How Millennials are forcing us to change our marketing strategies

By , 9 September 2016 at 17:30
How Millennials are forcing us to change our marketing strategies
Business

How Millennials are forcing us to change our marketing strategies

By , 9 September 2016 at 17:30

There’s no doubt, my generation is getting a bad wrap. It’s because we’re more than a bit demanding. Despite having entered the job force during an economic crisis with high youth unemployment, we have big dreams and only want jobs that can promise a path toward success. Add to this how we want a sense of purpose and meaning in what we do.

And we maintain this attitude toward shopping too. If you want to reach the largest, most-educated generation in history, it’s got to be online and its got to be multimedia, across all different platforms. If you want to reach this key market of 19 to 35-year-olds, you have to be savvy, transparent, and omnipresent. Today, Blog ThinkBig is going to tell you how to get here, there and everywhere.

A generation of hipster individualists, we strive for so-called authenticity. We want brands that are sharing—not advertising—products with #nofilter and a backstory of struggle and triumph.

Branding guru Dan Schawbel wrote on Forbes about how almost half of millennials will choose authenticity over content. We strive for a user-centric environment where we can read the unfiltered opinions of our peers.

We take this call to be excessively truthful seriously as we overshare on Instagram, SnapChat and detailed product reviews. Any product or even service that’s putting themselves for sale has to also put themselves out there for potential ridicule, with very open social media networks and on every review site, whether it’s Glassdoor for jobs, Amazon for stuff, app stores, or Netflix.

But this doesn’t mean that my verbose generation has all the power. We want you involved in our decision making—in fact, it’s something we’re very unlikely to do without influence. We expect you to respond. We expect you to boast and share our positive feedback and we expect you to rapidly and publicly answer the negative.

Don’t get discouraged, Millennials are loyal. We will be the first to like, share, pin, snap and comment our support of our favorite brand. It’s just that you have to work to cultivate that loyalty.

Millennials have the best brand loyalty, but you have to work for it

This generation is starting to make its own money but is waiting longer to have families, which means that we’re becoming the most important commercial group yet, with cash ready to blow. But reaching us via the Don Draper book of advertising just won’t do.

My generation isn’t watching TV or at least we aren’t paying for cable and waiting patiently for commercials. Outbound marketing is losing its buzz, while inbound marketing is all the rage. This means search engine optimization is more important than ever.

Brands needs to create regular, original content that is cleverly and covertly splashed with keywords so you rank on Google and with Siri for what your ideal customers are looking for. And this means using a tool like Google Keyword Planner to learn what this demographic is actually searching for—40-something marketing execs should not assume they have any idea.

We also want to feel like you’re creating content for us, not marketing to us. We want you to share content that interests us—particularly in snappy videos that make us laugh or cry—not directly selling anything.

Even the most boring product lines have pulled on our heartstrings with successful inbound marketing via viral videos.

Kleenex has done this tremendously by sharing sappy yet short sentimental “Someone Needs One” Facebook videos that have us reaching for these name brand tissues. Who hasn’t weeped at the story of Chance the wheelchair-bound dog? And then this year they hit us right in our over-exaggerated sense of nostalgia reminding us how nervous we felt on our first day of middle school.

Even Always has us Millennial girls reconsidering sanitary pads over our environmentally friendly menstrual cups. Their hashtag-friendly #LikeaGirl YouTube campaign looks to fight back at the dramatic drop in confidence that happens around puberty, reminding us how cool it can be to really throw “like a girl.”

Neither Kleenex nor Always show a pic of their fairly boring, mostly white products in their ads. They stream the videos via branded channels with maybe a small logo. They never make an ask. And, for this, us Millennials are eager to share how we just heart these usually yawn-worthy sanitary products.

Do you think you are creating authentic, Millennial-friendly messaging? Tweet us examples of it to @TefDigital and @JKRiggins!

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