It’s an ever changing world out there for brands and retailers. Each day, new technology and techniques come out that help marketers better personalize ads and target potential customers. Accurate user targeting and personalized content are priceless for brands, especially when marketing towards college students. These students are bombarded with a plethora of advertisements every day, so whether a campaign’s goal is branding or direct sales, personalization is an extremely important tactic that must be utilized in order to capture and retain attention. Mobile and social advertising play a critical role in delivering a successful ad experience.
Nowadays, college students carry around their social networks, and basically their whole lives, in their pockets in the form of mobile smartphones. Smartphones provide a two-way street for consumers to interact directly with brands. Emerging functionality within mobile and social media provides brands with a huge opportunity to reach college students at the right place at the right time. Savvy marketers have access to the activities, interests, and purchasing habits of their users, and take advantage of this available information to accurately target content, information, and even pricing to increase the likelihood of purchase.
Here are examples of how marketers can creatively and effectively use mobile and social to deliver personalized branded experiences to college students:
1) Location Detection
Location is one of the most important factors in modern day marketing campaigns. Today’s technologies allow marketers to target shoppers no matter where they are. GPS-powered location technology on phones is a powerful tool and enables companies to target a consumer’s precise location. Programs can detect when users are within a certain proximity to a retail store and deliver a message to the phone containing a coupon or advertisement. For a student who is already in the shopping mindset, this little nudge could be just the thing to ensure a purchase. These programs can be further tailored based on a user’s purchase history or category preferences to deliver an optimized marketing message.
2) Social Influence
College students tend to follow, read, respond, and listen to people with whom they can relate. Their decisions regarding engagement with industries such as retail, restaurant, travel, and finance via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ are influenced directly from their peers, friends, and classmates. This is why so many brands have begun using social influencers to help drive traffic, conversation, and sales.
3) Content Personalization
Finally, there is content personalization. This is where social integration has become a key feature for many brands and retailers. The ability to personalize brand content is stronger than ever thanks to the evolution of social outlets. Brands can target content and products to users based on their social action history on a given site. The technology can also display content and items that are popular with that user’s friends and influencers. Advertisements can be retargeted based on the browsing history of users, offering products and services they may have recently searched or purchased.
Brands and retailers that embrace and keep up with these mobile and social marketing techniques will thrive, and those who don’t risk being left behind in this rapidly changing technological world.
