Millennials — those born between the 1980s to the 2000 — are slowly taking over the world. That isn’t much of a news unless you’ve been hiding out in a cave. Despite the fact that they’ve generally inherited vast amounts of student debt and a poor economy, they are the leading consumers in the world with a purchasing power running up in the trillions of dollars on a yearly basis. As such, they are a market ripe to be harvested for their purchase power.
It is generally, erroneously, said that millennials are a group of self-centered narcissistic lot, and if you were to just run with that assumption you’d probably hit a brick wall. Because millennials might be one of the easiest generations to reach, especially considering the rise of social media, but they are also the hardest to sell to or the hardest to pigeon-hole. So below you’ll find some of the things you should keep in mind if you want to successfully market to millennials.
Speak Their Language
It is true that every generation comes with its own manner of speech patterns and its own lingo. Since the millennials are all children of the social media age, their lingo is largely determined by social media trends. However, it isn’t as simple as just fetching yourself a lexicon on millennial lingo and throwing them about randomly, that could in fact prove more hazardous as millennials also have an extremely low tolerance for ‘phonies’. They especially don’t have any tolerance for people who seem to be ‘courting’ their patronage by appropriating their lingo such as ‘yass kween’ or ‘on fleek’. Such evidence of superficial courtship is more likely to insult them or, at best, amuse them.
If you’re going to employ millennial language to reach them, you better use it as it’s meant to be used. But you don’t even have to go to all those lengths, millennials value honesty and authenticity more than anything else, so if you used simple easy-to-understand, conversational language in your approach that would go a long way.
Target Specific Demographics
Every generation also has its own distinct set of characters which makes it unique in itself. However, never has that statement been more true than in the case of millennials. With the rise of this generation, many of the traditions and assumptions that have held firm for centuries have been overturned and revealed to have been ‘inauthentic’ or ‘fake.’ As such you can’t simply target millennials based on life stages like buying an apartment, graduating, getting married, having kids, etc. Because things like marriage and family no longer mean what they once meant, these aren’t necessarily things millennials aspire to.
Work isn’t the same anymore, more and more millennials opt for alternative means of occupations that allows them the ability to retain their individuality and independence, such as freelancing, or start ups, or YouTube vlogging, etc. Millennials tend to lean more towards personal markers of identity, they are more likely to care about social issues like gender, sexuality, anti-bullying campaigns, etc. They are more likely to connect with pop culture. And as such you can make your marketing more relevant to your millennials by making it socially and culturally relevant. You need to be on the lookout for social media trends as well. Give a liberal and progressive spin to your products and services, make yourself out to be an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming business to really get their attention.
You Orientation
Millennials are extremely averse and suspicious of advertisements, and as such traditional mediums like magazine spreads, posters, etc, are becoming irrelevant. Which is why you need to maintain a blog, website content, or a YouTube channel that is conversational in nature and that addresses some of the common troubles or concerns of the potential customers. Making video hacks is a good way to get the attention of Millennials. An even more effective means of marketing is to get testimonials and reviews from your actual customers. Millennials are far more likely to trust peer reviews.
Mobile Marketing
Most millennials prefer flexibility and convenience, that’s what explains the popularity of AirBnBs, Ubers, and other similar services. They spend most of their time on their cell phones, even more so than their laptops or desktops, and as such you need to have a landing page which is simple, concise, attractive, and geared towards mobile viewing. You would also benefit by getting rid of any clutter or unnecessary stages because millennials are also notorious for their shorter attention spans.
You should have several payment gateways to give them the option to pay however they like, and all the charges should be clearly listed upfront because undisclosed charges are likely to be seen as sneaky, and would ensure that you don’t benefit from any word-of-mouth marketing, which continues to be the dominant factor swaying buyers.
So with these couple of pointers hopefully your marketing game would be all amped up and geared towards roping in millennial clientele! But even if you can’t keep track of all that’s mentioned above just remember, to reach millennial consumers you actually just need to focus on two main things, your social media presence to reach them and authenticity to sway them!
