5 Tips on Marketing Your Business to Millennials

Millennials. It’s a generation that is coming of age and changing the way businesses market themselves. They make up nearly 25% of the US population and over 20% of consumer discretionary purchases. As Millennials become America’s largest generation and begin to play a greater role in the economy, you need to evolve your marketing strategy so that your business appeals to these 20-40-year-olds. Here are 5 tips to market your business to Millennials.

1. Use Social

Nearly 80% of Millennials use social media. While Facebook is the largest platform, they also spend their time on YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Having a presence on social media is important as it plays a massive role in developing your brand image and cultivating trust amongst Millennials. With attention being divided across platforms, it is important to diversify your social strategy and maintain a presence on each of the different platforms. However, in order for your social strategy to be effective, you need to regularly post and interact with your followers.

2. Have a Conversation

The Baby Boomer generation embraced the hard sell. Millennials, on the other hand, are cut from a different cloth. This growing generation wants to have a conversation with a brand. Having a genuine conversation and social interaction with your customers online helps foster a feeling of trust that can make them more likely to make a purchase with your brand and increases the chances of them becoming brand loyal.

3. Focus on Mobile

Let’s face it. You need to be where your customers are. When it comes to Millennials that means you need to be online (and on mobile). In 2018, Millennials made nearly 40% of their total purchases using their mobile devices, and this is only forecasted to grow in the coming years. If your online presence doesn’t work well on mobile devices, you are missing out on these potential sales.

4. Embrace Video

As a marketing tool, video is more engaging and more memorable. Therefore, it is no surprise that it is growing in popularity amongst Millennials and is being incorporated into social platforms at breakneck speed. Video marketing can increase brand awareness more than 50%, making video a key part of any marketing plan targeting Millennials. A business can embrace video in many ways including doing Live streams on Instagram or Facebook, creating and maintaining a YouTube channel, webinars, product videos on their website, tutorials on their social feeds and website on how to use a product, etc.

5. Encourage User-Generated Content

The holy grail of traditional marketing is word of mouth. When it comes to marketing towards Millennials the new word of mouth is user-generated content (UGC). This means that users are actually creating the content that markets your business. UGC puts your customers front and center and highlights the fact that your brand is open to having a conversation rather than just another sale. Another benefit of UGC is that is stands as social proof that your business offers quality products and services. Millennials are less trusting of ads generated directly by businesses than older generations. When this reassurance comes from the mouth of a peer, Millennials are more likely to develop trust in your brand. UGC can come from posts on your wall, using a #hashtag with your brand name, tagging your business in a post on their own feeds, etc.

Take Everything You Think You Know About Marketing & Re-evaluate

While the backbone of marketing is still relatively the same, the nuances that make a marketing plan successful need to be carefully re-evaluated to make sure that it appeals to Millennials. One of the great things about marketing to Millennials is that content can often be repurposed across platforms, targeting an even greater number of potential customers. One business that has been successful at this is the website Marble.com, who has created video content on some of the top topics homeowners have when deciding on a new countertop. This video content is posted on their YouTube channel, embedded on their own site, shared with their Facebook fans, and posted for their fans on Instagram. Allowing them to get more reach with their video content and meet their customers where they are. So when you are ready to revamp your marketing to target Millennials, keep these tips in mind so that you can have a greater return on your efforts.