Welcome to

Discount voucher site studentbeans.com has grown to become an important online channel in the student market, with over 100,000 unique visitors a month.

Reach Students spoke to co-founder James Eder about its success.

Explain how it all started for you and Student Beans
The idea behind Student Beans is derived from three main problems with the student market:

1. Students are generally unaware of their new local environment
2. The financial burden of studying
3. Businesses have great difficulty in marketing effectively to students

With the power and accessibility of the Internet, Student Beans’ aim was to provide a solution to these market imperfections.

Student Beans is a revolutionary online voucher system for student offers. Businesses provide us with student offers for their services, which feature as vouchers on www.studentbeans.com that can be printed and redeemed with student ID. The website is actively promoted to local university students throughout the academic year. These marketing activities are coordinated by a dedicated and highly trained local studentbeans.com brand manager team, as part of a national campaign run in partnership with Procter & Gamble and accredited by The Chartered Institute of Marketing.

What was your background before Student Beans?
The business was setup by me and my brother Michael with the aim of bringing together businesses and students for mutual benefit through a unique interactive voucher system.
Launched in September 2005 studentbeans.com is now the UK’s leading student offers website.

Michael graduated from Nottingham University in 2003 with a degree in Economics. He has spent time as an oil futures trader and on the bond trading floor of an Investment Bank. Before launching studentbeans.com he set up a Chinese importing operation which developed into a successful ebay business. Michael is responsible for all aspects of the Company’s operations, including systems and infrastructure design and operational strategy.

I attended The University of Birmingham, where I graduated in Business Commerce. During my degree I worked with over thirty top brands, helping them target the student market. This included working as a brand manager for The Yell Group. With this background I saw a niche in the market for an online marketing platform to engage with students and set about forming studentbeans.com. I am a regular speaker at student and enterprise events sharing experiences and inspiring other entrepreneurial minds. I’m responsible for the sales and marketing team.

How have things developed with the business? What changes and learnings have there been?
Since the launch of studentbeans.com the website and brand has gone from strength to strength. Initially we established ourselves in the Birmingham University student market. After we had signed up the majority of local students to the site and thousands of vouchers were being printed off the site every week we knew we were on to a winner. We leveraged our experience to roll out across the country and engage with many more national brands, including Nando’s, ODEON, wagamama, Bella Italia and Alton Towers.

The website has developed to deliver national campaigns to the heart of the student market. We now have a mix of hundreds of local and national companies listing exclusive offers on studentbeans.com and we are approaching 100,000 members. Since its launch the website has seen a number of substantial revisions and revamps to keep it looking fresh and up-to-date. A recent member survey has provided new insights to what our users want and reflect the pace at which the Internet has evolved in recent years.

We are currently working on a number of developments, which will be released in the coming weeks. We are constantly in touch with our members who ensure that we are continuing to deliver and improve on our offering. Alongside the printable vouchers studentbeans.com now offers user generated content in the form of a community for students across the UK to share tips, deals and discounts for other members to benefit from. With our strong user base this is gaining good traction and will help the site to grow even quicker in the future.

Why should marketers target students?
Students are a fantastic demographic to target, not simply to gain their attention today as opinion formers and early adopters but as ABC1s of the future. Students have more time than most and should you choose to engage with them in the right way they could be spending that time, and their money with you.

What have you learnt about marketing to students? What are your tips for those wanting to reach the student audience and engage with them?
Marketing to students can be a challenge if approached in the wrong way. Students are very media savvy, they are very quick to judge and it is important not to patronise them. If you are looking to target students you should consider what you are offering them. Is it something that would appeal in its current form or do you need to re-package it? If you are going to provide a unique offering for the student market it is important to do your research, focus groups, polls and a phased launch will all provide useful insights to helping your campaign be a success. It is also important to remember that each year the student market is refreshed, allowing for this requires a constant presence and drive to ensure impact in the long term.

