Back-to-school marketing: campaign ideas and tools
Back-to-school stationary has already been sat on supermarket shelves for weeks but in another week or two, they will be ransacked and only the odd pencil and ripped notebook will be left behind. If you are looking to hit this market and haven’t already started your back-to-school marketing campaigns, then it is really time to get going.
There are many blogs out there with unimaginative and easy-to-implement ideas that offer little prospect of any sort of success during this essential retail season. Here at Diginius, we don’t believe in that. The management of high-stake digital marketing campaigns requires imagination and hard work. So while we hope this article will make your life easier and give you the tools for success, you’ll find no short cuts here!
School is around the corner
This retail period is arguably the second most important after the Christmas holidays with the 2024 season expected to generate $81 billion in sales in the US, according to EMarketer.
The shopping habits are changing, as the prominence of online shopping increases: Brevo even suggests that 45% of back-to-school shoppers plan on doing comparative shopping online. Since this shopping period has traditionally seen high numbers of in-person shopping, this statistic must bring joy to all the Ecommerce sites out there. However, this all means that competition is higher and your digital marketing is going to have to be taken up a notch to help you stand out from the crowd.
Back-to-school marketing ideas
If you sell stationary or tech, then a back-to-school campaign is a no-brainer. However, a wide variety of products and services can take advantage of this retail period, and many companies take aspects of school and parenting with special campaigns featuring their medical services, food and wellness products even travel and tourism companies.
The next question to ask yourself, ‘who is my audience?’. This is not a simple question. Often, you will need to appeal to multiple audiences at the same time: parents and their children, old students (including university students) as well as teachers.
Once you have narrowed down your ideal audience, you can use that to decide which is the best way to target them and ultimately have the most conversions.
Pop-up ads
If you have reliable website traffic but want to boost your conversion rate, pop-up ads are a great way to achieve this. This is an excellent way of tailoring your ecommerce site to suit your back-to-school visitors with pop-ups displaying special discounts, giveaways or perhaps even reduce abandoned cart rate with exit intent targeting. Giving away special discounts and coupons is always good practice for campaigns such as these and with pop-up ads there are engaging ways to offer them, such as with a game or perhaps a competition on socials. Let your imagination roam free!
However, pop-ups are not only useful for discounts that draw in immediate sales but to capture email addresses to send marketing messages to throughout this retail period and beyond.
Pop-ups are a fun and even interactive way of drawing in new customers and an easy way to capture the back-to-school shoppers who are already heading to your website.
Email marketing
Similarly if you have solid, engaged customer base already, then it would be a waste to not put your existing email lists to good use. Email marketing is a great way to lead consumers down the sales funnel, ensuring your brand is foremost in their mind.
Email marketing offers lots of flexibility and many options for creativity. You can be confident with the knowledge that you are reaching out to people who are already aware of your business and have engaged with your content/product/service previously. Therefore, while sales and special discounts have their place here, this is a unique space to focus on your full product offering, to showcase yourself fully and demonstrate why you are better than the competition.
Displaying back-to-school sets/ combos have been proven to be highly effective. It can serve multiple purposes but two main draws to this approach are that
a) It makes the user journey easier when your customer can group products commonly brought together at the same time.
b) It pushes consumers to buy more products. This is especially useful if you sell a range of products such as stationery and tech.
The sheer range of opportunities that email marketing offers is its biggest perk. If you are struggling with your open and click-through rate, the ability to easily implement new strategies is a godsend.
Furthermore, it is worth exploring what integrated solutions are offered to you through your marketing and website platforms. You may think you are alone in a particular challenge but you’ll be surprised at how many highly specific solutions there are. For example, if you have both a physical store and an ecommerce site, Shopify (through their POS or point of sale system) offer the equivalent of abandoned cart emails for in-store purchases. Around this back-to-school period, there are many reasons why your customer is unable or unwilling to purchase immediately – maybe they want to double check an item meets school or university requirements or maybe their child has started having a tantrum – but giving customers flexibility in this way is a good way to increases conversions.
Mastering all the possibilities that come with email marketing is hugely beneficial for your sales and is something that shouldn’t be overlooked. With all the options out there, this would be a very long blog indeed if we started going through each and every one of them. Moreover, it would also be rather fruitless for, as with all marketing, it comes down to understanding your audience and what works for them.
