Marketing to Millennials For Dummies
Overview
Market effectively to the millennial mindset
Millennials make up the largest and most valuable market of consumers in the United States —but until you understand how to successfully market to them, you may as well kiss their colossal spending power away! Packed with powerful data, research, and case studies across a variety of industries, Marketing to Millennials For Dummies gives you a fail-proof road map for winning over this coveted crowd.
Millennials are projected to have $200 billion buying power by 2017, and $10 trillion over their lifetimes — and yet industries across the board are struggling
to garner their attention. Revealing what makes this darling demographic tick, this hands-on guide shows you how to adapt to new media, understand the 'sharing economy,' and build meaningful relationships that will keep your brand, product, or service at the forefront of the millennial mind.
- Identify key millennial characteristics and behaviors
- Grasp and adapt to millennial economic realities
- Reach your target audience with integrated strategies
- Build deep, lasting connections with millennials
Get ready to crack the code —millennials are a mystery no more!
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About The 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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marketing to millennials for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Millennials make up a crucial part of the global economy, and they possess certain personality traits that make marketing to this coveted demographic a complicated road to navigate. Complex, however, doesn't mean impossible. The concept of Millennial is more of a mindset than an age range. The process of reaching and connecting with Millennials will be much easier if you remember to strategize around the many media Millennials use and recognize the unique qualities that Millennials prioritize with regards to a brand or product when making a buying decision.
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You may find yourself nodding your head each time you see a particular mistake. That’s because the majority of marketers have either made or might make these missteps when building out a Millennial marketing strategy.
Assuming laziness
Baby Boomers often have the opinion and perception that Millennials are spoiled, entitled, and lazy.
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Here, you will find some simple but effective tips to help keep you on the right track when crafting a campaign or acquisition strategy for Millennials.
Start with data
Data should drive everything you do. Data will prevent you from operating in the dark and basing your decisions on unfounded assumptions. Data can help you determine which decisions to make when you’re first building your strategy, and it can help you improve your operations at various points in your audit.
Marketers need to think about the concept of Millennial as a mindset or a persona, rather than an age bracket. The term Millennial often focuses solely on an age range. Generally, that means defining them as an audience made up of consumers born between 1980 and 2000. However, to succeed in capturing members of this audience, the definition needs to expand beyond that scope.
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For Millennials, experiences and relationships have a significant impact on a purchasing decision. Simply pushing a user toward an online store or through a conversion funnel does nothing to build a relationship. Relationships are cultivated as customers experience your brand over time. You don't necessarily need to create a unique campaign every time you want to convert new prospects.
When it comes to the buying journey, your prospects are no longer confined to one particular medium. Millennials aren't looking through a newspaper, watching television, or listening to the radio. Millennials may encounter potentially dozens of touchpoints (points in the buying journey where the consumer can connect with a brand or engage with a brand's message) before making the decision to buy.
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Millennials and Instagram go hand in hand. And Instagram ads exist within the Facebook advertising ecosystem, which means it’s fairly easy to run an Instagram ad campaign when you’re already familiar with Facebook’s backend.Millennials check Instagram throughout the day — starting when they wake up and ending before they go to bed — and engage with content at a significantly high rate.
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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.
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Once you have the rest of your Millennial marketing strategy in place, you can develop your Twitter content. Of course, you can’t prepare all of your content ahead of time. Third-party and network content will be spontaneous. The content you do want to develop ahead of time for Twitter will include
Evergreen
Promotional
Third-party sourced
Evergreen content
Your evergreen content will be sourced from your own media — primarily your website and blog — and you can continue to put it in rotation.
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After you make the initial introduction of your brand to your target Millennial audience, you can begin to develop the brand relationship. In this stage of the experience, you can use some sales-oriented content to encourage users to take the next step.
Engaging users with conversational content
At the relationship-building stage, it’s important not to solely focus on selling to your Millennial prospects.
