How Millennials Are Changing Internet Marketing

Millennials are everywhere: being the biggest generation in America, they are highly to make up a significant part of your demographic if you own an online business.

The thing with being everywhere is that millennials as a group have started to dictate the economy. They’ve embraced technology (and even invented some of it), they’re disrupting industries, they’re probably the most educated generation of consumers in history, and they know what they want.

And what they want isn’t necessarily a polished product or a great deal - rather, millennials seek experiences, with 98% of participants in a survey saying they’d be more convinced about buying a product if the marketer immersed them in a proper marketing campaign.

Jessica, a “classic” millennial, says her life is “always on.” In 2018, technology has advanced even more, and millennials’ lives are even more “on.” What does this mean for marketers and their campaigns? Let’s take a look.

Omnichannel sales strategies were a huge trend of 2018, but 2019 is the year when businesses will fully double down.

Remarkably, 85% of shoppers are going old school - they prefer shopping in a traditional brick and mortar store than an online one. This doesn’t mean online retail is redundant, of course. In fact, most customers like to research products online and then pick them up in a store.

In other words, since millennials are everywhere, they want to engage with you everywhere. They want to engage with your business in a brick and mortar store, on your website, on your mobile app, and on Facebook.

As a result, online businesses need to use data from each sales channel to create better, more tailored marketing campaigns. Millennials might use both Facebook and email, but it doesn’t mean they expect to be marketed to in the same way on each channel. Customer data can be used to create more relevant content that audiences will actually enjoy - and perhaps, even be inspired by.

Remember that in the Amazon era, millennials are holding businesses to higher standards. They expect to be able to have their cake and eat it, too.

When you segment your audience, you can then deliver more personalized content - which is exactly what millennials want.

With marketing automation, marketers can capture useful information about their audience so that they can build detailed buyer personas about each customer, including their previous buying habits.

Machine learning (Artificial Intelligence) has now advanced to the stage where it can analyze past consumer behavior and then use data to target customers with the right messages.

This means that millennials no longer need to read emails that aren’t actually relevant to them. Instead, they’re getting exactly what they want from you and nothing else.

Millennials’ lives are enhanced by technology: they’ve grown accustomed to rapid-fire customer service, instant search results, and being able to compare several similar items across several different stores while out shopping.

Marketers need to cater to this need for convenience via sophisticated platforms that give their customers what they want exactly when they want it. Take chatbots, for example. Instead of having to wait at least a day for a brand to respond to an email, a millennial can now get a near-instant answer from a chatbot. In this way, the brand is “always on,” which suits the consumer’s own lifestyle.

Facebook is hardly the cool cat that it once was, but millennials still share more content across Facebook and other social media outlets than anyone else.

Millennials like to share stuff because it reflects them, their values and who they are. Therefore, they are very unlikely to share something that doesn’t reflect who they are. They won’t just share any old content. What they want marketers to do is show them content that promotes their own personal identity via Facebook and the like.

Marketers, then, need to understand their audience to a tee. As an experience provider of sorts, a marketer needs to tap into what makes their particular millennial tick.

Millennials still hold all the aces, of course. If they share your content and it goes viral, your overall reach and exposure increases, which means your sales will probably go up, too. Giving millennials shareable content is key. Show them things they identify with, and you’re onto a winner.

LA-based growth hacker Vin Clancy likes to share anecdotes in his email newsletter about how he was still on UK welfare living at his parents’ house just a few years ago.

Entrepreneur Dan Meredith doesn’t gloss over his past with his audience; he gets real, discussing everything and documenting everything, from giving up alcohol to what he does at the weekend for kicks.

Millennials want this kind of openness and transparency from brands. They want to see the human behind the money-making machine. They want you to share your personal journey with them. As Gary Vaynerchuck puts it, “Document - don’t create.”

Instagram and Facebook Live videos help with this. Live videos are increasing in popularity, and part of the reason for this is that live streaming gives brands a chance to build trust and credibility with their audience right there and then, holding FAQ sessions on the fly or showing a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes. Millennials value this kind of connection.