From Generation to Generation
You understand your peers and other members of your generation the best, don’t you?
This is why older generations have been misunderstanding and bemoaning younger generations for thousands of years: “I don’t know what it is with kids today!”
The up-side of this is that each generation knows how to best communicate with other members of its own generation. When it comes to digital marketing, this means that we should look for trends within demographics to see what marketers are doing.
Marketing Trends
When Magisto recently published the results of an extensive survey that studied small and medium-sized business marketing trends, it caught our attention. Smart online marketers will look at these trends and match them to their target demographics, along with the products and services they offer.
A major finding in the survey centered around millennials and the way they are leveraging video in marketing. In fact, they prefer video far more than print advertising. Here’s the statistic: Millennials are 136 percent more likely to create videos for social media than are Baby Boomers vente libre viagra belgique. The flip side of this is that Baby Boomers are 112 percent more likely to invest in radio ads than are Millennials.
(By the way, we don’t want to say that Baby Boomers never touch video marketing. It turns out that one in three SMBs with Baby Boomers in charge of marketing will invest in traditional television ads, while no (that’s zero percent) Millennials will pop for TV advertising. No wonder broadcast television is having a rough time!)
Magisto has summed up these results and the attitudes they reflect like this: Millennials prefer to show, not tell. Here are some of the kinds of videos Millennials create to show:
- How-to and educational videos
- Product service and overviews videos
- Brand storytelling videos
- Virtual tour videos
- Customer testimonial videos
- Event promotion videos
These categories of popular Millennial social media and website videos should provide you with an excellent road map. You can control your own video marketing in the coming months and years. Let’s take a closer look at one of those categories and the method of communication associated with it: Brand storytelling.
Millennial Narrative
If you recall, just a few paragraphs above I pointed out that Millennials prefer to “show, not tell.” This provides you with a lot of guidance as you set out to produce a brand storytelling video. Let me take one step back for a moment and say that storytelling in general – or creating a “narrative” – is perhaps the most powerful mode of communication today.
Your Millennial audience doesn’t appreciate a dry, step-by-step, logical dissertation on a topic as much as it appreciates delivering the same information via an engaging story. Keep this in mind as you weave the tales that tell the story of your brand. Make your narrative personal. Perhaps this is where customer testimonials fit in.
Let’s go down a short rabbit trail for a moment. Your “About Us” page is one of the most viewed on your site. It should be personal and engaging. People should know who you are after they scan it.
“About Us”
Consider translating that personal and engaging About Us page into a video. Tell the story of you and your brand. Make you and your team come alive as real people. Remember, people do business with people, not companies. If you’re able to use video to tell a compelling story that makes your prospects see you as people they want to do business with, you’re a long way down the road to success.
Let’s close with a final word on why this is so important. Here are two simple reasons:
- Millennials are the biggest generation of buyers ever in U.S. history
- Brand loyalty created at a young age often continues throughout a consumer’s lifetime
In other words, the most successful businesses in the coming decades will be those that are able to establish strong relationships with members of the Millennial generation. Try early and maintain those relationships throughout their adult lives.