Millennials are officially in the workforce, accounting for over one-third of the working population. Not only are they the largest group of people in one generation, but they are also the generation that businesses have had the hardest time with marketing, selling, and gaining loyalty. In this post, we discuss how to successfully market your small business towards the millennial generation, so that you can tap into this large group as a source of growing your business.
Get to Know the Millennials
Millennials have approximately 80 million people in their group. Born between the late 1980s- early 2000s, millennials are not just in the workforce but are also a dominant buying group.
Businesses that aren’t gearing their marketing strategy to include millennials are missing out on a large demographic that, contrary to popular belief, is willing to spend. Millennials don’t spend less, they just like to be informed about what they are buying before they purchase. They are a very tech-savvy generation that wants to know what your product is, where it came from and understand your business’s social responsibility.
Tips on How to Market to Millennials
Since millennials are tech-savvy, careful about what they purchase, heavily influenced by others, and have a short attention span, marketing your business to them can be tricky. Here are 5 tips to help your small business be able to effectively market to millennials and gain customers.
1. Get on Social
If your small business isn’t on a social media platform, you will need to be on one to market millennials. In fact, we’d recommend you get on more than one platform. Your social media presence is where your business can easily connect with your target audience. It’s where they spend a large portion of the day and where they go for information.
Millennials grew up always being connected and building relationships with people through social networks. So, when they look for a brand or business to buy a product from they are also looking to build a relationship with that business. Insightful posts, product recommendations, useful information about your business and your product will help your brand build that important relationship.
When reviewing your social media accounts in order to attract millennials to your business make sure you have a clear and developed brand personality. Express your personality by posting interesting and engaging information on your social accounts multiple times a week. Post videos of your product in use or testimonials on how people (particularly other millennials) have benefited your business. Also, engage with your customers, to show millennials coming to your pages that you can form a relationship. Engagement consists of answering your followers’ comments, sharing their posts, and asking questions to welcome feedback.
Related: How to Make Facebook Work for Your Business
2. Build Your Reputation
Having a good reputation for your business is important no matter what, but especially when marketing to millennials. This generation puts a lot of weight on what others say about a product. They will look for reviews on your brand and product before purchasing an item, plan, or product.
If you have good reviews, that’s great! Show them off and make them easy to find when people are glancing at your website or social pages. If your reviews aren’t that best, that’s okay. If you have any long time or loyal customers with whom you have a good relationship, perhaps see if they’d be willing to post a review.
Another way to improve your reputation is to have testimonials or case studies on your website. This way Millennials can see from a first-hand account that people are happy with your product, which will encourage them to become a customer of your business too.
3. Become Socially Responsible
Millennials care about how socially responsible your business is. They are looking to your product and business to see if you’re charitable, eco-friendly, and have good ethics overall. If you practice any social responsibility, be sure to make it known (in a non-self-promotional way) and encourage them to support you in your causes. If you’re trying to identify which social cause to support, take a look at what’s important to the millennials of your target audience.
Being socially responsible doesn’t mean that you have to donate thousands, or even hundreds, of dollars to a charity, but it does mean you have to show you care about the world in some way. This can be doing a group charity event with your employees, making eco-friendly choices in your office, or have your business collect toys or clothes to give to those in need.
To show that your business is socially responsible, don’t hesitate to post about what you are doing on social media. Let millennials see for themselves what you are doing to be socially responsible rather than directly telling them. Tag the charities you are helping to create more engagement.
4. Diversify Your Content
Marketing to millennials is unique because although they want to be informed before becoming a customer, they also have a short attention span. This means that you have to convey important information to them quickly. This can be challenging, but video content, infographics, short blog posts, and digestible tweets can help with this.
For video content, remain under 1 minute. This requires you to really just focus on one positive aspect of your product or business. Also, try to be interactive, as the more you engage Millennials the better you are marketing to them.
Infographics are a great marketing strategy to target millennials too because they are short snippets of information displayed in a visually interesting way. Informing millennials through this type of content will allow them to consume your important messaging in in a fast, efficient way.
Blog posts are great for giving information about your product and business to millennials. With that being said, your business needs to make sure the articles you publish are easy to read and are broken up with images and other graphics. You might find that keeping the blog posts short will help with millennial attention spans. Or, you might find that promoting your posts on social media with a quick and interesting fact from the blog post encourages them to click the link and read the whole article.
5. Move Away from Traditional Marketing
For your business to be able to market successfully to millennials, you’ll also you need to move away from traditional marketing strategies. This doesn’t mean abandoning everything in your current marketing strategy. It means adding in some newer, more digitally focused or innovative strategies that will appeal to millennials.
For example, the “hard sell” tactic doesn’t work anymore. Millennials would rather you not be in their face going on and on about how great your product is. Instead, take a more indirect route by collaborating with influencers to promote your business. Influencers are people with large social media followings who can help get your brand in front of a bigger audience. When Millennials can actually see the product in use by someone they respect and trust, they are more likely to do the same the product.
Another way to move away from the traditional marketing is to create tutorial videos or video content. Tutorial videos will give you the ability to show off your product and give millennials a chance to see what your product is all about.
If you are a small business who is in need of new customers, then the millennial generation might actually be a new audience to tap into. Because of the lack of loyalty millennials have to big brands, they are going to be looking to other brands and businesses to buy products from.
Use these tips to help market to millennials and then hopefully gain some loyalty from the millennial generation. Let us know in the comments if you were able to use any of these tips!
