June 17, 2011

How does your brand market to college students, and what sets it apart? Many of us are looking back on college, and trying to figure out how to capture these elusive, busy students. It can be difficult; but we’d like to suggest putting yourself in their shoes.

Meet Katie. She’s peppy, smart, and involved on campus. She attends a university just outside Boston with 7,000 undergrads. Together we will explore a day in her life. Pay attention to all the marketing outlets she is exposed to today. You might be surprised.

Let’s dive into Katie’s day. She rolls out of bed at 7:30 am, just in time to shower, grab a coffee, and head to class. Right here, she’s been exposed to multiple brands. First, over twenty beauty products, all of which are “roommate approved”. Each of her three roommates has five shower products which she is free to sample as she pleases. On her way to class she stops by Dunkin Donuts and grabs a large iced latte. Despite being from New York, she is forced to tote around a cup with a Red Sox logo on it simply because she’s in Boston. Katie strolls into class and opens up her laptop (with a Burton sticker decorating the lid). First she checks Facebook, then her student e-mail, and finally her personal e-mail. She is bombarded with e-mails from her sorority, the literary society, retail stores, the university police, and her mother. Her best friend forwarded a link to a contest, which she enters and then shares across her social media outlets. While on Facebook, she sees that her crush updated his status to the lyrics from his favorite song. Katie pops them in Google to see what her next iTunes download will be. She sees an Anthropology banner ad featuring the hottest new looks for Spring. She’s forwards a link of a dress to her sister to gain approval before buying.

After two more classes, Katie heads down to the dining hall for lunch. She grabs a copy of the campus paper while she waits for five of her sorority sisters. A tanning salon minutes from campus is offering an exclusive package for college students; she rips the coupon out, throws the paper in her tote and finds a table with the girls.

The tanning salon knows that 82% of college students have read their campus paper in the past three months. Pepsi knows that most students will visit the dining hall daily, so Pepsi provides fountain soda for the school. A college student is in the beginning of their customer life cycle. If advertisers don’t target this market now, it will be difficult to gain their business once they are loyal to a competitor.

While they eat, Katie mentions that coupon she grabbed earlier and asks the sisters if they wanted to join. Three of them jump up and grab a copy of the paper immediately. Katie notices her sisters’ clothing choices. Two are wearing the sorority sweatshirt, one is wearing a JCrew top, one is sporting an Underarmour jacket, and the last, a Boston Red Sox t-shirt. She compliments the JCrew top, and the sister explains when she bought it and the additional colors it came in.

Katie continues her day, tennis practice at 3pm, group meeting at 7, and finally reruns of Jersey Shore at 10. She encounters hundreds, even thousands of marketing outlets throughout her afternoon. CBS News tells us a person typically is exposed to 5,000 advertisements per day. It’s likely Katie exceeds that; she reads magazines at the gym, she watches TV while surfing the Internet, and relies on her friends for fashion advice and the hottest new trends.

The first step to marketing to college students is understanding them. The best way to get your product in their hands starts with knowing your customer. Lesson # 4 from Dale Carnegie’s, How to Win Friends and Influence People is, “Become genuinely interested in other people. Take a sincere interest in them. Don’t just pretend you’re interested. Everybody has something interesting about them. Find out what it is.” This means finding out what motivates them, why they do things, and how they do things. Having this insight will help you as a marketer know where and how you fit into their lives.

Advice or questions? Get the conversation started below.

May 18, 2011

Gen Y (born 1977-1994) is now estimated to be the largest consumer group in US history. At 70 to 80 million, the generation accounts for 25% of the US population. Their annual spending power already exceeds $200B and that is expected to eclipse Boomers by 2017. But how are they different from other generations? Why do you as a marketer need to treat them differently? A lot of it comes down to expectations, high expectations.

If you grew up B.I. (Before Internet), you’re likely to find today’s most popular services impressive for very different reasons than the early adopters of those services. Chances are they are not even impressed. Someone studying abroad in the 90’s could only call home a few times a month because it was too expensive. Gen Y takes Skype, Google Talk and instant messaging for granted – “what do you mean you couldn’t call home?” Finding an old recording of your favorite show would be a big deal 15 years ago. Gen Y expects 1 million results in 0.11 seconds and you’ll get a “WTF?” if YouTube or Hulu can’t return what they’re looking for. But that’s not the kicker – they want it for free and they want it fast.

There’s a scene in “The Social Network” where ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ is on the phone with ‘Eduardo Saverin’: “Okay, let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else; we don’t crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected: that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don’t you get that?”
The dialog is probably exaggerated, but the writers have recognized Mark Zuckberg’s understanding of two important facts:

1)expectations are enormous

There’s truly no mercy, so when you have their interest make sure you work hard to keep things that way.

2) Gen Y is uber-connected

Gen Y is exponentially more connected than any previous generation. Processes that used to take years now take weeks. The new web has given social interactions a solid injection of steroids.

So how do you keep up with this? How do you make it work in your favor? We certainly don’t have all the answers, but here are some things to think about:

1) Change your marketing distribution

Go digital. Are you still spending a lot of money offline? Come on! The trends speak for themselves. Savvy brands are switching their marketing funds to where people interact – online.

2) Enable users to share and interact

Your online marketing needs to get smarter. Make sure your users can interact with you and around your brand. Ask yourself this: If someone really loved my brand – how do I help them tell people about it? It starts with social share buttons, marketing campaigns that use Facebook, Twitter campaigns and perhaps a few widgets on key landing pages.

