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BAM Agency A group of eight freshers joyfully jump in the air with arms raised. They are on stairs, dressed in casual attire, and smiling. The background is a soft, overcast sky, capturing the youthful exuberance of student life. BAM Agency

A student is for life, not just Freshers

Attracting students during Fresher’s Week is important if you want to crack the student market, but it’s also important not to forget them throughout the entire year if you want to maximise your impact among them. Business lesson 101, retention is widely believed to be more profitable than acquisition. If you engaged them during Fresher’s Week, well done, but the job is not over. It’s important to keep engaging with students so that you can build relationships with them and keep them interested in your brand long-term.

Here’s team BAM’s top six tips to put into action throughout the year to ensure you keep students engaged beyond Fresher’s:

Use the Internet

Make sure you’re creating content that can be shared on social media to capture the attention of those students (it’s where they spend most of their time). This is a direct and often inexpensive way to put your brand at their fingertips – even social media advertising is reasonably affordable.

Keep their income in mind

Most students will be on a tight budget, so it’s important to approach them with offers and helpful tips if you’re trying to sell to them. Also keep in mind important dates such as loan drops! (see our Essential Dates to Remember When Marketing to Students blog)

Use students you’ve already reached out to, to help you reach further

Word of mouth is a powerful thing in student communities. If you have students on board with your brand already, why not ask them to become brand ambassadors and spread the word – students are always looking for part-time work and experience!

Offer a student Discount or Membership

Students are usually looking to save pennies; they’ll appreciate products or services at a discounted rate and will probably continue to use them throughout their time at university.

Give away some prizes

There’s nothing a student loves more than a freebie. Giveaways and competitions are great for generating buzz around your brand and getting students interested.

Hit up the University

If you can get permission from the university then why not schedule a few more visits throughout the year so you can get more face-to-face time with students (if you throw in a few freebies I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to come!).

If you can keep students interested in your brand throughout university there’s a high chance they will continue to be a user after they leave. The importance of consistent marketing throughout the duration can indeed lead to an increased customer lifetime value, so don’t skimp out on the student’s people!

However, if you feel you need a gentle nudge in the right direction, get in touch with one of the team here today.

BAM Agency Five people, including members of Generation Z, are sitting in a row, each absorbed in their electronic devices. The group, consisting of both men and women on smartphones and a tablet, exudes a casual atmosphere with relaxed body language and expressions focused on important facts. BAM Agency

3 facts you should know about Generation Z

Generation Z

Although Millennials won’t want to admit it, they aren’t the big thing anymore, Generation Z is where it’s at now. With the oldest people in this generation graduating university this autumn, employers need to be ready in order to compete for the top talent.

Usually identified as being born between the mid 1990s and the late 2000s, this group is often wrongly labelled as millennials, and although they do share many of the same characteristics, they have significant differences. This generation have always known their smart phones, and won’t have any idea what to do with a VHS.

This tech savvy group of young people can be an organisations biggest resource, but be aware that there are less of them than their predecessors, and they do have different principles, so you will need to learn what is important to this group.

Don’t be faceless

One reasons that Snapchat and Facebook Live are doing so well with Gen Z is because they show that brands have a human element. We all want to be able to connect with a brand, but this is more important to younger people. These folks want to see a funny, quirky side of the brand, they want to see human inspiration and they are more likely to share content if they find it funny.

Trolli are a great example of producing great fun content, which is humorous, and shareable. They’ve been running the below campaign on YouTube along with an amusing snapchat filter to tie in. Visual content is where it’s at.

Don’t be afraid to have a bit of fun with your brand, if you don’t then you might just become invisible to Gen Z

2. Dual Wielding

Jiji-VML-Qais The number of Gen Z members who browse using an internet enabled device whilst watching TV has hit 74%. Although this is one of those traits that isn’t too dissimilar to millennials, it’s important to link content between the screens.

A recent Google study shows that more often than not, a user will view content on a smartphone, then move to a laptop. This shows that the multi-screen experience is more sequential than simultaneous.

Understand that consumers don’t want to consume the same content from multiple sources, but want each platform to enhance their experience, and also to lead on from one another easily.

3. Intrusive Ads

Since Ad Blockers entered our lives, we’ve been able to bypass the majority of the intrusive ads that we get force fed. Although, there are still many adverts that slip through the net. These adverts have been found to do exactly the opposite of what marketers want; a study by Ad Week shows that 56% of people have reduced their social media usage as result of newsfeed ads.

