The student demographic is one of the most coveted for businesses looking to sell their products. This audience group often relies on the internet to find products to buy, making them an easier yet tricky target for marketers. As it goes, it can also be challenging to create content that appeals to students. If you are developing a marketing strategy to attract students to your products, here are some tips that can come in handy.
Solve A Problem
This is, perhaps, the number one requirement of a successful business. However, what many forget is that you should not only solve the problems of your potential customers, but you should convince them that your product can be beneficial to them.
For instance, students often find themselves struggling to keep up with the demands of academic life. It is not surprising because today, you need to not only study but also engage in extracurriculars while doing a part-time job. In fact, they feel they study better with argumentative essay writing service EssayPro, and it also helps them manage their time more effectively.
This is one example of a ‘pain point’ for the majority of students. By solving the issue of lack of time, your business can turn out to be beneficial for them. So, when you develop content, make sure it caters to a specific problem and how you can help your customers resolve it.
Generate Platform-Specific Content
In 2021, about 42% of the world’s total population already used social media on a regular basis. However, how every individual and age group interacts with these platforms is not the same. Each social network comes with unique advantages, and these are used differently by various people.
For instance, if you are targeting school students, you might want to focus on TikTok. Instagram and Snapchat are popular as entertainment, Facebook and LinkedIn are preferred by university goers to build professional relationship networks. As such, you cannot use the same content across all these platforms. Instead, you need to identify which networks are unique for what and take advantage of what they are offering.
Make Use of User-Generated Content
It is not uncommon for youngsters to value the opinion of their peers more than their parents or anyone else’s. So, why not apply the same tactic to your brand? All you need to do is encourage your existing users to generate content and share them on your social media platforms.
For example, you can create a hashtag for your product and start a campaign to promote the hashtag. If done correctly, your community will build itself. You can feature such user-generated content on your official pages and share them to get them across to more people.
Choose the Right Medium
The attention span of humans is barely more than 8 seconds these days. The large majority of people, including students, only scan what they see on the internet and do not read anything deeply, at least initially. And consequently, you hardly get more than a couple of seconds to convince the user to pay attention to your content before they choose to scroll past it.
So, you need to create content that has catchy headlines and thumbnails and a copy that fulfills the promise of it. For instance, if you are solving a student problem that talks about how to find a job, the headline needs to suggest that, and the body should provide some value.
Secondly, you should also rely more on images and video content. These are likely to run better among all audiences and will command more attention. Failure to get to the point right away will also result in losing your audience’s attention.
Go Live
It can be good for your brand to engage in real-time sharing and interactions. This can make your business look more relatable to your audience. And the best way to do this is to go live and engage with your audience.
Live video and audio streaming across multiple platforms can help you build a strong media presence. It also gives you potential customers to gain insights about your products and answer any questions they might have. That said, a wrong answer here can do damage. So be sure to prepare the spokesperson on how to navigate through challenging questions if you decide to do a live session.
Personalize with Geo-Targeting
Depending on your product, your brand might also benefit from geo-targeting. For instance, suppose you are providing tutoring services, both online and offline. You need to be location-specific to connect your tutors to their target clients.
This can be one of the most effective ways to segment your target student audience and provide them with personalized content. As you might know already, online searches are location-specific. So, if a student is searching for ‘tutoring services near me, you want your ads and content to appear in the results. And geo-targeting is the only way to do that.
Generate Content They Care About
Students these days care about things that are happening around the world. They are active and well-informed. This is evident from the fact that over 40% of students use social media to stay updated about the latest news.
Given this, you will want to include not only sales pitches as your content but also other important events that happen on a daily basis. This will pass on the message that your brand, too, cares about the world around you and is ready to use your voice in the best way possible.
Build Brand Awareness
As we mentioned earlier, consumers want to know more about the brands they purchase from, not only about the products. This means that you need to be transparent about your values and what your goals are.
If you have a sustainable way of creating your products, do not hesitate to showcase this feature on your social media pages and website. It can be the best selling point of your brand. This theme should be prominent in your content and used as the key point when building brand awareness.
Work on Brand Loyalty
Finding new customers might be challenging, but it can be even more difficult to retain them. This can be especially true when targeting students who are eager to try out the new products. You will need to create different types of content to appeal to your existing customers and to cater to new clientele.
For instance, you can think of coming up with separate campaigns and discounts for products – exclusively for your customer who has already purchased from this. This can also include affiliate marketing programs and such, which will encourage them to bring others on board. On the other hand, to attract new users, you can provide a welcome bonus. This will help you retain your existing client base while you focus on finding new customers.
How to Sell to Students?
When generating content for students, there is no room for you to get sloppy or lazy. A few weeks of absence on social media and your target customers might already move on to the next brand. As such, it is crucial that you build and maintain a consistent presence on different marketing channels. You should prepare well beforehand and schedule your content in an effective way to be regular with your posts.