Campus mobile Internet: a tough piece of fat to swallow

In the minds of entrepreneurs in the mobile Internet vertical field, the university market has always been a piece of fat meat that they are eyeing. However, due to the closedness and special nature of the university community, both large platforms and small companies still find it difficult to eat this "fat meat" in actual operation and promotion.

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In my country, there are currently about 20 million college students of all kinds. Their annual expenses, including education expenses, entertainment and leisure, and making friends, average 4,000 yuan per person per year, which means there is a college market of more than 80 billion yuan. In addition, college students have a relatively longer time using smartphones, and the student period is a period when a person's product usage habits are formed. Therefore, in the minds of entrepreneurs in the vertical field of mobile Internet, the college market has always been a piece of fat meat that they are eyeing.

However, due to the closed nature and particularity of university communities, both large platforms and small companies will still find this piece of "fat meat" difficult to chew in actual operations and promotions.

The diverse functional services required by universities are difficult to replicate

The needs of college students are rich and diverse, but different universities have different "personalities", management methods and operating environments, making it difficult to provide unified services.

Let’s talk about the “takeout ordering” service. Some schools have student teams that provide takeout delivery services, while others do not. Some businesses around the campus can provide delivery, while some markets are stable and saturated and do not need takeout. The quality of these takeout services is also uneven, which makes it difficult to integrate and monitor the services. If you set up a delivery team yourself, not only will the operating costs increase, but you may also be killed by wealthy and willful tycoons such as Ele.me and Meituan Waimai.

It is easy to enter a niche field, but it is not easy to build a platform

Do college students have no common needs? The answer is of course no. There are at least two common needs: one is teaching tools such as "checking class schedules" and "checking grades", and the other is life services related to college students such as "finding part-time jobs" and "booking tickets". The former has already begun to show signs, but the latter has no representative products in the industry yet.

In terms of promotion, tool products can indeed quickly expand the user base when they first enter campuses, but this is unlikely to be the future development trend. In the fiercely competitive mobile Internet industry, if you want to form core competitiveness, you need to build a complete service system behind the product. It is foreseeable that although students have a great overall demand for life services, it is unrealistic for startups to "eat a fat man in one bite" to build a platform due to the many industries involved. Therefore, it may be a good choice to cut into a certain vertical service field.

However, no matter which niche they are in, it is just the tip of the iceberg of campus life services, and can only serve a small number of students. If entrepreneurs want to become platform products and eat up the entire "fat meat" of the university market, they still have a long way to go.

Make the product perfect and cooperate with students to operate

At present, there are many mobile Internet startup teams focusing on the university market, most of which are student teams, and their products are generally of poor quality. There are also campus e-commerce companies that rely on social platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, and their service objects are also limited to their schools or surrounding schools. Although these teams have various shortcomings, most of them do provide convenience for students. Therefore, if startup companies outside the school want to enter roughly, they will face the dilemma of being "out of touch with the ground".

So do startups still have a chance? If they can leverage their R&D and product strengths, maximize user experience, and make good use of the above-mentioned campus resources, they can still form strong competitiveness. The fastest way is to find relevant student organizations or key persons in charge for a certain category or function, and establish differentiated cooperation models based on their wishes, scale, and capabilities, so that student teams or individuals are responsible for their categories. On the one hand, for some students, they are happy to prove their abilities in this way; on the other hand, for companies, it not only reduces the operational burden, but also can quickly expand effective users.

It is worth noting that finding the right cooperation opportunity requires the right time, right place and right people. Once a student does something unreliable, users will only complain about the product itself.

Emphasis on the relationship with users to create word-of-mouth communication

The most important thing for general APP promotion is the ranking in the application market, search engine optimization, etc. However, for the university market, due to its relatively concentrated geographical location, traditional ground promotion will be more accurate and effective. But even so, it may encounter "force majeure" - mainly reflected in the intervention of university administrative power, so offline channels also need to pay attention to methods and methods. Implanting products by sponsoring campus activities, or recruiting part-time students to sweep the building and issue orders, is more advantageous in terms of cost-effectiveness and risk control than doing ground activities on campus.

Word-of-mouth marketing is also a point that is easily overlooked by entrepreneurs. College students are a group with a strong group effect. Compared with other marketing methods, they trust the recommendations of acquaintances or quasi-acquaintances more. Therefore, if an APP product wants to enter this group, the most effective way is to first make friends with potential target users through various social media, let a small number of students use and identify with it first, and then maintain user relationships through online and offline activities, so that they can become the source of word-of-mouth communication. Of course, user operation is a delicate job, which requires not only patience, but also personal charm.

Summarize

Campus mobile Internet is a piece of fat meat that makes many entrepreneurs salivate, but how to swallow it completely is a headache for entrepreneurs. At present, it is better to focus on niche areas rather than going it alone. Since small companies cannot swallow it whole, they might as well sit together and learn how to eat it. However, entrepreneurs need to pay attention that the day when they get the fat meat, it is likely that the giants will emerge from behind the scenes.