The time has come, when the leaves start to change colors, and more and more school busses are seen on the street with young kids riding them (as opposed to older summer school rejects). Ah yes, Fall is just around the corner. Instead of seeing leaves and kids, I see dollar bills. Think it’s a cynical approach? Well, good for you, because every kid going back to school is a potential dollar or two more that you could be making. When kids go back to school, and summer comes to a close, more people go online and spend more time on there. Whether it’s hanging out on myspace, or just looking for deals on books (college kids). So how do we bank on the back to school boom that only happens once a year?
Easy. We market to them based on a psychological approach, rather than a technical one. What does this mean? Well, think back to when you were in college (or maybe you still are, and if so, let me know so I can sell shit to you now!) and you knew that your folks only gave you so much cash to spend on books and supplies. So since the internet is by far the best and easiest way to buy those things at great prices, you’ll be deal hunting. Now, when people shop, psychology plays a HUGE part in it. I’ve always wondered, why someone would buy the same generic pen at a store for $4.00 instead of $0.65? What is so good about that $4 pen? Well, a lot of it has to do with how the pen is packaged and what cool and pointless things the company can come up with to make it sound like you NEED this in order to get good grades or save your hand from falling off. It’s complete bullshit when you think about it, and totally about the psychological aspect. They purposely package it in shiny or brightly colored paper and plastic with flashy tags right on the packaging about how it’s some advanced form of ink relaying from the ink well to the ball point at the end. Again, more bullshit. It’s a freakin’ pen for god’s sake! All you need it to do is write, nothing more. And yet, the company values it at more than $3 more than the barebones model, even though the actual pen is identical to the other.
So how do we take the example of branding psychology to the internet and sell these college kids on stuff like backpacks, electronics, beer, and other necessities? We package the site like that $4 pen. You sell them on the idea that this product will benefit them, and make them uber popular for having or using it. I’m sure you can be creative and come up with a pack of lies on your own for almost any product out there for the college kids. Make the site flashy, but believable. Don’t tell them something rediculous that they will just laugh at and close, you want to get inside their heads and sell based on their emotions and thoughts of the product.
Let’s use backpacks as an example. Ebags.com is probably the biggest backpack retailer on the internet, and I’m pretty sure you can find their affiliate program on CJ.com too. So we want to sell backpacks right? But let’s not focus on every bag they have, because then your site will be done by next September, instead of the one starting tomorrow. First pick out the type of traffic you want to sell to. Yes, we are going to go a little backwards, because when selling products, sometimes it’s good to start off with the target audience before the product. So, say our goal are freshmen students at colleges around the US. Simple enough, there are probably millions of them all around. Why not build a site focused primarily on Freshmen starting college then. Use the ebags affiliate links and pictures to market the bag right from your site, so that when they click to buy it, they go directly to the product page or signup form. Who’s to say that you can’t market and make a semi-white label product page of the actual bag or product in general. Your goal is to pre-sell them as hard and much as possible so that when they do go to the merchant’s site, all they have in their head is “I need to get this bag”. When marketing the actual bag, there’s no need to talk about it having zippers or pockets. Well, lightly mention it, but it shouldn’t be your primary selling point. Focus on something to get into their head. Don’t put a lot of focus on the actual makeup of the product either.
Let’s go over what we have so far. We are going to make a site targeting college freshmen students specifically. There will only be a few select, but uber popular bags that will be pushed so not to overwhelm the user with a plethora of crap. Insist that they will be getting the best possible price if they buy through your site or links. A good idea to do as far as deals go, since you don’t actually own the product or hold inventory of it, is to go onto the ebags site, and look at their prices. Usually they’ll have a price that looks like this - Retail: $79.99 — This is important, because you can put the price on all of the bags as that retail price, and then put a star or flashy symbol with the actual price of $25 or whatever it is. But list “mysite.com’s price $25! for Freshmen only!”.
On the site itself you want to really get them excited. Put in some ad copy with a very laid back down to earth appeal about how your site was made by Freshmen students (because we were all freshmen at some point) for other freshmen students. Maybe say stuff on how the bags on the first page all came highly recommended by sophmores, juniors and seniors in a poll about the best bags to use for school, but also looked really good too. Again, be creative, there are tons of little things to tell them about. Another solid idea would be to make them signup to a newsletter of “deals for college students only”. Have them list their basic info of first/last name, email, school, gender, grade. This way you know that if they are freshmen, you have 4 full years to market to them with other products or services!
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