Have you ever heard of Riipen? It is a website where you can find universities that have teams of business students looking for real projects. If everything lines up you get paired up with a student group and faculty advisor. You then define a project, and they work on it for the experience of working with a “client” and a grade.
I was looking for a fresh set of eyes to see how our marketing lands with a younger audience and to have them make recommendations. I had been a part of this kind of project in grad school years ago and have always thought there is great potential in this kind of work.
I was matched up with a team of 3 students from Brigham Young University (BYU). We met via Zoom at least once a week. I provided them with data, history, and objectives. They went to work. After about 8 weeks they presented to their class and to me, formal findings, and recommendations, just like a professional marketing firm.
One of the tasks they performed was to speak with Digital Event Bag past and current clients to find out what they liked and what we could do better. As you can imagine I was extremely interested in hearing their findings and recommendations. So here is what they found, unfiltered and exactly as they reported to me.
- Clients learned about DEB via Google search or through personal connections.
- Clients chose DEB over its competing virtual event bags because it was the easiest to use and offered the best customer support.
- DEB has saved its clients time & money, helped them feel successful & accomplished at work, and added value to sponsors & attendees.
- Clients loved that the platform was intuitive & simple, and provided them with helpful analytics and that the designs were beautiful & clean.
They did a ton of work which included researching competition, creating a master narrative, customer segmentation, and personas. For each segment and persona, they created suggested ad copy and designed digital ads. Perhaps most importantly they came up with a positioning statement.
“For managers tasked with planning corporate events, Digital Event Bags is the easiest-to- use virtual platform that connects sponsors with attendees because of its commitment to outstanding customer support.” ~ Positioning statement created by BYU Marketing Lab students.
I can’t understate the value of the process. As an entrepreneur, we sometimes face limited resources when looking for marketing insights. Sure, there are a ton of good agencies around, but they can also be quite costly. The mutual benefit of providing a real-world experience for the students and insights from some very impressive students who have committed to a marketing career was a great experience.
Larry Weil is “TheSponsorshipGuy” and founder of Digital Event Bag. Over his career, he has worked extensively in sports sponsorship including naming rights and SuperBowl halftime activations for clients seeking to grow their business and generate new customers. Larry is currently focused on the growth of the Virtual Event sector and is a proponent of integrating more digital assets across all types of sponsorship in order to improve performance and attribution.
