Have a startup need some help with marketing

Hello,

I have a launched my first startup company with a partner from school. It's basically a coupon type of site offering deals to college students, with our customer being small business owners around mid sized college campuses. Recently we have been offering our service for free to get deals on the site. Now, we have just promoted to students the past two days, however, have had limited success. We had students representing us by talking to other students and giving business cards, as well as having a deal "Like us on facebook for a chance to win $500 worth of textbooks". We have received little success with that, only producing around 50 likes around campus. Students seem interested as well as business owners. All we have talked to love the idea when we go into detail. But we are having trouble capturing that in our website traffic (~50 views per day) as well as facebook. Do you guys have any ideas as to what we can do?

Promote by using hot girls? It's college. No matter how many times I try to, I just can't see myself liking a status for a "chance to win" something. Maybe some viral marketing on facebook? Use memes to promote?

Free beer!

You have to know your target audience. Organize a party with big banners with your website name and give out flyers for the party with your website name all over it. Get the message across that thanks to your site, people will be saving money and helping local businesses.. and of course, hot girls always work

You have to get in the head of your audience.. here students.. when you were a student (or maybe you still are..? ) what grabbed your attention? Well, students are usually poor, so anything free will usually work. Also, students are horny so hot girls/guys work. Students are also bored and want to have fun so games, contests and parties are usually a winner..

Go to learn Guerrilla Marketing.

Football and basketball games offer several ways to do large scale promotions...put an ad in the campus newspaper for attractive girls to do flyer distribution at these events, sponsor something at the popular frats and sororities...most people are followers and if the right people are early adopters, people will follow their lead.

Here is what we are thinking:

First off, we have a competition coming up, in which we are one of 7 finalists out of 213 business plans in the state schools of PA. If we win this we are:

Re-doing the website - it initially cost us around $4k in design and development, however, it needs toned down, this project was done over 2 years as we could not fund full development off that bat. So some areas need fixed. However, we want to sift out all the BS and make the site more user friendly so we are thinking $5k should get a nice freelance or firm to take what we have already done and basically make it "Better"

Next:
Mobile application - vital component - this is our priority.

During this time we will try and get more businesses on board with our beta test - populate the site with more deals.

Then,
We would like to promote to students in the following manner:

Sponsoring club events
Judo/Wrestling/Boxing
Hold events, pay for the referees, trophies, rent the space, have another club do a food sale for their own profit for concessions.

ALL clubs must have their members facebook us and potentially share our page and deals, promote us with flyers (They should be excited as it will cut down on dues and other things for them). We then make it optional for guests to the events to like us on facebook at the door, they will be given a flyer of the event with our logo and on the back our description and why we are supporting the chosen clubs (I wrestle and would love to support groups as the above)

Fraternity events ---- Not so much parties (but social events ) we pay for some of their supplies, they have people like us to enter their door.

Student mailing lists
(well this is BHW after all, right )

Thoughts?

Thank you guys for the suggestions!

some questions:

1.) how long you started that idea?
2.) what kind of textbooks you are offering?
3.) you mentioned limited success, and you said the students are interested. How long you have been doing these exercises? And are you guys towards the end of semester where people already bought their textbooks?
4.) how did you promote the giveaway?

These questions may help you to adjust your campaign. I hope that helps

Yeah there's a lot of easy places to advertise in college, noticeboards, sponsor college events or even create an event of your own... easy peasy!

Ask the local companies for assistance. Try to put your ads in places your users tend to visit.
Like said above - there are a lot of possibilities.