Mason Talent Agency

Our target market: GMU students w/talent (who want to showcase their talents), undergraduate or graduate, all genders/race/ethnicity/religion/age

It is important to market the talent agency to the most important audience, the student body. The most effective way to reach them would be through the GMU Student Government to showcase credibility. In this way, they will be able to support us to spread the word about the agency and also events in general. If needed, they may also be able to provide grants to support the agency because of its benefit to the student body. We can also market to the Greek life on campus because they are always holding events on campus that require much planning.

In order to make our business plan more feasible we have to choose a specific audience to market our agency too.  Since our business requires clients and customers for our clients, we will need to have a broad target audience.  We will be using a differentiated marketing strategy to gain clients for our business.  To gain a stable clientele we will have to aim our advertisements towards people interested in the arts.   While we do not want to limit our agency to only George Mason students, the university will be a great starting location.  Once we build up our business we can branch out to local talent in the Northern Virginia area.  To guarantee our clients business and commission we will need to market to a broader target audience to gain customers.  Since we will provide a variety of artists and different art forms to our customers we should not have a specific target audience.

One method to market our web-based talent agency to the George mason community would be to use social media. Social media is a guerrilla marketing technique because it is cheap and it can be catered to specific individuals. A Facebook page can be set up with pictures of services that the clients have. There should be a Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook page to help spread awareness of the site and clients. Other mediums like Reddit and Pinterest can be used as well. With social media the cost is low, but the outreach is high. Since our company is also web-based it would be important to used web based marketing. For example, running an ad on Facebook. Running an ad on Facebook depends on the type of advertising objective the company has. The cost of placing ads depends on how much the company wants to bid. The daily budget has to be twice as much for a click to see the ad on the page. For example, the minimum cost for a click is $0.01 and if you bid $2.00 the daily budget should be at least $4.00. There are also other mechanisms such as page views. The standard amounts are $5.00 for 3-24 likes daily, $10.00 for 5-47 likes daily, or $20.00 for 11-95 likes daily. The budget can also be adjusted by the page owners which is an advantage for our company, because we can change how much we invest into Facebook ads and promoting without jeopardizing the budget.

Other low-cost strategies to market our business are to put flyers up in the Johnson Center where the majority of the student body congregates for group meetings, to study, and to eat/socialize. Renting a kiosk in Johnson Center to exchange info, ideas, and let people know will be ideal to recruit talent and inform potential clients of the business.