Have you ever walked into an interview with a boring resume? Are you looking for a way to stand out from the competition when applying for a new job? Upstage Resume is here to help! With a variety of customized templates, Upstage Resume will help transform your resume from bland to beautiful.
As part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge, Team Snapshot will be promoting Upstage Resume through an online paid search campaign. Below Team Snapshot provides background on the organization, its mission and products, a competitive analysis and a technical analysis. This information will be used to allow Team Snapshot to help grow Upstage Resume's business.
Background
Alysha Watson was updating her resume
three months ago when she became inspired to show off both personality and
creativity through the design of her resume. She realized that her
document hadn't changed
much in the last 5 years besides minor formatting changes. Lauren, who eventually became Alysha’s
business partner, was a graphic designer that Alysha collaborated with to
create her updated resume. The design was created to catch the eye of a
potential employer, with a finished product that included a headshot and graph used
to display Alysha’s skills in a visual way instaed of basic bullet points. Alysha received nothing but positive feedback on
her new resume and found that a lot of her peers and friends were interested in
having her help redesign their resumes. Alysha and Lauren began working on a
website that would allow consumers to send in a basic Word document resume and
select a template from over 20 designs for their new resume. The site launched
on April 1, 2014 and because Alysha and Lauren both have full time jobs, they
are fulfilling orders as they come in during their spare time.
To
quote Alysha on her new company: “Upstage Resume's
vision is to enhance the traditional resume with color, creativity and design.
We want to help the every-day person "outshine the competition" with
a resume that is unique and one of a kind.”
We (the members of Team Snapshot) chose Upstage Resume for the Google Online Marketing
Challenge because they are a brand new company that has great potential for
success. Because of their easy-to-use website and creative resume designs
available, Upstage Resume taps into a currently un-pursued niche market. Upstage Resume is currently using basic marketing tools , which leaves a lot of ways Team Snapshot can help grow the business (they use Shopify to track
click through rates and page views but have not pursued any further
advertisements besides their pages on social media profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook,
and Twitter).
Mission & Products:
What the company seeks to do and how it does this through its product
offerings.
Upstage Resume’s mission is to provide a product that will
help their customers, primarily job seekers, stand out from their competition by
providing customized resumes and cover letters that look and read very
differently than typical boilerplate resumes.
By enhancing their customer’s current resume through creativity and
design, Upstage Resume delivers a product that is a more distinctive and eye-catching
deviation from the normal tool of job seekers alike.
Upstage offers 15 different resume templates as well as
custom resume and cover letter design.
They also offer upgrades and revisions should your resume change or
require editing. Upstage Resume commits
to a 72 hour turnaround on resume deliveries, but offers expedited service for a
premium. Upstage does not edit the
content of their customer’s resumes, choosing to focus their business on
design.
Competitive
Analysis: What other companies out there could be substitutes, or offer similar
services?
There are a lot of options out there as far as receiving some
sort of assistance with writing your resume or creating a resume that is
aesthetically pleasing. Upstage has
determined that their two biggest competitors are Loft Resumes and Resume
Launch.
Loft Resumes is very
similar in that they take a basic structured word processing document and
translate it into something that matches form with function. With that being said, Upstage’s costs are far
lower and their designs are uniquely designed.
Loft has a lot of options to choose from, but the costs average $99,
which is considerably higher than the $35 charged by Upstage. Their website is also very similar looking to
Upstage’s, but a person looking for a job might not always be able to
rationalize the cost.
Resume Launch serves a different client base than Upstage Resume. Again,
they offer unique resume product designs that translate boring structure into
beautiful resumes but their designs are less interesting than those offered by Upstage. We suspect that a lot of their revenue is
driven by their resume assistance offering, which is manned by one person
(implying that turn around on purchases is either slow or not top of the line). Based on reading their twitter account, they
are constantly looking to broaden their resume template offerings, advertising
new templates on almost a weekly basis.
This will make them more competitive going forward and might force
Upstage, new to the market, to consider ways to differentiate themselves. Their costs are also lower for templates at
$25.
Technical Abilities:
how is Upstage Resume utilizing technology?
Upstage Resume is an
entirely web-based service organization. Because its products are purchased,
paid for and distributed via the website, Internet technology is a core functionality
requirement. If the organization forgets to pay its web hosting fees, the
website would go dark and there would be limited opportunity for the business.
Upstage Resume relies
completely on social media and word of mouth to spread awareness. They are
currently utilizing a website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter page, Google+ account
and LinkedIn profile. Due to their recent launch, they do not have a large
following yet on any of these sites. Their Facebook account has the largest
audience, which consists of 305 “likes” for their page. One of their current
strategies is too communicate flash sales and special offers via their social
media sites. Because of the importance of an online audience going to these
sites, one of Team Snapshot’s goals will be to increase social media site traffic.
There are a number of
suggestions Team Snapshot has put together regarding Upstage Resume’s social
media sites. First, because sales and special offers are only listed on sites
like Facebook and Twitter, including direct links to these pages should be obvious
on the company’s landing page. A site user currently has to scroll down below
the fold to find links to these pages, and there is no call to action or
benefits callout on why a user would want to follow Upstage Resume on social
media. Second, it makes sense to have an Internet presence on multiple social
media sites; however, defining what each will be used for is important. A critical aspect of social media for
businesses is defining the purpose of that social media account. Should all
social media sites be used to communicate special offers, or just a few? What
type of audience is each social media site trying to attract and what does that
actual audience look like? How can we incorporate analytical sites like Google Analytics
or other platforms to gain insight into who is actually going to these sites?
All of these points
will be addressed in how Team Snapshot helps Upstage Resume grow its business
in the Google Online Marketing Challenge.
Aol is taking website personalization to the next level with the recent acquisition of Gravity. Gravity is a content personalization engine that will provide site viewers with articles that are calculated to be more interesting to the user. Gravity, bundled with the 2010 acquisition of The Huffington Post, will allow Aol to provide a customized Internet browsing experience that focuses on customized content as well as advertisements.
