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Copywriting for a Student Audience
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Copywriting for a Student Audience

Blake Emal
Jan 28, 2021
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This is a guest post by Yash Gadodia at SMUMods.com

Tl;dr - Our marketing strategy to grow 10x in 1 year.

Let's jam on the topic of copywriting for student audiences.

First. Introductions.

I'm Yash Gadodia ๐Ÿ™‹๐Ÿพโ€โ™‚๏ธ . College Sophomore at Singapore Management University (๐Ÿ‡ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ ) studying some-degree-that'll-be-outdated-in-5-years-so-why-bring-it-up-in-the-first-place-also-why-am-wasting-valuable-word-count. I'm the Team Lead at SMUMods.com.

People know me in school as "that guy who doesn't shut up about SMUMods.com". And now, so do you.

What's SMUMods.com? We're a ๐Ÿ’ฏ % student-run initiative that's looking to redefine the college experience.

We make college life better for students by providing a platform that solves their needs. For example, we provide professor and course reviews -

Due to supply and demand forces ๐Ÿ“ˆ , it's imperative we have knowledge about what professors to 'bid' for. It's our first and biggest feature.

Why should you care about us? We're less than 2 years old at this point, but we've seen some significant growth. At SMU, we're used by pretty much every student. That's over 40 thousand users ๐Ÿค  .

"Gotta bump up those numbers. Those are rookie numbers"

So that's us. We're growing really fast, have an excellent team, and have big plans for the future (Spoiler Alert: World domination ๐Ÿ˜ˆ).

Introduction's over. Let's talk about our journey.

College students. What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out -

You probably already know this, but when copywriting, it's important to know your audience. Know what drives them, and develop mental models for thinking like them.

What makes college students unique?

  1. We're bombarded daily with advertisements.

    You can get a sense of the fatigue students feel by looking at this -

    This is from 5 minutes of perusing on the various chat channels available for students.

2. Short attention span / low tolerance for fluff.

I speak from firsthand experience when I say it's really difficult to focus in the age of push notifications and TikTok feeds.

To be fair, it's tough getting anyone's attention these days.

Enjoying the piece? Click here to tweet and help us share!

3. Students love, and I mean love free stuff.

We go through great lengths to score free food and swag (๐Ÿ” ๐ŸŒฎ ๐Ÿ• ).

Queue at SMU for a giveaway, circa 2019

Of course, this isn't to say that all students are this way, but itโ€™s important to have some sense of what your audience looks like. It constantly changes, so do be in touch with your audience. Always.

Problem: Most copies we see aren't good.

The SMUMods team learnt very quickly that school administration and other clubs and businesses break the cardinal rules of copywriting every day -

  • Less words. Big headers. Do less.

  • Use an active voice.

  • Show not tell.

  • Have a little "oomph".

  • Take risks.

To give you just one example -

If any of you read through this in its entirety, I'll buy you a coffee.

Why (we think) we do a better job.

  1. Titles are short -

Help us Help you would have been an even punchier title, but oh well.

2. We keep giveaways simple -

3 steps. Easy to follow = More likely to work.

3. We keep it consistent.

All of our banners and copy's have our unique SMUMods design and tone to them.

Consistency across all pages.

4. We aren't afraid to make mistakes โŒ -

We tried a colloquial message in "Singlish" as part of one of our campaigns -

Key takeaway here: You won't always score. That's okay.

Enjoying the piece? Click here to tweet and help us share!

Some tools/rules that help us -

1. Grammarly and Hemmingway -

2. MOM Test FTW

Before we launch a copy, we always show our designs/copy to non-smu people to get their truly unbiased opinion.

We're also constantly getting feedback from our users to get a sense of what works and what doesnt. As mentioned earlier, know your audience.

3. Focus on the visual, never the copy.

Think of the copy as enhancing your visuals. It should always be visual first, then copy. It's a rule we stick to -

this was our most successful post ever. It beat the giveaways in terms of high organic social media engagement.

4. Keep it simple, (stupid).

Never use big, flowery language.

"Join us" - short, simple, tells you everything you need to know

5. ABL - Always Be Learning

Some useful resources to learn copywriting -

  1. This.

  1. Watch the copywriting exercises video

  1. Marketingexamples.com is bae

  1. There are way too many resources out there,so JFGI

Thatโ€™s it. Good luck with your copy!

๐Ÿ“ท Follow our journey on Instagram

Did you enjoy the piece? Click here to tweet and help us share!

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