During last week’s #SAchat, I had the opportunity to jump in for a bit on the conversation regarding effective marketing strategies for students.
As a student activities professional, marketing is something that’s always on my mind due to the volume of events that my students and I plan for my campus community and to be honest, it can be tough. As the topic prompted, how do we cut through all of the noise that students are being bombarded with every minute that they are awake?
Spam, emails from every division/department/office/organization (spam according to students btw), posters, sidewalk chalk (if your campus allows it), smartphone apps ads, text message ads, search engine ad algorithms, social media ads/promoted content, table tents, flyers, peeps dressed up in crazy costumes, peeps yelling in free speech zones…..shoot, I could go on and on.
Let’s be real. The noise is here to stay and information goes at such a fast pace that this moment’s buzz moment is now “soooo 10 minutes ago” and now its played out.
Let’s get back to the question at hand, how in the world do we cut through all of the noise to market our events/programs/services/etc to our students?? I offered as my final thought the one lesson that has never left me from my undergraduate experience as a business major:
I had to take an “Introduction to Marketing” class and my professor that taught the course previously worked for Proctor and Gamble. The one thing he always emphasized to us was that effective marketing generates a reaction in people. It can be humor, fear (#1 tactic used by of products IMHO), inspiration, happiness and other feelings. So, if good marketing creates a reaction then that means that no reaction is the worse reaction. Why? Because that means you failed to cut through the noise that’s constantly around your target audience.
I’d argue that negative reactions are better than no reaction because that demonstrates that the person(s) took the time to pay attention to what you had to say. Unfortunately for you, they just weren’t feeling it. However, if you’re able to find out why, you now have some valuable information at your disposal.
It’s pretty simple to do but it does require you to know your audience. You need to get students involved in your marketing campaigns because they will be your best resource on how to craft your message in a way that to speak to them….rather than at them.
When looking at marketing for the perspective of how you want your target audience to react, what you’re essentially doing is asking, what do you want the outcome to look like which is very natural to our work that we do.
Pete Pereira (@PetePereira) is the Interim Assistant Director for Campus Activities and Student Organizations at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. Originally from NYC, he got his Bachleor’s Degree in Business Administration from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT and his Master’s Degree Counseling (focus on College Student Personnel) from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. He has been in the field for over ten years now mostly in Residence Life and Campus Activities.