Marketing 101: Scott Kerr visits TIQC
This past Thursday the Queens College Tech Incubator was honored to host Mr. Scott Kerr of Silvertone Consulting as a guest speaker. Mr. Kerr came prepared to give our companies and staff a talk on the importance of ‘Marketing your Startup’ where he covered the basics of online marketing and assessing your companies needs and values. However, the team got much more than expected as Mr. Kerr brought with him not only an enthusiastic personality as well as many stories about his personal experiences working in the industry. Specifically, Mr. Kerr recounted his time working with Steve Jobs and went on to explain why marketing strategies such as Apple’s are so successful. The key, he stated, lies within “Knowing your audience”.
The importance of understanding the age group you want to appeal to, their buying habits, how they make purchase decisions and what they’re looking for is the basic setup of any company’s marketing team. Mr. Kerr then went on to discuss budgeting as many of our companies at the Tech Incubator were concerned they did not have the budget to accommodate these large marketing plans which seemed to require a lot of research and resources. When asked about marketing with no budget Mr. Kerr smiled and simply replied, “Marketing with no budget is always fun because it forces you to get creative”.
The talk then went on to highlight the importance of strategy and execution, Mr. Kerr stressed that in order to succeed, every business needs to have a plan, once they have a plan they must create amazing ‘kick-ass’ content that will help convey this message/ service that they are providing. This assures that all the previous investments in finding your target audience doesn’t go to waste and builds a relationship with them. Finally, the content, he claimed, needed to be distributed properly which meant the right channels, “It is essential to have a clear understanding of how each channel works and to use a mix of paid, owned and earned media”. Mr. Kerr was such a pleasure to have as a guest speaker that we asked him to be our advisor for the incubator. Mr. Kerr will be offering a second talk sometime in the near future! To find out more about this, contact the Queens College Tech Incubator at (718)-570–0573 or, just keep an eye out on our social media pages!