Generation Z are much more likely to listen to a personal recommendation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a person they know in the flesh. With YouTube being the favourite platform for this generation, a recommendation from a blogger/vlogger/influencer can be 57% more effective, than traditional marketing methods.

Generation Z want to know who you are, they want to know that you do what you do for the right reasons, and they want to learn. Make sure not to annoy them, with the internet as their best friend, they have a lot of other brand options available to them. This makes Gen Z the hardest generation to keep as a loyal customer.

Get in touch with our team for more information.

BAM Agency A yellow tennis ball spins swiftly, creating a spiral of water droplets against the dark background, promising to keep the ball rolling even after Uni. BAM Agency

How brands can keep the ball rolling after Uni

It’s that time of year where students begin to make the huge adjustment from being students, to stepping forward into the wide world as graduates.

This change can be terrifying for many; as soon as they lose the student title it means that all of a sudden there are big responsibilities in mind like finding a job and a home, well, after the initial holiday period! Others may have felt stifled at university and are excited by the prospect of freedom, but they are about to find that they are a small fish in a massive ocean.

Understand your audience

The number of undergraduate students finishing university this year is a little under half a million; it’s an awful lot of people with a huge spending power (and that doesn’t even include postgrads). So it’s crucial to understand what they care about and
how to target them based on their needs and wants. Generally, this includes three things; money, food, and themselves, but be aware not to over-simplify your audience and make assumptions. Conducting focus groups can help to greater understand students and graduates, and what matters to them. Build your content so it focuses on helping to fulfil their needs, that way they will begin to build a personal connection between their interests and your brand.

What is really important to remember is that graduates don’t wake up on the day of the graduation suddenly as different people, with different interests and different values. They are very much the same people, and will be for a while. The only major change will be their student discount card expiring!

With that in mind, it’s best to engage with them the same way you would have before they graduated.

Think of the bigger picture

Appealing to students and their desire to earn money is an interesting one. Now more than ever students are worried about their finances and sticking to a budget.

Intuit, an American financial services corporation, developed Mint.com a free, easy to use, aesthetically beautiful budgeting program. The application is mobile friendly, secure, and it has a strong community centre where informative blogs and videos are shared. It was primarily designed to be a marketing exercise focused solely on offering free information.

This is a good example of appealing to graduates without dumbing down the topic. Giving them informative posts about money and budgeting post university life is as likely to appeal to them as much as a freebie did at a fresher’s fair.

Follow trends and respond

The stereotype is that students just eat takeaways and pot noodles everyday. While there are some students that do fit that bill, there is a large proportion that is hugely health and fitness conscious. This is even truer when students graduate, they no longer have big deadlines to be eating around.

Eating clean is a massive trend among young people, with 41% of under 25s saying that they’d actually pay more for healthier products. As you would expect, health brands are jumping on this, Wholefoods Market, for example, is doing really well out of the newly health-conscious youth.

The organic food shop posts regularly on a community blog, this in itself isn’t anything special but what they post is. Obviously everything is in some way linked back to organic food, but also featured are tips on recycling, tips on how to set the perfect summer table, and unusual vegetables, among other stuff. A simple way to expand the brands appeal, again by being informational and useful.

Alongside the blog, Wholefoods Market is taking education to the next level by putting up posters around its stores explaining where the brand’s food comes from; sustainable seafood safety lists, and what exactly the difference in taste is for customers, with in-store promo sending traffic to the blog.

The bottom line is, create interesting content that fulfils a need of your graduate audience and keeps your brand in the forefront of their minds. By building relationships founded on offering support and guidance brands can reap the rewards from their marketing efforts.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you keep students interested in your brands post-university, get in touch today!

BAM Agency A collage of social media posts showcases diverse content, subtly integrating dos and donts. Text snippets discuss events and apps, alongside images of buildings, food, and a mobile phone. Colorful buttons and icons for sharing and commenting are prominently featured. BAM Agency

Do’s and don’ts for piggybacking

Being able to schedule posts on social media really is amazing, no longer do we have to set reminders to post certain content at a certain time. You can bulk post directly on Facebook or use Hootsuite for twitter! Great.

