Week 1- The Role of Marketing

Welcome to my blog! My name is Itzel Rodriguez and this is my first semester at Benedictine University. I transferred to Benedictine University from Moraine Valley Community College where I graduated with a Business Administration Associate degree. I am now majoring in marketing and hope to graduate soon with a bachelor's degree.

I currently work at a State Farm agency as a customer service associate. Although most of my time is spent with our clients, I do also assist my agent in creating marketing material or events for our agency. State Farm might seem like a large corporation but in reality, the individual State Farm agencies are considered small businesses and therefore market like any other small business would. 

The goal for our agency marketing is to convert prospects into policyholders. This is done by identifying what makes us unique and marketing that aspect of our business to prospects.

The image above shows the top marketing strategies small businesses use. The agency I work for uses some of these strategies to market our business.

1) Word- of-mouth: Our agent has been in office for ten years and has several prospects just from word-of-mouth.

2) Core Foundation: Our agency believes in our company's mission, which is to help people manage the risk of everyday life and recover from the unexpected. We transfer this mission in the quality service we provide, along with low costs for the quality service.

3) Corporate Gifting: My agent likes to give back to the community and often has events to celebrate with clients and prospects. Examples of events that we have used to offer gifts are back to school events, Dia de los Ninos (celebration for kids), and meet and greets with local celebrities.