This week in PR publications, our class was assigned to finish designing two direct mailers for OU’s upcoming residential colleges. For the purposes of this blog, I will be detailing my journey of creating the first direct mailer. Suffice it to say, I’ve never had this much “writer’s block” in my life. Writer’s block is the easiest way to describe how I cannot imagine how to design this direct mailer.
However, research into my desired target audience, parents of current OU students, helped give me direction as to how I approach my design. My research was reading up on how OU is already marketing to parents. I checked out the OU Parents blog and found the specific keywords used to persuade parents. After perusing a few websites, I believed I had enough data to move onto the analysis stage.
Firstly, the analysis stage consisted with me narrowing down my audience further from just a generalization. My target audience are parents with income around $90,000 to $125,000. These parents are concerned with their children’s grades and how well they connect with other students. I based my decision on this because the competition of residential colleges are apartments, fraternities, sororities, and dorms. On one hand, Parents who would prefer apartments or dorms for their children would probably want to foster their children’s independence and improve grades. On the other hand, parents who would like fraternities or sororities for their children would most likely want to increase the sociability of their children.
Nevertheless, if I were to compare residential colleges to the above choices, it would fall in-between apartments/dorms and frats/sororities because the residential colleges is like a mixture between all of them. There is a diverse community and the college is structured to push students to socialize while also exerting that residential college allow for students to have a comfortable studying environment.
So, after analyzing the research, I apply all that I have learned into my design. I tried to make my design aesthetic while also using key terms to catch my potential reader’s eyes. After hooking them in, I show pictures to illustrate the possibilities of attending the residential colleges. The tricky part was only how to make the direct mailer look aesthetically pleasing. A lot of play testing later, I finished my design project and I couldn’t be happier with the results.
