Regardless of the highly notorious and uber-cliched fickle, shallow, and narcissistic stereotypes created for millennials, the 1981-1996 generation is ready to dominate the world of internet with vengeance.
Claiming to vow your entrepreneurial spaces with their ingenuity, millennials are not only tech-savvy and consumer-centric, but are also highly confident, sassy, and reluctant to steer low in attention-seeking areas. Moreover, it has been said that the US constitutes of around 1.7 billion millennials, with the number to increase as the decades proceed. Given that the target market is now surrounded and saturated deeply with millennials, impressing them with products and services is not only significant, but also hard.
As compared to Baby Boomers and Generation Z users, approximately 57% of consumers pertaining to the millennial age are known for researching about a product online before heading towards or making a purchase. It has been estimated that by the year 2020, millennials alone will be responsible for acquiring a whopping 30% of retail sales in the United States, or in other terms, for spending an economic value of $1.4 trillion per year.
Since we are dealing with immense saturation in ecommerce, marketing to millennials to acquire growth and significant promotion of a brand is the only solution today.
In order to known which trends are the most popular for increasing customer outreach for increase in brand awareness, ROI, and revenue in the millennial age, consider the following below.
1) Share User-Generated Content on Social Media
Social media has become an evident resource of connecting millennials with B2B brands for networking and communicating purposes. Moreover, for both B2B and B2C business models, obtaining conversion through the ecommerce conversion funnel is highly important for promoting growth of a brand.
With more than half of millennial consumers prying over the internet for reviews before making a purchase, providing social proof via user-generated content is a necessity for a brand’s visibility and growth.
With 86% of millennials entrusting their decision-making process by scrolling through your social media, you can improve your brand’s quality by taking the following steps for generating user-centric content.
Market via Instagram –
Instagram, one of the most heavily populated social media channel with 300 million users globally, harbours more than 50% of millennials aboard its user interface. Make an account on Instagram and hire a social media team to actively update your brand’s profile for the maintenance of quality in accordance with the shared quantity of daily posts.
Develop a social media strategy in addition to your brand’s hashtag, slogan, and tagline. If you’re using Shopify for hosting your ecommerce store, then you can integrate your Instagram account with your landing pages by installing an app named ‘Instagration’. Furthermore, create a series entitled ‘Shop The Look’ and share it on your Instagram for creating a buzz on your website for additive effect
Create a YouTube Channel –
Moreover, YouTube, the biggest video streaming platform on the internet, harbours approximately 62% of millennials who avidly watch unboxing videos of various products before making a decision towards a purchase.
Since video streaming is evolving and more YouTubers and Vloggers are joining the platform, try to add YouTube into your marketing strategy as a priority. Make a YouTube channel for your brand, and either show unboxing videos of your products as tutorials or how-to-use guides, or share consumer-rated testimonials and reviews in the form of videos on your channel.
Case Study:
Take a look at the Instagram page of Urban Outfitters. They share user-generated content on their social media and link them to their shop’s landing pages for interested customers to pursue the products.
Sharing user-generated or crowd-sourced content is a great way for increasing engagement and interaction between your consumers since it provides product information in addition to customer reviews as well.
2) Influencer Marketing:
Approximately 60% of millennials prefer shopping from a brand if they find testimonials and positive customer reviews of its products from the people they engage with and follow avidly on social media. These people, known as influencers, are a part of a carefully sought marketing strategy that allows both B2B and B2C brands to engage with their target market through various consumer-centric endorsements.
Influencers or microinfluencers are people who share a common target market as your industry. By tapping into their market, you can engage with your target audience more proactively as compared to having a celebrity endorse your product without using it in the first place. In order to approach influencers, take your business on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and request them for collaborating with your brand for mutual promotion of content.
In addition to influencer marketing, approximately 92% of millennials prefer tapping into a brand for their shopping needs based purely on their referrals. Consider launching referral or loyalty programs for new and pre-existing users, respectively, and link them with a promotional offer to entice their interest.
Case Study:
Target, a globally popular retail store contacted a YouTube beauty guru, Teni Panosian, for collaborating with their brand for the promotion of their plaid line of clothing by creating a sponsored look book on her channel.
Benefit Cosmetics also collaborated with Teni for the promotion of their products through a different video format on YouTube. This format, namely, Lifestyle, required Teni to wear a full face of makeup from Benefit Cosmetics during the documentation of her adventures in the Bahamas for her YouTube channel.
3) Take Live Streaming to New Heights
Having created the limelight for live streaming with the help of Twitch and Periscope, social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are no entering the landscape as well. Approximately 43% of millennials desire authenticity of content, which is why live-streaming is not only gaining popularity amongst this age, but also significance, importance, and value.
Twitch’s live-streaming gaming interface is inhabited by at least 100 million viewers every month, 75% of which is on behalf of millennials alone. Moreover, with the advent of people watching and human interest stories, Twitch is becoming more popular than Hulu or other prime cable networks as well. An average user spends 106 minutes on Twitch – streaming and scrolling through live-action videos and contributing to internet traffic with the most mundane and dull scenarios known to exist.
Take Periscope, for instance. While millennials prefer texting instead of wasting their time in attending calls, they, on the other hand, also prefer to watch live-streaming videos of dull events or meaningless obscurities on the clock. A live-steaming video of a puddle in Newcastle garnered the attraction of 20,000 viewers on the spot on Periscope.
If you think that your content has more authenticity, essence, and value to offer, then opting for a marketing strategy complacent with live-streaming videos on Periscope, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube will help you to tackle your consumer base and target audience of millennials more proactively.
Consider streaming videos that spark engagement with your users on your channel or any of the aforementioned platforms. For instance, share a behind-the-scenes snippet or stream a product launch showing your employers and employees toasting each other with immense interest. You can also collaborate with influencers by inviting them for an interview to stream their product review live on your channel.
Case Study
Live-streaming videos are also available for viewing later on, which prevents millennial users from obtaining the fear of missing out (FOMO). Snapchat, on the other hand, has been the pioneer of ephemeral content since its inception, and has to date, not updated its software for live-streaming video formats.
Similarly, live-streaming videos that are available for viewing for 24 hours on Twitch and Periscope create the same sense of FOMO amongst users, therefore, inspiring millennials to keep their eyes and ears out for prospective videos. Take the example of the #DrummondPuddleWatch video that was published for live-streaming by a digital marketing agency in Newscastle on Twitch. This video was used as a metaphor to denote the true essence and promotion of live-streaming content for making waves in social media.
Millennials have seen the establishment of the world of computers, technology, and the internet closely, which not only makes them difficult to please, but also creates room for flexibility and utmost feasibility. With the youngest millennials – at least 50% – marching off to college, the remaining are known for creating a difference with just their existence online.