Rs for the taking

A couple of weeks ago Streetscape and the myplace Support Team delivered the 3^rd Youth Marketing Conference, this time in London. Dozens of you attended to learn the secrets of communicating with your target audiences and how to involve young people in making all the decisions. As always it was brilliant to work one-on-one with myplace projects and address their unique problems. Everybody seems to be facing the same set of challenges:

• How can we raise awareness?
• How can we widen participation?
• What marketing methods work the best?

Awareness Raising:

• Is a bit wishy-washy
• Is hard to measure
• Doesn't achieve much
• Is confusing to the audience
• Doesn't offer anything significant

Direct Response:

• Get's young people to act
• Achieves SMART aims
• Can be measured and enhanced
• Tells the audience exactly what you want them to do
• Uses strong incentives

My basic argument is that direct response marketing also raises awareness, so you get double for your money. But it also tells young people what you want them to do - come to our open day, log on to a website, etc. So while awareness-raising might help people to find out about you, direct response marketing puts bums on seats. In short, it achieves your targets.

As for widening participation and choosing your marketing methods, these subjects are covered fully in the myplace Marketing Toolkit launched on the Support Team website last month. If you haven't already downloaded it, do it now! It will save you £thousands in wasted time and budget. The toolkit is focused on the most important aspect of marketing for new projects; recruitment, or in other words, getting new people through the door. Recruitment is the first stage in any marketing process - if you don't have any ‘customers' who are you going to market to? The toolkit will teach you how to find them, how to get them interested and, ultimately, how to get them involved.

But once you've found your crowd, what happens then? This is what I call the 3 Rs of Youth Marketing:

• 1. Recruitment
• 2. Retention
• 3. Reactivation

But let's look at each separately and in more detail:

1. Recruitment

This is the subject that is covered in the toolkit. There's more than enough information in there to help you to attract a big crowd of young people. You'd be mad not to utilise this free resource; it's the culminated knowledge of hundreds of youth marketing projects and written by the UK's No 1 Youth Marketing company.

Recruitment focuses on attracting the attention of young people but then converting them into service users. That's the big distinction; there's no point having a huge list of young people that are aware of your project if they never attend your activities. So find them, offer them something exciting and get them to act!

2. Retention

It's easier to hang on to an existing friendship than it is to start a new one. Close friends are loyal friends. The same is true of your relationships with the young people that have started attending your projects. Once you've got them to experience your services, ask them to come back: It really is that simple!

Retention is all about relationship building. You've incentivised them to enter into a relationship with you, now starts the process of making them fall in love with you. You want them to be loyal: How would you do it in your personal relationships? Apply those same techniques with your new services users. Some examples are:

• Stay in touch
  Communicate with them on a regular basis, at least once a month
• Let them know you care
  Take an interest in each individual, remember their hobbies and interests, send them a card on their birthday, use their name all the time
• Build inter-dependence
  Encourage young people to get involved, ask them to lead activities or develop new ones, give them a T-shirt to wear with your logo on it, call them ‘partners', ask them to tell their friends and spread the word
• Be friendly
  Talk to them as if you are already friends, be light-hearted and informal, make jokes and don't be afraid to inject your personality into your marketing
• Make them like you
  Be your best at all times, show empathy and passion, be attractive and associate yourself with things that your audience likes

3. Reactivation

If you focus on customer retention you should hang on to your ‘customers' for a very long time. Research shows that the main reason that people switch from one service provider to another is that they feel their existing company doesn't care about them. A strong relationship will stop young people from leaving and going elsewhere. But what if they do leave? Well, you should have a strategy for getting them to come back.

Reactivation uses many of the same techniques as Recruitment. You need to use lots of incentives. Special offers work well, as do ‘members only' style events. But often it's as simple as asking them to come back. Write to young people that you haven't seen for 3 months, tell them you miss them and ask them to come back. If that doesn't work, result to bribery; everyone responds to the right incentives.

Which R is the best?

Once you have used the toolkit and have a large crowd of young people using your services, I recommend that you put your maximum effort and budget into hanging on to them. It's easier and cheaper to build onto an existing relationship than it is to start a new one. Your next focus should be on getting ‘expired' users to come back. And then finally you should be reaching out to new people. So the cycle looks like this:

So as you can see, recruitment becomes less important over time and retention becomes much more important. I'll cover relationship building in more detail in future articles. For now, download that toolkit, start attracting your crowd and work on building those relationships.

John Davidson