/>Marketing is a sometimes fickle business that has a lot of variables involved. When marketing, you have to take into account your target audience. That could include a specific gender, culture, hobby, political party or an age group. Knowing your audience first, you have to find out more about millennial marketing and how it can help to build your small business.
Millennials Taking Over
Right now, the millennial generation is on the verge of overtaking the baby boomers as the largest currently living generation in the United States. Millennials have gotten a bad rap in the past few years. However, they are growing into the largest portion of the consumer-based economy in the United States. Millennials today are growing into a large and profitable market, one that many businesses, small and large, have been ignoring or have been slow to recognize.
Young Adults are Gaining Buying Power
For the most part, millennials aren’t kids anymore. They’re just now hitting their stride as young adults. Pew Research defines millennials as anyone between 19-35 as of 2016, although there is no specific start date for the millennial generation. They’re no longer underage, and now they are gaining in buying power by the day. It’s been posited that by 2017, millennials will be spending $200 billion dollars annually, a number that will only continue to grow. As a small business needs to shift some marketing effort to this rising generation, the following are some tips on how to do it.
Make Your Website Millennial-Friendly
First off, your site needs to be optimized and designed for, mobile devices. At this point, 20 percent of millennials use a smartphone almost exclusively for all of their web browsing. If your website doesn’t run well or is easy to follow on a mobile device, no one will find your web portal through a search.
Get the Apps
Get on all the major apps. Many millennials don’t find anything without a Google Maps listing. If there is an app relevant to your business, get on that one, too. If you’re not sure if there is an app for something, you probably haven’t looked hard enough.
Online Reviews
You need reviews everywhere. Online reviews are the bread and butter for millennials when they decide where to shop, what to eat or how to invest their hard-earned dollars. Specifically, user-generated reviews are considered the most trustworthy source of information for a product or service.
User-Created Content Matters
Studies have shown that some millennials trust user-created content more than what you post yourself as a small business owner. Forget your sales pitches, and promote user content and reviews on every platform you can imagine. Make sure you have reviews on Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, and especially Google and Google Maps, to name a few.
Manage Your SEO
If you aren’t already familiar with it, search engine optimization (SEO) includes the process, techniques, practices and methods for increasing website traffic.
Don’t Get Buried
The short version is if you don’t take care of SEO, your website, and your product or service will likely get buried under several pages of search engine results. Without optimizing your website for search engines, millennials won’t be visiting your site anytime soon. Done properly, Google search results will promote your site for you simply by putting your website higher up in the search ranks.
Social Media Presence
Before any other social media platforms, you have to be on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
If you aren’t already, drop whatever qualms you have, and get on Facebook. You don’t need to have a personal profile if you don’t want one, but your business needs its profile. Many millennials say that Facebook is one of the most important factors on social media for what services and products they pursue.
Instagram is the way to show your business’s polished side. Whether it’s the best sandwich you’ve ever crafted or the best implementations of your invention, well-crafted pictures are the key. People here expect to see your best, and if you do it right, you can significantly increase traffic to your websites and sales numbers.
Twitter is the best way to keep up a regular following and let regular customers know about your latest products and updates. Twitter is also the simplest. With 140 characters now and then, you can get millennials looking for you instead of you looking for them.
Create a Blog to Create Relationships
As we said before, millennials want to skip the sales pitch. Instead, they want a relationship. Much like how they will skip over your buzz lines for user-reviews, they want to work with real people.
Get Personal
Making a blog, posting real stories, and showing a snapshot of your day-to-day life is the best way for you to let them see you as a person and not as a logo.
Like any other relationship, you have to put yourself out there and feel a little vulnerable. Millennials, more than any other generation, want to do business with humans and not companies. So, you have to show them that you are both. Proper use of a blog is one of the best ways to guarantee repeat business due to building relationships with customers.
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