Financial Horizons Marketing Campaign: Target segments

The Financial Horizons Conference organized by the Undergraduate Investment Society (UIS), a student organization here at UCSD holds a special place in my heart because it was the first time I got to organize my own marketing campaign.  I got the chance to be the conference marketing director through UIS’s UCSD wide poster design competition for the conference. 

My winning entry

After coming back from Shanghai, I was offered the marketing director position at UIS and I took it with some hesitation.  However, as this year's Financial Horizons Conference is coming up, I am glad that I did because all signs point to this year's conference to be the biggest and best ever.  The $1500 marketing budget, which I get almost free reign over is the biggest I have ever worked with.

I have decided to chronicle the Financial Horizons marketing campaign on this blog, breaking it up into a series of posts that will examine everything from planning to execution and of course results.  This post is going to be about the segments that I will be targeting with the campaign.

Target segments:

UCSD Economic Students

Economic students are a large and impressionable group, making it the obvious main target segment.  From my limited time as an economics major, I have found economic students that fall into two groups.  There is the undecided group, which consists of students who have little idea what they want to do after getting their degree and the finance group, who are the students that all seem to want to be investment bankers.  Curiously, both groups of economic students have little to no idea of what finance is. 

I intend to appeal to economic students through money, or rather the promise of big money that only a career in finance can give them.  Pushing the conference as a way to learn about finance as a potential lucrative career for the undecided group and how to get into finance for the finance group is my current plan. 

  

Rady Business School Students

As MBA students, Rady students most likely have a firm grasp of what finance is, meaning that the money angle probably will not have that much pull.  However, the Rady business school is a fairly new addition to UCSD meaning that their alumni network is weak and it does not show up on many recruiters' lists.  The young age of Rady means that the networking angle will have great pull with the its students.  Pushing the big speakers' names and sponsors will appeal strongly with the graduating MBA student. 

Other UCSD Students

In terms of targeting the rest of the UCSD student body, engineering students and other majors that have a heavy quantitative background seem to be the obvious segments due to the recent popularity of financial engineering. 

San Diego Universities ex: SDSU, USD

There are a number of universities in the city that are a 30 minute or less drive away.  Pushing the star power of the conference's speakers out to influencers at these universities could convince them to make the drive. 

Nearby California schools (2-3hrs drive)

Same tactic as for the San Diego schools, but due to limited man power, I will be focusing on only UC's and privates with strong business schools.

Out of state universities: 3 schools

Out of state schools are a long shot, however, last year a school from Utah flew out to the conference and that gave us a nice ego boost.  For club pride, I am going to reach out to 3 out of state schools and using our all-star lineup of speakers as the draw, hopefully one of them will come.