Marketing is not an easy task in a fiercely competitive world. Digital agencies and marketers seek new ways to reach their audience, and most importantly, to leave a lasting impression.
One of these techniques – maybe even a “marketing hack” – is known as generational marketing.
You divide your target audience into several age groups, learn about their preferences, interests, and the content they’re more interested in, and design tailored marketing content for each age group accordingly.
According to HandMadeWritings, this is the only way to make the most of your content marketing efforts.
What are the key age groups?
To begin, marketers should divide their audience into six living generations, including:
- GI Generation
- Mature/Silent
- Baby Boomers
- Generation X
- Generation Y/Millennials
- Generation Z/Boomlets
GI Generation and Mature/Silents are older, born before 1945. They’re not often the target audience for businesses.
This leaves marketers with four key target groups: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z. All of these have different tendencies regarding social media, medium, and preferred content styles.
Create tailored marketing content for each
A universal marketing campaign for all of your audience irrespective of age groups may earn you results, but probably not the best. To make the most of your marketing campaigns, you need tailored content for each generation.
In addition, you also have to use separate marketing channels for each group. For example, if your target audience is Generation X or millennials, you can use Facebook as your primary social media channel. If you target the younger Generation Z, Snapchat and Instagram are better options to reach these buyers.
For a full breakdown of the key generations, scroll down to the infographic!
How do you reach millennials?
For many businesses, millenials are the most important. They tend to purchase online, have disposable income, and thus are a primary target for businesses investing in digital marketing.
Millennials are also the largest age group. In the United States, there are around 76 million millennials. They’re avid mobile device users, have a shorter attention span, like brief content, and are more active on Facebook and Twitter. They are also more active online during the evening.
Here is how you can maximize the outcomes of your marketing campaign if you target millennials.
- Social media: Social media is an integral part of all digital marketing campaigns. The issue is, there are already plenty of social networks with millions of users each. So focus on the most important. Millennials are most active on Facebook and Twitter and least active on Snapchat and Instagram.
- More video content: Video content is equally popular among all age groups, and millennials are no different. YouTube is a great social media platform to reach this age group.
- SMS marketing: As virtually every millennial carries a phone, SMS and mobile marketing is another great way to reach millennials.
- User-generated content: As mentioned earlier, millennials are the most significant segment of actual online buyers. They tend to read reviews and feedback from other buyers or customers before making a decision. So user-generated content (like reviews) is highly valuable.
Simply put, your marketing content must make it easier for your audience to make a decision. For this, your businesses must be listed on all review websites. In addition, you can also use blogs, tweets, product reviews, social media posts, and digital images.
So that was millennials. Similarly, you need a different marketing campaign for each age group.
Generational marketing is an effective way to improve your marketing efforts and to generate real results. Check out this detailed infographic from HandMadeWritings to learn more:
