Ringing the Bell: Succeeding in Back-to-School 2024

Back-to-school marketing has always been a balancing act between exciting kids and appeasing parents. That’s not going to change for the 2024-2025 academic year.

What could make the balancing act easier is the bifurcation of channels.

Search is No Longer Only Google’s Game

Though search will remain an important channel in back-to-school 2024, search is no longer just Google, particularly for kids. Today, kids are more likely to search on TikTok and Instagram. And by kids, I mean anyone under the age of 25.

According to research from search-first creative agency Rise at Seven, there are 503 percent more searches on TikTok than on Google for fashion-related terms. This data point is for all users, not just those under 25 (though I’d bet that users 18 and under are even more likely to be searching on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube).

This means that the videos being created and uploaded for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube must be optimized for each platform and for the most relevant query terms per platform.

Though there are parents searching on TikTok, marketers can safely target their parent-focused search campaigns on Google. Moving forward a few years, I’d expect parents to increasingly use video-centric platforms for search as part of the continued "pivot to video" unless artificial intelligence functionality like ChatGPT overpowers video to dominate search. Only time will tell.

Power to the Parents

According to education consultant Michael Horn, parents are now feeling more empowered to make choices about their kids' education. I’d expect this empowerment to impact back-to-school shopping in 2024.

Whether it means more conservative back-to-school clothes or greater input in selecting clubs and after-school activities, increased parental involvement will impact back-to-school marketing. For some product categories, it might even warrant reducing the marketing spend focused on kids.

Greater parental power might provide an opportunity for products and services that can improve the educational experience for students. This can include products that previously might not have been part of the back-to-school shopping journey, like computer (and other) games with historical or educational tie-ins. Marketers should also consider relevant cross-selling opportunities to partner with bookstores (which often sell more educational games), and arts-and-crafts supply stores to enrich the back-to-school shopping experience.

In Place of Third-Party Data …

As marketers prepare for an advertising world with less data (unless it’s the marketer’s first-party data), they will increasingly turn to privacy-friendly targeting tactics. One such tactic is contextual targeting. This long-standing digital marketing tactic is making a comeback because it relies on matching ads with content without accessing user-targeting data. For example, a marketer selling school supplies can create ads and then define contextual ad groups. They can then select keywords that are contextually relevant to the products they’re advertising for students, which can include contextual keywords such as "homework," "learning," "math," etc. Once the ad campaigns are live, marketers should test the performance of the ad creative and select contextual keywords to optimize campaign performance.

A second tactic that's gaining traction, particularly for back-to-school marketers with physical stores, is geo-targeting. Today, digital marketers can work with select demand-side platforms (DMPs) to target prospective customers according to state and province, U.S. county, and even city or ZIP/postal code.

Marketers can upload the ZIP codes closest to their stores and can geo-target prospective customers according to a specific radius from a store to reduce wasted ad impressions.

Not surprisingly, technology will impact the back-to-school shopping season, particularly for parents buying devices for their kids to use in the coming school year. And as anyone with kids knows, they're spending more time on digital devices. According to data from consumer research provider Circana, 62 percent of parents said that their preschoolers used a tech device for school learning in Q2 2023. However, there is a technology-driven silver lining for some parents: 23 percent of parents with kids under 18 say that they expect to buy fewer school supplies this year because of technology devices.

Sahar Musafi is an optimization manager at mobile user acquisition platform Zoomd, where she is responsible for analyzing campaign data in order to optimize campaign performance while scaling revenue and achieving client reach and other KPI objectives.