- Behind the Scenes
Inside our 2023 Freshers Week campaign
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By Ryan Moss
- 19 Oct 2023
- 7 min read
Freshers Week is always a busy time for Skiddle and this year was no different.
We spent the week chatting with new students and promoting Skiddle at universities and freshers’ fairs up and down the country. In addition, we displayed ads across several uni halls, created case studies on our accounts with a student focus and compiled guides for promoters.
Elsewhere, we optimised B2C blogs for events, introduced new features and promoted existing ones like reps and discount codes.
The campaign was a multi-department effort, with staff from the marketing, account support, customer support and business development departments coming together to plan the campaign, write, shoot and present content, chat with students, give out free stuff and promote Skiddle.
Now, we’re going to take you behind the scenes, show you how it all came together and talk about why we do these campaigns.
Our Freshers Week content ran across B2B & B2C channels
A campaign of this size requires intricate planning.
For the B2C team, the idea was to provide freshers with helpful information while promoting the events and venues which we sell tickets for.
So, we published event guides like ‘5 of the best freshers events in Manchester’, with links attached to make it as easy as possible for new students to purchase tickets. We followed this up with venue and cheap event guides to cement the company as an expert on nightlife and boost our rankings on search engines like Google.
On the B2B side, the focus was to educate promoters on using the Promotion Centre’s tools to help organise and market their events. For example, our Reps feature can be a massive help to promoters in freshers week, so we produced blogs explaining the hows and why’s in detail.
But it wasn’t just existing features. Our Discount Codes feature went live in September, and we produced long and short-form articles with practical advice on how promoters could use it for their freshers week events.
Elsewhere, we looked at tactics like guerilla marketing, a low-cost way of drumming up hype for events.
If that wasn’t enough, we also beamed Skiddle ads into 300 UK uni halls. This meant that our brand was firmly in the mind’s eye of the latest generation of British students.
All this ran in tandem with our Freshers Week events, where we spent two weeks talking to new students in a number of cities. Scroll down to get the lowdown on where we went and what we did.
What we did at Universities and Freshers Fairs
We hit London, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Bristol and Cardiff over two weeks. The universities we partnered with were new connections for us, showing our team’s expertise in finding and securing new avenues for the company to find business.
The planning began in April and by May we made contact with universities to get the ball rolling. This gave us enough time to deliver the best possible events we could.
We spoke to new students, got a feel for the music they like, gave out Skiddle credit and played games with our dice activation. Students had two rolls on the dice. If they rolled one six, they’d receive an 8GB, Skiddle-branded USB. However, if they rolled two sixes, they’d receive £50 Skiddle credit.
Our Events Manager, Claire, led the way with staff from the marketing, account support, customer support and business development departments chipping in, working in customer-facing roles to represent Skiddle across the events or filming and presenting content for our Instagram page.
It meant that new students got the chance to interact with the people who make the company what it is, as opposed to hired staff with no connection to the brand.
Speaking about the events, our Senior Marketing Manager, Lisa Braithwaite said: “The aim of our Freshers campaign was brand awareness. We wanted to gain a new audience with the students that were starting university, educate them on the type of events that we sell for, encourage them to download our app and look at becoming a rep if they are looking to make money outside of their studies.”
But what about the challenges? Lisa felt that it was logistics. “The logistics of organising these events was by far the hardest aspect to overcome. With all of the freshers fairs being held at universities around the country we had to work out moving our kit around the country and making sure that we had staff at each event.”
Keep scrolling to find out what we achieved.
What we achieved overall
As we mentioned earlier, our B2C content team published venue guides aimed at freshers.
These guides rank high on Google, with the article ‘The Best Student Bars and Clubs In Glasgow’ ranking number one, while the Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield editions rank on the first page of Google.
But what does this mean?
Our SEO is strong, and people are clicking on our articles when they search. People see Skiddle as a trusted name when it comes to student nightlife and as a place where they can buy tickets to exciting events that are relevant to them.
Lisa says “We achieved extra app downloads across the month of September when we were at these events.” So, our efforts at the university events can be considered a success. For our Freshers events, we gave out 7,000 tote bags, gained 9000 Skiddle app sign-ups and promoted thousands of events directly to new university students.
So, that’s our Freshers Week campaign round-up. We’ll be back next year to talk all things events, lifestyle, culture and music with the next wave of students.
Got a question you need an answer to? Give us a call on 03333010301 or ask us a question over on the Skiddle Promoter Twitter account by clicking or tapping on the button below. Alternatively, you can also find a list of our most frequently asked questions over at https://help.promotioncentre.co.uk/
