Marketing to Millennials For Dummies
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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.

Each of these audience clusters possesses its own set of characteristics and will respond very differently to various types of messages, campaigns, and images. With this in mind, you want to create even more narrowed audience pockets that take these idiosyncrasies into account. You can do this by

  • Developing strategies that reach Millennials on your owned platforms in public media spaces
  • Determining where brand awareness opportunities exist with other Millennial audiences that have not yet been directly identified
These strategies help drive up engagement and build more lasting relationships.

Identifying target audiences within your owned media

When you build out your target Millennial audiences, your owned media is likely going to be your easiest starting point. So, while you don’t necessarily have control over what is posted on a news website like The New York Times, you do have complete control over your own website or Facebook page.

On your owned media, you have a wealth of information about your audience that doesn’t exist on other platforms where you don’t have access to expanded audience profiles. Therefore, you can consider incorporating several elements into your audience clusters, which you can identify and group using a mix of your audience analysis and the data available within your owned audiences. These elements, which you can find in your Audience Insights analysis, include

  • Millennial: Targets age range segments, which are primarily users between the ages of 18 to 35
  • Gender: Choose either male or female users
  • Location: Can be as broad as a country or as narrow as a zip code
  • Lifestyle subsection: Identified from your audience analysis
  • Interest categories: Can be broad and all-encompassing
  • Interest topics: Select from a range of interests that your audience members have indicated matter to them, based on their profiles
  • Buying behavior: Based on various findings in your audience analysis
  • Liked pages categorization: Choose the kinds of branded Facebook Pages that your audience has indicated it’s interested in
  • Branded content engagement propensity: Helps you dictate the types of content (subtle or overtly branded) to develop for each one of your audience segments
  • Household details: May include income, home value, and whether a targeted user lives alone or with others
  • Education level: Select the level of education that your audience has received, from high school to post-graduate
  • Employment status and field of employment: Can target users based on the fields in which they work, their employer, or even by their job title
  • Marital or relationship status: Can segment based on relationship status as well, which can be particularly valuable when you are promoting a product or service — for example, that caters more to individuals who are married or who are planning a wedding

Categorizing target Millennial audiences within online public forums

The digital and social spheres of the web are filled with an endless number of conversations. The vast majority of them are publicly available and readily accessible. You should take advantage of this fact and leverage these conversations to refine your target audiences and identify new opportunities.

Monitoring tools like Brandwatch and Salesforce Marketing Cloud track conversations that take place online about your brand and your industry. You can take this tactic a step further and use it as a way to analyze the audiences talking about your industry in order to identify new opportunities.

Many of these social listening tools pull data from public profiles to provide brands with insights into the demographics of users talking online. You can isolate these bits of information d by age range and study them further to add to existing audience segment descriptions, or you can create entirely new ones.

These tools were originally designed with one type of objective in mind — for example, conducting social care and customer service by listening to conversations online. However, there exists a world of opportunity when they’re used in unique ways. One opportunity is to develop new audience clusters and content strategies based on new web discussions.

With the help of these technologies, you can

  • Identify new audiences that fit into your target demographics
  • Discover an audience you ignored because its members were not traditionally in your target audience
  • Identify unknown targets that were previously underutilized or missed entirely

Finding Millennials for brand awareness targeting

While the majority of the campaigns you develop will be geared toward driving some form of action, one campaign type you’ll still want to consider is the ever-important brand awareness campaign. Although returns on brand awareness campaigns may not be as tangible as action-oriented ones, you should still aim to identify Millennial audiences and strive to expose them to your strategically developed content.

Considering the vast number of conversations that are consistently taking place online, it’s always easier to join an existing conversation for the purposes of brand awareness. It’s fruitless to try and pull Millennials away to your channel from a conversation in which they’re already engaged.

By focusing entirely on industry and industry-adjacent keyword analyses using the powerful tools like Brandwatch and Google Alerts, you’ll be able to segment your Millennial audience and identify both user profile themes as well as media types where Millennials are already having conversations about your industry.

Once that brand awareness connection is made, the action-objective campaigns will see lowered barriers to success, as well as improved conversion rates and lowered costs per conversion.

An action-objective campaign is one that establishes a campaign-specific goal, which can only be accomplished when an audience member takes a particular action. This is a common structure for singular, seasonal, or topical campaigns that do not run forever.

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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