A Guide for Brands During Freshers

Over 70% of students feel that their ability to self-express has been limited due to C-19 and is having a negative impact on their mental health.

Brands should be thinking about how they can motivate and mobilise students around creative challenges, platforms like TikTok (and more recently Instagram Reels) have iconic challenges that provide a perfect native channel. To get it right, work with key influencers co-creating content to spread joy and engagement among the student community.

82% of brands reported having the highest rate of success with Micro and Nano influencers in the past year. Student micro-influencers are so powerful because they have both an increased relevance to other students through lifestyle, life experience and location, plus a far higher level of credibility and trust, creating just the right balance of aspiration and achievability. Once the right partners have been identified, brands should be willing to do something which makes many feel uncomfortable – hand over control of their brand to the co-creators, allowing them to generate cut-through content. Obviously, there’s a quality control process which ensures consistency and some amount of conformity, but this comes after the creative process.

In a recent survey of over 1000 UK students, 72% said they would most trust the recommendation of a friend or peer vs only 22% who would trust that of a brand. In addition, over 85% said that they’d made a purchase or signed up to a service as a result of a friend recommendation. The symbiotic relationship between brands looking to drive sales and subscriptions and students looking to make some extra cash makes perfect sense for both sides.

In order to make it work we suggest, as always, finding the right people to represent your brand and finding the right incentive to mobilise them effectively. Setting realistic targets is also important – the trust which students have will diminish rapidly when a mate’s recommendation becomes too insistent or repetitive.

Social is a great channel for building relevance to student audiences through credible influencers and compelling content. Sometimes there’s a post or piece of content which taps into the zeitgeist perfectly and just explodes on a platform.

There’s no real formula for hitting gold, aside from working with amazing creators, but when you do there’s a great opportunity to nurture it and help to push it far and wide with targeted social spend.

By monitoring campaigns in real-time and tracking performance, you can be there in the moment to catch content when it’s gaining momentum and boost the organic reach and relevance to look-a-like, location-based or passion vertical audiences, exactly where and when you want to.

Sure, it’s hard to predict exactly what the physical experience of university will be this Freshers, but we do know that 77% students are keen to interact physically with brands this year and that they will be physically on campus during term time.

Whether its hall drops, sampling or virtual gifting - we can ensure that students get to experience your brand in real life.