Marketing to Millennials For Dummies
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Before diving into the various media platforms to see how to create targeted Millennial audiences, think about the following questions, which are designed to facilitate the audience development process:
  • What are your objectives by media type?
  • What does your ideal Millennial audience member look like?
  • How will the customer journey connect across various media?
  • How do you prioritize target demographics and psychographics?
  • Can you define some of the segmented audience pocket umbrella categories right away?

What are your objectives by media type?

Not all media are alike. Every platform offers up something unique and valuable. For this reason, Millennials use them in very different ways. Take time at the outset of your campaigns to understand how Millennials use these media platforms and what objectives are best suited for each one. This will assist you in the creation of targeted Millennial audience goals in the shortest possible time.

What does your ideal Millennial audience member look like?

Use an analytical process to build your Millennial audience, which will help you build a targeted series of audience clusters or segments. Asking what your ideal audience member looks like will provide you with a working road map. It will also help you determine whether something is wrong with your clusters or whether the data has presented a new opportunity.

Here are a few key elements that you’ll want to address to develop your ideal audience profile:

  • Age range: Age range limits the audience to users between a certain set of ages.
  • Education: Education looks at users that have either completed or are in the process of completing a certain level of education, such as high school or college.
  • Income: Income will focus on an audience that earns a certain range of income each year. This income range is determined by Facebook based on a series of criteria including self-reported job title and career field.
  • Location: Location settings will target your ad to audience members in a given location.
  • General interests: Interest categories and topics are selected in an effort to reach Facebook users that have expressed an interest in a particular field or subject.
  • Employment field: Employment field limits the focus to users that have indicated they work in a particular field by self-reporting this data.
  • Buying behavior: Buying behavior can include aspects such as the number of touchpoints a user will need before making a decision
  • Brand engagement tendencies: Engagement tendencies tell you whether a user prefers to click on an ad or like it on Facebook. It can also be as broad as Very Often or Rarely.
Use this list as a guide and add any additional ones that you decide are important to you.

How will the Millennial customer journey connect across various media?

Millennials are interested in a cohesive omni-channel experience. The omni-channel experience refers to the modern customer journey that includes interaction with several media and platforms in the buying process.

As you develop your target audience, you want to consider how every touchpoint and every medium connect. For example, when Millennial audience members leave your Facebook page, how do you ensure that the brand experience isn’t broken when they reconnect with you over email?

The omni-channel experience is an important concept for which you need to plan. No longer does a buying decision rely solely on brand recognition or proximity to a product. Millennials have access to vast amounts of information that is viewed on many different channels. Building a strategy that provides an optimal brand experience across all these channels is important.

You need to determine beforehand how you’ll track and measure every touchpoint and what your success metrics or key performance indicators will be.

How do you prioritize target demographics and psychographics?

After you determine the important demographics and psychographics of your ideal Millennial persona, you need to prioritize each of the characteristics that has been laid out. For example, if you’ve indicated that you want your audience to be interested in electronics and live within a five-state region, you need to decide whether the location (demographics) is more important to you than their interest in electronics (psychographics).

From this prioritized list, you can create audience pockets or segments. Then you can rank those pockets according to their value to your brand and business objectives.

When developing a Millennial persona, you want to consider the ideal Millennial customer, both in terms of demographics and psychographics (interests and behaviors) that you would like to target for a specific campaign. Narrow this list down to specifics that extend beyond basic age range and interests. The Millennial persona needs to be as detailed as possible.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Corey Padveen is an industry- leading marketing data expert with extensive experience building strategies and working with brands in a variety of industries to execute measurable growth campaigns. He is a partner at t2 Marketing International, an award-winning marketing consultancy that has worked with some of the largest brands in the world.

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