How to start campus promotion and marketing from scratch?

The school season is about to begin, and the campus marketing war for the new semester is about to begin again. Major Internet companies have begun to collectively enter campuses. New student handbooks, welcome buses, back-to-school season posters, door-to-door campaigns, outreach, all kinds of promotional methods are emerging in an endless stream. However, 80% of companies do not really want to do campus business. It is just because online channels are becoming increasingly difficult to operate, so marketing operators are forced to try the campus market . It can be said that 80% of companies have no practical experience in campus promotion . So for these marketing operators, how to start from scratch on campus? This article will be very long. If you can read it patiently, you will at least understand 80% of campus channels .

Currently, those who are trying to operate on campus are mainly focusing on e-commerce , o2o and app applications. Let’s count which companies have already started working on campus? Baidu, Tencent, Weibo, NetEase Games , Xiaomi, 360, Super Course Schedule , Vipshop, Lefeng.com, JD.com, Renren, and many other small companies.

Before trying to develop campus channels, market operators should first think clearly about:

What is your purpose in campus?

If your product is not particularly well matched with campus users and you feel that you have reached a dead end in terms of promotion, then in this case it is recommended that you do not blindly enter the campus. Just like many sex toys, housekeeping products and other products also ask me to do campus business, doesn’t this mean they have too much money and nowhere to spend it?

The purpose of doing campus work can be summarized into the following four points:

1. Get app (or website) registered users at low cost
2. Capture the student market to gain higher sales
3. Relying on the student group to increase UGC content output
4. Enhance product brand image

Before explaining in detail how to build a campus from scratch, I need to dispel a few misunderstandings so that some companies that have the following plans can give up these ideas.

Myth 1: Campus promotion costs are lower

At present, the cost of campus promotion (registration) is at least 4 yuan; it is even higher in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, already more than 6 yuan. Compared with online marketing, the cost of offline marketing is sometimes higher. Especially when you want to do outreach, the venue fee can easily be two to three thousand. If someone tells you that his marketing cost is only 1-2 yuan per registration, then you can just give him 200,000 yuan and ask him to promote 150,000 real users to you.

Myth 2: Activities can become popular simply by spreading the word on campus

Many people who organize activities think that the activities are not fun and have a budget of only 1,000. They always think that if they promote it on campus, they can attract tens of thousands of UVs and thousands of registrations. This can only rely on sentiment.

Misconception 3: Overestimating the compatibility of brand and data

Of course, this idea is normal. However, for campuses, they always want to promote it in the form of brand promotion, while also wanting to ensure the data. This idea is definitely problematic. If you want to have good data, you can either go door to door and do promotion, so that the data can be guaranteed; if you want to have a good publicity effect, then plan an easy-to-participate and fun activity to enhance publicity efforts.

Having discussed some misunderstandings about the campus market, we can now move on to the main content: how can an enterprise start from scratch in the campus market?

Is it necessary to establish a campus team when doing campus work?

Many people are concerned about the issue of building campus channels. My suggestion is, "For campus-based products or e-commerce, o2o, and community products, you can build channels; but for products that are not very compatible with campus users or are not in the above categories, be cautious in building your own channels."

To build a channel by yourself, on the one hand, the person in charge of the channel needs to have certain campus channel experience; on the other hand, it requires sufficient manpower and material resources (expenses) to establish the channel. However, most companies do not have experienced campus channel personnel and do not plan to invest much money on campus, so it is better not to build a team.

You don't necessarily need a team to do business on campus. You can still have fun on campus without an offline team. The key is the marketing ideas and thoughts. Whether offline or online, the core is products and good marketing activities. With good marketing activities as support, you can often get twice the result with half the effort.

How to run a campus without a campus team?

The most important thing for a school is to know your purpose clearly and achieve it. How can a company without a campus team run a campus? I think three methods are the most feasible:

Hold the thigh :

Currently, companies that have their own campus teams also have overall campus publicity arrangements and monthly offline publicity activities. If these companies have good activities and publicity, join them in doing so.

Do activities :

Companies plan their own activities and promotional plans, usually about once a month; for example, September is the start of the school year, October is the club welcome season, November is Singles' Day, December is New Year's Eve, etc. In fact, the campus has its own main activities every month. Once your activities are planned, you can also contact various offline teams and clubs to help implement them according to the needs of publicity. Don’t say you can’t find anyone to do the job. If you can’t find anyone, just search for QQ groups for part-time students in various places.

