Suppose you’ve done your homework researching the Millennial generation as a potential target market for your product or service. In that case, you already know that one of the biggest motivators for Millennials is eco-friendliness. According to Nielsen, 75 percent of Millennials (those born between 1981-1996) are eco-conscious to the point of changing their buying habits to favor environmentally friendly products. And a vast majority of them say they are willing to pay more for eco-friendly products versus their cheaper competitors.
Suffice it to say if you can appeal to this sensibility in your marketing practices; you can build considerable brand loyalty among Millennials. That said, there are right and wrong ways to approach this strategy—so let’s explore some dos and don’ts regarding marketing to eco-conscious Millennials.
DON’T Make False Claims
Millennials are very Internet-savvy, and they will research your claims about your product or service. If you say your product is environmentally friendly when it is not, they will find out—and when they do, not only will you fail to win their loyalty, you’ll build the opposite of brand loyalty. In other words, these people are more likely to tell others not to buy from you. Unless you want to self-sabotage your efforts, make sure you only make claims that can be verified.
DO Pursue Legitimate Eco-Friendly, Sustainable Practices
The best way to win brand loyalty among eco-conscious Millennials is to be an eco-conscious brand—period. If you’re a startup, you have the advantage of being able to build this core value into your foundation from the beginning. If you haven’t yet adopted sustainable practices, look actively for ways to do so—even if it costs you more money to produce your product. (Remember, Millennials are willing to pay more for it, as well.) Most importantly, be genuine about your commitment to these practices, as Millennials can spot insincerity a mile away.
DO Weave Environmental Consciousness into Your Brand Story
Being a sustainable and environmentally friendly company doesn’t have much traction if your target market doesn’t know about it. What’s more, if you’re serious about developing this ethic (see point above), it needs to become part of your branding. Study the examples of successful eco-friendly companies like Patagonia, Whole Foods, LUSH Cosmetics, and Seventh Generation to see how they’ve woven their ethic into their messaging.
DON’T Ignore Social Media Marketing
Millennials often choose products and services through recommendations from others, and social media is one of the most significant avenues for word-of-mouth recommendations these days. Furthermore, if you have an eco-conscious brand, 95 percent of Millennials will recommend you to their friends. Thus, one of the best ways to spread the word about your product/service to this demographic is through effective, targeted social media marketing. Find out where your target market hangs out online, engage them in regular conversations, and provide helpful content interweaving your brand story and your ethic.
If eco-consciousness is a potential selling point for your brand, Wicked Bionic will utilize cutting-edge techniques and technologies to get your message to resonate with the right people. Reach out to find out how we can help.
Virtual backgrounds, meticulously designed bookcases, children and partners trained to crawl across the room when necessary – the whole world has learned to adapt to working and learning from home, for better or for worse. But frankly, many people have had enough. So, how should a modern marketer reach a “Zoom-ed” out population?
Toss out what you knew about marketing pre-2020. The rules have all changed, and many of them continue to change with each passing day. If your strategy relied heavily on in-person interactions, you quickly learned to adapt to virtual last year. But in this new world – where everyone is much more comfortable interacting online, but plenty of people are itching to return to “normal” – what should your new strategy be?
Don’t focus on virtual. Yes, virtual interactions are here to stay. Many corporations learned to love remote work, and many individuals learned that video conferencing can play an important role in their lives. But that doesn’t mean that people will opt for virtual when in-person is an option. We’re moving into a hybrid world, where interactions are both online and in-person, and your strategy should recognize that. People are ready to jump back into living IRL. Your strategy should meet them there.
Virtual experiences need to be stellar. If you decide to do a virtual event, it needs to be short (under 20 minutes), optimized with great tech and production, and plussed-up with surprise-and-delight moments. Everyone has endured too many Zoom calls and webinars to tune in to an online event that doesn’t impress.
Be health-conscious. No, you do not need to go full Howie Mandel. (And you shouldn’t.) But the whole world knows more about virus transmission now. Your live events should factor in some of the past year’s lessons. Consider ways to allow extra space. Look for opportunities to be outdoors. Your guests will appreciate the extra breathing room.
Use social media strategically. Yes, social media marketing is still a great tool, but social burnout is real. Be strategic with how and where you spend your budget and your energy. Consider your target audience and where they’re likely to be scrolling – and don’t waste your time and money in places your audience doesn’t want to be.
Marketing in 2021 looks different than it did in 2020, or in 2019. The world has changed, and the rules have changed—and your strategies need to change, too. With some careful thought and planning, you can meet your market where they are, with a message they want to hear. Reach out to Wicked Bionic to help your business craft successful messaging.