However, reacting to breaking news stories can put you head and shoulders above other brands. We call this piggybacking, but others use terms like news-jacking, although it doesn’t guarantee attention, when it comes off, you can land yourself some prime time national media coverage.

Be aware, there are very few original ideas. You may think you’ve had a ground-breaking idea that will set the world alight but someone else out there is probably thinking of the same thing. It’s all about how fast you produce and distribute this content in your social media channels.

Be different

There is no point in copying content that you have seen already, as this will have already been shared and engaged with; you’ve already lost your audience. In order for the content you put out there to be shared and loved, it needs to be interesting and original.

If the content isn’t different, you’ll just be seen as a copycat, something which is very unpopular among the younger online market. It can be detrimental to your brand reputation.

A good example is when Skittles recently partnered with Pride in London. They decided that only one rainbow deserved to be the centre of attention, and released simple black and white skittles. A great way to engage with the topic whilst making it extremely brand relevant. Which brings us to…

Be relevant

This year we’ve seen BuzzFeed blow up with sponsored content. You’ve seen them; articles telling you what flavour soup you would be, and at the end you usually discover that they are oddly sponsored by a mobile phone company. These tedious links somehow work in this context. But in piggybacking they don’t.

Occasionally, brands will hit the post button before really thinking about it. The American pizza company DiGiorno, got into hot water when they piggybacked on the #WhyIStayed hashtag. It was being used by victims of domestic abuse to tell their important stories. Unfortunately, someone at DiGiorno HQ decided it would be a good idea to highjack the top trend without checking what it was about and posted a pizza-based tweet. It of course offended lots of people.

Be quick

It’s all very well coming up with ideas days or weeks after a news story breaks, although, generally that is far too late. There is the 24 hour rule of thumb, which is a time limit of 24 hours between a news story breaking and getting the piggyback out there. However, that window is getting smaller and smaller, as technology and the media industry develops, and it depends on the story too, it could be a much shorter time period before your idea is no longer relevant.

You must not sit on your ideas too long, be quick, jump into action, and you could win big.

Here is the most famous example of a brand acting quickly to capitalise on an opportunity – http://www.studentmarketing.co.za/3-brands-that-know-afrillennials-dont-like-it-slow/

Who would have thought that Oreo would be a good fit?

Be discerning

It’s so important be discerning when attaching your brand to trending topic. If you choose the wrong topic then you could
end up harming your reputation. DiGiorno pizza failed to do this, and attached their brand to a hashtag where people shared painful, personal stories. They didn’t come out of that one well. But, people were, and still are, talking about them. So there is the flip side.

An example of when a brand did not manage to gain any positives from their piggybacking attempt was done by Epicurious, a website for foodies. Someone in their marketing department decided to piggyback on the terror attack in Boston. Yes, I know. Someone, somewhere thought that would be a good idea. The tweet has since been deleted but we have a screenshot from Forbes.

The brand received an incredibly negative reaction, as you’d probably expect. Epicurious did send out an apology tweet, but at that point the damage was done. Yes they apologised, but the fact they sent out not only one tweet about the event but two tweets, proves it was not a mistake and an is absolutely horrendous error of judgement.

Social media can be scary, you have such power in your hands, and with great power, comes great responsibility as Spiderman would say.

A good rule of thumb when piggybacking on events, is, if you second guess yourself at all, don’t send the tweet.

Get in touch with our team for more information.

5 simple ways to create brand awareness

Successful brand awareness is more than simply brand name recognition. It means that consumers know what you do on a more intimate level. For example, when you hear the brand name ‘AirBnB’, you probably think of more than just the name. You think about going on holiday, low cost unique accommodation, and their ads “don’t go to Paris, live there”.

Put simply, brand awareness is the level of consumer consciousness of a brand.

Creating an identifiable brand
Consistency is critical when it comes to branding; streamlining your colours, logo and fonts makes this easier, as well as making the brand more instantly identifiable. The big social media brands do this really well, the blue that Facebook use is called Social Butterfly Blue and all their branding is the same blue.

We love clever and effective branding! A great example of a company whose brand awareness is on point is Carlsberg. They are a major sponsor of the European football championships in France this year; a country where alcohol advertising has been outlawed since 1991. To get around this legislation, Carlsberg simply replaces their brand name, with the word ‘probably’ in the same font and style as the brand name.

They have such strong branding that they don’t even need to use their own name.

