Many marketers, especially those representing restaurants, retail stores, and hotels, scramble to attract the Instagram obsessed, avocado toast loving millennials aged 18 to 34 whose spending habits marketers depend on. Many of those marketers turn to social media to catch millennials’ attention, a prudent and clever move as studies show. According to eMarketer, millennials are twice as likely as baby boomers to follow a brand on social media. Furthermore, 60 percent of millennials are more likely to purchase something from a brand they follow on social media than any other age group.
Although marketing to millennials on social media is a shrewd move, marketers can’t successfully do so without catering to their needs. As eMarketer found, millennials will only purchase from or follow a brand if marketers fulfill several conditions.
How to Successfully Market to Millennials
1. Incorporate the Three Es of Advertising
Marketers must incorporate the three Es of advertising, entertainment, education, and engagement, into their ads. Because, as eMarketer found, millennials follow brands for entertainment and information, marketers must create brands that entertain, educate, and engage to attract their attention and leave an indelible impression.
Several publishing companies worthy of emulation, such as Buzzfeed, Tastemade, and Now This, successfully incorporate the three Es into their videos. To stop millennials mid-scroll, those three companies create 60-second DIY and news videos decorated with captions to optimize for sound off. Because their videos are entertaining and valuable, most millennials can’t resist leaving a tagged comment or posting the videos on their own timelines, catapulting the videos to popularity.
2. Hire a Talented Customer Service and Social Media Team
If marketers don’t hire a talented customer service and social media team, they could easily lose their millennial followers. According to eMarketer, millennials are more likely to unfollow a brand that posts annoying, spammy, or offensive content and that doesn’t respond to comments or messages. Marketers must hire a customer service team that respectfully and promptly responds to inquiries and complaints, and they must also hire a social media team that engages with followers. If they create a positive experience for their millennial followers, those followers will be more likely to purchase from the brands they represent.
3. Regularly Refresh Ads
Marketers must refresh their ads if they want to maintain millennials’ attention. If they neglect this crucial task, ad fatigue will occur, a phenomenon in which users overlook or ignore ads that they have seen too often. As previously mentioned, millennials will unfollow a brand if it posts spammy ads, or ads that appear too frequently on their feeds. By refreshing their creatives, marketers will show new and relevant ads that their audience won’t perceive as spam.
If marketers cater to millennials’ needs on social media, millennials will consume their content as often as they spread avocado on their toasts.
