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One of the biggest questions I get asked by clients these days is how to properly target millennials. For the past 35 years, the corporate world's DNA was programmed to focus on the needs of the Baby Boomer Generation (those born from 1946-1964). While this group has made up of much of America's core spending power over the past three decades, they are now being supplanted by a new demographic group who are now the new darlings of the business and marketing world...the Millennials.
So just who are these millennials, how are they different than baby boomers, what do they want, and how can you, as a marketer, get their attention and profit from them? We'll try and answer these questions in this edition.
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So Exactly Who Are the Millennials?
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After Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) came Generation X or "Gen X". Born 1965 to 1980, this was a much smaller generation. Those born from 1981 to 2000 (some say till as late as 2004) are the generation we call "Gen Y" or Millennials. This group is today between the ages of 15 and 37 and they represent an astounding 92 million Americans...who spend over $600 billion per year. And many of them are your own children, neighbors and fellow employees.
How Are They Different From Baby Boomers?
They're different from baby boomers in many ways. For example, whereas baby boomers have long attention spans, millennials have almost no attention span. Baby boomers tend to typically follow the general rules of society, while millennials tend to be more creative. They also have more of a sense of entitlement. Finally, this group grew up on technology and social media vs. baby boomers who had to learn to embrace technology.
Eight Strategies to Engage With & Profit from Millennials
So how can you grab a millennial's attention? And once you engage them, how can you profit from them? Let's explore 8 strategies:
1. Leverage Mobile - Since 85% of millennials own a smartphone, marketing via mobile is a great way to reach a millennial consumer. In fact, 4 out of 10 say that they interact with their phones more than they interact with human beings! Sad, but true...
2. Find Influencers
- Millennials put extreme trust in the recommendations of influencers. It's for this reason that I often tell clients that one of their best investments is to find influential bloggers in their particular category (not just B2C, but B2B as well) who can play up the virtues of my client's products or services. In fact, 40% of millennials say that they relate to online influencers more than they do their friends. Now that's powerful!
3. Don't Hard Sell - The old world of traditional advertising is starting to die as millennials focus on "experiences" and "participating" in the conversation, not hard sell. Millennials do not respond well to hard selling because they grew up in a culture of social media sharing (in fact, 84% of millennials do not generally trust traditional advertising).
4. Don't Just Sell Products; Sell Your "Purpose" as Well - Baby Boomers basically want to know a product's hard benefits and features. Millennials also want to know how you're impacting the world. So talk about purpose as well. I push clients to think charity, social responsibility, environmental consciousness, and the like.
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5. Optimize Content For Social Media and Make it Post Worthy -
As mentioned, Millennials have short/no attention spans, so you've got to capture their attention in ten seconds or less. Keep key attention grabbing parts of videos brief and punchy. And remember that customer generated content such as product reviews can have a huge positive impact as well.
6. Make It Personal & Targeted
- I've been pushing clients toward Facebook Boosted Posts, Instagram, and Remarketing where you can micro target customers by age, geography and specific interest. Millennials expect messages that are tailor made for them, not cookie cutter.
7. Provide Instant Gratification
- Millennials like instant gratification so make content short, instantly useful and impactful.
8. Coupons and Discounts are Important to Them
- In fact, 64% of millennials "like" a brand or company on social media just to get a coupon or discount. And they're even willing to share their location on their mobile device in order to receive coupons from stores that are nearby.
If after reading this e-mail you're scratching your head on just how to develop and execute a plan for your business that helps target millennials, feel free to reach out to me to talk...
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Transformational Brands That "Get It" Regarding Millennials
Dollar Shave Club is a brand that completely disrupted the male personal grooming market. For a small monthly fee, they deliver razors and related products to your mailbox, and you get to be part of their hip online social 'community'.
Their humorous product content, revolutionary pricing model, potent selling lines and videos watched by tens of millions of consumers were transformational, especially for such an old, well established category led by Gillette.
Check out their website HERE and peruse their highly innovative product offerings, community like atmosphere and social mindedness...all of which really won over the hearts and minds of millennials, and revolutionized their category.
Good Luck & Good Selling
Hope you enjoy my newsletter, and if you do,
why not share the newsletter with a few of your friends or business colleagues?
So until next time, good luck and good selling in the rest of 2017!
Yosi
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Yosi Heber is the Founder and President of Oxford Hill Partners, LLC, a strategic marketing firm specializing in traditional marketing strategic planning, and in helping companies maximize their website, digital, social networking, and mobile marketing revenue potential. His clients include many of the world's
most famous corporations including Procter & Gamble, Novartis, Pitney Bowes, Nestle, Hyundai Capital, UnitedHealth Group, Krispy Kreme, Textron and Readers Digest. He also currently serves as "Interim/Part Time CMO" for a number of companies as well.
Yosi spent many successful years in senior executive positions at Kraft and Dannon where he invented the $900 million dollar kid yogurt category, and as CMO of the Entertainment Division at Barry Diller's interactive conglomerate - IAC/InterActiveCorp, where he worked with Expedia, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, and Match.com. Yosi is a highly sought after speaker at many major conferences and universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and Wharton Business Schools, The DMA, ad:tech, Conference Board, and IIR. His work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, USA Today, CNBC, DM News, and Advertising Age. |
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The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist (Harvard Business Review)
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Marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most technology-dependent functions in business. In 2012, the research and consulting firm Gartner predicted that by 2017, a company's chief marketing officer would be spending more on technology than its chief information officer was. That oft-quoted claim seems more credible every day.
A new type of executive is emerging at the center of the transformation: the chief marketing technologist. CMTs are part strategist, part creative director, part technology leader, and part teacher. Although they have an array of titles - Kimberly-Clark has a "global head of marketing technology," while SAP has a "business information officer for global marketing," for example - they have a common job: aligning marketing technology with business goals, serving as a liaison to IT, and evaluating and choosing technology providers. About half are charged with helping craft new digital business models as well.
Regardless of what they're called, the best CMTs set a technology vision for marketing. They champion greater experimentation and more-agile management of that function's capabilities. And they are change agents, working within the function and across the company to create competitive advantage. Read More HERE
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How Digital Reinventors are Pulling Away from the Pack (McKinsey)
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Digitization is a long way
from running out of steam, since the bulk of company revenues in most industries still come from traditional sources. Yet the results from the latest McKinsey Global Survey on digital strategy suggest that a digital divide is already taking shape.
Companies competing in traditional ways (that is, without applying digital technologies and strategies in their businesses) have seen lower rates of revenue and earnings growth than have companies competing in digital ways - and those rates are tightly correlated with the level of digitalization in their respective sectors. But other players are seeing tremendous growth as digitization advances. The companies making digital moves - digital natives, industry incumbents competing in new and digital ways, and incumbents moving into new sectors - are out-performing their traditional-incumbent counterparts.
As digitization progresses, companies competing in new digital ways are significantly outperforming those that continue to operate traditionally. Read more about what McKinsey learned HERE
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