Engage, Retain, Convert: Youth and their Relationship with mobile content.

Engage, Retain, Convert: Youth and their Relationship with mobile content.

By Daniel Collins, Strategy Director at The Big Shot

Why would you read this article? It’s fine your current approach is always to create mobile first content, well, in all honesty that is just not good enough. Brands and advertisers really should be thinking about their consumers’ journey first, especially if you are talking to a younger digital native audience.

Here at The Big Shot I focus primarily on content marketing campaigns for a youth audience. At the heart of what we do is understanding how a digital native audience responds to advertising and how they use different platforms for their journey with your brand.

How do we actually find out these answers? Well you talk to them….

January 2019 I created research in order to help our brands figure out how to engage, retain and convert this digital native younger audience. In this following article I will share with you some of my findings, feel free to implement away!

Engage: Video, Video, Video and Video

 Ironically, I realise this is a written article and not a video but it’s true, 40% of the younger audience engage the most with video. With Internet and streaming technologies advancing we will only ever see a rise in the most engaging format of all, video.

However, just because you have a glossy TV ad that you’ve had approval to put across all of your social channels doesn’t mean you are ticking that engaging content box. With all content please think about the platform first, 67% will consume content across mobile / tablet, so if you want to use video make sure you have it in the most ‘feed ready’ way possible. For example, think about short-form square formats for Facebook and longer form for YouTube.

What type of content of content do you engage with the most?

Okay, so don’t put all your eggs into that video basket as we found that 25% engage the most with blogs / articles. When planning or creating content you need to still be prepared to give your consumers a destination page that will be focused on informative and longer form written content.

Retain: Platforms – Kylie killed Snapchat right?

 This Kylie Jenner Tweet reportedly decreased Snapchat stock by $1.3 billion, however, Snapchat is not dead! Brands compare the different social platforms with the same criteria and to really retain your audience you need to know what journey they take on the different platforms.

For example, 32% said they spend the most time on Instagram compared to 16% on YouTube. More time is being spent on platforms that have an incredibly fast newsfeed scroll rate and shorter form content, compared to YouTube which focuses on longer form content . You need to ensure that the content you are producing fits the type of useage of the platform.

Which social channel do you spend the most time on?

 The most time spent on a platform does not mean that is where your content is best used. To really influence the journey you need to know why the user goes to that platform. In our research, 37% actually go to YouTube when they feel most upset and 26% go to Snapchat when they are their most like their actual self, both platforms were not top in the most time spent.

Where are you most like your actual self?

 Retaining your younger audience with content is not about using each channel the same; you need to move with how your audience use it. Snapchat has moved into a platform less about following celebrity stories but to a platform used for messaging and sharing stories with close friends.

 Convert: Who are you kidding?

We live in an age of ad blockers, #ad, influencer content and paid social advertising, it has never been so easy to notice when you’re being sold to. Added to this, the recent GDPR and data misuse from social channels there is a huge air of mistrust. In fact 65% of our research said they do not trust social media companies with their data.

When approaching that final conversion step, you need to be aware of how your audience will respond. 59% of our digital native youths said that they know the difference between paid and organic content.  It is key to be transparent when you are putting a more direct response sales message out there, do not hide behind a glossy piece of content.

Do you know the difference between paid for and organic content?

If that wasn’t hard enough being transparent in your paid content, well your audience won’t actually click on your ads to purchase, massively affecting your direct response ROI. This is something we as marketers battle with on a daily basis, how do I know the exact return from this piece of content? Well in short, you will have to look at attribution. I know it’s not easy but you will need to think about the whole journey rather than last click. For example, a staggering 91% of our respondents said they would research a product after seeing an ad and buy later.

What sounds more like you?

In summary, when looking at conversions don’t just look at last click as your audience will not be buying direct. No matter how many targeting links or tags you put in place, you’re influencing a human and they will do whatever they want, especially the digital native younger audience.