Reviving the Downtown Knowledge Market: My First PR Campaign

Have you heard of the Downtown Knowledge Market? No, well, most students at Grand Valley State University haven't either, so as the PR professional I am, my team and I put together a PR campaign for the Downtown Knowledge Market. 

Breaking DOWN the Elements of the Campaign

The overall goal of the campaign is to increase awareness of the Downtown Knowledge Market amongst GVSU students, which will be completed by following our set objectives, strategies, and tactics fit to the client's needs. My team and I made sure each objective followed the SMART framework, ensuring it was specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (Beyond Team, 2025). The first objective is to drive awareness of the Downtown Knowledge Market amongst GVSU students by gaining at least 250 new followers on social media platforms by April 2026. To achieve this objective, our strategies focus on creating compelling, shareable content and partnering with reputable GVSU social media accounts. Since there are many tactics for this objective, for the sake of this blog, I will discuss one that happens to be my favorite and, in my opinion, the most effective: create a giveaway where students have to follow, like, and comment on the Downtown Knowledge Markets Instagram. Giveaways receive so much engagement, which is precisely what the Downtown Knowledge Market needs. By sharing the post, more students will be reached, resulting in higher awareness for the Instagram account.

The second objective is to increase awareness of the Downtown Knowledge Market amongst GVSU students by 15%  by April 2026. The two strategies for this objective are creating exciting in-person activations at the Downtown Knowledge Market and partnering with GVSU professors who teach on the downtown campus across various majors. To reach this objective, we again developed numerous tactics, which I will briefly touch on. A couple are to post flyers throughout buildings on the downtown campus, give in-class presentations about the services offered at the Downtown Knowledge Market, and have a grand reopening of the Knowledge Market. The grand reopening will generate buzz across campus, creating a unique opportunity to grow awareness. Our group decided to be more innovative with our reopening, since students love free food, it will be available at the reopening as an incentive to participate. Food=attendence. 

Know Your Market

Our target audience consisted of undergraduate and graduate students aged 21-25 who take classes on the downtown campus and are majoring in nursing, engineering, business, or marketing. To help narrow down our target audience, an audience persona was created; her name is Carly Smith. She helped shape our campaign to fit her needs, as many students may struggle in classes but turn to AI for help rather than tutoring. Using Carly, we can reach our target audience of downtown students who are unaware of the Downtown Knowledge Market.

Why Will It Work

The campaign will be successful because of its unique beginning. The Downtown Knowledge Market started the campaign with nothing, no visibility, no awareness, and no social media. After conducting primary research, a focus group with downtown students, 0% of participants have heard of the Downtown Knowledge Market. So, it is easier to gain more awareness when it starts at zero. Even if it wasn't starting from zero, our strategies and tactics align very well with our target audience, which means students will be reached, whether through social media or in-person events. In a survey, my team

distributed among the 80 participants, 70% said that having a social media account would lead to greater awareness, with flyers in a close second.

Most students get their information and see what is going on through campus on social media platforms, specifically Instagram, where GVSU has a personal account. The largest age group on Instagram is people aged 18 to 24, which happens to be the typical age of college students (Sheikh, 2025). I believe the campaign will meet the client's needs, as she stated she wanted more awareness and foot traffic for the downtown location. My team and I will know for sure towards the end of the campaign, when we begin redistributing surveys and comparing trends, if the goal was reached. 

Potential Issues

Our campaign accounted for everything, even possible issues we might encounter. A big one we considered is our budget. For the campaign, each tactic needs to be considered when allocating the budget, but for the flyers, it will not be known exactly how many are needed until they receive approval from the buildings to post them. If, by chance, one of the buildings will not allow flyers to be posted, that could affect our budget and the implementation of the in-person activations. To address these potential issues, a budget category will be set up to allocate any additional funds that may not be used to support end-of-campaign activities that need a boost. If some flyers cannot be posted, we could turn to social media to promote the designed flyers on the new Downtown Knowledge Market account to still increase awareness. 

What Now?

The following steps in the campaign implementation are to monitor the engagement rates and visibility on social media and track how posts are performing. One idea my team and I would like to see in the future, related to social media, is creating internship opportunities for students to run the social media platforms. The client has a hard time finding time to manage social media, so an intern or interns could reduce her workload and provide relevant content for students. It is shown that interns can help boost productivity in a workplace and allow our client to focus on higher-level matters, which is what the Downtown Knowledge Market needs to continue to grow (Hill, 2025).

PR has not Scared Me Away Yet

Overall, I really enjoyed the process of creating this campaign, and it made me realize that I want a future in PR. Being able to use my creativity to create a whole new concept and seeing it come together is incredibly rewarding, and I actually had fun during the process. I learned a lot about collaborating effectively and ensuring deadlines are met. I am looking forward to continuing down the PR track.

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References

• Beyond Team. (2025, June 23). How to create SMART goals for your company – Beyond Esade. Beyond by Esade. https://www.esade.edu/beyond/en/how-to-create-smart-goals-for-your-business/

  
  

• Hill, Z. (2025, October 18). What Makes Internships Work? - Tomorrow’s Talent. Tomorrow’s Talent. https://tomorrowstalent.org/blog/what-makes-internships-work/

  
  

• Sheikh, M. (2025, February 24). Social Media Demographics to Inform Your 2025 Strategy. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/new-social-media-demographics/