As advertisers are wrestling with the right language, cause, channel, and overall marketing approach to reach Gen Z, 2023 will be an even more important time for brands to figure out how to reach the most ethnically-diverse, and largest generation in American history. As seen in a recent research study, Gen Z doesn’t want to be advertised to. This presents a big challenge for marketers. So, preparing successful campaigns in 2023 will require a different approach to advertising.
The new Gen Z marketing channel brands have been waiting for
ScholarshipOwl, the most advanced scholarship platform with over 8 million students, is rolling out Scholarship Campaigns as a new marketing channel that doesn’t advertise to Gen Z, but instead, activates them. Scholarship Campaigns automate the scholarship creation, reach, management, and optimization process to finally enable marketers to utilize scholarships as a new marketing channel to achieve their business goals.
Rather than limiting the power of scholarships to mostly manually-driven corporate responsibility efforts, ScholarshipOwl empowers all your brand’s marketing teams to automate the creation, execution, and optimization of Gen Z-focused Scholarship Campaigns that drive sustainable performance. Scholarship Campaigns can now become a vital part of your marketing efforts.
Show Gen Z you care about them
Gen Z can easily tell what brands care about. Most brands are running ads that focus primarily on their products, or themselves. Every social media platform is littered with millions of ads that are wholly transparent in their goal to sell products, limiting their ability to establish a brand connection. Gen Z knows how to easily skip traditional digital advertising strategies, or simply move between channels during commercial breaks.
With Scholarship Campaigns, brands can show Gen Z that they care about them.
According to Jeremiah Emmanuel, a youth activist and Gen Z expert, “We cannot be seen as a marketing segment, but as the leaders, thinkers, writers of tomorrow. Having this outlook can help brands delve into what really matters to young people and, in turn, enable them to channel this in their own communications.”
Gen Z wants to be heard and valued. “I like to know that I am being valued as an individual with the freedom to express my ideas and knowledge, that I am chosen for my work and not to tick the diversity box, “ said Sahra-Isha Muhammad-Jones, founder of ASRA Club, BA Queen Mary University of London’21.
The primary purpose of Scholarship Campaigns is to help Gen Z achieve their goals. If you compare this to the traditional advertising objectives found in the ad platforms at Meta, Google Ads, Tiktok, etc., they focus on brand awareness, traffic, sales, etc. The starting place is focused primarily on what benefits the brand, not Gen Z.
ScholarshipOwl’s Scholarship Campaign objectives focus on the goals that matter most to Gen Z including the following:
Advertisers running Scholarship Campaigns begin by selecting one of the Scholarship Campaign Objectives above. For example, if you’re a brand delivering financial solutions to Gen Z, you could select the Scholarship Campaign objective, “Financial Mastery” where you’ll be taken through a creation flow to design a scholarship that helps Gen Z master how to make and manage money.
If you’re a brand delivering travel solutions to Gen Z, you could select the Scholarship Campaign objective, “Spark Curiosity” where you’ll be taken through a creation flow to design a scholarship that gives Gen Z a reason to learn new things.
This format allows brands to truly collaborate with their target market and apply their insights, creativity and vision to create memorable and effective brand campaigns.
Scholarship Campaign Manager is the marketing dashboard you’ve been missing
ScholarshipOwl’s new Scholarship Campaign Manager is a self-service scholarship platform that empowers brands to manage and optimize scholarship campaigns at scale to reach their business goals.
With ScholarshipOwl’s Gen Z audience growing at 150,000 new accounts every month; Scholarship Campaign Manager lets brands target your scholarships by demographic, geographic, diversity, education, degree, and other options. As a result, students will be made aware of the opportunities that best fit their profile, allowing them to collect the maximum amount of award funds for their education needs.
Brands will also benefit from an easy way to manage applicants, create tax deductible awards, select winners, disperse awards, and measure scholarship campaign performance all from one place. Plus, we’re making it possible for brands to amplify their Scholarship Campaigns by setting a Sponsored Scholarship Campaign budget. The Scholarship Campaign Manager makes a scholarship campaign easier to manage than an advertising campaign.
Learn more about Scholarship Campaigns
Brands can begin their Scholarship Campaign efforts by going to business.scholarshipowl.com where they can launch their first scholarship campaign, and find out more about Scholarship Campaigns and the ScholarshipOwl Scholarship Campaign Manager, our new self-service platform. You can also access case studies, best practices, and more.
