The science of segmenting your campus list

Your campus list is the starting point for a successful college marketing campaign. But most brands only segment on the basics: school size, state, and maybe school type. They’re designing a list around conditions for reach rather than conditions for performance.

That’s a mistake. Reach is important, but it’s meaningless without the right segmentation criteria behind it. We looked at data from dozens of real client campaigns and identified five segmentation factors that have a measurable impact on performance.

Five segmentation factors that measurably impact campaign performance

When building your campus list, start by identifying the campus conditions that give your campaign the best chance to succeed. We've found that the following five factors are especially impactful:

1. Local geography — how easy is it for students to act? Campus proximity matters. The same message can perform very differently if the next step is a short walk, a quick drive, or farther away from campus/
2. Academic calendar dates — when are students most reachable? Move-in, class start, finals, and other key dates vary widely by campus. If your campaign launches on the same date everywhere, it could hit one campus during move-in and another in the third week of classes.
3. Affluence — how much spending power do students have? Household income, campus housing affordability, and student debt levels can all affect how students respond to your message.
4. Campus partnerships — what local dynamics help or hurt this campaign? Many campuses have partnerships and exclusivities with multiple brands. If a campus already has a relationship with competitor, your campaign may need a different messaging approach.
5. College major — how does the student body makeup affect relevance? The concentration of majors on a campus can affect how well a message aligns with student interests and priorities.

This level of segmentation is difficult to do manually. It requires a level of campus-specific targeting that most internal teams and agencies don’t have. We do this for brands every day at flytedesk. Our platform sorts thousands of campuses by dozens of specific criteria, allowing us to build highly segmented campus lists in a matter of minutes.

Campus segmentation in the real world

We used the flytedesk platform to create an actual campus list for an imaginary supplement brand. The brand is online-only and wants to promote a new line of supplements designed to help students focus better, boost mental clarity, and retain more information when they study. They want to reach students with a targeted offer during midterms and finals, when the urgency for a study solution is highest.

Given these brand characteristics and the campaign goals, we identified the campus conditions that give our campaign the best chance to succeed — distance from a pharmacy, college move-in dates, student spending power, the local competitive landscape, and student body characteristics. Using the flytedesk platform, we then applied those conditions to our entire database of over 2,300 college campuses to build our final list of roughly 500 campuses that:

1. Are not within walking distance of a pharmacy
2. Have available ad inventory during midterms and finals on each campus
3. Have a higher than average proportion of high-income students
4. Do not have partnerships with competing delivery apps
5. Have a high percentage of health- and fitness-focused majors

In other words, we designed our list around conditions that maximize our likelihood of success.

Not just reach. Not just relevance. A set of campaign-specific, context-aware conditions designed with the end goal in mind.

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