Marketing to Back-to-School Shoppers: 

5 Considerations

Students are still on summer vacation, but retailers are already planning for the back-to-school shopping season.

It’s the second largest consumer-spending period for retailers behind the winter holidays, and a huge opportunity for marketers to increase brand awareness and expand their customer base. Average back-to-school spending has continued to increase every year. The average American with kids in grades K-12 shelled out approximately $688 during the last back-to-school season, up from $603 in 2011.

Here are 5 facts you need to know about the typical back-to-school shopper so you can make your school-themed marketing campaigns better than ever.

Timing Is Everything

 1.Timing is everything: Did you know the timing of back-to-school spending varies by product type? Shoppers often buy office supplies at the beginning of the spending holiday and then clothing in late August and September during the start of the school year. Also, back-to-school purchasing started in July last year,earlier than usual. Marketers should keep this purchase timing in mind in 2013, offering relevant products when their target market is buying.

Tech Has Changed Shopping Habits

2. Tech has changed shopping habits: More than ever, families – especially moms – are browsing and buying online. Online searches including back-to-school-related words increased significantly from 2011 to 2012.

Expect your customers to browse and purchase online. 

Make your campaigns mobile-friendly, and lead your fans to mobile-optimized websites so their shopping experiences are as seamless as possible. Last year, 40-50% of moms purchased apparel, books and electronics from a tablet.

Everyone’s Searching For Good Deals

3. Everyone’s searching for good deals: When shoppers make big purchases, they want big discounts. Nobody wants to break the bank before the school year begins!

Give your customers what they want. Run contests with compelling rewards, and create look books of affordable back-to-school products. 

Offer coupons, discounts, free shipping, and other exclusives to get your fans to buy more. They 

are sure to tell 

their   friends  about their savings.

Kids Influence Purchase Decisions

4. Kids influence purchase decisions

It’s not only adult shoppers who are getting savvier. Moms with kids between the ages of 6 and 17 are highly influenced by their offspring.

Marketers need to not only appeal to parents, but also to their kiddos. Run campaigns geared towards students so they ask for your products by name.

 A Good Review Goes A Long Way

5. A good review goes a long way:
During back-to-school season, shoppers are likely to see products and special offers on social networks and then talk about them with their friends. 

      

Reward moms for reviewing your products and sharing their reviews with friends. Moms trust other moms; encourage those moms to trust your brand.  

So, it’s time to get started. Get in the back-to-school 

 groove and create campaigns that matter 

                                                 

                                                                        

Does Content Marketing Measure Up?

In the same sense that you don’t want to host the majority of

 your ads on your own site (usually), you don’t want to focus your

 content marketing efforts on your own site.

The truth is you can’t really replace outbound efforts (i.e. paid ads)

 with inbound-only campaigns such as social and email. 

Relying on inbound efforts only is like never leaving your circle of friends.  

Yes, brands should be publishers….but not exclusively.

Many content marketers have bought into an incorrect view that brands should be their own publishers. Why exactly does this make sense? Brands don’t usually try to be their own ad platforms…that’s what TV stations and magazines and websites are for.

Instead, one of the most effective ways to get drive traffic to your website and create brand awareness is to have content published on other sites. 

Like paid ads, content published on top sites draws consumers not likely or at least not always be captured by inbound efforts.

In a Venture Beat story last week CMO’s confessed their uneasiness with the actual effectiveness of content marketing. 

That’s easy to understand – what exactly is the ROI of an effort to attract 10,000 Facebook fans?

What’s easier to measure is a strategic campaign that produces several million impressions from content created by brand advocates on their own sites. 

Measurable like advertising – more engaging because it is content created by bloggers and website owners who already love the brand.

More on this in a future post  – because simply reaching out to brand fans without a specific message and target objectives wastes precious resources and while measurable…might not measure up!

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