Marketing to Millennials For Dummies
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Personalization is key when you attempt to drive action from your Millennial audience. Relationships matter a great deal to Millennials. Sending personalized, hypertargeted content is the best way to build loyalty, higher-than-average engagement, and conversions.

Hypertargeting is the process of taking your content customization a step further. Instead of simply tailoring your content to some of the universal audience traits that you identified in your initial analysis, you’re going to dive deep into each of the segmented audience clusters. This deep-diving process will help you identify the most unique traits for each segment. It will also help you tailor your campaign content to focus on the small details that make each of these audience clusters distinctive.

While the overall message in your content may be the same across each of your Millennial audience clusters, the delivery, structure, and creative approach may differ. Those differences can be relatively negligible, such as the use of a particular keyword that regularly leads to a higher click-through rate with one audience. Or those differences may be significant, like the use of a short video with one audience and an image featuring a call-to-action with another. There may also come a time when you identify an audience cluster that suits the target audience criteria for a campaign, while another may not.

Audience clusters are unique in many ways. Apart from their categorization as Millennials, they’re made up of users that significantly differ from one another. You may find yourself launching a campaign that’s right for only half of your clusters. Therefore, analyzing the characteristics of each cluster is important to ensure that you don’t waste ad dollars on ones that simply don’t fit with the objectives, messaging, or structure of a campaign.

To develop hypertargeted content for each campaign, follow these steps:
  1. Identify the audience clusters that fit your campaign.

    Remember that not every audience cluster will be right for every campaign. You’ll do a disservice to yourself by trying to tie every member of your larger audience into every campaign. This approach can cause you to spread your ad dollars too thin. It is better to focus on the most viable audience segments first and then see whether you have an opportunity to incorporate others after you exhaust the potential of your most valuable audience clusters.

  2. Select the defining characteristics of each cluster and let it guide your content development.

    The small details of these groups are what makes them so valuable. After you identify the audiences that best fit your campaign, review the audience persona outline to see what makes them unique. These unique characteristics will be the guiding force behind your content development.

  3. Prioritize your audience according to value.

    Based on the objectives that you’ve outlined, particular audiences will possess traits that make them more valuable than others. It is your job to go through the defining characteristics pulled from Step 2 to determine which ones are the most valuable.

    At the beginning of the content development process, you may want to create a numerical scale with brief descriptions, based on a quality score — perhaps 1 through 5. This scale will make the process of determining audience cluster viability much simpler because you’ll be able to quickly determine each cluster’s viability.

  4. Create universal messaging and content for your campaign.

    Creating a series of messages that are not tailored to one group or another will make the process of customizing that messaging much simpler. This customization is made easier because the foundation of the message will already be laid out in this step.

  5. Tailor your universal messaging to the idiosyncrasies identified in Step 2 of this process.

    Finally, take that universal message and tailor the message of your campaign to each one of the Millennial audience segments.

After completing these steps, you’ll have the necessary personalized content to use in your campaign. Personalization is a crucial part of building lasting relationships with these users.

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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