How to Use SMS Marketing to Keep Your Brand in Front of College Students
When you consider how to market to college students, do you craft messaging with a specific person in mind? Or generalized demographics?
Targeted messaging makes a big difference when it comes to connecting your brand’s products and services with college students and their parents. But how do you know who your audience really is, and what they need to hear to make a conversion?
Enter: Audience personas.
Audience personas are fictional representations of your target audience — in this case, college students and their parents. Your personas are the people who are most likely to engage with your brand and buy your products.
Data-driven audience personas help humanize the students and parents you’re trying to connect with. They put a face to abstract data, allowing you to see your brand’s products or services from their perspective.
When you draft messaging with a specific persona in mind — like David the suburban dad — you’ll know exactly who you’re talking to and appeal to his challenges and needs to move him through the buyer funnel.
You’re no longer speaking to a vague demographic or broad audience: you’re reaching out to David, the middle-aged dad who makes $200,000 a year and who wants to learn more about how much spending money he should give his college freshman. Understanding David’s needs and challenges allow you to draft content that answers his questions and helps move him from consideration to conversion.
As another example, you may have a hunch that one of your college student personas is 18- to 24-year-old males. Once you start digging into the data (via your email list, Google Analytics, or organic social audiences), you may discover that most of these students are working part-time and are concerned about how to pay for college. Now you can craft content that offers solutions about how they can support themselves throughout their degree.
The most effective marketing strategies involve more than one persona. Every brand has more than one type of person buying a product or service.
You may find as you are creating your audience personas there’s an entire segment of your college audience you didn’t know existed. Now you can start targeting an entire group of students or parents you weren’t reaching out to before.
Keep in mind you don’t want to create too many personas, either. If you overdo it, you could end up diluting your messaging or losing your primary focus.
Before you start to craft your audience personas, have a plan for the type of meaningful quantitative and qualitative information you’re looking for. Start with basic demographic information:
Next, dig deeper into each persona’s goals, challenges, concerns, or pain points as they relate to your brand’s offerings. Some questions you can ask yourself include:
Reflecting on each persona’s actual motivations and values will help you craft effective messaging that speaks to their specific needs.
How you craft your college audience personas will depend on your brand’s niche, industry, and overall goals. No matter what, you’ll have to gather and analyze data before you can create your personas.
Audience personas can inform how to market to college students and their parents, so it’s important to get them right. Grounding them in data-driven insights will yield the best results.
Determining audience personas is a critical part of building an effective content marketing strategy. Think of them as a foundation for moving your college audience through the buyer funnel and towards brand loyalty.
You can now turn your attention to designing and implementing organic, content-focused strategies that will elevate your engagement and improve your overall conversions.
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