A teacher’s job is to create engaging projects which give their students hands-on, real world experience. If you’re studying marketing, you might get assigned a project like this: create a fictitious business, create a business plan, build a marketing strategy. In the real world, this process is full of legalities and investments. If you’re doing this for school and the business is make believe, you get to skip the not so fun part of applying for permits and coughing up cash-for now, at least!
So, let’s see, what are you left with? Of course, you still have to create your business model and build your marketing strategy. But without spending money, how are you supposed to create the logo and make your business cards? What about building a website and creating advertisements? Marketing materials cost a lot of money in the real world. Or do they?
Now I’ll let you in on a little secret. There’s TONS of free resources for creating marketing materials! See, your teacher knows what they’re doing with this project. Here you are, already learning some of the tips for being a savvy businessperson. Pinch pennies. Yay for learning!
To ace that school project and walk away with some real-world marketing experience, here’s what you’ll need:
1) First and foremost- your logo
Creating the logo is one of the most important steps in starting your business. Starting with your business logo will set the path for a theme in the rest of your marketing material. Think about it- what is your brand, simplified into a symbol? What is your brand’s main color(s)? Once you figure this part out, all you have to do is coordinate the rest of your marketing materials with this visual theme.
To get your logo designed quick and easy use LogoCreator. It’s of course free to use like the rest of the tools on this list. Start by picking your color, then play around with frames or shapes if you like. Get yourself a free icon from Flaticon and download it through LogoCreator. Before you know it, 5 minutes will have passed, and you’ll have yourself a professional grade logo! Simple enough.
2) Your business website
You’ve picked your logo and given your brand a color scheme and symbol. Nice work! Next, you’ll want to design your website. Make sure to stick with the style you’ve chosen while designing your logo.
A word of advice: save yourself the time and trouble and use Wix for building your website. The design tools are very straight-forward so you’ll have it down in no time. Wix makes it easy to build a gorgeous website when you’re strapped on time and money. Which you probably are. You’re a student, afterall. Your fully functioning, professional looking website will be sure to make an impression on teacher. Go get that A!
3) Your marketing materials
To market your business, you’ll need to find creative ways to promote your brand. Think about blog posts, advertisements, social media material… etc. It might seem like a lot. Maybe you don’t know where to start. But what if I were to tell you there’s a shortcut?
Yes, there’s a god-send called Canva that provides free templates and tools to create any marketing project your little heart desires! So, here’s what you’re going to do- get on Canva and pick your project. Are you making a business card? Brochures? Social media posts?
Whatever your chosen methods of marketing are, you’ll have tons of free templates to get you started. You can even download your awesome logo to Canva to incorporate it in all of your marketing materials. Next, tweak and customize your design to match with your brand’s colors and fonts.
Design made easy!
Just like that, and you’ve created a professional and coordinated brand image. Something that will stand out and be remembered. Don’t forget, you can use these tools for not only your fictitious business model, but your own growing business one day. All of the success to you, with this project and your future business endeavors!
