2 Best Tips for Marketing to College Students in 2020

As college students are finishing up their examinations for the school year (remote exams are still exams), brands are faced with an increasingly difficult challenge to attract and engage the attention of college students. A high potential market for nearly every business, college students possess a unique ability to have high levels of influence. The right student seeing your content can spur near-instantaneous attention and connection to your brand. But what happens when your content gets to the right person, and…it flops? Well, you already know the answer to that.

Frankly, students more than anyone else see an absurd amount of ads targeted directly towards them. So how do you beat out the competition?

Marketing to College Students Tip #1

Use video. TikTok, am immensely popular social media platform for all students alike, is expected to have nearly 1 BILLION monthly users in the coming months. That’s billion, with a b. TikTok is, at its core, a video sharing platform. Why are platforms like TikTok so popular and how are they able to capture so much attention?

A 2019 study from Facebook showed that posts with videos yielded nearly 60% more engagement than any other type of post. Another 2020 report found that 87% of video marketers saw their traffic increase as a result of using videos in ads, and another 80% said that videos directly increased their sales. In fact, an additional study shows that 93% of people aged 18-24 use YouTube at least once a week.

Creating video content can seem intimidating, but just go for it. You’ll learn as you go, and the results will tell you how you did.

One of the best video ads we’ve seen was a recent one promoted by the Ohio Department of Health to address social distancing. Check it out:

Ask yourself, what makes that video so engaging and so attractive? It’s twenty seconds long, and barely has any words in it. But it sure is effective. What we love most about this video is how it incorporates tip #2 below.

Marketing to College Students Tip #2

The best marketing is the simplest marketing. We’re in an age of information overload, and this is all too relevant for Generation Z. Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. If you can say less to say the same thing, do it. If you can cut out content to get the same results, do it. Sometimes, less is more. And that’s why we’re going to keep this section short. Rewatch that video. It’s extraordinarily simple with extraordinary power.

How can you figure out if your content is engaging Generation Z now, and what you can do to improve?

At GenZ Designs, we offer a free analysis using research-backed quantitative and qualitative metrics to identify how likely your brand is to engage Generation Z. We do this because it’s our mission to create a world where brands make people happy. Any chance we get to help your brand engage with more customers is a win in our book, and a win in yours. To get started, enter your information below: