Some of the most popular campus marketing methods are also the least effective. Brands rely on certain go-to campaigns because they’re easy to do, inexpensive, and reach thousands of students fast.

But that doesn’t mean you’re running a successful campaign or influencing students’ buying decisions. Here are four of the worst campus marketing tactics that should get tossed out for good.

Flyering

Most brands that do traditional flyering simply give student brand ambassadors a stack of flyers to hand out on campus, expecting that wide distribution will get their message out and influence buying behavior. But today’s students have become desensitized to unsolicited advertising.

And even if students read a flyer, don’t expect them to think much of it, because 84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising such as flyer distribution.

But even if flyering were successful, there’s no way to know it because you’re not collecting data. There’s no way to measure behavior or brand awareness. With flyering, you’ve put something in students’ hands, but you have no way of following up with those same students.

If flyering is the only tactic of your marketing campaign, you should reconsider your campus marketing strategy. But if you’re committed to making flyering an integral part of your method, combine it with product distribution or pair it with an experience that will be seen as valuable by the students you’re targeting. This way, the flyers become ancillary to the campaign, an additional resource they can take with them for future reference.

Chalking

The idea of chalking is to grab people’s attention in high-traffic areas with a visual message that’s hard to miss. The great thing about chalking is that it’s low-cost, easy to implement, and requires few resources. You can easily get thousands of views in just one or two days, for very little investment.

But chalking is actually worse than flyering in terms of effectiveness. With chalking, you’re leaving too many variables in the hands of your brand ambassador: the timing, location, actual message, and quality of the chalking are all out of your control. If the ambassador rushes the job or doesn’t care about quality, it can look ugly and misrepresent your brand.

Some brands use stencils to control the quality and messaging. While the chalking usually looks great and very professional, you still haven’t solved the timing and location problems.

But the real reason chalking doesn’t work is because there is no real way to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. Because there’s no data you can collect, you can’t track any KPIs. You have no way of knowing whether the money you spent was effective in reaching college students or influencing them in any way.

Floor Stickers

Floor stickers overcome some of the drawbacks of chalking. They look great, and you can create any design you want with them. The messaging is consistent and guaranteed, and floor stickers attract more attention than chalking. They’re also a lot cleaner and more professional-looking. Stickers can be placed anywhere and they’re easily peeled up without ruining surfaces.

 

But floor stickers are more expensive than chalking, and they aren’t any more effective. Some brands include QR codes on the stickers, which introduces the possibility of tracking data. But a 2013 survey found that only 21% of American smartphone owners have ever scanned a QR code—and only 15% of people know how to scan a QR code properly.

People just don’t respond to QR codes, especially in a setting where floor stickers are used—people are on the go and they’re not going to stop to pull out their phone, go to the barcode app, snap the image, and find out what the link goes to.

So there’s no reliable way to track effectiveness of floor stickers either.

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful influencers a brand can enjoy—especially among millennials, who value peer recommendations over brand messages. To capitalize on this, some brands will task student brand reps with making announcements in class or inserting messaging into conversations. And while organic word-of-mouth is marketing gold, paying a student to do it always comes off as an obvious advertisement and disingenuous. It can backfire badly and make your brand appear inauthentic and manipulative—two of the worst traits for millennials.

And with word-of-mouth, you have even less control over the message than with chalking.  When you rely on brand ambassadors to talk about your product, you can get descriptions like the one Kevin Wang heard for the XBox Kinect as “video games for fat people.”

Successful Campus Marketing Tactics

Effective campus marketing uses campaigns that control the messaging, provide valuable experiences or giveaways that students will enjoy, and collect data that can be used to measure relevant KPIs. Other methods may be inexpensive, cool-looking, or easy to implement, but in the end you don’t know if you’ve had any impact.

At Go Commando, we help our clients to develop smart campaigns that students will love and brands can evaluate. Want to make sure your next campus marketing campaign is a successful one? Let’s talk!

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Who is Campus Commandos?

Our college marketing agency functions to serve two purposes; to provide opportunity for college students, and to market products and services on behalf of brands to students on college campuses and universities across the United States. Contact us to learn more.

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