Paid Social Media Campaigns
Social media campaigns are great way of broadcasting the goals and targets of your brand to your followers. However, when your social media follows are lacking in numbers, what can you do to increase your reach? You can boost your strongest content!

Boosting your content on Facebook can be an effective way to reach a bigger audience, with the potential for many impressions. The data that Facebook collects allows you to target user groups with great precision. Although, this does require you to still have interesting content. Bad content won’t be interesting to your 10 followers, never mind the 100,000 people you boosted it to. Bad content will get lost in the crowd, so make sure to create content that people want to engage with.

Check out our previous blog post on engaging with students.

Fact is, we now live in a world where we have to be investing some cash on Facebook Ads to get the exposure we want.

Don’t be boring, create shareable content
As we just mentioned, an easy way to get people to share your content is to create content worth sharing. A great example of this is Go Pro video content, these clips make us want to jump off things with cameras attached to our heads. Also, they make us want to share the videos with our friends because of how cool they are. Goal accomplished.

We all have an ever decreasing attention span, science tells us that we now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, at just 8 seconds! Creating shareable and short content is the key to growth and awareness. Just look at the facts: Photos and video get 53% more Likes and 104% more comments than a post without visuals.

Get face time with your target market
Eventbrite recommend getting out there and meeting the people that you’re trying to reach. An amazing way to do this is via freshers fairs, where hundreds of students will be in one space. Again, you must engage your audience with creative content. Dominos always score highly when they give away pizza at these events. Greggs also do really well within this sphere, offering chances to win some great prizes; engaging and potentially free pastries, win.

Freshers Fairs are not the only way to get some face to face contact with this group demographic. Depending on your product, think about whether it could be appropriate to target specific courses, and try to plan giveaways during lectures? Obviously ambush giveaways would need significant planning, and could lead you in a bit of hot water if specific precautions are not organised. Proceed with caution.

Finally, be authentic
Being authentic as a brand is important, we live in a world where there is a lot of competition. Anything you can do to set you apart is good, one major part of this is brand trust. If you promise to do something on social media and you don’t follow through, it can drastically affect your image, ruining consumer relations.

It’s really important to respond to all comments that you receive on social media, not only the positive ones. A common mistake is to ignore, or delete the negative comments, this is bad news. Not only can other followers see that the brand has ignored the complaint but it only fuels the fire for that unhappy person. Responding in a positive way goes a long, long way with everyone.

So that’s that. Be real, be interesting, be consistent and the good word about your brand will spread.

BAM Agency A group of students outdoors, joyfully jumping in the air with trees in the background. They hold white papers and are dressed casually in jeans and jackets, smiling widely. BAM Agency

Essential dates for marketing to students

It can often be difficult to pin down the exact dates most relevant to the student population, with each search providing a different result. So we have strived to provide you with an array of essential dates and pivotal times of the year to add to your marketing agenda.

First up, GCSE results day

25th of August… A huge proportion of under 18s are on social media, 96% are signed up to sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Generally, students undertake their GCSEs between the ages of 15 and 16 where life exists almost entirely online. On average this age group spend a massive 4.8 hours connected to the internet a day, which equals a lot of snapchat snaps. Given this data, it is no wonder that this group is a prime audience to target with your content and adverts. Although the time spent online may drop drastically during the exams themselves, afterwards however, expect these millennials to ecstatically take to twitter to post their results. Alternatively you can be there with a tissue to offer to those disappointed students who didn’t perform as they may have liked.

A-Level Results Day

18th of August… In the UK there are 1.8 million students, and that figure is on the rise, with an increase of 3.1% of university applicants compared to last year. As these soon to be university students ready themselves for their first steps into freedom. Both parents and students get excited buying new ‘uni stuff’, with £235 on average being spent on kitchen and room items. A perfect time to get your brand noticed. When the results are released, emotions are high. You can positively tap into this emotion by offering support and advice, which should help to build brand loyalty. However, this high level of emotion can also draw negative feelings from students, so handle any comments sensitively and tread carefully.

University Final Classification

4th of July… The day where each student will decide if spending £40,000 was actually worth it. The day where they get the final classification of their degree. The day where they can no longer cling to being a student. The day where they have to decide what the heck they want to do with their life.
Many immediately start looking for their dream job, many get stressed that they haven’t been offered that job yet, but the majority of students just want to have an amazing summer celebrating the past three years; before picking up the responsibilities back up.

