumbled upon after reading various blogs for hours on end.
From time to time, I would discover insanely eye-opening and insightful content that was deeply relevant to my current situation, be it a news story or an article or blog. These articles were not in one central location but rather scattered across various sites and platforms on the web.
I could never find a website that created and curated content specifically for someone like me, ‘A Marketing Student’. I told myself I need to do something about this.
Approach
To solve this problem I decided I first needed to better understand the problem. I needed to know was this a pain that others were experiencing or was it or was it something that was unique to me? Could I create a solution that would create meaningful value to people? And if so what would that look like? I had a lot of questions.
In addition to spending many hours researching on the web, To further validate my idea I created a set of questions that would test some of the riskiest assumptions in my idea, the biggest one being that ‘many marketing students have similar reading habits and consume content in similar ways’. I proceeded to ask these questions to several other marketing students in 1-on-1 conversations. Here is a snippet of the questions I asked:
- what career do you want? what is something you’ve always wondered about the career you want? Do you know how to achieve the career you want?
- Do you read marketing related news? If so, why?
- How many hours a day do you spend reading the news?
- what aspect of marketing interests you the most?
A few key takeaways I got from the research process were:
- Most people don’t read articles about marketing nearly as much as I do
- Students indicated an appetite for reading marketing related content but often felt intimidated by the amount of business jargon that was being used
- Most students when showed news articles related to marketing often felt they were too long or not relevant to them as a student.
Given these Insights, I now had a good Idea of what traits a solution would need to to have in order to deliver the most value:
- Articles need to be short within reason, No jargon.
- Don’t assume readers understand concepts discussed in an article. Concepts that are discussed in an article need to be explained then and there.
- The key value lies in the additional context provided. Each article should answer one main question — why should I care?
Given this information, I now had a good understanding of what content people wanted to see. Now I Had to determine what the format of that content should be and how it should look like. After doing some more research on similar blogs or publications and writing test articles, I decided the content format should be ‘News stories’ but with a twist. I wanted to cover marketing related news but, in an unconventional way. Each story was to have 3 main sections:
- What’s going on here?
- What does this mean?
- Why should I care?
I also decided the publication was to be hosted on Medium.com, a content platform, instead of my own website because of its ease of use and its built-in reader base that allows content to be discovered organically.
Objectives
As this was the first stage of an ongoing project, for the purposes of this case study the objectives are only for the first 2 months. At this stage of the project the objectives are mainly about getting the project off the ground. In addition, I set a couple admittedly arbitrary performance-based objectives. Here is the full list of objectives:
- Create the logo and branding for Dear Marketing Student.
- Create copy to be used for description and in marketing materials.
- Create an elevator pitch to be used for pitching potential readers.
- Reach 100 total views for the publication after 2 months.
- Publish at least 8 articles to the publication within 2 months.
- Get the Dear Marketing Student website & publication up and running.
Content Creation Process
The content creation process always starts with spending multiple hours every day reading marketing related news and searching for recent news stories that were relevant to marketing students. Articles that I felt were good candidates would go on my proposed list of articles.
From there I would spend up to 7 hours researching each proposed story. The research process involved reading:
- The primary source article.
- Articles by other publications covering the same story.
- Articles that explain the concepts in the aforementioned story and
- Articles that provide added analysis or evaluation on the topic of discussion related to the news story.
My goal with research was to fully understand what was happening and why it matters to marketing students. I set up a template for outlining all articles. My approach to writing drafts was to divide the content into small bits and write in non-sequential order.
For example, I may write the first paragraph of the last section first, then the last paragraph of the first section next. Non-sequential writing does not come without drawbacks. However, the main benefit of writing like this is that you hardly ever suffer from writer’s block or a lack of ideas due to its free-form, flexible nature.
The content creation process took an average of 10 Hrs per article.
I used the following tools in the content creation process:
- Trello — Content planning / Project management / Editorial calendar
- Quip — writing / Document management
- Google docs — Writing / Content templates
- Google drive — Document management
- Grammarly — Editing / Proofreading
- Wordcounter.net — Proofreading / Keyword tracking / SEO
- Canva — Creating blog post images and graphics
- Photoshop — Editing blog post images and graphics
- Swiped.co — Copywriting (writing headlines)
- CoSchedule (Headline analyzer) — Copywriting (writing headlines)
End results
☑️ Logo and branding completed within the first week
☑️ Brand copy created in the second month.
☑️ Elevator pitch created after about a month.
☑️ Dear Marketing Student website & publication up and running within the first week.
🔴 Over 85 total views for the publication after 2 months.
🔴 8 articles published after 3 months.
Thanks for reading, If you like this post give it a 💚 and share! :)
In case you didn’t know…I’m a writer, value-driven digital marketer, student and founder and managing editor of Dear marketing student. A Medium publication that delivers valuable insight to marketing students. You can catch me on twitter at @Ayo_af or see more of my work on AAFOLABI.COM.
