Five Tips for Marketing Leisure Activities and Experiences to Millenials

Campus Media offers its top tips to brands looking to market its leisure activities or experiences to students on a national or regional basis.

This year it was reported that a record number of school leavers were accepted into university – 409,000 school leavers to be exact.

Brands looking to acquire new customers should recognise the huge potential in marketing to students, both from the short-term standpoint and the long term. While it’s difficult to fit all students into one stereotype, there are ways in which brands can be more strategic when marketing their experiences to this particular market.

Here are my five top tips:

Pick the right time of year

Aim to promote your activities after the Freshers’ chaos (late September) and before Christmas. After January the student schedule is suddenly much more hectic due to dissertations and exams being due in Easter. Therefore, leisure time is going to lessen significantly.

Offer incentives

Student life is about being frugal. Offer discounts or freebies in order to entice them to engage with your activities rather than your competitors.

Geo-target

The leisure/entertainment industry is often constrained by geography – realistically people aren’t going to cross the country to go to the cinema so you’ll need to factor this into your marketing.

The most obvious approach is targeted emails promoting your activities. However a wide range of marketing activities can be geo-targeted – including events, content, display and social channels.

Take a holistic approach to marketing

Make sure that your marketing includes multiple touch points – digital, experiential and social. One recent study found that 65% of millennials regularly research hobbies online[1].

Online content will always be important, but social and experiential campaigns can create more lasting impressions.

Encourage students to talk about their experience with your brand

The great thing about targeting millennials is that they are super connected. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat they are likely to have thousands of connections. If you can get them speaking about your brand then it can prove the most efficient form of marketing. Consider rewarding social mentions.