Of course, your activities must be fun. For example, planning "520 One-Day Couple Event" and " Double Eleven Hug Party" and other activities, the number of participants and the response are very good. If you are going to do an event, you must do it well and don't just do an event casually.

Pure push :

The simplest way is to post posters, distribute brochures, and go door to door to promote registration. Maybe some people think that distributing flyers is not effective. That’s because your flyers are not well designed and the distribution staff lacks execution ability. The best promotional page is to promote an event. As long as the event is easy to participate in and fun, the effect will be very good. I have distributed single pages for a campus single-page fund, with a conversion rate of 6% (WeChat attention), and the production cost of a single page is low (usually around 50 for 10,000 copies).

Campus marketing focuses on ideas and creativity, or it can be pure ground promotion or using a small budget to rely on other campus channels. Today’s students are no longer the same as they were before 2010. They have more ideas of their own, have seen more marketing activities, and are not so easily fooled.

How to build your own campus team?

When it comes to building campus channels, the first recommendation is to recruit an experienced campus channel person, even an intern will do, so that you can get twice the result with half the effort. If you figure it out yourself, it will be too troublesome and take too long; usually, before the channel matures, this business may be cut off. How to recruit personnel in this area? It is faster to seek recommendations from other companies that provide channels or to recruit through online recruitment platforms.

If there is no additional staff and you have to do it yourself, then channel building can be divided into three steps, namely: naming, documentation, and recruiting. After completing these three parts, you can start formal work. Generally, start with the city where the company is located, and then gradually develop to other core cities. Don't expand across the country from the beginning. After all, you don't have that much energy.

Naming

That is, you need to give this campus group a name, such as Campus Ambassadors, Super Intern, Lenovo's Elite Club, Asus's Master Students, etc.; at the same time, give it a certain culture to build up the appearance of this organization.

document

It mainly refers to the documents necessary for establishing a campus channel, generally including four parts: team introduction PPT, team salary assessment form, team onboarding information form and team work strategy. The team introduction PPT mainly introduces the company, products, team atmosphere, the work content of the campus team and a simple salary introduction; the team salary assessment form mainly introduces the specific assessment content and salary; the team onboarding information form is the basic information of the student; the work strategy is some more appropriate promotion methods compiled by the company based on the work content.

Recruitment

Refers to the recruitment of campus teams, which is divided into five parts:

1. One way is to recruit through internship and part-time job websites;
2. The second part is recruiting through part-time QQ groups and WeChat groups in various cities;
3. The third part is recruitment through the mechanism of acquaintance recommendation or ambassador recommending ambassador;
4. The fourth part is to publish recruitment notices through official Weibo and WeChat;
5. The fifth part is to recruit local station managers, who will be responsible for recruiting teams in their respective regions.

The most important thing in recruiting people is to recognize your company, your product and your team; ability comes second because their work is more execution-oriented. As long as you accept this job and are guided appropriately, you will work hard to promote it.

How to assess and formulate the salary of campus team?

Many companies are always worried that even if they pay the ambassadors, they won’t work; and if they don’t pay them, the ambassadors will work even less. At this time, it is best to let the team work in the form of task-based system and assessment. Develop a detailed salary assessment form, which lists some daily tasks that the team can choose to do or do all of them. At the end of each month, the salary is determined based on the team's feedback (such as screenshots, photos, data, etc.). In fact, it is pay according to work. Most students would be interested in a monthly salary of 300-500 yuan. If it is too high, companies will not be able to afford it, and if it is too low, many students will lose motivation. But if you are Baidu, Tencent, or Alibaba, there will be people willing to work even if you don't pay.

How to manage campus teams?

When it comes to team management, this is no longer the era of getting excited. No matter what team it is, if there is nothing that can satisfy them, the team will eventually die; the demands are always equal.

There are many things that can satisfy them, such as money, internship certificates, job recommendations, meeting more people, teaching them some work skills (PPT, resume writing, etc.), sharing more knowledge, etc. You must be able to provide them with what they need, otherwise why would they work for you?

Money is not the most important thing. However, if your team keeps exploiting students, it will not last long. If the salary offered by your own company is low, you can take on some work from other brands to support the team. At the same time, do a good job of daily communication. The content of the communication can be anything you want. At least make everyone recognize you as a manager and see you often (online). This also shows how tiring channel work is, because you have to stay online all the time.

When it comes to campus, regardless of whether we have channels or not, we hope that more people will know us and use our products. Communicate more with students, start from the product perspective, and be more flexible.