Are you familiar with generation marketing?
Marketers target these five demographics in their campaigns:
- age group
- income
- gender
- occupation
- education
Some marketers believe in the shotgun effect. The shotgun strategy holds that the more demographic groups you market to, the greater your success.
This post takes the opposite approach.
We maintain that generation marketing is more effective than marketing to all five demographics at once. Generation marketing is the first demographic on the list above. In addition, this post provides data supporting these claims.
This post shares a generation marketing strategy effective for marketing to Generation Z. Generation Z’s age range is 10 to 25.
Let’s unpack generation marketing strategies for Generation Z.
Along with millennials, Generation Z makes up a sizable consumer base. They are a distinctive demographic with a taste for sustainable brands, who frequently use social media and spend money on internet purchases.
Here are some statistics about Gen Z and how it can inform your marketing strategy:
1. Leverage the Power of Eye-Catching, Visual Content
Here’s the deal:
You cannot ignore the power of social media in your generation marketing campaigns.
YouTube is the most popular online video property in the United States, and there are more than two billion platform users worldwide. As you see, there are advantages of YouTube in your generation marketing strategies such as the massive audience.
Instagram is also at the top of the list for this demographic – 30.2% of its user base falls from 18 to 24. Clearly, there are also advantages to Instagram for marketing to Generation Z.
Of course, let’s not leave out TikTok. This platform boasted a global user base of more than one billion as of the third quarter of 2021. And TikTok is expected to reach nearly two billion by the end of 2022.
What does this mean for marketers?
Gen Z has a strong appetite for short-form video content, meaning marketers need to incorporate visual platforms into their overall digital strategies to develop the types of bite-sized content this generation craves.
Short-form videos like TikTok that utilize overlays and visual effects accompanied by music have shown to be a bar of marketing gold for brands trying to get the attention of this up-and-coming consumer base.
Related: TikTok to MP3 download
Let’s explore more generation marketing strategies.
2. Put Interactivity at the Top of the List
Gen Z is a creative generation, with 64% reporting being proficient in using Snapchat Creative Tools and Instagram Creative features as part of their regular mobile phone usage.
Related Reading: Pros and Cons of Snapchat
Why should marketers care?
Gen Z wants something to do when they interact with a brand. They want to be able to swipe, tap, or click when they arrive at your posts.
You want to encourage interaction and conversation on social media platforms, too. For instance, you might use polls to encourage Gen Zers to engage with your brand. As a bonus, you’ll get to collect valuable data about this audience that you can use for future campaigns.
There are also advantages of Twitter in your generation marketing strategies.
Twitter and Instagram both offer easy ways to create polls that encourage engagement. Instagram also provides stickers and sliders, which can add an extra punch to your posts and Instagram Stories.
Look:
For the purposes of this post, I asked Instagrammers if they believe in the effectiveness of generation marketing. As you can see, the majority agreed that generation marketing works wonders in the success of your marketing campaigns.
Instagrammers love answering interactive polls. Clicking just takes a second. Afterward, respondents get to see how other Instagrammers answered.
You can also make custom Instagram stickers in order to make your brand different and eye-catching.
As you see, I not only created a custom Instagram sticker for my Mostly Blogging brand but also I used the sticker to engage my followers with a poll asking them to share which sticker they prefer. Social media users develop loyalty to your brand when they feel their opinion matters.
Quizzes are another great way to encourage Gen Z to interact with your brand. Quizzes are tools that help shoppers find products that speak to their unique personalities and styles. When addressing the younger generation, it’s important to show that your brand acknowledges their individuality and wants to encourage each person to be themselves.
3. Use FOMO to Your Advantage
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a huge thing with Gen Z. In a time when everything is live-streamed and available at the click of a button or the scroll of a screen, Gen Zers don’t want to be left in the dust.
You can use this to your advantage as a marketer. Instagram Stories, for instance, allows brands to produce time-sensitive content that followers will actively seek out when they’re on the platform. These Stories will appear in followers’ feeds via notifications, but they disappear quickly, so users know they need to act quickly if they want to see the latest and greatest news your company has to boast about.
Instagram also now has Drops, which help create a buzz around soon-to-come launches that won’t be available for very long.
4. Don’t Forget About Tags
Social media tagging is a great way to leverage social platforms when you’re looking to build engagement. When you add your brand’s hashtag, it encourages your audience to share user-generated content, such as photos.
Suppose you enable customers to tag themselves at your physical locations. In that case, you’re instantly getting that age-old word-of-mouth advertising that’s been so crucial to the advertising space since the beginning of time.
Gen Z desires to be “seen in the wild,” so making it possible for them to place themselves right at your location is fun. Be sure to have something on site that’s selfy-worthy and a hashtag or two that followers can use to promote themselves, so like-minded folks can easily spot them.
You can also ask your followers to tag their friends and invite them to follow you. Again, this leans on the new version of word-of-mouth advertising that’s invaluable when you want to build your brand’s reputation and online recognition.
One word of caution:
Make sure you avoid using Instagram banned hashtags in your generation marketing campaigns.
Let’s continue discovering effective generation marketing strategies.
5. Let Your Funny Side Show
62% of Gen Zers are attracted to new, cool, and fun brands. This is why this crowd is so popular with memes and parody videos.
For marketers, the challenge is keeping up with the ever-changing trends and expectations delivered by the internet. If you’re trying to post a humorous meme that’s two months old, it might already be outdated, which could mean your brand becomes seen as out of touch with its followers. Along the same lines, not every industry can play the funny bone card and get away with it.
What’s most important for Gen Zers is for your brand to be authentic and showcase a distinct voice and the human side of your organization. When you interact with your audience, look for ways to be organic and unpredicted, not something coming from a marketing template.
6. Put Customer Service Above All Else
It’s no surprise that these digital natives have little patience for lousy customer service, given they’ve grown up in a world where chat, email, and social posts are just the world’s way.
Gen Z wants your undivided attention when they have something to say (and they have something to say regularly). As part of your brand’s social strategy, you should offer strong customer service by way of timely responses and openness to feedback.
Utilize social listening tools to ensure you never miss a brand or keyword mention so you can respond quickly to any complaints, issues, or rave reviews.
7. Work with a Professional Marketing Agency
With so much changing online daily, it can be tough to keep up. Consider working with a professional digital marketing agency whose job is to stay on top of the internet’s evolution, so you don’t have to!
Generation Marketing: Frequently Asked Questions
What is meant by generational marketing?
Generational marketing, also called “generation marketing,” is a B2C strategy marketers use when they just target one generation of consumers.
Why is generational marketing important?
As opposed to the shotgun effect in which marketers target all demographics in order to maximize their sales, generational marketing takes the position that different generations make purchasing decisions differently. Based on this belief, marketing campaigns can be narrowed to target one generation at a time. By focusing on one generation, marketers can maximize their effectiveness according to advocates of generation marketing.
Wrapping Up: Generation Marketing
What have we discovered? Let’s recap.
What generation marketing strategies work when marketing to Generation Z?
- Social media marketing is a must.
- Use short-form video.
- Create interactive posts.
- Encourage user-generated content.
- Create relevant tags for your generation marketing campaign.
- Use humor.
- Use Instagram launches to create a Fear of Missing Out.
By reading this post, you discovered powerful generation marketing methods effective in marketing to Generation Z, 10 to 25-year-olds.
Readers, please share these generation marketing strategies.
I look forward to your views in the comments section. Do you agree generation marketing is effective or do you prefer a more one-size-fits-all approach to marketing?
This post was contributed and made possible by the support of our readers.