3) Content is important

You may have heard this for years already, but Gen Y wants more than just transactions and confirmation emails. How about some helpful articles, videos or even webinars? You need to be the expert and help them with more than buying something.

4) Listen

B.I. companies could get away with poor service and adequate products. They could stay alive for years without changing or innovating. Gen Y and the new web is leading the revolution. Successful businesses now need to listen first and then act. Your marketing needs to engage your users. It’s not all about how fantastic you are. It’s all about how you can do something fantastic for the user. Take NetFlix – first they changed the game (movie rentals) and brought down Blockbuster in the process. Then, unlike an “old” company they continued to deliver what users wanted – online streaming of content. They spent millions of dollars optimizing their rating systems – because expectations are high, very high.

February 2, 2011

Marketers hear it all the time. There’s a lot of hype around building your social media following quickly. Some claim that a Facebook fan is becoming more valuable than an email subscriber. But don’t abandon your email marketing and lead generation efforts just yet. Let’s take a closer look at what social media accomplishes for your brand.

The value of social media

Marketers love social media. It’s cheap and effective. Companies are buying ‘likes’, follows are being traded, and you aren’t stumbling upon anything by accident. There is no doubt that social media has become an important piece of any marketing mix. The important thing to note is what social media is good for.

• Social media is great for engaging customers. Social media sites allow brands to open a dialogue with their customers. Social media allows customers to get involved in a conversation in an environment where they feel comfortable.
• To that point, social media is great for customer service. Customers can ask questions, address complaints, and write reviews. Not only can brand representatives respond, but other customers can answer and share experiences as well.
• Social media is a great driver of impressions. Unlike email where users can delete a message without even opening it, in social media, messages often show up in news feeds.
• Then of course, there’s the sharing aspect that allows messages to go viral. Social media makes it easy for users to share content they find interesting with their ‘friends’. Further, if a user interacts with a brand in social media, the interaction is automatically shared with their ‘friends’ in many cases through news feeds. When users are sharing content or messages with ‘friends’ and those ‘friends’ continue to share with their ‘friends’, content and messages ‘go viral’.
• The ability to share makes social media a great place for promotions. Submitting content, votes, opinions, and spreading the word for a chance at winning something is a natural fit for social media. Very often, the end goal is lead generation, by driving additional followers or fans, or by requiring users to opt-in to emails to enter.

So the question becomes: “why spend money to deliver brand messages through email marketing?” If companies can reach their customers on a platform where they are engaged, feel comfortable, can interact with the brand, and can easily share the message, why would you want to crowd their inbox with emails that they may never open?

The value of email marketing

There are still a few things that email marketing can do far better than social media.

• It is important to keep in mind that social media is intended for just that: social interactions. Whereas email can be more of a transactional tool. Any message that pertains to a specific user, such as order confirmations or customer status notifications, must be sent by email. Do you know which of your Twitter followers are your VIP customers? Can you segment your Facebook fan base and send users who haven’t purchased from you in 180 days a special sale?
• Email remains a superior tool for driving visits (clicks) to your website and thus for driving short-term sales. On social media sites, the user expects to engage in a dialogue with brands within that space. Contrastly, when a user receives an email from a brand, they expect to be called to visit the brand’s website.
• Email is a great place to include advertising. In a well-designed HTML email, you can surround the message the user is looking for with relevant ads and links to your website.

Conclusion

Marketers need to differentiate separate incentives for their users to follow them on their social media sites, in addition to subscribing to their emails. For example, maybe your brand runs sweepstakes and giveaways only on its social media sites and announces sales and promo codes only through email newsletters. If that is the case, and the user is aware of it, then your users will be incentivized to follow you in social media and subscribe to your emails. And they’ll open those emails too. Then, you can deliver messages through the appropriate channels to a larger and more engaged audience.

January 25, 2011

Give them what they want

Guess what? When someone clicks that little like button, they actually make a connection with your brand. They’re telling you that they like your page, your brand, and what you give them. So, your job now is to give them what they want, not what you want. Don’t fill your page with marketing. Remember, that’s what you want, not what they want. The more you know about why someone likes your page, the easier it will be for you to please them.

Don’t be something you’re not

Culture is like language, you can only participate if you get it. Students and youth are different. You can’t read an article about slang in the Wall Street Journal. It doesn’t qualify. If you’re old, don’t try to be young. Work with someone that speaks their language and that knows what they’re interested in. Then, (and this is the hard part) trust them!

Have a plan

The best posts and the best pages are not nearly as random as most people think. Great marketing starts with a smart plan. How do you get users to hit the like button? Can we get people to tag themselves? What are we willing to give away? What’s a new fan worth to us? Make sure your message is consistent and in line with what you stand for as a brand. Remember, they like you. They like you.

Update

Things need to happen. Make sure someone’s in charge of the page and make sure they update it often. You should also make use of Facebook’s excellent tools as often as possible. You can review your “Insights” to follow active users, new likes, post views and more, but most importantly, learn. Under your posts, you will find two important stats: 1) Impressions and 2) Feedback. Impressions is fairly self-explanatory but keeping an eye on it can teach you when to post to get the most impressions (i.e. Sunday morning is good for a church, not so good for a vodka brand). Feedback is king. It tells you how many people had some kind of interaction with this post. Go through your posts and find common denominators for posts that got a high percentage feedback. Then, do posts like those more often.

Keep it simple

Messages should be short. Only pose one question at a time. Avoid complicated instructions.