SMS Marketing – Instant business idea for students

Text messages are still hot. Unlimited text messaging plans are more common than ever before and the cost of sending messages has gone down. I use tatango.com to manage a list of students that want to hear about happenings on campus. The challenge here is to get students to give up their cell-phone numbers. What works really well is to add wherever you can that they can unsubscribe anytime by replying with STOP. The absolutely amazing benefit of text message marketing is that you get a timely delivery of your message into someone’s pocket. The opening rate is basically 100% and the conversion rate isn’t bad either.

I run three lists

• Happenings on campus
• Food
• Clubs/Bars

What I do for the Food and Club/Bars lists is I go out to these businesses and ask for exclusive discounts for the list. What businesses often do is offer limited time deals with huge discounts. (i.e. Come by in the next 2 hours and get 70% of the price of a hookah). Works like a charm. What web-based businesses can do is offer limited time discounts to their website or store by sending out a custom coupon code, which makes measuring results even easier. Other list-building promotions I run are “hunts” on Sunday nights. I hide a prize (i.e. $50 gift cards) somewhere on campus and text out a hint about its location. People go nuts.

Eventually you can sell access to your lists to businesses. “Want to reach 300 students instantly with your discount code? $ please” You can do the same with campus clubs “Want me to remind people of your event? $ please” You provide a great service and people are willing to pay for it. All you need is maybe $200 to get things rolling.
Let me know if you try this, I’m curious to hear how it works out at other schools.

If you want to advertise on my list get in touch bjoernweidlich at gmail.com

Popularity: 26% [?]

Offline marketing that reaches college students

Stop focusing solely on online marketing. It is true that our generation spends a lot of time online but from time to time we do leave our dorm rooms. When we do we attend events, go to bars, house parties, clubs, etc. On-campus events are the least utilized but extremely effective marketing opportunities that exist for the college student market. These opportunities are so easy to tap into it’s surprising more companies aren’t doing this. Let’s say you wrote an iPhone game and college students are your target market. All you need to do is

1. go to a university website of your choice
2. find the student organization directory
3. find an organization that sounds relevant to you (i.e. video game club, entrepreneurship club)
4. search for them on Facebook
5. see if they have a group/page
6. look for the kinds of events they organize
7. email the president asking if you could sponsor one of their future events

Offline advertising doesn’t have to stay offline. As part of the sponsorship deal you might end up with a mention on their Facebook page, or have your company name in the event title. To understand how good this opportunity is let me tell you about how clubs work:

• they get a limited budget from student council
• if they have a good fan base on Facebook they have figured out how to market themselves
• they get to use campus resources that you can’t use (i.e. power point slide show in the cafeteria)
• they know what students want to see at events
• it is cool to have corporate sponsors, it adds to the credibility of the event

All you have to do is sponsor some food, or send them some free products and they will love you.

image credit: saparksfoundation.org

Popularity: 100% [?]

The problem with Facebook Advertising

I have not yet seen one relevant Facebook ad that seemed worthy of a click. The main problem is that applications like Mafia Wars have flooded profile pages with spammy, irrelevant ads. There is a lack of trust toward ads that will be difficult to gain back. The only ads that seem to be running successfully are giveaway and “Get a free something” ads. I have noticed that people who do click on Facebook ads don’t really understand why they are getting certain ads. They don’t realize that marketers are able to target ads using pretty much any piece of information on their profiles. A red-haired friend of mind just recently freaked out about a “Gingers Unite” ad he saw on his Facebook.

Something else that marketers have to keep in mind is that some people pick specific information for their profile pages to portray a certain image of themselves to other people. During the first days of Facebook I caught myself listing a certain book as a favorite because a couple of my friends had listed it on their profiles. Classics tend to be keywords that I would call somewhat diluted and should be used with care.

