Whilst the prospect of marketing to a Millennial doesn’t always fill most brands with joy, getting inside the mind of this generation is easier than you think.
Born between the mid-1980’s and early 2000’s, this is fast becoming the most dominant demographic of people within the workforce. This means like it or lump it, if you want your brand to succeed and consumers to ‘buy into’ what you represent, then understanding the millennial shopper and how their brain works should start being your number one priority- if it isn’t already.
Millennials, also known as ‘Generation-Y’ (the demographic cohort following Generation X) aren’t like the generations before them, having been the ultimate ‘digital babies’, that grew up in a world where everyone was connected to one another through the power of the internet or just by pressing the green telephone icon on their mobile phones. Whilst Gen-X and Baby Boomers have followed a very traditional path of brand loyalty over the years, millennials (not to mention Gen Z) aren’t afraid to look elsewhere, if they think they can get something better.
Here are 4 key points to know before marketing to Gen Y:
1.) They are driven by social opinion
Word-of-mouth promotion is still the most powerful brand asset, but you can’t rely on it anymore, as social networks have dominated over half of millennials’ lives. If your brand has a substantial amount of likes and shares online, your brand is far more likely to be trusted by the typical Gen-Y consumer, who now pay minimal attention to digital adverts having been bombarded by them for the entirety of their lives.
Therefore, targeting your brand’s social media channels will give you more sway from a generation who represent the largest audience on social media and who rely predominantly on their mobile phones for most things.
2.) Be interactive: bulldoze your brand’s barriers.
Having been coined as the original ‘digital natives’, in which their voices can be heard by even the biggest corporations through the power of social media, their consumer role has in fact shifted to take on a more interactive part alongside brands.
Clever brands are actually using millennials to co-create their content to allow them to feel like they are ‘part of something’, whilst instilling brand loyalty and fueling further engagement online. This satisfies the millennial consumer voice, whilst allowing a brand to grow organically as well as guaranteeing that they reach their target audience.
How can you develop and start interacting with your millennial audience more?
3.) Understand your audience and get personal
Carrying on from the theme of interaction is the idea that brands should be investing in customising their products to allow the typical millennial consumer the choice of personalisation. Gen-Y will actively search for brands that will allow them to personalise a product (both Nike, Coca-Cola and Nutella spring to mind, allowing consumers to buy their products with their names imprinted across them), finding these products to be more alluring over brands that don’t.
Now we don’t just mean, have the ability to put your customer’s names on your product, we mean a full sense of personalisation. Spotify give you a daily playlist tailored to your genre preferences, your Facebook feed is personal to your general tastes and various subscription models are thriving off the ability to understand your personal loves to continually impress you after you’ve given them initial feedback on your interests.
Understand your customer and understand their tastes change and reverse engineer what they’d want to see and hear from you at the various levels of interacting with your brand. Once you’ve mastered this research, tailor your service to feel personal and unique, rather than broad and uniformed.
We recommend doing regular “customer persona’s maps” through a mix of online analytics reviews (especially Google Analytics & Facebook Insights) and getting out the office and interviewing your key demographics.
4.) Purpose Driven
We always chuckle when we see pas blogs on Millennials being relentlessly referred to as ‘entitled and self-righteous’. As key drivers to the purpose-driven way of life, the under 35-year-old generations are proved in the majority to show they prefer to spend their money on socially responsible corporations.
Therefore, if your brand is proven to be socially responsible and giving back to the community, a Millennial is more likely to buy from you than one that is not. With over half of Millennials making an effort to invest in brands that are more environmentally friendly, it is worth making the time to look into your brand values, that indicate the actions you’ve taken to be environmentally responsible where you can.
Of course, if you’re needing help communicating these values, either externally to your following, or internally to you to employees – or perhaps you’re struggling with coming up with these values at all – Enviral is here to help.