When your customers and your users are different, how do you market to them?
I am working on building a startup where my customers and my users are two different people. We are building an app to help highschoolers get into college. Our users are students, but our customers are parents.
We were originally focusing our marketing around students, but few of them were converting into paid users as they don't have buying power. We now switched to focusing on parents, however it's hard to convert them as well because they are not users of the product.
The age group of highschoolers (14-18) is a though one. They are not as small as to have their parents decide everything for them and be very involved, but they are not big enough to be fully independent and make their own decisions. So we are kinda stuck.
Do you have any tips on how we could market to them and increase conversion?
Thank you for the help!
We're experiencing something similar. Our app (https://wildkard.io) is meant for youth athletes (ages 13-18), but our customer is the coach (hard to acquire). What has helped us is to create a growth strategy centered around the coach's pain-points, which are wildly different from kid's pain-points. But, we need to solve for them since they bring the kids during acquisition. We've discovered email marketing to be the only effective channel (contact list building is super important). When we have more resources, we want to get into content marketing and placing ads on coach association newsletters.
I'd recommend ideating around a value message for parents - what is their incentive/pain-point associated with the problem you are solving. You then need to find where parents live online - think about Dad and Mom groups on social media, Quora, niche platforms, college discussion boards, parents associations, etc. And then find ways to engage them on those channels.
Where do parents hang around online and talk about universities for their high schooler children?