When you decide to buy Facebook advertising try to think of it as hanging up a poster in someone’s living room. Generally people dislike ads, especially on a site where they spend most of their online time. What I do see converting amazingly well are ads drawing people to Facebook pages. They usually include names of friends who are fans of that certain page already. This is extremely powerful and I wish Facebook would use this model and apply it to regular ads as well. The thumbs-up thumbs-down symbol next to ads should be used to endorse and ad and make it more likely to show up on friends’ profile with a little badge at the bottom showing that one of their friends liked the ad.

I’m curious to hear what you think, let me know in the comments.
Photo credit: ricardocabello.com

Popularity: 30% [?]

The ROI of Social Media

Popularity: 10% [?]

Micro-Sponsorship

Popularity: 17% [?]

Lessons learned from marketing to college students

It still amazes me after three years of running a student organization and doing on-campus marketing for the entrepreneurship program how difficult it is to get students’ attention. Here are some things I’ve learned about college students:

Free food

Generally free food will guarantee at least a small crowd but these people will not be interested in the event and will leave once the food is gone. It’s a good hook and will definitely convince some students to miss a meal at the caf to attend your event. If you schedule an event around dinner or lunch time you’re pretty much required to provide food to get anyone to come. Warning: Don’t rely on free food as your only marketing hook because even just a little bit of rain can be enough to keep people away.

Raffles + Giveaways

Again, these things are never the main reason for an event and students know that they are mostly a marketing stunt. I’ve been to some events where they had some expensive prizes and moved the drawing of the winners to the end of the event to make sure students sit through all of the lecture. It is not very satifactory as a host to know that people really just came for the raffle.

Cool speakers

You would think this would do it! Bringing Johnny Cupcakes to campus to talk about his story is cool. Everyone who attended loved it. All 80 of the 240 who said they would be attending on Facebook loved it. It is absolutely nervewrecking if after a crazy marketing campaign on campus with flyers, emails, powerpoint slides, and over 240 attending on Facebook and something like 300 maybes only about 80 people show up. The week after the event I ran into a ton of students who told they had forgotten about the event even though we had sent out emails the day before reminding everyone. Even though I’m convinced that getting interesting speakers is the best way to drive traffic to your event, it will still surprise you how many students just forget.

Facebook

Two years ago Facebook events was a far better way to market your event than it is today. Really none of the settings or things you can do with Facebook events has changed, there are just many many more of them now. People start events for all sorts of reasons today and students get flooded with invitations all the time. The way to gauge possible attendance has also gotten far worse. Selecting “Attending” really doesn’t mean much today. Students will not think about whether you need a good approximation to buy the right amout of food and will say they are attending if they are interested. I want to argue that for a large portion of Facebook users selecting attending is almost like “digging” an event with a slight chance of attendence. Maybes are pretty much no’s with a 10% success rate from my experience.

Email

This might be the best way to get in touch with students even though email inboxes get flooded with administrative stuff daily. Most students will not write themselves a note after they read your email so you better email them again right before the event. And be prepared for plenty of “i didn’t get that email” excuses even though you know that your university’s spam folder does not block emails from addresses connected to the same nameserver.

In-Class Announcements

This stuff works. Professors, for the most part, have some influence on students and if they recommend an event it is very likely that some of those students will show up. Make sure the professor actually likes the event, too, otherwise it will sound like another marketing message that the professor was asked to deliver.

Marketing to college students is like being in marketing boot camp. You deal with one of the most distracted audiences and if you get them to do stuff you’re good.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Interaction on .edu sites

I started doing pro-bono consulting for my university a couple of months ago to help with social media marketing. In the process I have learned a lot about how some colleges think about marketing. The lack of online marketing budgets is astonishing. I can’t think of any other industry where a potential sale is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition plus possible donations in the future and in comparison close to no money is spent marketing to students online. High school students and parents are shopping for colleges online and why shouldn’t they expect the same treatment from college sites that they get from online retailers? What I started working on is a “customer service” section of the Web site that consists of a U-stream live stream + chat linked to a button on the front page that only goes live when someone is on camera. Imagine doing college shopping and being able to talk to a student at a college who is sitting in his/her dorm room ready to chat with you. I can’t believe no college is doing this…

Popularity: 9% [?]