Surveys conducted recently show that spending by students amounted to more than $145 billion this year and nearly $30 billion of that was discretionary spending. What is more, student spending is increasing. Baby boomers’ children and their children are, or will be in, an institution of tertiary education in the next ten or twenty years.
College attendance in America is growing more significant. The percentage of college students now stands at the highest ever and this tendency is not diminishing at all. For all these reasons it is a good idea for marketing professionals, or anyone with a business, to increase their marketing efforts where students are concerned.
As mentioned in the introduction, student spending will be more than $145 billion this year. Student spending has never been this high. This amounts to about $14 000 per person. If any company advertised to that market and converted their input costs to just one thousandth of a percent (0.001%) that would total $1,450,000. If only half of this was achieved ($750 000) or even a quarter ($362 500) – well, these are still big figures.
Another good reason to look at marketing to students is the importance of word of mouth advertising in today’s commercial environment. Consider the performance of MySpace and Facebook. Neither of these companies relied on expensive marketing campaigns to build their business. They did it by offering a service that met need and were appreciated. Once word got out, these businesses simply grew organically and exponentially. These two website are the two most commonly visited by young adults. These massive businesses were built purely on word-of-mouth reputation.
Never forget that students are easily influenced by their peers and tend to go with the crowd when making purchases or deciding on which route to take. The perception might be that students are busy with classes and homework but in reality they have tons of free time where they mix with friends. This means plenty of opportunity for talking about your product.
Probably the most important justification for advertising to students is to build brand loyalty. Remember that students are in school to get an education which will make them higher earners who will be at the top of the heap. These are the kind of people you want to take your brand into the future. After selling to them successfully as students, students stand to become customers for life.
In addition, after the initial sales have been made and the prospective customer as a student has been converted into an existing customer, the company stands to gain years of free word-of-mouth advertising from this important customer.The bottom line is that there is literally a wealth of positive results that can result from a marketing initiative focusing on students. It is advisable for marketers to research this market segment and conduct a test in a segment of that. A good place to begin investigating this marketing is www.campuspitch.com. Here campuses can be researched depending on a company’s target customer profile. The importance of marketing to students can barely be over-emphasized. Watch this become the big new marketing trend.