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After you establish the objectives of your share economy campaign, you’re ready to provide your audience with incentives to participate. For example, you can create a place for your community to share access to online subscription services, such as creative software, instead of requiring them to buy access to each individual product.
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When developing your Millennial marketing strategy, leave plenty of room for mobile. Unlike other media, where your audience members can easily become distracted, content on mobile devices is largely served up in a singular fashion. This means that you have more of an opportunity to engage with a Millennial on a mobile device because your content is the only thing he or she is seeing.
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Your involvement in the share economy and targeting of Millennials doesn’t mean you need to change the way your business operates. The share economy, like any strategic tool, is something that you apply to a particular segment of your audience. Creating a voice for these users is an important part of your strategy.
Millennials have a tremendous influence over the national and global economy. The Fung Business Intelligence Centre estimates that by 2020, Millennials will control 30 percent of retail spending in the United States, up from 13.5 percent in 2013. That 30 percent, according to Standard & Poor’s, accounts for about $1.
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For Millennials, relationships are the root of loyalty. To build any kind of consistent audience base among this demographic, you need to nurture and form a relationship over time. Despite the common criticism of Millennials, they’re fiercely loyal and even willing to pay higher prices for certain products when they feel a personal connection to a brand.
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It will benefit you to find out how to create content that appeals to Millennials on each of your active channels. Here are some universal tips when developing content on various media:
Get to know your audience on each channel. Millennials are going to engage with brands and content differently on every channel.
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After some initial research, you’ll have a much better understanding of the small details that make your Millennial audience members tick. You’ll likely notice after conducting this analysis that not all of these individuals are exactly alike. Your Millennial audience analysis will uncover several subsets within the overall age demographic.
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While Millennials prefer receiving information in video form, simply creating a video won’t guarantee that you attract them to your brand. Millennials possess certain traits that you’ll want to consider when creating your video strategy:
Millennials have a short attention span. A 2015 Canadian study by Microsoft entitled “Attention Spans” found that the average attention span of adults is about eight seconds.
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As with any marketing strategy, Millennials included, it’s important to use your data to identify new opportunities. This is one of the most valuable takeaways from a data analysis.Check out some of the elements you want to be on the lookout for when identifying these opportunities within your data.
Outliers and influence points
When analyzing a data set, keep an eye out for statistical outliers or influence points that either fall out of the realm of standard deviation or manipulate the curve of the best of fit line that you’ve applied to your data set.
After your Millennial marketing content strategy is in place, you should take full advantage of Twitter’s advertising platform. Because Twitter data doesn’t zero in on Millennials like it does on Facebook, you should access your Twitter advertising dashboard and begin promoting specific tweets. You should also start running targeted campaigns geared toward Millennials.
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Creating an omni-channel communications strategy isn’t a practice unique to Millennial marketing. The media landscape requires that all marketers think in terms of multiple channels rather than focusing on each medium in a vacuum. An omni-channel communications strategy is the only way a long-term program can succeed.
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A great opportunity to engage Millennials takes place entirely on Twitter through its advertising backend. Twitter TV targeting is a mechanism that pushes your ads or sponsored content directly to consumers engaged with a particular television event while on Twitter.Take, for example, the popular HBO series, Game of Thrones.
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Data can come from virtually everywhere. Millennials leave small bits of information everywhere they go. To develop your Millennial marketing strategy, you use three types of data:
Data from your owned media channels like your website
Data from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
Data from public channels
Data from your owned media
Perhaps the richest center of owned data is available from the backend on your website.
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It may seem a little strange at first, but as far as Millennials are concerned, email isn’t considered a new media. Email is the digital side of what is now categorized as traditional media. Millennials, therefore, use email very differently when communicating with brands. Knowing what these idiosyncrasies are and tailoring your Millennial email marketing strategy to them will help you maximize the potential of this platform.
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After you determine the cause that Millennials will associate with your brand, you’re ready to start developing the materials that will work with your cause marketing. Remember that cause marketing can be something that is associated with your brand in perpetuity, or it can be something that your brand is participating in while it’s relevant to the community.
