I am working as a marketing intern for The Commons XR. The company is located in San Diego, California but I am working remotely in Massachusetts. The company communicates via a Slack channel and email. I meet with the Product Development employees twice a week over Microsoft Teams, and there is a company-wide standup every week. Currently, the type of work I am doing is writing market research reports. This includes a marketing strategy plan, customer segment information, and focus group questions. The company’s mission is to build a VR learning platform that prevents students from falling behind in the classroom by giving instructors real-time analytics about students who are not engaged with the material. Below is the company logo:
I am responsible for a market research project where I input psychographic, demographic, and other information about each of the target customer segments. I researched this information using tools such as Google Scholar, Google Trends, etc. This work will impact the marketing strategy that the company uses in the future. The marketing channels, copy, images, etc. will be chosen based on the market segment details. This market research report also gives changes that need to be made to the company website in order to appeal to each market segment.
In addition, I must write the questions for each market segment in the upcoming focus groups and product testing. I had to use and study the company’s product in order to brainstorm these questions and researched how to conduct focus groups using books and websites. These focus groups will give the company more insight into each customer segment and the pricing strategy. It will also give the company information needed to iterate and improve upon the existing product. The feedback loop from focus groups and customer interviews are very important for software startups such as The Commons XR.
I am also working on a marketing strategy plan which includes SWOT analysis, customer analysis, competitor analysis, and business initiatives (e.g. social media marketing plan, paid ads strategy, etc.). I used tools such as CrunchBase to research some of this information. This plan will give the company guidelines this summer to increase web traffic, social media engagement, web engagement, email list sign ups, and leads.
One of my goals for this summer is to learn how to increase the follower count on each of the company’s social media platforms by one hundred followers. Later in the summer, the company will execute the social media marketing and branding strategy; I will learn to post engaging content specific for each platform and raise brand awareness.
Another goal is to write ten statistical programs in R to analyze the website traffic in Google Analytics and/or the ad metrics in Google Adwords. R can be integrated with Google Analytics in order to forecast long-term value of marketing campaigns.
My third goal is to have twenty video meetings with other company members in order to improve professional communication skills and streamline tasks.
Philip Bonmassar