We’ve heard the horror stories of being in horrendous debt without a job. Good news is that the majority of graduates move quickly into full-time work, with a third in non-professional roles, and only 7% unemployed six months after graduating. Whether these graduates did well or not, they will all be glad to see the back of final year stress. Each one of them will be hoping to be earning more money, so staying focused on graduates could help to increase your engagement and sales. Why not tweet advice for graduates, Instagram photos of an amazing summer that they could be having, or even try employing them via a recruitment drive?

Student loan dates

Three times a year, students will receive a pile of cash, their student loan. This joyous time of year is when students are more than happy to part with their cash. On average, a student will receive £3,750 in living cost loan this year, however it could be much higher with a maximum of £10,702. Of course this varies because it is means tested. One thing is for sure though, that is a lot of money for brands to be competing for. Although the exact dates are different each year, and will depend on when the students complete their enrolment. They are usually the last week on September, the first week of January, and the first week of April.

Students who receive a lower loan, do often struggle to make ends meet, and have to be much more frugal with their spending, however those with a higher amount can live like a king for a few weeks, until they realise they may have overdone it a little! Offering discounts at this time of year is a really good plan; even better, target the more frugal students with further budgeting tips.

Dissertation Submission

A special shout out goes to the dissertation hand in period, which usually extends from the first week of April to the middle of May. This is a horrible time for every final year student, where they will often attempt to eat or sleep away the stress of writing it. Then add to that the stress of having to fork out £40+ to get the darn thing printed. A little pick up from you can go along way with winning their hearts at this time of year.

Each student is different, you can treat them as if they are all graduating at the age of 21, but that isn’t always the case now. Take note of these key dates that students will have their eye on and use them appropriately for your brand. Aiming useful tips, discounts, and distracting funny cat videos at students during relevant times will go down a treat.

Get in touch with our team for more information.

BAM Agency Comic-style speech bubbles with expressions: OMG in a blue starburst, THX! in a red burst, YAAAS! in a red and white burst, and REKT in a blue starburst, all outlined in black. Perfectly capturing the essence of slang for vibrant marketing campaigns or advice columns. BAM Agency

Advice when using slang in marketing

Under the WikiHow article titled “How to Be Cool” it stresses that being yourself is important, simply copying the trend is not enough.

We at BAM, are all for being hip when communicating with the youth, but it can be very difficult. They can see straight through you when you’re trying to relate. If you’re trying too hard to be funny, you probably aren’t.

Developing a tone of voice for your brand can seem like an awful lot of work for what seems like little gain. However, taking the time to understand your audience and communicating in the way they expect can give you a huge advantage over your competitors who view it as a waste of time.

Do your research

Researching exactly who your followers are is something commonly overlooked, just because you have 15000 followers, does not mean, they aren’t all 16-24. Thanks to services such as Twitter and Facebook Analytics, we have more of an idea who exactly follows us.

There are multiple different platforms for a reason, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing exactly the same content on Facebook
and Twitter. Cross-posting does have its advantages; it can help maintain consistency, but can also appear lazy. Remember that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are all different platforms that were designed with separate uses in mind, so treat them accordingly.

Slang is often seen as ‘lazy speech’, at least that’s what our parents always told us, and it can be laziness on the part of the speaker. The guys at Verbalidentity.com explain how slang operates on a certain set of social rules, under which we all fall (at least we should). When slang forms the core of a brand identity, it risks alienating others outside the ‘in crowd’, thus significantly reducing the widespread effectiveness of your marketing. However if you have a strong tone of voice and engagement is mostly positive, it probably means that your audience is lapping it up; making your audience feel like they are part of the in-crowd can have a strong appeal, especially in the millennial market.

Be relevant

Slang has a shelf life, use it before it expires.

44018 Due to consistent social and mobile innovation, whatever is currently trending, won’t be trending fo
r much longer. Okay,
so you know, ‘LOL’ isn’t cool anymore, neither is ‘YOLO’, and we’re not sure ‘on fleek’ ever was. One sure fire way to stay current is to read and read and read your Twitter feed, especially youthful trending topics to help you get a sense of the language being used and the correct context to use it in.

