Why Virtual Freshers Festival?

Students have often been a difficult audience to reach for marketers, and one of the best ways to target them has always been Freshers Fairs. This form of experiential marketing provides one of the greatest returns on investment of any marketing effort. In fact, 90% of attendees have more positive feelings towards a brand after attending an event, and 85% would consider themselves ‘likely’ to purchase from the brand after the event. More than anything however, event marketing delivers a level of brand engagement and experience that simply cannot be matched through any other form of marketing.

However, Coronavirus has forced universities to close their Freshers Fairs, leaving a significant gap in the student marketing calendar for 2020. This has made the tricky task of engaging the student demographic an even more difficult one. To solve this issue, Freshers Festival Group have created the Virtual Freshers Festival: An online event that brings together tens of thousands of students, incredible social media influencers, and some of the biggest brands in the UK.We are so excited for Virtual Freshers Festival – both for the incredible experience it’s going to bring to our students, but also for the huge marketing potential it presents to brands.

What our audience wants

Students consume content faster than almost any other demographic. They have a significant presence on YouTube, Tik Tok, and Instagram, and this content all has one thing in common: Video. This is the reason we chose video as the primary medium for Virtual Freshers Festival. 90% of customers suggest they are more likely to purchase a product after watching a video, and brands can become much more relatable through successful video content. Similarly, in order to replicate the success of our physical freshers fairs, we want Virtual Freshers Festival content to have a highly personal and engaging approach, something that can only really be achieved through video content.

Particularly more recently, with the growth of Tik Tok and Instagram video, it is clear that short form video content is the medium of choice for students. At Virtual Freshers Festival, we aim for most content to be around 5 minutes or so in length, in order to maximise student engagement.

However, it is not just video content that will play an important role in VFF. There are many other ways you can produce interesting content to engage the student audience.

How to deliver engaging content through VFF

If you want to create the content for VFF yourself, there are many ways you can do this. The great thing about VFF is that the content you create can have multiple purposes. You can repurpose older content to use on our platform, or you can create content that can be used across multiple channels. Here are some of our top tips for delivering engaging content through Virtual Freshers Festival.

1. Use Existing Content – you have more than you might think!

You probably have a plethora of content on your social feeds already, much of which can be repurposed for Virtual Freshers Festival. Particularly for video content, these videos can easily be cut and edited to help form part of your VFF content. Then, rather than having to produce an entire student-focused video, you will only have to record small new sections, add them to existing promotional content, and the video process becomes much simpler!

2. Social posts

Whilst video content forms the basis of VFF, your social media page is also an exciting asset which should be effectively utilised. You will be driving your audience from your Virtual Freshers Festival channel to your social page, meaning your social media pages (particularly Instagram) will form an integral part of your marketing strategy. Your content before, during, and after the event should obviously have a student focus, and any student deals should be widely promoted during this time. The good thing about this is that it means you don’t only have to focus entirely on video content. Social media posts, deals, memes, and other student-centred photo content can also form a useful part of your VFF strategy. This is quick and easy content to put together, yet can really help your brand to stand out in the market.

3. Create long-lasting content

The great thing about Virtual Freshers Festival is that any video content you create can be used on your own socials and marketing efforts long after the event. There are no licensing issues, meaning the content featured on the platform is yours to keep. This means that the content can be re-used on your own social channels, your own advertising campaigns, your own brand’s YouTube channel etc. Therefore, you should try to make your VFF content as evergreen as possible. If the content is engaging, interesting, and eye-catching, then it will perform well for your entire audience, and won’t just have to be a VFF centric piece of content. Whilst creating engaging video content may take longer than usual, it will easily be worth it in the long run.

Let us create your content

If you are struggling for content creation, there are many ways we can help. There are a variety of options available to you when deciding what sort of content you want to make for Virtual Freshers Festival. Here are some of the options that we offer:

1. We will create engaging influencer content for you

Using influencers can be a great way to engage the student audience. Influencers achieve an extremely positive return on investment, with an average earned media value of $5.20 for every $1 spent. Students also treat influencer recommendations in a similar way that they would a friend’s recommendation, meaning influencers provide a much more trustworthy image to your brand. Lastly, all the influencers we use have a significant student audience, meaning any content that they may share on their socials will reach thousands more potential customers

But how do we use influencers for your brand’s VFF content?

Once you join Virtual Freshers Festival, you will receive an initial consultation about exactly what content you want to promote. We will discuss your KPIs, targets, and brand image, in order to help us understand the content and influencers that will be best for you.

After this consultation we will create a video brief based upon your KPIs and our expertise on the exact type of content that students will engage with. To create this brief we consult with influencers, current students, and numerous marketers in order to determine what type of content may be best for your brand.

After your approval of this brief, it is sent to our influencers. We work with a number of high profile student influencers, ranging from 10,000 – 300,000 followers. A price will then be agreed (based on length of video, size of influencer, type of content, etc.) and the video will then be created!

But what type of content do we create? There are many examples of potential video content that we can help you create with our influencers.

• ‘Mask ready makeup in 5 mins’ with lifestyle influencer
• ‘How to make fast food at home’ with food influencer
• ‘Top tips for your LinkedIn profile’ with student influencer
• ‘Zoom interview outfits’ with fashion influencer
• ‘Student-friendly workouts’ with fitness influencer

Here is an example of a campaign we ran with That London Duo (food influencers with 23,000 Instagram followers):

As you can see, we try to create fun, interesting, shareable content, rather than simply a ‘glorified advert’. This is the key for student marketing success. If you want us to help run you an influencer campaign, please contact Graeme Barratt on LinkedIn. 

2. We can create all sorts of content using our in-house videographer team.

If you do not want to spend budget on influencers, but do not have the time to create engaging video content yourself, then we cam help. Our in-house creators, combined with our team of talented freelance workers, can help make engaging video content for your brand. We can work with you on a brief, outline your KPIs, and come up with an interesting angle to your content that will be a hit with the students!

3. Sponsoring Freshers Festival content

One of the simplest yet best ways to get your messages across can be through sponsoring Virtual Freshers Festival content. Our weekly newsletter reaches 20,000+ students, our website has thousands of monthly views, and our social media reaches tens of thousands of students every day. We have an extremely engaged and trusting audience, and we can promote your brand to them in a number of different ways:

• Dedicated social media post to our Instagram audience
• Dedicated blog post on our website
• Feature in our weekly email newsletter to 20,000+ students
• Dedicated email to our 20,000+ student audience.
• Appear in VFF advertising which reaches 100,000+ students.

If you are interested in any sponsorship opportunities, please get in touch with us.