The back-to-school season is fast approaching, and it’s time to prepare your marketing campaigns. In this article, we’ve compiled a series of back-to-school marketing ideas to inspire your strategy. Whether you’re looking to interact with your audience, boost your sales or collect first-party and zero-party data to get to know your audience better, we’ve got you covered!
For this edition, we’ve decided to display and illustrate our back-to-school marketing ideas in a different way:
- We have integrated all our ideas into a Loyalty program (created with Qualifio Loyalty) launched by a fictional e-commerce site called Ecoshop.
- To see these marketing ideas, you’ll have to register as a member of Ecoshop’s loyalty program.
- Once registered, you’ll be able to play the different quizzes and games proposed by the brand (aka our back-to-school marketing ideas) and earn points.
Loyalty programs are certainly a highly effective marketing strategy for building consumer loyalty and maintaining a close relationship with your audience. We wanted to make the most of the back-to-school period to show you how you can combine interactive marketing and loyalty together to engage your audience.
We hope you’ll have fun joining the loyalty program launched by Ecoshop for back-to-school!
About the back-to-school marketing ideas integrated into the loyalty program
1. A battle: back-to-school mood
Why not poll your community on their mood at the start of the new school year? Firstly, this battle enables your brand to easily interact with your audience and know more about them. You can then use the results to inspire your other marketing campaigns for back-to-school!
2. A sudden death: it’s time for a test
This sudden death quiz brings users back to the school benches. They’ll be immersed in a classroom, facing a teacher, and will have to answer the questions he asks them. To not make things too complicated, the answers to the questions will be hidden in the image, so they’ll have to keep their eyes peeled 😉
3. A swap & match special back-to-school
Like in the Candy Crush game, the swap & match is a memorisation game where participants need to swap objects to make a row or a column of at least three identical objects. The more objects they match, the more points they score!
4. A hidden object: class picture time
It’s class picture time! This game asks participants to look at an image (a class picture in this case) to find the hidden object (among your products, for example) by clicking on it. Put a time limit to challenge them even more and offer some of your products to the winners.
5. A blind test: the sounds of the office
Back-to-school also means back to business! Based on the idea of Red Pipe and their “The sound of colleagues” campaign, this blind test is about all the sounds you can find in an office. Participants have to listen to the different sounds and find what it is, either among the given proposals or by typing the correct answer. And to make it event more challenging, you can add a time limit!
6. A personality test: what’s your ideal career?
This personality test offers something valuable to your audience by helping them to find their ideal career. Not only are you enabling them to learn more about a relevant subject, but you’re also collecting valuable zero-party data from your audience!
Other back-to-school marketing ideas you could launch
During our brainstorming, we had even more back-to-school ideas you could launch to engage your audience. Here are the other ideas we didn’t include in the loyalty program:
- A memory game showcasing your products and offering to the fastest participant their snacks for the whole month of September;
- An obstacle run showcasing a child running after his bus to get to school on time;
- A hidden object where participants have to find all the school supplies hidden in a picture to win them for the new school year;
- A personality test helping your audience find out which new activity they should try out in September (cooking classes, sport activities, etc.)
- A catcher where participants have to catch your brand’s products for a chance to win vouchers for new shoes and clothes for back-to-business or back-to-school;
- A jackpot in the shape of a train to extend your audience’s holidays by giving them free tickets;
- A general knowledge quiz testing if your participants are ready for the new school year.
We hope you’ll find what you were looking for! And if you’re looking for other back-to-school marketing ideas to inspire your brand’s strategy, check out our previous articles:
