Ask HN: How can I market to young parents?

[mauricio-OH]

Hi,

I've been working on Instagrad.com for a couple of months. Instagrad is a social funding platform to accelerate college savings.

We help parents raise funds for college by encouraging friends and family to contribute directly to a child’s established 529 Savings Plan. With Instagrad, a parent can easily create a profile for his or her child, create a campaign to help raise funding (birthday, Christmas, etc.), and then easily transfer the funds to their child’s college savings account (529 account).

What is the best way to reach and market to parents of young children? I'm not looking for "get mommy bloggers to talk about you" or "create a facebook page". I'm looking for specific winning tactics.

[brudgers]

Use local school systems as a marketing channel. This however requires the appearance of a local presence, or an alignment of your product with that of the local school systems.

One traditional example of national companies aligning with local schools is the school book fair. Another is the fundraiser by selling crap industry.

The example of a web based service that first came to mind was one allowing parents to fund their child's lunchroom account and the school to draw payments.

Your idea is more in line with the book fair, I think.

A third approach is to develop the product for wealth management companies - that's where the real money is, hmmm. There's also an alignment of your interests and theirs - so long as you offer better value than in house services. Again, this may be better targeted at a local level to agents rather than national companies.

Good luck.

[mauricio-OH]

great feedback - do you think facilitating the fundraising with books would help? we think this may work but it deviates somewhat from what we want to do as it means we help people do fundraising as opposed to us doing it which is what we want. If we have to change to make it succeed that works.

[mknappen]

Careful there- "mommy bloggers" are both your target market and a prime marketing channel. (Case Study: Purex Crystals, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/business/media/06adco.html)

[labaraka]

Link: http://www.instagrad.com/

[jyu]

If you have a marketing budget, use Facebook Ads. Target married people in a certain age range. The age range may vary based on education level.

[mauricio-OH]

We have done this but CTR on FB is very low. We spent a long time improving it and then landing page interaction is poor. I find FB ads are great for continued exposure in FB, for example, towards an FB page. However, to an external site, it's very difficult unless your value proposition is crystal clear. Considering young parents are not thinking of college per se, makes it difficult to be crystal clear in 2 seconds.

Have you seen succesful campaigns with FB ads?

[jyu]

Yes, FB ads was one of my main user acquisition channels for several years before I shifted from marketing to development. I remember there used to be ads for "Dad Scholarships go back to school" campaigns running for a long time, so what you're trying to do should work.

On FB, CTR is really really important, and you want to get your CTR up at least over .07%. My best campaigns started at .10% CTR and with a lot of refinement and optimization of the audience, I was able to get .20% to .40% CTR with more traffic than my dedicated server could handle for almost a year. Keeping in the FB ecosystem will lower your CPC, but it's doable with external sites too.

Based on the limited info you've provided, either you are not targeting the right demographics, or you have a messaging problem.

[mauricio-OH]

I think we target the right demographics but definitely are experimenting with messaging. Will definitely come back with more data on messaging.