Marketing
Millennials make up a crucial part of the global economy, and they possess certain personality traits that make marketing to this coveted demographic a complicated road to navigate. Complex, however, doesn't mean impossible. The concept of Millennial is more of a mindset than an age range. The process of reaching and connecting with Millennials will be much easier if you remember to strategize around the many media Millennials use and recognize the unique qualities that Millennials prioritize with regards to a brand or product when making a buying decision.
Marketing
An editorial calendar can help you plan your Millennial marketing strategy. Your editorial calendar on Twitter is going to differ significantly from your editorial calendar on Facebook. Your network and topical content are examples of content that you can’t plan. Therefore, they can’t show up in your editorial calendar.
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Although data comes in many different types, all data exhibits certain universal indicators. By monitoring these indicators, you can get a better sense of what your data is telling you about Millennials and how to use it.
Outliers
Outliers are data points that sit outside of the normal range that you may expect to see when looking at a particular performance indicator, such as engagement.
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Leveraging the share economy to market to Millennials isn’t going to be a strategy that suits every brand. For some, there simply isn’t going to be a way to organically integrate a sharing component into a product or marketing strategy. To effectively leverage the share economy, you can run through a checklist that will help you determine whether your brand is capable of utilizing the strategy.
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According to the New Media Institute, new media is defined as media that are primarily digital. Millennials love new media. They offer a highly interactive platform that can be manipulated and customized. New media is an umbrella term that comprises all the platforms and social networks where Millennials are spending the majority of their time.
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Social media is at the root of the everyday lives of Millennials. Research from Mobile Advertising Watch shows that, on average, Millennials check their social accounts 17 times per day, and the majority of those checks take place on a smartphone. The reality is that social is going to play an enormous role in your mobile strategy.
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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?
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One of the fundamental differences between a traditional objective-oriented campaign and a brand experience campaign for Millennials is the seamlessness with which a brand experience campaign is executed. Users can move from one piece of content to another and from one channel to the next without becoming confused about the path designed for the process.
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Your share economy campaigns leverage unique segments of your Millennial audience, which means that the objectives you create will relate to a particular audience construct (niche) and may not necessarily focus on long-term goals. Your goals can relate to universal objectives, such as driving up brand awareness, engagement, or conversions, but they must target a particular segment.
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Developing thematic content is a useful tactic when building out your Millennial content strategy on Facebook. The frequency and regularity with which Millennials see this content will help build your organic reach and engagement over time. Several types of thematic content are easily tailored and adapted to any brand or industry.
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After you develop your Millennial content strategy, brand voice, audience clusters, and editorial calendar, you’re ready to begin taking advantage of Facebook’s robust ad platform. While network’s like Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others offer advertising options, Facebook is perhaps the most valuable when it comes to reaching Millennials in segmented clusters.
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You can use print media to target Millennials. For centuries, print media was the primary way to reach the masses. Most people got their news from newspapers and magazines. The development of new low-cost and readily available technologies means that print media has suffered. Nowhere is this truer than with the Millennial audience.
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Millennials, more so than any generation before them, have populated the web with a seemingly endless amount of data. As a result, everything you choose to do from building audiences to developing social ad campaigns will be completely rooted in data.Following are five steps you can take — before employing any strategy or starting any campaign — to ensure that you have data to justify every one of your decisions:
Review all the data sources to which you have access.
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Relationships drive Millennial buying decisions and inspire loyalty. The price may have a lot to do with the timing of the buying cycle, but ultimately a relationship can be the deciding factor. When you tie in the importance that Millennials place on cause affiliation, you can say with certainty that cause marketing can push your relationships with Millennial consumers forward.
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After you decide your tone and your ratios for the Millennial audience, you can apply them to a variety of content types on Twitter that make up the mix you want to share. Certain types of content will resonate with Millennials much better than others on Twitter. Following are some content types to consider:
Humor: Millennials love to laugh.
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