Student marketing agency FLC launches with new funding from Katz School of Business – The Durango Herald

Students help develop strategies to increase customer traffic

The student marketing agency program at Fort Lewis College is beginning to take off, thanks in part to a record donation made last fall by Marc and Jane Katz.

In October 2023, the Katz family donated $10.4 million to the Fort Lewis College School of Business, now renamed the Katz School of Business. As part of the donation, part of the funds was transferred to the FLC marketing agency program.

Last week, students presented to their clients and Katz School of Business faculty at the Fort Lewis College Center for Innovation.

Now in its third year, the program has expanded from helping one company with its marketing efforts to helping five.

Local First, O-Bar-O Cabins, J. Bo’s Pizza and Rib Co., GeekPack and Pine Needle Mountaineering reached out to students for help. Most owners were impressed with the students’ work, with some saying their work was better than the marketing agencies they had paid in the past.

Program advisor and associate professor of digital marketing Tom Miaskiewicz said one of Katz’s funding missions is to find ways the business school can help organizations in Durango and La Plata County.

Miaskiewicz said students have the opportunity to showcase their skills to local businesses, increasing their chances of finding employment. In the program’s first year in 2022, three of the four students involved in the program walked away with entry-level job offers in the field.

“It’s a small sample size, but it’s been really effective,” he said.

Digital marketing is a field that is becoming more and more popular among students. According to LinkedIn’s 2021 report, digital marketing was one of the 15 most in-demand skills in the world.

Many of the students presenting last week did not have business degrees but were still interested in pursuing pro bono work through the college’s program.

The main reason for the interest is the emergence of artificial intelligence and chatbots like Chat GPT, said Steven Elias, dean of the Katz School of Business.

Wraygen Shouldis, a 2024 FLC graduate, was asked about the use of AI technology. Shouldis said she programmed the AI ​​chatbot service to create the perfect Facebook post for Pine Needle Mountaineering.

She said the tool is great for checking grammar, but people shouldn’t rely on it completely when writing for themselves. She said the technology still requires human input to ensure information is reliable.

Incoming senior Chloe Hammond worked as a marketing consultant for J. Bo’s Pizza & Rib Co. She was tasked with developing a marketing strategy focusing on people who had moved to Durango in the last three to five years.

As she stated during her presentation, J. Bo’s is a restaurant well known to longtime Durango residents, but they may know less about the restaurant than new residents. It was also tasked with finding an online medium to organize online food orders.

“It was an amazing opportunity to be a project manager, which I had never done before, but also to have the help of my peers who might have different experiences and skills,” Hammond said.

Hammond also manages the Fort Lewis College Outdoor Pursuits social media accounts. She says her experience at a student-run marketing agency helped her understand how she could better organize social media content for the FLC department.

Other students included incoming senior AJ Espindola and 2024 graduate Martine Tsosie.

“The fact that these types of new platforms and new applications are being used sparks student interest, and I think that at the Katz School we prepare students well,” Miaskiewicz said.

Next semester, Miaskiewicz will teach numerous courses on the use of artificial intelligence in marketing.

In a survey by HubSpot, a marketing software company, 64% of marketers said they use AI tools in some form in their work, but the purpose and level of integration can vary significantly.

Forty percent of marketers use it for data analysis, 39% use it for market research or summarizing written articles, and 38% use it for content creation.

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