As you can imagine, company executives are often not quite as up to date with the current lingo as their audience. American taste sensation, Taco Bell have a team of ‘cool hunters’ at their HQ who send out a weekly email to employees titled ‘Millennial Word of the Day’, the email is curated by a group of hipster Taco Bell employees in their 20s.

And obviously there are countless articles on emoji marketing. I’m sure you all are aware of emoji’s and their cultural importance, however many brands latch on too hard to trends like these and milk them dry until they are as cool as socks and sandals.

Engage

We stress this a lot, but it really is important. Simply existing on social media is not enough, engagement is key.

Millennials don’t just want to be spoken to, they must be able to talk with brands. 62% of the tech savvy age group say that if a brand engages with them on social media, then they are more likely to be a loyal customer. If you can speak to your fans with humour and some self-deprecation or self-awareness then you’ll win even more points.

@o2 jheeze so u man speak slang and dat r u a girl what ends u from. And naa ii didn’t what router

— Tunde (@Tunde24_7) October 9, 2012

Adidas engage with their 1.82 million followers well, tracking their brand mentions and replying to every single tweet. Their replies are casual, appropriate and with that, cool. Again as we mentioned, if you try too hard to be cool you probably aren’t being cool.

A good rule of thumb if your company or brand isn’t naturally cool, and wouldn’t excite a teenager, then it’s probably best to not try and talk like one.

So use slang, but do so with great caution. Get in touch with our team for more information.

BAM Agency A diverse group of students is sitting on the grass in a park, enjoying a summer picnic. They are gathered in small groups, engaged in lively conversations and sharing food. Trees and greenery frame the background, creating a relaxed and social atmosphere. BAM Agency

Keep students engaged over the summer

During the summer, the student population can breathe an (albeit short) sigh of relief as they can return to binge watching Netflix, no deadlines and no responsibilities.

A huge 73% of students live away at university and will be returning to live with mum and dad for a few months. Their freedom will undoubtedly be restricted when they receive the customary “whilst you’re living under my roof, you’ll follow my rules”.
There are different types of students; some will completely shut down from all things academic, whereas others will be searching out internships and career-enhancing volunteering gigs during their time away. Both of these groups are an important audience for your brand, and need a tailored approach over the summer break.

Strategic timing

If a student didn’t tweet about their exam results, did they really take them?

Just because the studying stops over the summer, it does not mean the worries do. It’s not the assignment deadlines that keep millennial’s stressed anymore; it’s the results day. This is a perfect opportunity to reach your target market on social media. The results period is a highly emotional time in a student’s life, the anticipation, the ecstasy, and unfortunately in some cases, the disappointment. More GCSE and A-level students are on twitter than ever, so you need to be there waiting to pounce on the highly emotional #ALevelResults, #GCSEResults and other results day related hashtags. We’ve listed a few of these dates below for you to write in your diary!

Final University Classification 4th July
GCSE 25th August
A-Level 18th August

Not only are these type of tweets a great way to get further brand awareness among students, but a study by UCAS shows that students spend £117 on dorm room accessories in the week immediately after getting their results. This is the perfect opportunity to get your brand in the minds of these free spending, soon-to-be students.

Instagram

If a student didn’t post a photo of what they did every day of the summer, did they actually do anything?
describ
Students love Instagram, you can’t go out to eat these days without seeing millennial’s taking photos of their food at about 20 different angles. For example, #summerholiday has 335,872 posts on Instagram. Your brand can easily get involved with this hashtag to help keep you in the student consciousness. A recent algorithm change to Instagram’s feed has caused quite a stir among the users of the photo-sharing app. Though there are still an astronomical number of monthly users, which has recently risen to 400 million. The change does benefit brands; if you wish to influence users you can target specific audiences by scheduling adverts. Instagram users engage with content much more than they do on Twitter. According to Hootsuite, Instagram’s per follower engagement rate is 120 times higher than on Twitter and 58 times more than on Facebook! So targeting your audience on the photo-sharing app is a worthwhile investment; that is if you want engagement from your audience. And who doesn’t want that?

Giveaways

If a student went to a festival and didn’t get given a brand freebie, did they even go?

Whether they keep it or not is irrelevant, if done right, giveaways can be very successful. Students (like most of us) like free things, something useable with your branding on is always a win. Sunglasses are just as attractive to students as free shots in a club, and will draw them towards you like moths to a flame.
Whether you can actually be on-site at a large summer festival giving away branded swag or whether your handout is online based, you can generate massive social media engagement by running giveaway campaigns. It is important to remember to not be too self-promoting. This can do the opposite of what you want to achieve; it can deter students from your brand and leave a lasting impression, the wrong one!

