Marketing to Gen Z? Advertise where they're at.
The place where trust, LTV, community, and peer influence around buying decisions are their highest—and the cost of customer acquisition is the lowest.
60-second read
There’s an opportunity for B2C companies targeting Gen Z that many marketers are unfamiliar with.
It’s advertising to college students on campus.
Not on social or in a busy, chaotic feed. But in the confined geography where this demographic spends the vast majority of their time between the ages of 18-24. The place where trust, LTV, community, and peer influence around buying decisions are their highest—and the cost of customer acquisition is the lowest.
Think about the things that matter to college students: creative tools, professional networking platforms, EdTech products, jobs, health & wellness products and services, consumer goods. The list goes on…
If direct-to-student marketing is interesting to you, there are two approaches to accessing the ad inventory on college and university campuses:
1. If you have a low test budget (sub-$10K): contact university student media departments individually for pricing and advertising options. Many sell direct.
2. If you have a mid to high test budget ($10K+): use a managed service that has access to inventory. You'll be able to get more targeted with your audience and they'll report metrics to measure against your KPIs.
(Yes, we (flytedesk) do this. We're the largest college marketing platform in the US and build the software that colleges and universities use to manage ad inventory on campus. We don’t own media, we’re just the pipes that control media owned by colleges and universities. As a result, we have access to the ad inventory on 2300+ campuses and reach 95% of the US student population.)
Regardless of your route, if Gen Z is your target market (or a demo you're looking to grow), college marketing is worth exploring.
To give you an idea of the breadth of on-campus marketing, these are the ad products that are generally available. (Note: Availability will vary by school depending on its size and/or sophistication with student media.)
OOH
Campus Screens, campus billboards, campus posters, street teams.
Digital
High-Impact Digital: script tag installed on hundreds of college-owned & operated news sites. That’s commonly the college newspaper website, but there is a huge portfolio of digital media brands created on and serving campuses… sports blogs, class advice, content for interest groups, etc.
Campus Email Newsletters
350 schools send a daily campus email newsletter to all students. It’s like a Skimm for campus and has general interest news and notifications. HIGH open rates.
Influencers
Student influencer posts by nano-influencers who are guaranteed students.
SMS
Text offers or awareness campaigns directly to students
Transit Media
Ads on buses and in transit shelters. (Some schools are larger than cities.)
Campus Newspapers
The back page ads on College Newspapers: Does anyone read the college newspaper? More than you’d think. But most still don't accept this. So, put ads on the back page of college newspapers… because everyone is going to see an ad when there are 15,000 copies strewn around campus.