Marketing Projects

Okay, I know everyone wants to know all about what I'm doing with my internship these days, and I haven't been good about posting about it, so here goes...

I'm planning to launch my online advertising campaigns for 3 Dumplings Tours soon. Most likely tomorrow actually, so hopefully they bring some good traffic to the site. We're not exactly fully prepared to give tours yet, but we need to practice and get a feel for what people are going to want out of the tours, so we have to start sometime, what better time than now.

I'm going to start focusing essentially all of my work on 3 Dumplings. Kelley wants me to basically be the one who builds out the business to start it up, which is a lot of responsibility, but it's a pretty awesome opportunity. Within the next couple weeks, I'm going to be meeting with Hotels in downtown Shanghai (the Pudong area) to figure out what we need to be doing to have our tour offerings presented to Shanghai tourists staying at these hotels. First, I'm going to meet with some directors at a couple big hotels (two people who Kelley know) in order to learn about what it takes to get our product into hotel concierge desks to be offered to their customers. I'm not doing sales pitches or anything quite yet, just learning from them and collecting information. I'm hoping to learn the best way to build out our marketing materials in a way that will hit home with Shanghai tourists who will hopefully want to take our tours, and also, how to go about connecting with hotels so that they offer our tours to their clients. From there, I'll create pamphlets, packets, presentations, and whatever else it takes to get us behind some hotel concierge desks, and then I'll try to go out and put 3 Dumplings into the hands of as many hotels in Shanghai as possible. While doing this, I'm also going to be building our tours. I have to go to all of the markets that we plan on taking people to, and I have to figure out what people might ask questions about. This is good because I'm pretty much the exact audience that we are directing our business towards: the foreign tourist who has never been to Shanghai before. So I'm heading to food markets, shopping markets, etc and taking notes on what weird foods are or anything that tourists might needs answers for. This is going to require quite a bit of Mandarin, as many local food markets do not have English-speaking people behind the counters. Also, I'll be researching good places to eat and good nightlife options for our other tours. Then, I will create a training guide for tour guides that we will hire in the near future. This guide will provide them with all of the information that they will need to give a great tour to our customers. Hopefully I do all of these things well! I'd love to see this thing take off in the right direction.

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PMM