Responsiveness: Traditionally, a curtain has been in front of the big, powerful brand. Now that curtain has been lifted, thanks in large part to social media. Communication with a brand is easier than ever before. A certain sense of satisfaction comes from receiving a response from a brand. Therefore, responding to your audience members when they reach out can go a very long way toward nurturing budding relationships.
Meeting Millennials Where They Are
Billions of interactions and engagements take place online every single day. Joining a conversation in progress is always going to be much easier than trying to create your own.
Millennials are engaged on various platforms with content, brands, and each other. Your responsibility as a marketer is to find new and creative ways to become a part of those exchanges. To reach these individuals, you need to understand
❯❯ How they communicate
❯❯ How they share content
❯❯ How they decide to make purchases
It may seem like the only way for brands to reach Millennial consumers is via social media. But the reality is that Millennials use a broad number of communication platforms, including traditional media. Familiarizing yourself with these media is going to play a crucial role in communicating with your audience. (Chapter 5 covers the use of traditional media.)
Traditional means of advertising, such as television and print, were once restricted to brands willing to spend the big bucks. Now new methods that meld the digital world with the offline world allow virtually any brand to connect with Millennial consumers. (Chapter 6 covers multiple kinds of new media and details how marketers can take advantage of both organic and paid initiatives to communicate with and convert Millennials into long-run customers.)
Organic initiatives and strategies are those that don’t rely on paid advertising to reach a specific audience segment. Organic engagement is powerful and a key component to the success of a marketing program. However, building these kinds of audiences takes significantly longer. A well-thought-out mix of the two – paid and organic – will be useful in helping you build out your brand on both traditional and new media.
While Millennials aren’t a monolithic group, many Millennials have certain traits in common:
❯❯ They use various media to communicate. Millennials don’t confine themselves to one particular medium. The average Millennial is active on multiple social accounts, messaging platforms, and devices. You don’t necessarily need to plan to be active or even discoverable on every one of these media. That would be too costly. But you should get to know your audience and familiarize yourself with their preferred means of communicating. Then you can identify those media that stand to generate the greatest return for your brand.
❯❯ Mobile is the primary communications tool. Whatever Millennials do, they prefer to do it on mobile. The explosive growth of mobile is unprecedented. Marketers have had to make a dramatic shift in the way they do business. Millennials are on the go and wherever they go, their mobile devices go with them. Essentially, ignoring mobile means ignoring your audience, and that is a recipe for disaster. (Marketing to Millennials on mobile is covered in Chapter 8.)
❯❯ Personalities differ from one platform to another. The average Millennial may be active on four or five kinds of digital media. If they’re active on several media, it doesn’t mean that your brand will necessarily find success marketing to them in the same way on each platform. Millennials use different media in unique ways. To communicate effectively, analyze your audience on each platform.
Sharing means a lot more than it used to, thanks in large part to new media like Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb. You can look at the concept of sharing from two perspectives.
First is the content and information approach. Millennials share more with each other and with brands than any generation that came before them. Unlike Baby Boomers, Millennials have indicated that they are willing to share personal information with brands. This willingness to share has led to the explosion of data-gathering methods, such as social sign-in. Social sign-in allows users to sign in with a single click via Google or Facebook.
Thanks to social sign-in, your brand can collect a significant amount of data without having to directly questioning your audience. The desire for simplicity and convenience on the part of the Millennial consumers means that they’re likely to use this option. It’s less cumbersome than creating stand-alone profiles for each platform and limiting the information they share with brands. Data is crucial to the creation and improvement of your Millennial marketing strategy. The willingness of Millennials to share via social sign-in means that those processes are made significantly easier.
The second concept of sharing relates to the rise of the sharing economy (covered in detail in Chapter 12). Millennial consumers agree that access to goods and services is more important than ownership. Brands like Airbnb (https://airbnb.com) and Uber (https://uber.com) recognized this fact and built multibillion-dollar businesses to capitalize on it. The priorities and measurements of success have changed for Millennials. The sharing economy has facilitated this transformation. (Chapter 12 covers the sharing economy.)
Impulsivity and ownership are no longer the names of the game when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Millennials have access to a wealth of information that can help them make informed, educated, and trusted decisions, and they don’t hurry the process.
The Edelman Trust Barometer showed that industry and academic experts and peers rank above brands as trusted advisors. Review sites like Yelp!, shown in Figure 1-1, make peer reviews readily available for virtually any type of product or service. Millennials use these kinds of sites when making a buying decision.
FIGURE 1-1: Yelp! allows consumers to provide reviews.
As the availability of trustworthy, verifiable information, such as reviews, has increased, their impact has been noticeable across all markets. A 2015 study by Forbes found that only about 1 percent of Millennial consumers would trust a brand more as a result of traditional advertising. Roughly, a third of Millennials review blogs and review sites before making a purchase. Authenticity is what matters most to these prospects, and that outweighs even the quality of content.
This trend has leveled the playing field for smaller brands. Of course, big budgets open doors and opportunities not available to smaller companies, but now they have the opportunity to compete for the same business as larger organizations.
Chapter 2
Creating a Modern View of Millennials
❯❯ Defining the Millennial consumer
❯❯ Recognizing common errors marketers make with Millennials
❯❯ Understanding the Millennial mindset and its implications
Building an effective strategy for Millennial consumers