A cookie-less world is coming, and it has nothing to do with the Cookie Monster eating all of them. What we’re talking about here is a pragmatic shift in how websites communicate data and activity to the servers that need it in order to, amongst other things, track individual preferences, and cross-site activity. How does that impact your digital marketing? Well, it may in many ways, but before we get into that, let’s take a step back and understand, in lay mans terms, what this is all about.
If we were to take the way back machine, to the beginnings of the web, and by the beginnings, I don’t mean the origins (that’s way further back), I mean the time when the public at large started to interact with what we now know as the digital space, we’d find the origins of cookies. Wikipedia defines cookies as “HTTP cookies (also called web cookies, Internet cookies, browser cookies, or simply cookies) are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user’s computer or other device by the user’s web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user’s device during a session”. When we look at the origins of the web, the basis of the internet was in the interconnection of information. It’s why the internet was called the information superhighway. It allowed information from one server (computer) to be served to another server across the country. It was all about the transfer of information to build what would be come the world’s encyclopedia. A place where all information became easily accessible. If we think about it as a filing cabinet, which it’s formulation was structured in, we still to this day use terminology that came from that structure. Servers have files, we still transfer files (as we did from one cabinet to another), we also still have folders, as what held the file sin cabinets, an so on. However, interconnecting those servers inferred that one organization would be accessing another organization and transferring those files over a connection. Thus there was an innate need for security. When web browsers were created, which made that information available to the broad public, that need for security became even more evident. Thus, browsers were built to have that security built-in. A lot fo that security had to do with keeping information safe, anonymous, and non-identifiable. However, we still needed to be able to track activity on the web, as in passive activity, like how many pages a person visited on a website and which and active, as in how many times a user returned to a website. In came cookies.
Originally, cookies were just files the web browser would place in your computer, without your knowledge, that tracked identifiers that allowed websites to then “pick up” a previous cookie they had left on your computer OR if they hadn’t yet left one, they could create one. This cookie tracked your activity on their site. Activity like what items you had left in your cart, what types of content you were interested in, and the like. This was a useful way for a your information to be safe, yet available. As with everything in technology, over time, these cookies became meatier and meatier, they had more and more information on them. That caused a slew of problems. Why? Because as with everything on the internet, there are good actors and there are bad actors. You could say: But the cookie just hd anonymous information. That may be true, the problem came with the fact that if you provide enough anonymous information on a person, you eventually are able to gather enough information on someone to construct who that person is. So if I told you that a cookie on your machine knew you were a man, from Los Angeles, in Santa Monica, who liked a specific group of foods, ate at a specific group of restaurants, was somewhere between 30 and 32 years old, went to school at UCLA, was an architect, and so on. Eventually, you could gather enough information to determine who this person is. As an Advertiser myself, I can tell you that is premium information. As a software engineer, I can tell you that is valuable information, and in the wrong hands, it could be extremely valuable information to anyone meaning to do harm.
We’ve known for a long time that cookies were a problem. However, we’ve built an economy on cookies. It is estimated that data tracking accounts for at least 60% of internet commerce. We know so much about you at this point that we may know more about you and what you want and need than you know about yourself. And that, is scary, not only because like us good actors, bad actors will be able to use that information. Because bad actors can use that information to cause serious harm, not only to you but to the economy as a whole. So over time, it as decided that cookies had to go. And so they will, in 20222 (partially).
Having worked at a tech firm, an ad tech firm, and a publisher, I can tell you that one of the greatest fears for both tech firms and businesses that rely on the internet, is government regulation. Why, because the government will for the most part, take things to an extreme, and make good actors pay for the deeds of bad actors. Ideally, we prefer a self-regulating body, where experts come up with solutions that help resolve the problem in a way that prevents or reduces the ability of bad actors to take action while allowing business to thrive. The problem I see with that is that it ends up transferring that ability to make decisions on the overall welfare of an industry to the only groups able to dedicate enough resources to coming up with these solutions. That is, large corporations, the large tech firms that have all but monopolized the internet. Companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. However, that is the subject of another blog. What matters on this one is, what do I do now?
Well, there’s many initiatives out there that can help prepare you for the shift to a cookie-less world. Google for one, is testing transferring the information from being kept by your computer, to being kept by your browser, so that websites will get anonymized and randomized data from the browser; not your computer, to help them make decisions. So, the website will know you have the pants you left in your shopping cart there, but it won’t know that you left them there last Tuesday. Another initiative that is happening is contextual advertising, which has been around for a while, but will become more prominent as this rolls out. Contextual relies on the content of a website to inform an advertisers decision to serve an ad to the website. So the ad server may not get to know you like cars but if you’re reading an article about cars then you probably do. Depending on how many options are out there, I foresee a world with a LOT of articles about cars, beauty products, fashion and the like. As that will become the way to be able to deliver the number of advertising impressions required to hit the impressions needed for a campaign.
