Entrepreneurial Marketing

Week 1: Introduction and Knowing What You're Marketing

Objectives:

• To introduce the course and ourselves
• To understand how important mission and vision are to marketing
• To think about crafting a message and staying true to it

Readings:

• Introduction and Week 1 page
• "Build a Mission Statement" video from Microsoft Small Business - all rights reserved

Assignments:

Due no later than Feb. 1

• Post an introductory message in the forum
  • Please include:
    • a little about yourself, particularly with regard to this course (and please also feel free to share any other fun things about yourself)
    • a short description of the "enterprise" you want to focus on for this course. (This can be from your "sign-up task," but make sure it is specific and tell why you are passionate about it)
    • your specific learning goal(s) for this course
    • something you can contribute to the class (Remember, this is peer learning. We all teach and learn.)
    • a request for collaboration on one or more parts of this class if applicable (something specific you'd like to work on as a team with others in the class)
• Make-your-own-case-study
  • Analyze the mission or vision of an enterprise of your choosing. (This can come from an enterprise's web site or just search YouTube for mission or vision statements.) What are it's strengths and weaknesses? Is it unique, short, memorable, market-oriented, inspirational, etc.? Post your work under the appropriate prompt for this week in the forum. Then review and respond to at least one other participant's post.
• Craft your own enterprise mission or vision statement. Post your work under the appropriate prompt for this week in the forum. Then review and respond to at least one other participant's post.

Welcome to "Entrepreneurial Marketing." The purpose of this course is to look at a variety of marketing methods -- both traditional and non-traditional -- and explore how they can be used to succeed as an entrepreneurial enterprise.

The content in this course applies not only to businesses, but to non-profits, events, hobbies, special projects, or any pursuits that need marketing (which is almost everything). For the purpose of this course, we will refer to these generically as "enterprises."

Like other P2PU courses, this one is built on:

• Individualization
  • You all have different learning goals for this course, different enterprises, different amounts of time to devote to the course, different learning styles, etc. Please CUSTOMIZE THIS COURSE TO MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU. For some this might mean changing an assignment to meet your needs. For others, it might mean radically redesigning the course. Please go ahead and do this, while keeping in mind that others are doing their own thing too so be careful not to impinge on their learning experience. (For example, if you want to do your own syllabus, create a new page for it rather than altering the syllabus posted here.:)
• Openness
  • To the extent possible, this course uses open-licensed resources. (There may be some resources that are free but licensed under traditional copyright. They will be noted as such.)
  • All content posted on P2PU is licensed CC BY SA, unless otherwise noted. This means that others can use the content however they like as long as they attribute the source and license the derivative work under a similar sharing license (CC BY SA).
  • If you have any content that is proprietary or that you do not wish to share or have others use, please don't post it here. If this relates to one of your assignments (I understand that some big ideas do benefit from staying secret), feel free to email me and I will regard them as such.
• Peer learning
  • We will all learn a lot from each other.
  • Please view your participation in this course as that of learner, teacher, peer, etc. and move freely from one role to another. I will do the same.
• Community
  • What differentiates courses like this from a self-study project is our collaboration.
  • There are a million tools for building community. Rather than overburdening the course participants with too many of these, we will be relying primarily on the Forums here. However, if you want to use other tools (blogs, wikis, Google Docs, Skype, UStream, etc.), please do so. If you use one of these tools for an assignment, just post a link in the Forum thread for that assignment. If you want experience with a social media tool for your own marketing activities, you migh want to use it with this course. If you want to talk more about this, message me.
  • I will also keep online office hours in the Chat room for this course every ____ from ____-____. There will be a designated topic of discussion for that time (related to the syllabus); however, we can talk about whatever you want as well. Because I know you are all busy folks, this synchronous chat time is optional, but participating is recommended.

Knowing What You're Marketing

Marketing includes any activities involved in getting your product (service, idea, etc.) from your enterprise to end users, including promoting, selling, and distributing.

In order to do this effectively, you have to know what you are marketing.

This sounds basic but many enterprises get derailed by not having a clear mission or vision or by not sticking to it.

Your mission and vision should drive your marketing program. Every communication with customers or users you have should reinforce your mission. Every dollar or minute you spend should be focused on achieving your vision.

You mission and vision should reflect your passion and what your enterprise is all about. Write it down big and bold and think about it at every stage in the marketing process.

After you have your mission statement well defined, think about your "elevator pitch" for your enterprise. This is a very short pitch for what you're marketing and why folks should be excited about it. (It is meant to be able to delivered in the time it takes to go up a few floors in an elevator.) Practice your pitch. Get really good at it. Then use it whenever you can. You never know when you'll run into someone who might be a potential customer or an influencer for your enterprise.

(Bonus activity: Make a video of your elevator pitch and share it with us.)