Those are our top three tips to keep students engaged over the summer break, and of course, you can combine these tips to keep your brand at the front of their mind. Go get ‘em tiger!

Get in touch with our team for more information.

BAM Agency A large crowd of excited people, mostly young women, fills the indoor event, creating a smash of energy. The atmosphere is lively and bustling, fueled by student marketing buzz as individuals express enthusiasm and joy. BAM Agency

3 brands who smash student marketing

There’s a lot of focus on millennials in the world of marketing at the moment, and for good reason. They make up the largest demographic in the UK and come with huge spending power, which opens up countless opportunities for brands – they’re certainly a consumer force to be reckoned with!

However, not all brands are effectively communicating with this tech-savvy, “always connected” generation. More often than not, brands make assumptions about the student and millennial demographics. Those that lead successful marketing campaigns and reap the returns are taking the time to understand this audience and not just their behaviour.

Here are three brands that have totally grasped the concept:

Hostelworld
As the world’s number one hostel booking site this brand is totally leading the way when it comes to marketing to students. Firstly it has nailed its product offering, providing low-cost, sociable accommodation at the hottest travel spots worldwide, resonating with students seamlessly. Secondly, it knows how to create an interactive experience for its consumers and the campaign we discuss below perfectly encapsulates what the brand is all about – fun!

The brand’s ‘Escape to the World’ cross-channel campaign involved launching a student competition, ‘My Awesome Escape’, offering the opportunity to win one of three all-expenses-paid trips of a lifetime.

Now, instead of simply investing in traditional channels to promote the competition, the brand created an experience that students could participate in, the Hostelworld Union Challenge. SUs across the UK competed to gain the most student entries for a chance to win an awesome prize that included a 30ft inflatable cinema screen with a projection system. With sixteen unions battling it out to the very end, each union created their own content to encourage its students to get involved and had a designated landing page to track progress and make it competitive.

The brand utilised the clout and sway of students and SUs in order to promote the campaign and generate organic engagement with the competition, as well as with the brand on social media.

Key takeaway: Try to create an interactive experience for fans that they can participate in and share their own content to drive organic engagement.

RedBull
Now, it’s probably no real surprise that we have included this super cool and innovative brand in our top three. Not only does it take content marketing to the extreme, but it also has the most robust and dynamic Student Ambassador Programme that we can’t help but jealously admire.

We’ve found that the best way to directly influence students is through on-site, face-to-face promotion – and Redbull has totally nailed this concept. One of the longest running programmes, the brand has created an unrivalled package to help attract students, offering complete training, a fancy car to drive, amazing events to attend and tonnes of free Redbull (we defy you to find any student who doesn’t drink Redbull) – what’s there not to like?

Over the years, Redbull has created a huge network of brand advocates and we have yet to see any other brand come close to delivering the kind of return they do. Huzzah!

Key takeaway: People trust people more than they trust brands. By using student brand ambassadors brands can deliver a more meaningful, genuine experience without being too salesy/promotional.

Nandos
From our experience working with brands and Fresher’s Fairs, it’s clear that students absolutely love Nando’s and not just because of the brand’s tasty chicken!

It has become greatly known among student marketers that Nando’s knows how to do Freshers. What sticks in mind the most is the brand’s approach to gamification and how it uses this to drive student engagement. You’re probably all familiar with ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and Nando’s was probably the first to bring this style of game to Fresher’s Fairs with their spin to win concept offering prizes and freebies of value to students (namely their own food products but who doesn’t like free chicken?).

Gamification helps brands to stick in the minds of students by entertaining, informing and inspiring – often one of the main reasons brands are remembered after Freshers, Campaign reports.

Key takeaway: Increase awareness and brand loyalty by embracing trends – gamification – and being among the first to adopt fresh and innovative marketing tactics.

So, how can your business successfully market to millennials and students? Here are our top five tips to help get you on your way (and if you get really stuck, we’re here for a chat!):

Align your brand with a cause – this helps students relate to your brand values
Recognise the evolving styles of students so that you can evolve with them
Go where they are! They’re very tech and social savvy, so mobile and digital activity is crucial
Build a personal relationship with them – get to know them and never make assumptions.

