May We Have Your Attention, Please: How to Market to Millennials
Capture the attention of Millennials with these marketing tips.
1. Be Transparent
Millennials (like most consumers today) have virtually any information they want at their fingertips. Because of this, it is vital for brands to be honest, authentic and transparent at all times. Millennials are being bombarded with thousands of messages every day, so providing them with a holistic and positive experience will set your brand apart from the crowd.
2. Let Your Audience Shine
This group of consumers is extremely susceptible to influencer marketing and positive word of mouth. Focusing on user-generated content to help tell your brand story is the best way to increase organic audience engagement and reach. Contests, giveaways, influencer campaigns and guest bloggers are all excellent ways to let your audience become the star of the show.
3. Optimize for Social
To Millennials, social is everything. Not only is it how they choose to interact with brands, it’s also how they choose to share brand experiences with others — both positive and negative. A strong social presence is a must for brands looking to engage with this demographic. But, it’s not enough just to post on social, you need to be sharing rich content, encouraging organic engagement and making sure that all content you share is optimize properly for social sharing.
4. Don’t Market Your Products, Market Your Story
Millennials care about a brand’s purpose, mission and impact on the world. Unlike older generations who care more about product features and benefits, younger generations want to know the whole story. What makes your brand different from others? What solutions do you offer to their problems? How are you impacting those around you? These are all questions Millennials want answered.
5. Listen, Listen, Listen
Listening to your consumers can be truly helpful when trying to figure out how users feel about your products as well as understand how they operate. Do they love it, hate it, wish some features could be changed? Millennials can, and will, tell you how they feel — you just have to be willing to listen.
6. Ditch Traditional Ads
This generation cares more about organic experiences rather than a hard sell. Aside from trust, Millennials find traditional ads annoying — pop ups, display, social media and YouTube ads are not very popular with this generation. To reach Millennials you have to focus on organic content that is honest, impactful and worthy of a share.
7. Let Them Come To You
In today’s world, consumers want to seek out a brand, not the other way around. With unlimited information at their fingertips, Millennials prefer to make purchases on their own terms. Educating your consumers, relying on positive word of mouth and online reviews, and sharing content that matters will all help Millennials seek out your brand when they are ready to shop.
8. Make Things Personal
If you do plan on using ads to market to this generation, make sure they are timely and relevant to each individual user. Nowadays, consumers expect all ads delivered to them to be customized to their wants and needs — not just a generic ad for all users to see. Whether it’s a social media ad, email campaign, or on-site lead generation strategy, make sure the content you are delivering makes sense for each user.
