Balancing social media with all the daily tasks you have often feels impossible. If you tilt one way, you end up falling into the social media blackhole and losing hours of your day when you should have been focusing on work. If you lean the other way, it is easy to neglect a valuable tool for connecting with customers. Life would be so much easier if you knew where and when you should post, but that’s just a dream … or is it?
Text messaging, email, website, phone, mail, apps, chat, social media, advertisements, in the age of information communication shouldn’t be difficult. The many options for how we speak with one another haven’t made communication simpler. Instead, they have created a cloud of noise that is difficult to maneuver through. How can you ensure your message reaches your specific audience?
Winning the heart of today’s student means showing you care about the two things: money and career.
Topics: Marketing to Students, podcasts, Bookstore marketing
What do you think of when you think of podcasts? Coming into this, I wasn’t a fan. Really, that’s probably not a fair statement. I simply never thought about them. I didn’t understand what podcasts provided. In my mind, I equated them with a morning radio show — I’d rather listen to music. Podcasts, however, are so much more.
Topics: textbook affordability, rental
June 19, 2018, Basking Ridge, NJ – Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. (NYSE: BNED), a leading provider of educational products and services solutions for higher education and K-12 institutions, today announced an agreement with Pearson to distribute Pearson rental titles at the Company’s 1,483 physical and virtual campus bookstores nationwide. The agreement will allow the companies to provide students, faculty and institutions with greater access to more affordable course materials.
Connecting with nontraditional students can be a challenge. As they come and go, more disconnected from campus events than other students, your message can be lost. Many of these students have jobs, they might have kids and they are older. All of this contributes to making them feel disenfranchised on campus. Keeping this population of students in mind, here are a few ideas of how your store can engage with overlooked students.
Topics: social media, facebook, snapchat
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” the loquacious Polonius famously spouted in Hamlet. This statement, originally fraught with irony, has been increasingly embraced by social media. Blog-like post length wasn’t uncommon on MySpace, Facebook favors shorter statuses but didn’t limit users, Twitter cut people off at 140 characters, and now pictures and videos often speak for themselves. Image dominance is evident not only in post engagement but also in the current race to win users’ smartphone cameras.
As the English poet John Donne famously posited, “No man is an island.” College campuses can often feel like their own, self-sustaining world. In a lot of ways, that’s what they are; jobs, housing, food and even medical services are often provided. However, no one exists in a bubble. Embracing the greater community beyond the campus walls can drive foot traffic, enhance the shopping experience and support the local economy.
Topics: window displays, pinterest, Bookstore marketing
As an author, the first chance you have to bring a reader into your world is with your book cover. A great cover will stop a person who is browsing. The art will present an intriguing story to the reader that makes them want to know more. Once the book is in their hands, it is up to the content inside to make the sale and create a loyal customer, but it is the cover that makes the introduction. With a college store, creative and eye-catching window displays act in the same manner.
Topics: college retail, MBS Expert, college bookstore, spotlight
We had the pleasure of sitting down in Oklahoma with Territory Manager David Ritz to discuss his long career in the college bookstore industry and how he thinks college retailers can adapt to the changing course materials distribution environment.
Contact our editorial team to set up an interview or to contribute a guest post.
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