Marketing plan

”Attracting Erasmus students to

Business Gate”

Elaborated by: Coordinated by:

Plamadeala Catalina Doc Ing Jarmila Sebestova PhD

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Content:
1. Executive Overview.....................................................................................................................3
2. Market Review.............................................................................................................................3
a) Trends overview.......................................................................................................................3
b) Market overview......................................................................................................................4
c) Target market..........................................................................................................................4
3. Competitive Review.....................................................................................................................4
4. Service of Business Gate..............................................................................................................5
5. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT).............................................................6
6. Goals and Objectives of Business Gate and our campaign activity.............................................7
7. Parts of marketing mix (Promotion and Place).........................................................................7
1) Social media..............................................................................................................................7
2) Announcements at University....................................................................................................8
3) Involving teaching staff……………………………………………………………………...8
4) Newspapers/magazines..............................................................................................................8
5) Media, TV, radio......................................................................................................................8
8. Action Plan and Implementation................................................................................................8
9. Evaluation.......................................................................................................................................9

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 1. Executive Overview

The main aim of this Marketing plan is to attract International students that come in Karvina
School of Business and Administration at Business Gate.

Business Gate is the result of a vision to assist and alleviate the issues surrounding business
and businessmen. It is located in Karvina on Str. Poštovní 615, Fryštát 733 01 Karviná.
Currently, three high-school and University teams from Karvina can sign up for and compete
for the best marketing solutions for a particular company. The competition for university and
high schools “Business Gate Solutions” gives a chance for best students to represent their
school in a prestigious battle of creative brains in Karvina. Teams usually compete in a
marketing campaign competition for a particular business. They are not be alone in it! During
the implementation of the project, they are able to attend all workshops at the Business Gate
for free, and they also meet with the consultants directly at the school.  Business Gate has a
collaboration with Silesian University from Karvina, which allows many students including
international students to be part of it. As Business Gate doesn’t have a big amount of
international students involved we are coming up with solutions for Business Gate for
attracting those students to them.

We are a group of 4 enthusiastic students and we believe we are the best candidates for
achieving this goal within a year 2019/2020. Thus, we had to analyse and go through several
steps and finally come up with new solutions and strategies to be applied for Business Gate.

The challenges we are currently facing is the fact that students have other options to go for.
For example, going abroad for travelling or choosing any other entertainment instead of
going to Business Gate.

2. Market Review

a) Trends overview

The most likely „buyers” of what we have to offer are coming international students from
Erasmus+ study mobility, as well as students from Master level study from India. School of

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Business and Administration also plan to have this year students from China. We don’t know
the exact number of international students as every year it’s different. This year 2018/2019,
Karvina’s University has about 20 international students.

b) Market overview

The chosen population segment for our plan will be International Students in Karvina. These
are young people with age between 20-27 years, both male and female with a fair level of
business and marketing educational background. They are studying at Economics and
Business Administration Faculty, thus, there is a high chance that they will be interested in
going to Business Gate, in the way to explore their potential in this field.

c) Target market

Our place for applying our actions will be Business Gate for coworkers and university. We
have chosen this place to develop our actions because Business Gate offers us necessary tools
for work ( individual work stations, meeting rooms, small projection room, conference room),
as well as personnel asset (IT specialist, accountant, directory of contacts we may find to be
useful). University, offers us space and direct interaction with students.

3. Competitive Review

Competitor Competitor
Name of competitor Travellers (students that „Nerds” students that choose
choose to travel instead of to stay in the dormitory to
going to BG study instead of going to BG
Location Visiting Europe Dormitory
Employment 4 students willing to be part of this project (us)
Customers International students International students
Marketing and Communications
Tagline „We are here for you”
Key message Come and get the best from Business Gate
Advertising and 1. Informational events within university
promotions 2. Social media, sharing the newest information from
BG site to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other
social media channels.
3. Using teaching staff to spread information about BG

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 among international students.
4. Local newspapers- 2000 czk
5. University newspaper- free of costs
6. Local radio/TV- 2000-3000 czk/min(radio), 6000czk
per one advertisement.
Total costs: 120000 czk
Strengths and weaknesses
Strengths - Gaining experience ; - Saving money (not
- Visiting countries and going to travel);
cities around; - Getting more
- Meeting new friends qualitative education;

Weaknesses -Cost(they spend money for

traveling);

4. Service of Business Gate

Business Gate is about providing people their services. Business Gate offers a program
Academy for students, different kinds of workshops, where they can play a board game
“Cashflow” and if students are thinking about making a business right at this moment, they
will receive 50% discount to all the services, or they get them for free. Program Academy
gives students unique opportunity to work on real company’s tasks. In return, companies will
get wholly different point of view, a number of impulses and ideas. Each day brings big
amount of news that one can hardly keep up with while working. Business Gate watches
them for you and makes ready interesting training, workshops, competitions or meetings with
people. There are individual work stations, meeting rooms or a small projection room and
when it is time to take a break or advise, you will be never alone.

They offer experience for students and new ideas for companies (Academy), support, advice
and help for go-getters (Benefit), pleasant working space for everyone
(Coworking), interesting events and workshops for public. Hub is run by statutory city of
Karviná, with collaboration of the School of business administration of Silesian University in
Opava and participation of other partners.

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 5. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT)

Further we did SWOT analyse which is a strategic planning tools used to evaluate and
manage internal and external factors that affect an organization.

We applied matrix formula for further calculations, with a scale of 1-5. Where 1- the least
important, and 5- the most important.

