At the beginning of this weeks session, Louise filled us all in on the bronze and silver Arts Award we can take part of alongside making the app. This was really exciting news because it gave us an opportunity to be creative outside of the sessions but to also network with other people that could be interested in the app.
After this, Mark from PH internet marketing agency came in to talk to us about all the online marketing opportunities we could use to make our app as popular as possible to lots of people. He talked a lot about social media strategies, with one example being the wide range of marketing available throughout Twitter. I had never thought about making lists to find a target audience range on Twitter, which makes finding people who would benefit from the app a lot easier than what I thought it would be! As well as this, Twitter provides a direct contact between our app and celebrities, which could get them involved in the app. If a famous person was to retweet one of our posts about In Hand, lots of people would see it who read the celebrity’s page and this would get the word out further.
Mark started to talk to us about the fact that we are creating the app for people our age which is a very important detail as we need to import things that we ourselves would use. He told us to write down all the apps we went on throughout the day, and to write down what was good about the app and why we go on it. For example, I go on Snapchat every day. I like it because it is fun and you get to communicate really quickly to your friends. So, to benefit our app, I feel we could take on board the speed of Snapchat to keep the people on our In Hand app entertained. We then had a small break, where I had lots of satsumas! Then we got back to marketing and we were split up into three groups of three. From this, we each created a name for our marketing agency and had to answer the question: How (if all) will you utilize the following? Social Media, Mental Health and Youth Organisations, Educational Institutions, Print, Screen Based Media, A Launch Event, Merchandise/Promotional Objects and Viral Marketing.
Stuart, Robyn and I decided that all of the sections would be essential for a marketing campaign to really promote the app. For Social Media, we discussed using Twitter, and other websites like Facebook were we could already connect to pages/brands similar to our app. We discussed that there are lots of Mental Health and Youth Organisations that could be used to aid the promotion of our app, including big brands like Time For Change, alongside the NHS 11-25 year old help service found on Kooth.com and many more. Instead of just targeting larger brands, we recognized the fact that you could go to local schools and tell them directly and ask guidance councilors and local GP’s to encourage young people to use our app. For print and merchandise, you can use beermats, posters, flyers and badges- or other uncommon merchandise like lip balm and hand cream (for In Hand). In regards to the Launch event, we thought it had to be fun and interactive to make people get involved with the app, but we also thought that we could record a short film that promotes the app which could be showcased on the event to incorporate screen marketing.