You may have also heard about apple allowing you to opt-in to give your information to apps. Most people didn’t even know that the apps on your phone can track you while you’re on other apps on your phone. Guess what, that is one of the basis of the success of facebook at advertising. If you’ve ever wondered how they know so much about what you like. It’s not only what you do on their apps/site, it’s what you do on your phone and on other websites that have nothing to do with them, other than maybe advertise on facebook. And speaking of Facebook, they’re one of the ones that is resisting these changes the most. I wonder why? They’re coming up with solutions like a server-side form of tracking. So the data would be gathered by facebook, on the server of the websites people visit. This would allow them to bypass the browser, which if you haven’t figured it out yet, it allows them to skip the controls established by Chrome (Google), Safari (Apple), and Edge/Internet Explorer (Microsoft), amongst others.
Modern digital marketing is all about connecting with your target audience. Based on your brand’s unique purpose, you can create tailored content. This content can help you connect with the people most likely to interact with your brand.
As time passes, target audiences for many brands are shifting to include a young and exciting new demographic—Gen Z. However, millennials currently make up the bulk of the workforce. They’re also (currently!) the most likely demographic to buy items online.
If you’re a brand figuring out your multigenerational marketing strategy, how are you supposed to reach both generations and balance your efforts while still sounding like you?
Wondering how to connect with millennials?
Millennial consumers are conscious of their values, ready to connect on social media, and interested in a good story. To market to millennials, consider the following actions:
• Emphasize an environmental or social consciousness across your branding—millennials want to associate with brands that share their values.
• Millennials follow shares, reviews, and recommendations. Partnering up with influencers can pay off in spades for this segment of the market.
• Millennials prefer authentic engagement and will exhibit brand loyalty if given a chance to interact with your audience personally and offer loyalty programs to build your relationship with your consumers.
• Focus on YouTube or social media influencers rather than celebrities.
• Prioritize extremely concise, snappy content.
• Optimize your mobile content.
• Emphasize your commitment to protecting your consumers’ private information. (Gen Z loves its privacy.)
While most Gen Z is slightly too young to qualify as a consumer, they’re the largest demographic in the United States. Keeping an eye on them for future trends will be vital for every savvy digital marketer.
Why doesn’t anyone care about Gen X marketing trends?
Gen X consumers tend to spend a lot of time in YouTube and Facebook comment sections and remain the best audience for traditional advertising. We suspect people care less about these trends because they target an increasingly smaller group of people and because many brands are shifting from traditional advertising. However, Gen X consumers are in the prime spending years of their lives. Offering loyalty programs and rewards may be a good idea to reach Gen X, which is fortunate, as millennials like these offerings as well.
Wondering which trends to prioritize? As millennials are (right now!) the dominant consumers, they may represent the best focus for your investment—but that is changing. Depending on the nature of your offering, it may pay off to invest in Gen X or Gen Z marketing strategies at a qualified agency from time to time.
One thing’s for sure: If millennial and Gen Z marketing strategies are telling us anything, it’s that empathy, integrity, and authenticity in marketing are here to say. Focusing on transparent practices and authentic connections with your consumers will be worth your time for multigenerational marketing.
Whether you’re interested in millennial marketing trends or you’re wondering what Gen Z’s up to these days, Wicked Bionic can help you reach your target market.
Marketing has become a catch-all word in recent years, often being confused with sales and advertising. While marketing is all about perception, the focus of sales is on converting people once that perception is established. Advertising may SUPPORT Sales.
As the number two search engine in the world, YouTube accumulates roughly 35 billion visits per month offering a huge concentration of built-in eyeballs. The only site with more monthly visitors is Google.
As an organization with a marketing budget, you can’t ignore YouTube as a host for your advertisements. And if you’re not going to ignore it, why not make the most of your YouTube-focused advertising budget?
We’ve distilled three crucial tips for unlocking the full potential of your YouTube marketing dollars.
1. Study YouTube’s advertiser guidelines
Due diligence prevents your organization from wasting precious capital. In addition, by doing your due diligence on YouTube’s marketing rules and guidelines, you will avoid punitive measures that compromise your ad campaign.