What campaigns/brands do you think have succeeded most in this arena?
The most successful campaigns are those that have kept to a core offering and simple message providing real value. As we provide a free service to students, they choose what to engage with and naturally there are certain offers that stand out. Two-for-one promotions generally strike the right note. The option for companies to provide restrictions, for example Monday to Thursday, enables a promotion to give good return when it is normally quieter. A promotion that is complicated and difficult to redeem simply creates a barrier to success for everyone concerned. wagamama run a promotion with us along these lines and they have really benefited from this approach.

What future developments will we see in student marketing?
In our recent survey, answered by 1,000+ of our members, over 66% of students questioned spend over 2 -3 hours a day online (over 25% spend 4+ hours everyday online). There has been a tremendous growth online in recent years and this will naturally continue to evolve. Our survey indicates that students now spend more time online than doing any other activity (apart from sleep). This is highlighted by the explosion in the use of social networking sites, in particular facebook. These sites have enabled students to connect in more ways than have ever been possible before and are likely to continue. Advertising through these sites however has been a challenge due to the focus of the audience being online to communicate with each other and not be distracted by adverts. In contrast studentbeans.com has created a service which integrates with student purchasing decisions and actively encourages users to engage with advertisers.

The future of marketing to students will involve integrated campaigns communicating and engaging with students. Previous campaigns that have seen isolated marketing activities will struggle to be heard amongst those that build a relationship with students. Brands that will win are those that support students, helping them as they grow and develop through their student experience from their fresher days until graduation.

Facebook is the website du jour, but in Reach Students’ experience it delivers appalling ad clickthroughs.

We’ve run four targeted campaigns this year using its flyer ads, and each time the results have been disappointing.

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

When we first experienced poor results earlier this year we looked carefully at creative and planning. Further experimentation saw a variety of quite different offers and creative approaches. What kept us going was the fact that others had anecdotally mentioned good returns from Facebook ads.

Yet our results did not improve.

Baffled, we did some research and discovered that actually we are not alone.

Valleywag finds that 0.04% is pretty much the average when it comes Facebook clickthroughs - note that they are talking about banners as well as flyers.

There is varied speculation as to why the clickthroughs are so shockingly poor on Facebook. Some have cited the fact the site is essentially messaging orientated – rather than content orientated - meaning that therefore users are in no frame of mind to slope off down trails.

I don’t buy this. As a long time Facebook user myself I find myself inadvertently following trails like a distracted sniffer dog. Similarly I nearly always click on flyers when I see them. I click them because their restrictive nature (there’s little space to work with) means the advertiser often has to be clever, and I am usually intrigued by the offer.

Many of the flyer ads I’ve seen have been very clickable – much more so than typical banner ads. That said, I actually don’t see that many flyers on my Facebook travels. Nothing like the amount that are displaying on my network, according to the flyers board.

It remains a mystery to me why such perfectly targeted ads with highly relevant messages perform so badly on Facebook compared to other sites - often sites where the targeting is less precise.

Until solved, I think we’ll stick to PR initiatives through the site – such as our work for Avenue Q that generated over ¼ million mini-feed messages through user profiles. And on a budget significantly smaller than it costs to buy the same number of Facebook clickthroughs.

In fact, at least $199,000 smaller!

I said I’d report back on Haymarket’s student marketing conference. That was back in April and I have since allowed the blog to get covered in cobwebs. My bad.

With feather duster in hand, here goes on what I remember of it…

Read the rest of this entry »

So, not long until Capture Student Spend, Haymarket’s one day conference on student marketing. See below for the programme. Go here for more information from the organisers and to register.

Reach Students will be there and looks forward to meeting faces new and old.

If you are a newsletter subscriber intending to visit - and if we haven’t met before - come and see me (Luke) say something like “I read the newsletter” and I’ll give you a free copy of Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide…while stocks last.

Read the rest of this entry »

Almost every university students’ union nowadays has someone responsible for selling on-campus media. Almost all of them talk to each other via a private network, sharing best practice, ideas, resources and of course gossip. If one brand or their agency has upset a union, it will only be a matter of minutes before every other union knows about it.

Now these unions have got together to market themselves independently. Students’ Union Marketing is a new website where anyone can access contact details of the UK’s most marketing-active unions. Over 130 universities are represented.

For more information contact John Abell, Senior Marketing Executive at Warwick Uni, on 02476 572800.