Category: Okdork

Online marketing to college students that actually gets people to the site for the site’s purpose, not for a promotional give - away

Something I find very interesting is that a ton of websites, especially those that market to the college audience, market in such a way that they lure people to the site not to actually use it, but for an incentive that is completely irrelevant to the website. Yes, some of the incentives may be very enticing, but really in the end it is just creating a list of inactive registered users which are worthless to the website. I suppose though, if the product is good enough and if they are pulling in the right target market, that in some cases the users will start to use it. I find this to be a very big problem in the college market. There are a handful of sites that use ineffective marketing tactics and generate inactive users. Could it be that the college market is so over saturated with marketing that it has become extremely difficult to penetrate? Or could it just be that everyone resorts to mass marketing, because it is the easiest and creative marketing is now a rarity? Everyone puts up flyers, everyone starts a Facebook group and uses Facebook flyers, everyone does email blasts. Those are probably some of the most popular people approach college students. Often, there are several competitors using these exact marketing methods and nothing else. In that case, it is very hard to have your site succeed.

Does online marketing yield more online users on a college campus, or due to the fact that a college campus is much like a community should websites still use “guerilla� marketing, or a combination of the two? Many people face this challenge and very few succeed. One very interesting form of marketing was done by www.ruckus.com. They launched on a per school basis, and got the school to support them. This created them a lot of media attention and with the school’s backing put them ahead of the game. They also created a controversial FaceBook group that got 500,000 users. The group said if X amount of people join my girl friend will have a three some with me. FaceBook pulled the group, but not before it was able to get Ruckus out there. What do you think is the best approach to take in order to really break the college market?