Marketing to Millennials | Get Fact Up #42

Thanks for joining us for the episode 42 Get Fact Up!

Millennials are a hot demographic to target. Described as "a person reaching young adulthood around the year 2000" - finding the right way to approach marketing to millennials seems to have a lot of people confused. 

So we're here to help! Let us break things down for you...

Subscribe to our Get Fact Up series for weekly updates: https://www.memedia.com.au/get-fact-up

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/memedia

Join us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/memedia

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/me_media

______________________________________________________________

MARKETING TO MILLENNIALS | GET FACT UP #42

- Good day, Australia. I'm Chris Hogan, founder and CEO of MeMedia. It's time to get fact up. Today I want to focus on who you're targeting, and millennials are hot on my demographic audience that I want to discuss today, so let's get started.

When speaking to the local community about your target audience and talking about demographics, there seems to be some confusion around who are gen Y, gen X, and gen Z, and then thrown in millennials, so we want to cover off who they are.

Millennials are born between the early 1980s and the year 2000 and are between 15 and 35 years of age. According to Deloitte Australia's millennial survey in 2016, the millennials are generation Y and also known as the digital generation. And according to Roy Morgan Research here in Australia, millennials make up around 4.9 million Australians. Gen X make up 4.8 and baby boomers 4.1 million. In that same report from Roy Morgan Research, it goes on to explain that the title millennials, really all it describes is their age and that all millennials aren't created equal.

But throwing back to the study from Deloitte Australia on the millennial survey 2016, they describe millennials as the values generation. While this study focuses heavily on employment of millennials, it also tells us a lot about how this generation functions in everyday life. Millennials want business to shift its purpose. While they continue to express a positive view of business's rule in society and have softened their negative perceptions of business motivation and ethics compared to prior services, millennials still want businesses to focus more on people, employees, customers, and society, products and purpose and less on profits.

So what does this tell us about how millennials choose brands? Essentially, we need to have a purpose beyond profit, and we need to clearly articulate why our business exists. So how are you going to express all this in your marketing? Let's have a look. As we said before, millennials are the digital generation, and of course that means they're using their smart phones to communicate via Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

If we dive in and have a quick look at the stats from Facebook, there are 5.8 million millennials on their platform and 2.2 million on Instagram. Snapchat's consumer research source tells us that on any given day Snapchat reaches 41% of all 18 to 34 year olds in the United States, and a Business Insider article earlier this year recorded that there were just over three million Australians on Snapchat in February. If we jump over to the business focus social media platform LinkedIn, we can see that there's 1.5 million millennials using this platform, but all of these statistics on how you're gonna reach your target audience mean nothing unless you've defined your brand's purpose and can communicate that via storytelling or through useful content that is gonna bring a change to the world, which brings us back to why content marketing is the best type of marketing that you need to be focusing on, and YouTube is definitely a great place to do this.

In 2014, Google partnered with TNS and Ogilvy to answer our burning question about what brand advertisers can do to connect with these new consumers. The study revealed that consumers choose the brands that engage them on their passions and interest 42% more often than they do those that simple urge them to buy the product being advertised. As a result, their path to purchase is actually their path to purpose.

In the same study, it was revealed that consumers are 70% more likely to purchase something with a brand which engages people on their purpose and their passions. YouTube analyzed that users 18 to 34 years old are four times more interested in watching a video ad on YouTube than in viewing any other platform. But to be clear, we don't all need to look and act just like Gandhi to make sure we attract the right type of consumer. Be the change you want to see in the world. It's clear from that last bit of research that content marketing via video and uploading to YouTube could be a perfect strategy for everybody, but it's not just video that is working out there in the marketplace.

Look at infographics and photographic-heavy blogs. Absolutely get visual. So instead of me telling you that you have to go and produce this amazing content right now, I want you to come back to some of this absolute grassroots preparation that I think everybody needs to do before entering into a content marketing campaign.

Number one is define and document your core values, your purpose, and your why.

Number two, understand why your existing customers do business with you and how this relates to your values.

Number three, discover what secrets you hold in your head or your company that could truly make your industry a better place to work with if they were shared openly for the uninitiated to learn from.

And, number four, what valuable lessons can your clients teach the world and how did you work with them to make their business a success?

While going through this process, you'll begin to structure your business in a way that focuses less on your profits and more about the change that you bring to the world.

And on that super positive note, I just want to say thank you to all of you who have been listening to get fact up, and we hope we've been bringing value to your work life. And if you need help with producing any of that content for your marketing, you know we're here to help. Hey, we make pretty good videos I hear, and we just so happen to be a Google partner as well. So keep making a difference, Australia. We'll see you next week.