● Do not serve a clear purpose (such as selling a specific product or service)
● Are submitted in an unsupported video format
● Contain explicit or “shocking” content
● Violate any other advertising guideline
To avoid rejection or removal of your ads, do your homework on Google’s marketing rules. Then, if you have any questions or concerns, present them directly to Google representatives. Doing so could spare you from migraines, wasted advertising dollars, and other avoidable hardships.
Want to advertise on YouTube and get your brand in front of the right people?
Connect with Wicked Bionic to set up a free Discovery call.
2. Police your own videos (to the extent that you can)
YouTube and it’s parent company Google felt the heat from advertisers in 2019. The allegation: that YouTube failed to police ad placement on unsavory videos.
While YouTube actively demonetizes videos that may paint advertisers in a poor light, they cannot catch all offenders. To the extent that you can, monitor the placement of your advertisements and report:
● Unwanted brand affiliations
● Ad placement on videos that are not relevant to your target audience
● Any other ad-related concerns
You spend good money on YouTube advertisements. Don’t settle or let your concerns go unheard. Nothing less than your brand’s reputation is at stake.
3. Know your target audience
Failing to target your advertisements is like fishing with a wooden pole. With targeted ads, you swap the pole for dynamite.
Free services like YouTube gather troves of data about their users. As an advertiser, it’s your prerogative to take advantage of this demographic data. Whether you’re appealing to growth demos like millennials and Hispanics or an even more narrow category like college-age hiking enthusiasts, target your YouTube ads for best results.
For more insights into YouTube marketing best practices and how Wicked Marketing helps you succeed, click here.
The competitive digital economy requires savvy marketing. With nearly $7 billion in advertising revenue in Q4 2020, YouTube is a behemoth within the modern advertising landscape. Ask yourself: are you getting the most out of your YouTube advertising budget?
Millennials, Hispanics, and other growth demographics are heavily represented on YouTube. In fact, YouTube offers marketing tools to engender the favor of these high-value demographics. There is a wealth of marketing potential with YouTube. Make the wrong moves, however, and you may see your expensive content pulled down, sandboxed, or ignored. Consider these tips and insights when crafting your YouTube marketing strategy.
Avoid Negative Brand Associations
Be cognizant of which videos are hosting your advertisements. If not, you may spend significant marketing dollars to harm your brand. Media outlets reported in 2019 that several companies’ advertisements ran alongside anti-vaccination-themed YouTube videos. Those companies had no clue that this was happening. Who knows how much reputational harm was done to these brands? How many pro-vaccination viewers associated the advertiser with content that they considered offensive or even dangerous?
YouTube claims that its algorithms protect advertisers from associations with problematic videos. Ultimately, though, your organization must decide which videos are suitable hosts for your ads. Though you may have limited control over where your advertisements land, be quick to alert YouTube when you see an unsuitable video hosting your ad.
Want to advertise on YouTube and get your brand in front of the right people? Connect with Wicked Bionic to set up a free Discovery call.
Mind YouTube’s Content Rules
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) levied $170 million in fines against Google and YouTube for violating the Children’s Privacy Law. YouTube has enacted wholesale restrictions on kid-focused videos and advertisements in response. Ads explicitly targeting kids can be a non-starter. This is one of the many YouTube-specific guidelines that you must abide by. Google lists specific criteria governing:
Maximum ad length
Accepted video formats
Advertisement relevance
Advertisement clarity
Various other ad components
Ignoring these restrictions may come at a great cost. You may spend ungodly sums of money for a YouTube ad campaign that never goes live.
Target, Target, Target…Then Target Some More
YouTube’s viewer base is not a monolith. Don’t blast your ads indiscriminately as if one YouTube viewer is as valuable as the next. They’re not. If you don’t target your audience as narrowly as possible, you risk wasting your ad budget on the uninterested. Let’s say your ideal customer is an active millennial or dog-loving Baby Boomer. YouTube lists best practices for targeting audiences by age, interests, and other important characteristics. If you’re not targeting, are you even trying?
Take the Necessary Steps to Harness the Power of YouTube
Though it sounds easy enough, even identifying your target audience can be tricky. Wicked Bionic is here to help. We have more than 30 years of experience crafting and executing digital marketing strategies. Our team will work with you to make the most of your YouTube-specific marketing efforts. Check out our agency portfolio to see how we can help your advertising more effective by spending less.
When it comes to advertising, the days of creating a single ad that has “universal appeal” are all but over. As the American population becomes more and more diverse, your messaging must adapt to a broader range of cultures if you want to reach your target market fully. Los Angeles alone is home to hundreds of distinct ethnic groups, with more than 185 languages spoken and more than half the population speaking a language other than English at home. Statistical trends show similar diversifying occurring in many other areas across the globe. Never has it been more important to clarify exactly who your audience is so you can craft specific advertising to reach them where they are. Let’sLet’s explore some reasons why.
