Summary
Comcast knew Gen Z was a high-value consumer base for its Xfinity brand, but was only reaching part of the audience. The Xfinity On Campus (XOC) service provided great value to students in select on-campus housing, but it wasn’t relevant to students living off campus or attending schools outside the XOC footprint. Comcast partnered with SheerID to develop a strategy capable of engaging all US college students, no matter their living situation. The result was a top-selling program that generated unprecedented year-over-year growth for Xfinity Student.
Challenge
Comcast is a telecom giant with stellar streaming content, but when it came to the fast-growing Gen Z audience, the brand was losing ground to competitors. The company knew its content appealed to digitally savvy 18-to-24-year-olds—a fast-growing segment that offered the brand incredible revenue potential. The challenge was to find the right way to engage them.
“Comcast has product superiority to serve the needs of Gen Z, but we didn’t have the means to provide exclusive subscription packages to meet the needs of each niche student audience,” said Cheri Davies, Comcast’s senior director of acquisition marketing. “We needed to expand our strategy to fulfill the needs of additional student audience segments, most notably those living off campus and in non-XOC markets.
Comcast needed to find a way to reach Gen Z college students with targeted, relevant offers that would complement their existing XOC marketing efforts. The process needed to verify a student’s status to prevent offer abuse and give Comcast permissioned data so it could fully own the brand relationships and nurture them as Gen Zers graduated and moved into their adult lives and careers.
Comcast has product superiority to serve the needs of Gen Z, but we didn’t have the means to provide exclusive subscription packages to meet the needs of each niche student audience.
Solution
Comcast’s first step was to develop a student offer to meet the needs of Gen Z consumers living off campus or outside of the XOC footprint. Then it needed to promote all Xfinity student offerings via an integrated marketing strategy with the ability to adapt to the varying needs of the student audience.
Research confirmed Comcast had three of Gen Z’s top four priorities: fast internet, streaming media, and gaming. Music was the only thing missing, so the company partnered with Amazon Music to develop an unforgettable Gen Z package. For one low price, college students could receive fast internet, Xfinity’s great content, six months of Amazon Music Unlimited free, and a $150 Visa prepaid card.
To secure the offer, Comcast used SheerID’s Audience Network. Students would simply visit Comcast’s landing page and enter basic information, such as their email address and the college they attended. SheerID would instantly verify their eligibility, and students would finish subscribing without ever leaving Comcast’s website.
With the offer in place, Comcast was now armed with offerings to meet the needs of any US student. Cheri’s team evolved the seasonal XOC program into an always-on, peer-to-peer student marketing program that promoted the complete library of Xfinity offerings and had the flexibility to adapt messaging to be most relevant to any student segment.
The authentic voice of Xfinity Student Brand Ambassadors provided trust and authenticity within the Gen Z audience, localizing the benefits of content and offers to the unique culture of each school community. Over months of sustained peer engagement, Brand Ambassadors hosted their own Xfinity events, integrated the brand into existing school programming and activities, and created and published organic Instagram content to their personal accounts.
SheerID provided a 100% guarantee that only students could redeem the offer, which gave us the confidence to make it really appealing to Gen Z without any fear of losing revenue to discount abuse.
Results
Partnering with SheerID unleashed Xfinity’s full potential with Gen Zers. The strategy won students’ attention and drove 6x growth in subscriptions year-over-year.
In addition to tremendous growth, Cheri said the program generated high levels of Gen Z engagement. The largest increase came from organic and paid search, and year-over-year conversions increased by 91%.
“Xfinity’s College Student Program is the top performing gated program in Comcast history, and much of the credit goes to SheerID,” said Cheri. “Their holistic approach fully ensured we could reach the right audience and deliver targeted product messaging in a credible way. We could never have launched such an ambitious campaign and seen such incredible results without this partnership.”
Partnering with SheerID has given us a powerful new way to capture and engage our ideal customer segment. Their teams stood up to every task and continue to be onboard with us 24/7.