The end of the school year is an event that every university student looks forward to, when tests and papers disappear and there is an entire summer of traveling, projects, and relaxing ahead. But the beginning of the new school year comes around again surprisingly quickly, often catching students by surprise. For those of us who lead college organizations or manage businesses that cater to university students, it’s very important that the new school year doesn’t catch us by surprise as well. In fact, spring is exactly the right time to plan out your promotional activities for the fall, so that you can get all of your marketing stress balls, print items, and other materials in place before those freshman orientation and student life fairs happen.
Take Time for Creativity
If you have been promoting your company or campus organization for several years, you may have settled into a comfortable pattern for student events. You always use the same tablecloth, floor sign, and brochures, and you may distribute the same imprinted pens, key chains, or plastic cups at every event. But when you start thinking carefully about the next school year’s events far enough ahead of time, you can exercise creativity and come up with even better ideas for getting students interested in what you have to offer.
Analyze what you’ve done in the past, what has seemed to attract the most attention, and what hasn’t been as successful. Build on those conclusions and consult other sources to come up with creative ways to connect with students more effectively. If you decide that you would really like to design a new sign with brighter colors, print a new brochure that emphasizes different features of your service, or invest in a different type of giveaway item, you’ll have time to make those changes before the deadline.
What Do Students Want?
One of the most important rules of marketing is to orient yourself from your audience’s perspective as you think about what to offer. You may want to focus on certain services of aspects of your organization, but if that isn’t what the average person walking by your table is really interested in, you won’t make many meaningful connections. There may be a product or service that isn’t really the “flagship” of your business, but it may be a great attention-getter for college students. If you can lead with that, you’ll start more conversations, in which you can transition to talking about those more important services.
Sometimes what a college student really wants, at least in the short term, is something fun and goofy. You may represent a bank or other very serious organization, but promotional products like marketing stress balls with your logo printed on them could be the fun “hook” that gets a student to stop at your table and find out what you’re all about. With this approach, you could get the name of your business in front of a young person for the next few months in a way that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.
The Case for Stress Balls
Whether it’s a returning student or an incoming freshman, one thing is sure: there is a lot of stress ahead for them in the coming school year. They may not all be fully aware of that fact yet, but after a few weeks, a simple tool like a stress-relieving squishy ball could become an important go-to item for a student who finds himself faced with pop quizzes, long papers to write, and the general upheaval of living away from home for the first time. By distributing imprinted stress balls at back-to-school events, you can make sure students remember you and the conversations they had with you every time they reach for that stress ball.
Aside from their serious function as a stress reliever, stress balls are just fun. You might choose to give away small football or baseball-shaped stress balls that will get tossed back and forth across dorm rooms and maybe even the classroom on occasion…but hopefully not during class! Fun, quirky designs are perfect for decorating a student’s desk and reminding them to smile once in a while, even while they pull an all-nighter to finish a midterm paper. And a stress ball cell phone holder can serve both purposes at once, providing a useful service in a fun, enjoyable way.
Ordering Your Stress Balls
This spring, we hope you will spend some time on our website as you plan out your promotional activities for the 2019-2020 school year. Whatever theme you want to focus on and whatever service you want to emphasize, our catalog is sure to have several stress ball designs that can deliver your message in a memorable way. Many of our most popular designs are available in a wide range of different colors, so that you can either match your company’s branding or select the color that you think will best attract the eye of a student from across the room.
The most important part of placing your stress ball order, of course, is uploading and imprinting your company or organization’s name and logo. With decades of experience in the industry, we have made it easy for you, the customer, to tell us exactly what you want your stress balls to say and how you want them to say it. Our online system lets you upload text, font, and logo images, and an expert designer looks over your information to determine whether it will work well on that particular stress ball design. If there are any factors that could negatively affect the final product, we get back to you with specific questions and suggestions for making your promotional products as successful as possible.
You may be feeling tired at the end of the school year, but don’t put off your back-to-school event planning! Once you get everything in place and submit your bulk order for marketing stress balls, you can take it easy and enjoy your summer vacation, knowing everything will be ready for those fall events.