How should colleges and universities carry out promotion and operation?

College students have 37 million potential users, and every year countless products try to tap into this group of users. However, as we all know, college student users are very difficult to promote and operate .
First of all, during their four years in college, college students born after 1995 have been bombarded with countless app promotions since childhood and have already experienced many battles. Secondly, there are more than 2,000 colleges and universities in the country, which means that although they are all college students, they have more than 2,000 communities. The same operating plan may be successful in one school, but run into obstacles in another school.
Today, I will analyze for you how to carry out promotion and operation of colleges and universities from the perspective of Super Course Schedule .
Since the Super Course Schedule app became popular after it appeared on CCTV programs, it has rarely appeared in the media in recent years. Perhaps everyone does not know much about the current status of Super Course Schedule. In fact, in recent years we have returned to the essence of entrepreneurship , focusing on product research and development, and relying on the ultimate experience and user word of mouth to let users speak for our brand .
Let’s look at a set of data first:
Over the past three years, the daily active users of the Super Class Schedule app have grown by 50% per year to 4.1 million. During the 2017 back-to-school season, the company added 6 million new users, compared with 7.5 million college freshmen during the same period.
That is to say, 80% of the freshmen in 2017 downloaded the Super Course Schedule app.
During the school opening season in September this year, almost every app market has opened a "back-to-school special topic". The formats of the special topics are similar, but they all point to the same APP - Super Course Schedule. The top ten application markets all have Super Course Schedule, including OPPO , vivo , Huawei, App Store , Meizu Market, 360 Market, pp Assistant, Xiaomi Market, Anzhi Market and Lenovo. In addition, even the hot searches on App Store were dominated by Super Course Schedule in early September.
At the same time, according to Analysys data, the number of active users of Super Course Schedule in September more than doubled month-on-month, and it ranked first in the category of learning tools .
Such achievements have been made thanks to the refined operations in recent years, and refined operations are particularly important in campus promotion .
When it comes to offline campus marketing , most people think of handing out flyers. I was once a "senior operator" in college who handed out flyers and posted posters for a month.
Although handing out flyers in schools is the easiest way to reach college students, everyone knows how effective it is. Even though giving gifts seems to increase the scanning rate , over the years, the students who received the flyers have already been trained to have a conditioned reflex of scan-download-delete, and often even forget what they have downloaded.
I am not saying this to tell you that flyers are ineffective, but to ask you to think clearly about the user scenario of college students before distributing flyers. When they are stuffed with flyers, they may be on their way home from get out of class and preparing to go to the cafeteria or library. At this time, gifts, coupons, and red envelopes are definitely not what they need. No matter how good the gifts are, their effect will be greatly reduced.
The conversion rate of Super Course Schedule’s flyers can reach 12% . What kind of flyers are more likely to be accepted by students?
Traditional operators like to fill DMs with product introductions, but such DMs usually do not last more than 3 seconds in the hands of college students.
In actual operation, we found that for a college student on the move, even if the benefits of the DM form are increased, they will still refuse.
We observe and analyze new and old college students through big data to understand their needs at different time points during their four-year college career, and know when to conduct content marketing to which users. Therefore, in order to ensure sufficient brand exposure and conversion , we thought of cooperating with 400 key colleges and universities across the country during the school opening season in September every year to send out 1.2 million DMs that universities would not refuse - "Campus Hand-Drawn Maps"
When freshmen first enter school, they have the strongest desire to learn about all aspects of the school. Although they will repeatedly research every aspect of their school through Baidu, freshman groups, and seniors, all the information is false and is far less useful than having a map.
Super Class Schedule App Hand Drawn Map
A campus map includes the school's detailed coordinates, admission guide and club introductions, and finally guides students to understand the "super class schedule". With such a hand-drawn map, our conversion rate can reach 10%, and we don't send out any gifts or red envelopes. You must know that ordinary flyers only have a 1% conversion rate.
We have traffic and users, but good products are the key to retaining users.
Today's Super Course Timetable app is no longer a small course timetable tool application, it is also an application that integrates university tools, campus social networking , and life.
In the past few years, we have generated a total of 37.0849 million pieces of campus gossip information, with a total of 196 million comments.
On the Super Course Schedule platform, your appearance can be evaluated and scored by your classmates. There are a total of 337,000 beauties with an appearance score of over 8, 185,000 handsome guys with a score of over 8, and a total of 120,000 students have recorded their own music covers in the Microphone Master section.
We all know that college students have a strong desire to perform. After school started in September, we launched the celebrity certificate and star user plan. Provide college students with a platform to showcase themselves, where they can meet college students with similar interests from all over the country;
Our first batch of celebrities and star users were invited to join the platform through a series of screening. The first batch of campus KOL users can get support in terms of traffic, but the most important thing to do well is training.
Users need to be managed, and we cannot abandon them to fend for themselves. In order to help the first batch of campus KOLs operate their own accounts, we formulated corresponding strategies based on the characteristics of each celebrity to help them grow quickly.
The training mainly includes the following points:
Personalization
You have fans but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are a celebrity. Celebrities need to have labels that can be remembered by others, such as being witty, sexually apathetic, having a special skill… These are more down-to-earth labels, so everything from the account’s self-introduction to the post style and even the way of interacting with fans’ comments are very important.
Increase the number of active fans
We should focus on fan operation rather than fan attraction, just like working in new media . Celebrities here attract fans through bonuses, but fan operation is the core. Fans may just follow the celebrity out of curiosity and passively. Every influencer must learn to use emotional elements to arouse discussion. Anything that is interesting, original, controversial, and character-building is worth supporting.
Content Production
Content is not king, interaction is king
Users of social platforms are very disgusted with hard content. Even if they follow a large number of people, they are not actually real fans. Fans do not interact with influencers for the purpose of reading marketing content, so we do not allow influencer accounts to become marketing accounts. The content produced by each influencer must make everyone trust them.
After 3 months, some top users now have more than 1 million followers.
This is a refined approach to user operations . There must be a sequence of priorities, and more importantly, it must ensure that users enjoy using your product when they need it.
The four years of college are the period in a person's life when they have the strongest need for making friends and spend the most time making friends. As long as we serve this four-year life cycle well, the user group will always be in dynamic balance. Once the atmosphere is formed, there will be a constant flow of fresh blood (we have naturally closed classmates who naturally settle down and update synchronously with each other. New users only need to settle down with new users in school, and lost users will not have much impact on new users)
Many companies, especially startups, focus most of their energy on new customers and rarely pay attention to old users. The reason we do this is that we have almost grabbed all the new customers (78% of universities in China are using it), and the focus is on old users, which is the growth point at this stage.
The above, from the execution of offline promotion to finding growth points for products, can be regarded as the promotion strategy and operational ideas of Super Course Schedule.