Marketing to Millennials through Social Media

Marketing to Millennials

The Millennial generation is made up of people born between 1982-2004. This one generation alone counts for hundreds of billions of dollars in buying power every year. For business owners in countless industries, if you aren’t marketing to this generation of young individuals, you are making a mistake with your marketing strategy now and for years to come (since the youngest in this generation aren’t even 21 yet).  The question is how.

• What can you do to appeal to such a vast and diverse population?
• What steps should you take to get their attention and hold onto it long enough to make a connection?
• What are top companies doing nowadays that you could also be doing?

First, and arguably most importantly, understand that even though the Millennial generation is incredibly diverse, but there are certain characteristics that can be considered to be shared across nearly all of them. For example, 85% of Millennials within the United States own a smartphone and access it upwards of forty times a day. Most Millennials have another source of internet access they use in their daily lives, and a smaller percentage even has three or four. The predominant way this generation of young adults gets their information is through social media platforms accessed on these multiple devices. If you aren’t on social media daily with frequency, you essentially aren’t even part of the conversation with Millennials.

Which social media platforms should you be using? The obvious choices are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and possibly Snapchat. But also using YouTube to effectively market your business to Millennials is additionally an excellent strategy.  It’s becoming increasingly successful with the advent of famous “YouTubers” and partnerships with popular channels. YouTube can help you tell your business’s story and tell that story to millions–including the much-coveted Millennial audience. YouTube, owned by Google, also helps improve your SEO rank.

Instagram currently has 100 million users (as of January 2017), most of whom fall into the Millennial bracket. Your brand can easily access a vast number of potential fans and followers and effectively tell your story on this platform.

Now here’s one you may not have heard of, at least not from a marketing standpoint: Snapchat. This app is a social sharing platform that allows you to post videos or images that are only available to view for a brief period of time. It is absolutely perfect for real-time marketing because you can give your audience direct access to live events, getting them excited for the authentic view that you’re sharing. Snapchat will let your customer base go behind the scenes, and see the inside of your company in a way that no other social media platform really allows. Snapchat is a platform with very specific uses, so proceed with caution in how much time is devoted to this platform.

Our last piece of advice is that even if you’re on every social media platform we lay out here and utilize them daily, that online presence is useless if you don’t formulate an appropriate strategy for maximizing social media to it’s fullest potential for your business related to Millennials. It’s essential to understand how this generation is different from others that you may be used to marketing to. A few examples:

• The words “family” and “community” mean something different to Millennials than they do to Generation X and Baby Boomers.
• They shop and evaluate purchases like no generation to come before them.
• Ordinary milestones such as marriage or buying a house aren’t necessarily immediate, high priorities for Millennials.
• Their lives are not as linear as we’re used to with other age groups.

You’re going to need to reevaluate your marketing accordingly if you want to stay relevant and continue to grow your business. Millennials are too large of a group to ignore now or even more importantly, as this young group ages.

Are you wondering where to begin marketing to Millennials? Contact us for strategic planning and execution to tap into this incredibly important generation.

Article Data Last Updated: January 2017