There Are Many Subcultures within Cultures
Multicultural advertising digs much deeper than simply crafting different advertising for different languages or races. Using Los Angeles again as an example, at least 48 percent of the population is Hispanic/Latino. Still, within that demographic, we have Mexican, Argentinian, Columbian, Costa Rican, and dozens of other ethnicities, each with different psychology and worldviews. Even among English-speaking populations, Americans use words that mean something entirely different for British English-speakers and vice versa. Why would we consider it would be any less relevant among other language groups? Our advertising needs to be sensitive to cultural differences we might view as subtle but which are anything but subtle to the audiences we’re trying to reach.
Multi-Cultural Advertising Isn’t Just About Ethnicity
Effective marketing and advertising today don’t just account for ethnic distinctions but also generational ones. “Baby boomers” have a completely contrasting outlook on the world than Millennials. For example, the current teen/young adult demographic, “Gen Z,” responds to various stimuli differently than Millennials do. All three of these generations have significant buying power in America, and your messaging needs to understand these disparities to reach them effectively.
Don’t Forget Geographic Differences
Worldview isn’t just shaped by ethnic or generational culture; our environment also shapes it. Geographic location affects how people think and respond; so does the community—the people we live around. These experiences are why people of a particular culture can react differently to the same advertising in different parts of the country—and sometimes even between two zip codes in the same city! Effective multicultural advertising will also be sensitive to these differences.
Although it may not be necessary for your brand to reach every demographic, it can still be a daunting task to clarify your target audience, given all the multicultural factors involved today. Understanding these cultural and generational nuances is where Wicked Bionic can help. We specialize in precise multicultural marketing, relying on deep data and 30+years of experience to create appropriate messaging for the people you want to reach. Take a look at our portfolio for more examples of our work and how we can help you make an impact in your advertising
Have you ever wondered if your logo looks outdated, or if the messaging on your website needs updating? What does it mean to do a brand refresh? When you want to change your business or your audience because the business has grown or is pivoting, you may need a brand refresh that assists your new marketing and advertising efforts.
In this episode of the Wicked Marketing Podcast A Brand Story, marketing experts and co-hosts Carlos Sapene and Dana C. Arnett present a brand story for a consumer-facing mom offering a baby services and products business. The rebrand addresses a new marketing approach for reaching Millennials and Gen Z in order to grow your business in new markets.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why a brand refresh may be necessary for your business
Components of a brand and what you need to know
Why cheaper isn’t better when it comes to logos and design
The differences between Millennials and Gen Z, and how to talk to them
Millennials represent about one-fifth of the U.S. population. A large age cohort with the purchasing power of $1.4 trillion, Millennials need to factor into your marketing strategy. And with nearly 50 percent of Millennials spending at least 10 hours per week online, the best way to reach this audience is with digital content.
Millennial Marketing Trends to Watch
To connect with Millennials over digital media, you should know which marketing trends to look out for when doing research. One of the biggest trends that will impact your digital content strategy is that Millennials are socially conscious. They will research a brand before buying and refuse to purchase if the brand’s values don’t align with their own.
Another trend that affects your digital content strategy is that Millennials lead the sharing economy. They’re much more likely to be swayed by recommendations, reviews, and influencer marketing than mass messaging.
Finally, consider that Millennials are a diverse group. This cohort stretches from people in their early twenties to married couples with kids. The products and messaging that appeal to a 22-year-old may not capture the attention of a 39-year-old.
How do you turn these marketing trends and insights into digital content that appeals to your Millennial audience?
What Type of Content Do Millennials Like?
Millennials don’t like the hard sell. They can be dismissive of sponsored content unless it directly meets their needs. They’re more likely to respond to content that is authentic, original, personal, or informative. Millennials also:
Like to research extensively before buying
Don’t like missing out
Use a variety of social media websites
Consume media on multiple devices
Prefer visual or interactive content
Digital content that informs and feels authentic is more likely in a blog post than a traditional ad. Establishing a presence on social media—specifically Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn—helps you engage with Millennials, build loyalty, and tap into the sharing economy. When you’re creating and publishing content geared for Millennials, always, always optimize it for both mobile and desktop.
As a top Millennial and multicultural marketing agency in Los Angeles, Wicked Bionic uses proprietary data-driven research on the different cultures in the Millennial market to help your business craft a digital media strategy. If your business wants to reach Millennials with digital media, you can reach us here.
