How to get students involved in your product?

Children, students, youth – seem to form a distinct market in India, so massive in size, complexity and taste and entrepreneurs, marketers - everywhere are trying their best to grab their fleeting attention. They're part of that coveted 15 to 30-year-old demographic. If your product has a shelf life after college, you're in luck--you're catching them in their purchasing power formative years. But to use an appropriate analogy, selling to college students is never an easy thing.

That's because marketing to college students poses a special set of challenges. They're often transient, skeptical and cash-strapped thus making it a difficult market to penetrate.

So, how do you market to the student community? Here are some tips.

• Consider mobile marketing.
• Most students have yet to settle down and no matter what it may seem so they are highly engaged on one device that serves the purpose of portability. Be it a mobile, an iPad or iWatch – Portability is obviously the next big thing. Thus promoters need to devise unique methods for promoting their brand value.
• “SMS text and cell phone browser access are the surest ways to make your company reachable to students”
• When considering mobile guerilla marketing, consider the cash strapped situation of the students. For example: They are free to switch a prepaid network provider just because the next network provider is cheap. Here, having one number is rarely a concern. Of course things change when they graduate as and when priorities fall in. But until then, several numbers are discarded on regular basis.
• Get to the point, fast.
• Students have complicated classes, complicated schedules and complicated lives. Thus, simple and sweet, to-the-point articles helps understand better as there are constantly bombarded & seek definitive and unique information. The creativity here lies in how convincing is your idea, so that it can fit into a 140 character SMS. “Small is beautiful”
• Don't try to be cool if you're not.
• College students are often critical thinkers and wary about advertising. They can be very quick about sniffing out a phony. The best thing in such a circumstance is to be yourself cause being cool or not is decided by them and not your brand!
• Get your product right before bragging about it.
• Students can be a marketer's dream--or nightmare. It's a great word-of-mouth community. Since they see each other often, they always need new topics of conversation.
• The good news is that if they like your product or service, they'll talk about it. And the bad news is that if they hate it, they'll talk about that, too.
• The youth of India or for that matter, world over, actually don’t care much about your product. Its human nature as they have been bombarded to a great extent. Instead they care for the value you try to create with your product. Evidently, they are more concerned when a product fights a ‘cause’ than a product trying to market itself via advertisement. In the case of the ‘cause’ – each student can become a marketer for the brand.
• Thus, you will need to ensure that your product targets mainly to the influential community and not to the community that gives the major chunk of the revenue. The reason is, in this current world, your influencer has the power to spread news about product. Just make sure your product, serves a cause, or I might say – portray a product so that it fights a cause to start a movement.
• Win over mom and dad.
• Selling to college students as a group may result in big bucks, but individually, they don't have much disposable cash. Even if they aren't tapped out from tuition, many students are on a limited budget. Pricing strategy is paramount: too expensive and your customers might not be able to afford you. Too cheap and you won't clear overhead. They're incredibly price sensitive as spoken off earlier and you need to offer a great product at a price that doesn't cut into their other planned funds."
• An interesting factor among student culture is that they know how to solve problems – and they'll try to find a solution [before] purchasing your product.
• Hence one move you could do here is to target both on a 70:30 (Student:Parent) basis.

Despite all the pitfalls and obstacles of selling to students, the benefits can be substantial. Many business owners in the niche find it a fun market. "It keeps you young," Dorm Co's Gawronski says. "The majority of people think of college as the best years of their lives. When you meet the parents, they're excited about getting their room ready, and the students are excited about going to college. I mean, they're actually excited to shop with you."