Why Authenticity Matters to Millennials

In 2016, growth hacking your marketing strategy for Millennials is one of the most valuable things you can do. To have a robust content marketing plan in place, won't be enough. It won't be enough to be produce content "snacks" that are easy reading and contain elements of life-hacking and lists. You will have to do branding on visual marketing channels like Instagram & Pinterest. Reach audiences in new ways via Snapchat, SMS, vlogs, influencer marketing, viral marketing campaigns and User-Generated-Content campaigns. 

You will have to diversify your video content. You will have to create content for short attention spans and multi-tasking audiences. In short, you will have to become a master at authenticity, to boost your brand identification quotient (BIQ). This is how easy it is for your target audience to "identify" with your brand, this goes beyond trusting you for your content tone or respecting you for your thought leadership and knowledge authority. This is very much, about how you brand the people behind your brand. Do you position your top talent to be influencers themselves in your domain?

Authenticity matters, and take the time to understand what it means for your audience. 

Is there video content and thought leadership that is easy to find on the co-founders, CEO, CMO and even the content writers of your team? Does your company have any potential social media influencers, potential start vloggers (video bloggers)? Thinking for Millenials requires a mobile-centric marketing plan. Content is not about sales, it's about human interest and authenticity. 

To quote Josh Felser: 

Authenticity is about how you share.
Transparency is about what you share.

Authenticity is about context
Transparency is about content

Authenticity is about sharing genuinely.
Transparency is about sharing everything

Authenticity is about being true to yourself
Transparency is about being true to the facts

Authenticity shouldn’t change: always be constant
Transparency breadth should change depending on audience

 

In fact, authenticity, transparency, thought-leadership, viral marketing on doing good in society, influencer-marketing and increased personalization of the customer experience all contribute & facilitate an audience to identify with your brand, your brand's influencers and leadership.

Millennials have been so conditioned to see marketing as fake via advertising. They feel the same way about sales and cold-calling. As we shift to a more mobile society, cold calling becomes less effective and social selling becomes more effective. Interacting with customers on channels that are less filled with spam is the way to go. Why would you bombard your customer with Emails, LinkedIn messages if you could reach them easier on Snapchat, on WhatsApp or on Twitter? What if you could on board them via an app and send them special offers based on their demographics, buying history and real-time behavior via predictive analytics?

So then, Authenticity marketing is also about the channel of the audience. While Email marketing may have decent implications for brand advocates and customer loyalty and retention, if brand's don't adapt to the reality of mobile comms that is SMS, how do they expect to reach Millennials?

Authenticity in Content Marketing Is

•  To be conversational in tone, and colloquial in tone so as to promote actual real interaction. (Accessibility)
• To demonstrate visual marketing that display and is representative of a company's real culture and how they care about and empower their employees. (Caring Culture)
• To strive to be humane and innovative and entrepreneur-centric, without content sounding purely like a sales gimmick, like click-bait and chiefly just interested in CTRs. (Authentic thought leadership)
• To use social media in a more original, provocative and pro-social manner. That is, to be inclusive, boldly unapologetic, refreshingly to the point, insightful and occasionally, a little edgy. (Unique & daring content) 
• To curate and create User Centric Campaigns where we try to celebrate our real assets, brand advocates, engage in real talk and encourage real consumer-generated content. Upholding your audience and the user-generated content they create and creating campaigns of this nature, taps into viral marketing directly. (User-Content-Centric-Campaigns, U3C) 
• Having a defined and powerful brand personality that creates a cohesive content tone and attitude that stands out. A voice that brand advocates can relate to and is congruent with the brand's DNS of the talent and the sort of people and values they hire. Your brand's Voice includes all language, imagery and is implicit in your company's content strategy in every detail. (Value Driven Branding).
• Having content that is directly educational & relates to technological change and coping with information change management. Having articles that relate to the challenges that Millennials face and are unique to them. Having some content that is life-hacking related, that directly is easy useful reading that you might find on the top of Medium. (Educational content positioning)

Conclusion 

Brands that haven't thought about Millennial marketing and that don't have a content strategy plan the incorporates authenticity, relationship marketing, mobile interface, gamification, visual marketing social channels, SMS may miss out.  The key here is not to just build credibility but build identification mechanisms, or else run the risk of being so far removed from today's trends in marketing that in 2016 will slip further behind their competitors. This includes B2B brands. Authenticity isn't just a Millennial B2C event, it's across the board. 

In this series, professionals share how they embrace the entrepreneurial mindset. See the stories here, then write your own (use #BetheBoss in the post).

This is the first post in a series of articles on Authenticity marketing. 

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Michael Spencer helps companies improve their content marketing, blogs, social media & video marketing initiatives. If you are a startup or smallbizz you may want to outsource some of your digital marketing needs. 

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