Engaging with a younger audience is a tricky art to master, never underestimate your audience – no matter how young they are. Cancel culture is still very much a thing and you don’t want to endanger your brand by being insensitive and disingenuous. Engaging with a younger audience is quite possibly the hardest audience to attract, young people have high standards and even higher expectations when it comes to the content that they will engage with. If you think your business doesn’t need young people, or they aren’t your target market, then think again. Those young people will be your market at one point in their lives and you need to make a great impression on them now. Here are twelve valuable tips for helping you impress a younger audience:
Don’t Be A Try-Hard
Remember when you were a teenager, and your dad would say things like “hip” or “rad” and you literally wanted the earth to open and swallow you whole? Well, that hasn’t changed. Only this time, you’re not their dad and they don’t have to put up with you in front of their friends. Young people can spot a try-hard from a mile away, so be careful with your choice of slang terms. If you don’t know what “lit” is then rather just don’t – it won’t be pretty. It is easier to talk about Millennials than it is to talk to them; they set the bar high when it comes to deciding whether or not they will give you the time of day.
Be Honest
Younger consumers aren’t as obsessed with cost as their older counterparts are, for them buying online is so much more than cost. Focus on customer experience, user experience, and your brand’s message on Instagram. Young people care more about the environment than any other generation ever has, and they want to know what your brand cares about. Brands should have a purpose other than just blatant consumerism, find your brand’s purpose, and then be honest with how you market it.
Instant Gratification
Older generations are generally more patient with response times and site loading times, likely because they came from a place of postage stamps and dial-up. Younger people are far less tolerant, so be mindful when deciding on acceptable response times to online queries and orders. Much like they wouldn’t wait an entire day for a reply, they would also never wait a week for a parcel to be delivered. Instant gratification is all about the here and now, not the then and later. Not all communication is done through writing; younger audiences generally prefer to interact with brands through a more visual route. This is important when factoring in the time it will take for your audience to engage with you, which is why most content is absorbed through imagery and not text-based posts. Reading an article, like this one, is generally not high on their list of things to do. You need to plan an immersive strategy that is based heavily on appealing visuals and not lengthy text blocks.
Immersive Video Content
Much like a few of the points above, your video content needs to be on point. Anything less than that and you may as well turn around now and go back home to plan your retirement. Adults don’t speak the same language as kids do but immersive video content will. Choose your content wisely, consult with a younger audience for guidance. Splash out and hire a video production company like Zipinmedia, they will help you make professional videos that engage with a younger crowd.
Music Is Key
To attract a younger audience who are (let’s face it) so much cooler than you were at their age, you need music. Team up with a music streaming provider and give your website an upgrade. Keep your player somewhere discreet though, this isn’t Winamp and we aren’t doing anything to a llama. Make sure you change up your playlists regularly according to what’s popular for that month.
Youth Empowerment
Older generations will never understand the struggles that more recent generations had, and still have, to deal with. The world is a far more complicated place than it was 20 or 30 years ago, the problems that young people face these days are unimaginable to most older folks. These kids have gone through so much. If they have managed to emerge on the other side of teenagerhood victorious, then they deserve to be celebrated. Young people don’t agree with outdated ideas, and they regularly challenge the status quo, so you need to make them feel as empowered as they are. Encourage them to have a voice and to use it; they will appreciate you for it.
Thoughtful Topics
The next important thing to keep in mind when trying to pull a younger audience is to choose topics that will interest them. Have an entire department working on this because your selected topics will make or break your brand. You can have a fantastic product but if you don’t advertise it properly, then no one will ever know about it. Stick to topics that matter to them but be careful with the sensitive ones. I’m not saying you should shy away from them, quite the opposite actually – you must just be mindful of how you approach them.
Language
Besides leaving out the “lits”, “crunks”, and “yeets”, language is so much more than the slang you should probably never use as an older person. Speaking to a younger person in a manner that they will appreciate and listen to is a whole new ball game. When drafting the copy for your ads, ask your kids to help. You’ll learn a lot, laugh even more, and have a great bonding experience. If your kids aren’t old enough or they are (gasp) too old, ask a friend’s kid or a niece or nephew. You must succeed with the language element here, or you’ll lose their attention quickly. TLDR is a real thing, folks.
Be Relatable
Younger audiences demand fresh content that they can relate to. Brainstorm topics in a weekly meeting with your digital team and make sure that they gain a close understanding of younger people. You need to know their interests, concerns, and their pet peeves – that is the recipe for being relatable.
Be Interactive
Make the most of the platforms available to your brand. We are the most advanced we have ever been as a digital society, and you would be shocked and amazed by what your brand can achieve online these days. Create engaging and interactive content but always remember that a well-placed iTunes voucher will never go unnoticed.
Stand Out
Younger audiences are highly specific with the content that pulls them in. They are impressively adept at scanning through posts and articles until they find something that attracts them long enough to focus on. Your job, as a marketer, is to create different content. Find a unique way to attract an audience; there are so many brands competing for attention within the same industry space that it is easy for brands to disappear in all that digital noise.
Digital Natives
The internet, as we know it, is a vastly different place from what it was five or ten years ago. It is unrecognizable from what it was 20 years ago. Your target audience, particularly those younger than 25, has grown up with this constant flurry of pop-ups, content overload, and constant sensory overstimulation. They are immune to most ad strategies unless they are created with them in mind. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why most marketing efforts from some of the biggest brands are put together with a team of psychologists assisting.
To engage with an audience under the age of 30 takes work. Engaging with an audience under the age of 20, however, takes strategizing and in-depth research. We all like to think that just because we’re older, we somehow know what it’s like to be that age, so we must automatically be able to talk to them. That is the biggest mistake you will ever make as an advertiser or marketer. The world these young people are growing up in is vastly different from what the world was when you were that age. Their problems are far more complex, their attitudes are constantly evolving, and they are trying to navigate puberty in a world that rarely stops to listen to them. If you just took the time to put yourself in their shoes for once, then you will see what I mean.
These are the future adults of our next generation; don’t make the same mistakes that the generations before us did. These young humans need the platform that they deserve to adequately voice their feelings, their thoughts, their opinions, and their fears in a safe space. Any brand that can combine all these elements into one strong, bold, and unapologetic message will be a winner.