How to Reach the Millennial Consumer

Drivers of mobile usage, first generation digital immersion experiment, YES, we’re talking about a trillion-dollar demographic. They live on social media and their customer expectations are high.

Have slow loading times on your website, don’t offer instant messaging chat technical support, don’t send triggered emails on a personal basis? These people will actually notice.

Please realize your company will likely fail in the next 10 years if you don’t’ start optimizing for this generation. They want a customer experience that is impressive, functional and cutting-edge. They aren’t reputed to be loyal to brands who don’t keep up.

Wooing the future buyers and leaders with authenticity, won’t be easy, especially if management and marketing is not keeping up with the trends. They are in all respects, advertising immune and the most educated generation of all-time. They know the crash of 2008 intimately, likely have student debts and will see through your sales pitches. Think “generation gap” + accelerating speed of change.

Digital Marketing for Millennials Guide

Here are some tips to help your company deal with them: 

Truth Worthiness

• Do make your about us warm and friendly with faces of your company’s employees, bios with personal tidbits, ideally with short videos. If they can identify with the people behind your brand, that’s an “in”.
• Do have testimonials that feel credible.
• Do have case studies that are explicit and sincere.
• Do use social media in a pro-active manner.
• Get your products and brand reviewed objectively (Millennials will be weary if they cannot find reviews of your products and brands that feel objective)
• Make sure your website and ecommerce pages are mobile friendly with responsive design.
• Pay attention to SEO for local search and geo search options.
• Have company polices whereby employees are maintaining their digital footprint on social channels and as innovators in content creation that shows collaboration, teamwork and a company that is youthful, dynamic and creative.
• Have Millennial social influencers on board, as spokespeople and bloggers that they can relate to.

Authenticity

• Gain their trust by mirroring their cultural trends and speaking to them on what moves them
• Speak to their authentic self
• Read up on unique buying preferences of Millennials & design your product packaging accordingly if Millennials are a key segment of your customer base.
• Adopt their channels (Yelp, Instagram, Periscope, Redit).
• Always be fresh and able to reinvent yourself (not a typical rebranding cycle of years, but adapting in a matter of months to emerging trends).
• Realize they have an “opt-in” mentality to transhumanism, enhancements and what may appear to you as futuristic, to them is just normal. 

Global Humanism

• Show you care about the Environment, global issues and the local community
• Demonstrate that your company cares about work quality and values its social capital (employees, benefits, perks, talent attraction). They will respect you for it.
• Altruism is something worth going viral, so show you care about causes, charities, disasters relief, human rights, humanitarian issues, etc...
• Appeal to their sense of being free global citizens.

Video Entertainment

• Entertain and make them laugh via good storytelling Video
• Blog via podcasting and video that is mobile friendly
• Use humour, satire, parody and quirky originality to your advantage in video content.

Interactivity

• Use animation, and animated info graphics
• Do use new media and animated video for sales pitches
• Do use gamification design layers on all channels
• Create incentives and rewards, loyalty points, for everything related to sharing info about your products and brand
• Demonstrate you enjoy engaging with them and promoting their User generated content .
• Don’t think of branding as a logo and website, but as a design and customer experience process that influences all channels both digital and IRL.

The following info graphic snippets made an impression on me, perhaps they will you too:

Do you have any insights on how to reach Millennials? Share them here.