Millennials are a generation that make up 12 million people, almost one-fifth of your population. They are exposed to ads every day, so if you want to convert them into customers, you need a strong content marketing strategy.
Millennials dominate the business world with 35% of the UK workforce estimated to be millennials within the next 2 years.
This domination gives them a considerable amount of buying power, and if you’re not focusing your content marketing strategy on millennials, you are doing something wrong.
What is personalisation in content marketing?
Personalisation is all about bringing value and delivering a meaningful message to the customer you are targeting.
All customers are different, so the content you send to them should be personalised. You can base this on the data you have on them such a buying history, location and interests.
By incorporating personalisation into your content marketing strategy, you give yourself options to create more relevant – and therefore high converting – content for your customers.
Learn everything there is to learn about content marketing with our Complete Guide.
You can incorporate personalisation into your content marketing strategy in so many different ways – no matter what your budget is.
You might not want to splash out on chatbots and personalised online experiences for your website or multi-device operations. But, even simple things like segmenting email marketing lists and adding first names in texts can still have a huge impact.
Millenials and hyper-connectivity
Millenials are the very first generation to have spent their entire adult lives with technology such as smartphones and the internet. They have witnessed the positive and dramatic changes these technologies have had on peoples lives.
This has resulted in a generation that values accessibility, transparency and convenience. They are the most tech-savvy and socially-conscious generation in history.
Millennials love social media and share over 350,000 tweets, 2.5 million pieces of content on Facebook and 300 hours of Youtube video every single minute.
Why personalisation matters to millennials
Customer expectations are higher than ever – especially for millennials. Personalisation meets those expectations in a number of ways:
- People, in general, can sometimes be controlling – most people like to be in control of their environment. Personalisation provides a cherry-picked environment that feeds into that need to be in control.
- If you see an offer for something specific you are looking for, it gives you a feeling of empowerment as if your thoughts have been manifested.
- There is a dizzying amount of content out there. We are exposed to an average of 5,000 marketing messages a day. Personalisation stops you from bombarding your customers with too much content (much of which they might not find useful) and ensures the content they do see will be remembered.
- Selective attention – this is the fact that your brain picks up and responds to messages that are most relevant to you.
American Express hired psychologist Emma Kenny to try to figure out how they could best engage with millennials. The results from her study found:
- Personalisation was most important for the millennial generation
- Almost half of the millennials expected brands to customise offers to suit their needs.
- Millennials were more likely to go out of their way to use a customised offer compared to other age groups.
Millennials have trust issues
Well, don’t we all? To build a relationship with a millennial and turn them into a customer you need to have patience. Build trust with them over time, provide them with valuable content and align your values with theirs.
Concerning corporations, especially things like financial institutions have a very low trust rating with millennials. They grew up through the recession and saw how financial institutions can fail. 92% of Millennials firmly do not trust banks, but 47 percent of millennials indicated they’d be more likely to trust a financial service if it created useful content.
Content is King – we say it all the time and it goes double for millennials. The ridiculous amount of ads and the difficulty finding good quality content you want mean that if your business can create high quality, personalised content for millennials you will see a greater ROI than on any other marketing strategy.
With that being said, Millenials are also more likely to be brand loyal than any other generation. Authenticity sells so if you can build that trusting relationship with your customers as individuals they will stick around and provide a more significant customer lifetime value.
Companies that do personalisation for Millennials well
Netflix
Netflix and Chill? Millenials have moved away from traditional TV to streaming services and no service has captured this market better than Netflix.
72% of Millenials have a Netflix account – they are leading the streaming revolution; but how did Netflix get them to do it? Personalisation.
Sucess in marketing is about keeping your audience engaged so Netflix recommends personalised content based on your watch history. Often they will suggest shows to you based on other users who have watched similar content. This keeps you watching and before you know it you’ve lost your whole weekend to a Netflix binge.
Netflix is now going even further by tailoring its ads to your interests. TV shows have many layers and appeal to viewers for different reasons. They trace the wildly different paths viewers take to reach each show and analyse them for common threads. Ie. for their new show Defenders, they might trace the tread back like this: those who have a love for the anti-heroes and moral ambiguity of Daredevil; the coming of age tales such as Iron Fist; the sharp humour and dark crime of Jessica Jones would like Defenders.
Amazon
The titan online retailer owes a huge amount of its success to how well it has incorporated personalisation into its marketing.
Four out of five millennials purchased from Amazon in the past month, buying at a much higher rate than any other generation.
Amazon is constantly improving and innovating their algorithms for their recommendations. They have raised the bar for retailers across the world and everyone is trying to keep up. The algorithms they have are so thorough that often you will find yourselves adding a number of extra items to your basket before checkout that Amazon has recommended.