 I Strengths Importan Weaknesses Importance

N ce (points)
T (points)
E 1. Adding to your CV 4 1. Losing time while 3
R (enriching it) being at BG
N 2. Personal development 5 2. Less focused on 5
A 3. Meeting new people 3 the main courses
L 4. Pleasant working 2 3. Limited access for 4
place BG services
Total points 14 Total points 12

 E Opportunities Importance Threats Importance

X (points) (points)
T 1. Probability to find a 5 1. Other social 2

E job activities

R 2. Start ups 2 2. Failures at main 5

N 3. Connections 4 courses at
A 4. Interesting events university 4
L and workshops 3 3. Other

5. Opportunity to work consultancy

on real company’s 4 companies

tasks
6. Receiving 50% 2

discount to all
services if you have
a business idea.
Total points 20 Total points 11

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The results shows us that we have the most points for Strengths 14 points and for Opportunities 20
points, which means that these two aspects are the most important, and it means that is a good sign
that Weakness and Threats have less points, cause they will not affect us that much. This step
allowed us to overview the most important aspects of our activities. We have more opportunities
than threats and more strengths than weakness.

6. Goals and Objectives of Business Gate and our campaign activity.

The main and most important goal for us is to increase the number of international students
that will go to Business Gate. Let’s further go through a prioritized list of our objectives:

1. Stimulating International Students to come and be active within Business Gate;

2. Promoting image of Business Gate;
3. Every international student has a chance to realize his full potential of
entrepreneurship within Business Gate;
4. We expect the number of involved students this year 2018/2019, to be 18/20.

7. Parts of marketing mix (Promotion and Place)

Our the most important strategy is promotion among students, as it is the most efficient one.

The promotion will consist in:

1) Social media- creating a group using Facebook and adding this certain group of
people in it, so we can post there information about Business Gate and the services
their provide for them. According to a research made in 2017 by
www.investopedia.com, Instagram is the most used social made platform by young
people, that’s why we will create another account there, to reach faster our students.
Other tools used will be blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics.
The frequency will be daily posting.
2) Announcements at University- We plan to create and share brochures containing
information about BG and what benefits they will from it. The frequency will be
weekly, after we know exactly the time and class so we can reach most of the students
3) Involving teaching staff- it supposed to be a direct interaction with students of
teachers that have classes with them.
4) Newspapers/magazines at University- weekly posting news from Business Gate and
offers for International students.
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 5) Media, TV, radio - Every week, we will made Business Gate to be heard, through
these channels. We believe that the more often students will hear any information
about BG the more likely a student is going to have an interest for BG.

Another part from marketing mix we involved in this plan is place.

Place refers either to the physical location where the Business Gate carries out business,
which is very close to the University and the distribution channels used to reach
international students ( appropriate balance of advertisement, PR, direct marketing as
mentioned earlier).
The place refers to providing customer access which will be guaranteed for our
students, being close to the university. It means that we considered providing
convenience for students.
Strategies:
 Intensive distribution- we plan to spend 4 hours a day 5/7 in the way to
interact as much as possible with coming students and share as much
information as we manage to them.

8. Action Plan and Implementation

First of all we set the time needed for this project which will be 3 months. During this time
we plan to achieve all the goals mentioned above.

1) First week

In the first week, we will collect information about coming students: number of coming
students, full names, contact information, academic schedules of each of them. We will
obtain this information collaborating with administration of University.

2) Week 2-4

In this period we will get in touch with each of them and we will try to get to know them
better. As a result, we will understand what are they interested the most about. For this, we
will need to create a survey for them. Based on the results, we will know what we should do
to attract them to Business Gate.

3) Week 5-12 (Intensive distribution)

In these weeks, we will have decided who will take care of a specific group of students.
For example, we are 4 people and they are around 20 students, it means that each of us we
will work with 5 of them. The smaller group is the more efficient is to work with them.

Every day we will spend 4 hours 5/7 for interaction with those students (240 hours in 3
months). To be more specific, we will start to share our personal experience from

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 Business Gate. Then we will share brochures about services Business Gate provides for
them.

We will agree with Business Gate to organize meetings inside the building so they can
experience the friendly environment they provide.

On the most visible places, we will post big posters with the main activities for students at
Business Gate ( spent amount of money for posters 1100czk). Moreover, in this period we
will involve radio as a tool (2000 czk/min X 40 min= 80000czk), plus TV advertisement
(24000 czk).

At the same time, we will distribute the workload so each of us will have a social media
account to work on our Facebook Business Gate group, blog posts and YouTube videos.
We will make sure those specific students will see the information we share. Newspapers
of university are free of costs for us, all we need to do is just ask the administration of
University to collaborate with us.

In the end, we have 240 hours to spend for this actions and 110000czk needed for
implementation.

Expected budget after an approximate calculation is 110000 czk.

9. Evaluation
As a result, after 3 months we will have the following performance accomplished :

 The total budget needed will be spend of promotion- 110000 czk

 90% of the coming International Students will be involved in Business Gate activities
(18/20)
 The necessary number of hours- 240
 Each of us (4 members will work with 5 students)
 Implemented actions: questionnaires about student’s preferences, intensive
distribution of information about provided services of Business Gate, using social media
tools like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, blog posts, university newspapers, posters in
visible places at University, physical interaction with students etc.
 Customer response and reactions ( survey online for students)
 The actions of our competitors can often be very telling when it comes to the success
or failure of our marketing plan. If competitors rush to copy what you've done or try their
best to one-up our initiatives, the plan is working. If our campaign go largely ignored or
there is an immediate negative response, there may be an issue or at least a question about

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what you've set in motion. Our competitors are alternatives of entertainment for
students( travelling, other companies, etc)

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