PPC advertising
If you are looking to reach audiences who aren’t already familiar with your brand and products, PPC campaigns are the best way forward. PPC for e-commerce is difficult in such a crowded market, especially at such a competitive time.
Two of the most common searches by anxious advertisers looking for help are ‘back to school marketing slogans’ and ‘back to school marketing phrases’. Yet, while the content of your PPC campaigns should be carefully thought out, performance improvement requires a holistic approach.
Before we delve into the campaigns themselves, it is briefly worth considering the platforms that you are using. While we would never suggest you move away from Google entirely, it is certainly worth considering diversifying your advertising spend across other platforms such as Microsoft – again though this depends on the demographics you are looking to target.,
The type of campaign, especially when weighing up search vs displays ads, comes down to the product or service you offer and what your customers will be searching to find it. Whichever approach you take, you will need to make the most of the tools available to hone your targeting, budget and bidding strategies. No matter what advertising platform you are using, there will be a host of tools to help you refine your campaign and maximise your return.
Developing a successful back-to-school PPC campaign, relies on best practice techniques that are applicable at any period: research into your audience, suitable and engaging content and then testing, reviewing, testing, reviewing.
Video ads
Video ads continue to grow and dominate the world of digital marketing. Indeed, according to Statista, $92.253 billion will be spent on video advertising in 2024. We are consuming more video content than ever, with SocialPilot stating that it will make up for 82% of internet traffic this year. This visually engaging format is more immersive than text/image ads and this reason is why they generally get higher engagement and reach. If you haven’t considered what video advertising can offer, then you are missing a trick.
Video ads can take many forms and appear on many different sites and platforms, each having their unique advantages and restrictions. It has been repeatedly mentioned throughout this article that the audience for this retail season is complex and you are often looking to appeal to very different groups at the same time. Therefore, putting all your budget in one spot, on one type of ad, in one place is unadvisable. If you choose to go ahead with a video ad, it is just as important to tweak your video for different audience, perhaps even running different versions of the same ad if you have the space and budget to do so.
Advertising on Netflix
Connected TV (CTV) is a particular form of video advertising which has huge reach and reaches high value audiences with 405B+ monthly CTV impressions in the US. A newer platform that has much promise in this sphere is Netflix. Through Netflix your ad has huge reach and gives you fantastic options to target different audiences as well as the top 10 shows.
If you are struggling to create an advert suitable for CTV and Netflix in particular, there are a few back to school marketing ideas that are successful time after time; and they all evoke an emotional connection with the audience. According to a 2022 study, entitled The Emotional Effectiveness of Advertisement,
‘…providing an emotional message in publicity increases the audience’s attention to the advertisement, enhancing the product’s appeal and generating a higher level of brand recall.’
From nerves and excitement to bittersweet nostalgia with a twinge of sadness, evoking the emotions of back to school have proven to be a successful marketing strategy.
Netflix offers many opportunities for this period but knowing how best to make the most of them requires some attention.
Tools that will elevate your back-to-school marketing
To manage a huge campaign such as a back-to-school, you’ll need all the help you can get. It has already been mentioned that you probably have tonnes of handy tools at your disposal; and spending a bit of time educating yourself on your current systems is often surprisingly rewarding.
If you are struggling on the creative side of things, especially when it comes to snappy slogans, having a play with AI will help you on the way. Remember though that AI’s capabilities are limited and nothing is as good as human ingenuity!
If you are rolling your eyes and screaming at the screen that you’ve tried all of this and are still overwhelmed, then maybe a few deep breaths and an all-on-one marketing platform is for you. This is a big decision though and should not be rushed, especially if this is the first time considering it.
Back-to-school marketing
There isn’t much left to say but good luck! It is undoubtedly a busy period for any marketing team and trying to manage multiple different campaigns all at the same time is stressful. Whether you are starting from scratch or are concerned about your current campaign’s performance, we hope there is some food for thought here that will allow you to boost your sales during this key season.
If you’re a marketing agency head to this page to explore our Diginius Agency Partner Program. Meanwhile, if you’re a business managing your advertising in-house and you’d like our support, discover how our Diginius Insight Platform boosts your ROI.