If you’ve been inspired by these case studies and would like to kick-start your Fresher’s campaign, please get in touch with the team.

BAM Agency A large crowd gathers at the outdoor Freshers campaign under multiple white tents. People in colorful shirts hold signs, creating a lively setting with greenery and a banner enhancing the scenes vibrancy. BAM Agency

4 ways to enhance your Freshers campaign

If your brand is looking to target students there’s one event you instantly think of to get your brand seen. The event which students flock to in the hope of freebies, yep, the Fresher’s Fair! It’s your main port of call when your brand needs to get in front of a university audience, but your promotion shouldn’t stop there. There are lots of opportunities that you as a brand can get involved in to promote your Fresher’s Fair activity and further enhance your campaign to keep the conversation going!

Student Discount Events at Shopping Centres
Around Freshers and throughout the year there are always big shopping centre student events that allow students to shop with big discounts during and after hours. These shopping events are extremely popular, seeing thousands of students through the doors, and with discounts usually around the 20% mark it’s a great chance for students to bag a bargain from their favourite brands.

Sponsoring a student event is often a popular choice for brands as it can provide great exposure, particularly as they are heavily flyered and promoted on social media. The most successful brands include experiential activity to engage students; hosting an interactive game with the chance to win prizes for example, which easily lures students, ensuring they remember your brand name.

Social Media
Social media, as everyone knows, is essential in promoting your brand online. There are certain ways to make sure you target the right audience; including Twitter chats, advertising, and cross-platform campaigns. Using social media to promote your freshers activity will help raise brand awareness among students and drive more visitors to your stall on the day.

Twitter chats are a great way to provide valuable advice or insight on a given topic, while showcasing your expertise without over-promoting your brand. They are organised in advance so it is easy to spot when they are coming up and prepare some relevant material for them. For example, you might explore a ‘freshers’ or ‘new students’ chat to share tips or life hacks you have for students new to university. Be sure to use the relevant hashtags and get involved with any conversations without being too spammy. Following up with people after the chat is a great way to keep the conversation going or get to know people on a more personal level!

Targeting your social media posts with advertising ensures that the right people are seeing your posts and engagement is likely to be higher with results more impressive. This is especially true of Facebook which has a great advertising tool that allows you to target people with specific interests as well as by location.

Creating a cross platform campaign could also encourage more visitors to your Freshers Fair stall. For example, a simple activation such as a student tweeting with your brand’s hashtag could allow a student to pick up an extra freebie at your stall. We’ve seen similar campaigns with the ‘Tweet to pay’ mechanic, such as this 2014 one from Marc Jacobs.

Emails
One thing to think about getting involved in around freshers is email campaigns, reinforcing your brand message before and after the Freshers activity. Student’s Union and Association databases are clean, pure and are full of genuine student emails, with average open rates above 30% and click through above 10%, access to these databases is invaluable.

It’s important to make your mailer stand out to grab attention, as you well know, inboxes can often be overloaded with marketing emails, and although the email will be sent from a trusted source you still don’t want yours to get lost. Good first steps are supplying the reader with helpful information, (such as important student calendar dates or tips for giving a good first impression in lectures) or an exclusive deal (here is where you could tie in your social media and real life reward)! Most importantly, think of your audience when creating your mailer and don’t overload them with information as it can cause emails to be ignored or deleted without thorough reading and therefore cause your brand to be forgotten.

Other large student gatherings such as balls or sporting events
Keeping your brand in the forefront of students’ minds through consistent year-round activity is imperative to reinforce the message from Fresher’s Week. You can do this by taking advantage of big events in the student calendar, including seasonal balls and big sporting events such as varsity. Sponsorship or arranging to have involvement at these events can be a solid investment, with guaranteed footfall and lucrative engagement opportunities.

Another popular way to engage with students at these kind of events involves using brand ambassadors, who will help to get your product to stand out among fierce competition. We’ve found that students tend to trust their peers more than brands, so by deploying on-site ambassadors they can easily engage with students passing by and help to start building relationships.

A dip into authorised guerrilla marketing would also certainly grab attention, whether it’s a momentary flash mob, your brands logo projected onto a campus building or something even more creative like this brilliant Coca-Cola campaign!

If you’d like to speak to a member of the team about your upcoming Fresher’s campaign just get in contact with us.