What is a brand partnership?
While a one-off campaign can deliver great results for a specific objective, with the best will in the world, it can’t give you a holistic view of your brand. There simply isn’t time to test everything. That’s where a TSR partnership can really add value.
A brand partnership gives you much deeper engagement, more powerful insights and the chance to keep refining your communications strategy as your campaigns gather data. Partnerships also involve more collaboration, which means your partners are highly invested in achieving exceptional results.
How does a TSR partnership work?
At The Student Room, we start by talking through your unique brand challenges and goals. For example, you might want to increase your target audience’s awareness of a recent award or achievement.
Next, we find content our users are already engaging with and develop a communications strategy. We prioritise our audiences’ needs and match them with your brand positioning objectives.
By leveraging the trust our audience already places in The Student Room, we can position you as the authoritative voice in your field.
Benefits of a TSR partnership
Our tailor-made partnerships are the perfect way to engage and understand a youth audience. By building content our users love and need, you can develop meaningful relationships with our community.
A trusted platform and the perfect audience
With over 10 million monthly users, The Student Room can promote your message to highly targeted audiences on a large scale.
Young people come to us expecting to find useful, expert advice to solve their problems, so it is easy to integrate content that demonstrates you are aligned with their values.
Users also volunteer actionable targeting data every time they use our site. For example, they tell us what they study, what year they are in, their interests and their location.
An added benefit is that we can apply the findings from onsite activities to offsite communications, such as targeting via Facebook.
Valuable content positions your brand as an expert
Our knowledge of content that works for our audience, coupled with robust data, allows us to match our users’ needs to your expertise and USPs.
The data proves that there is high demand and engagement around your chosen topic, allowing us to plan co-branded content which is valuable for our users and focused on your conversion goals.
We can test a range of formats and media to tell your brand story, such as:
- Events
- Social media
- Advice articles
- Video/rich media e.g. in situ features
- Quizzes
- Ebooks
- Infographics
- Listicles
In-house experts allow ultimate campaign flexibility
Our partnerships are agile and responsive, meaning that our in-house experts are on hand to continually assess and optimise your campaigns in a live environment.
They will use leading technology for segmentation, targeting and refining copy, so that your message reaches the right audience at the right time.
This also gives you the flexibility to fine-tune your strategy and communications based on user feedback and engagement rates.
Our dedicated team has a wealth of expertise in a broad range of specialisms, including: digital marketing, user testing, copy-writing, design, community engagement and more.
How we measure the success of our TSR brand partnerships
Awareness communications are not always a last-click solution. The true value of our partnerships is often far-reaching and transformative for brands.
Of course, we measure all the usual KPIs (dwell time, unique users, pageviews, audience breakdown/segmentation, social media impressions and engagements, referrals, conversions, clicks and open rates etc), but we know that many of our users go through a long decision-making cycle before converting.
They engage, consider, then act.
Therefore, in addition to measuring direct response and your initial conversions, we also capture the long-term value.
To measure broken journeys and show you which of your users have previously engaged with TSR content, we use technologies like Google Tag Manager.
Finally, we use surveys to measure brand sentiment before, during and after your partnership campaigns. We offer support with handling the survey responses, as well as benchmarking data using control groups who did not engage with your content.
UEA renewed their brand partnership for the third time
UEA wanted help to change students’ perceptions of UEA as a university and Norwich as a City. After a successful first year partnership, UEA renewed for a third time this year.
Our surveys revealed the partnership delivered a 80% uplift in students who would ‘definitely consider’ applying to UEA.
UEA delivered value for our users through student case studies, advice from lecturers, student advisors and the UEA Student Union.
The strategy was to deliver informative content at key stages in the decision-making process.
As with most native content projects, we found light-touch brand messaging to be the most effective.
Next steps for securing your TSR partnership
We’ve delivered lasting value for clients from every sector.
Our partners include: BBC, Birmingham City University, National Apprenticeship Service, RAF, Student Finance England, The University of Law, University of East Anglia, University of Portsmouth
Want to know what’s possible for your brand?
Call 0800 999 3222 or email hello@thestudentroom.com