Millennials. Some of us market to them. Some of us recruit them. One of us says they don't exist. That one person is Brenda Wong of Debut.
I recently had a chat with Brenda after she delivered a great talk at #smlondon LIVE! 2016, have a listen to the podcast interview on iTunes or SoundCloud. Keep reading for a summary of our chat.
What are your 5 steps for reaching out to Millennials?
"The first tip is echoing my whole 'Millennials don't exist' thing. Tailor your campaigns. Researching who your target audience is and constantly updating that research is so important. Young people occupy different kinds of tribes. So you can have young people into K-Pop, or grime music, or somebody who's obsessed with the Kardashian family. You need to do your research into whether your product is going to be applicable to them, whether they can relate to it, and then, from there, you make up your own specialized custom audience.
Number two, don't jump on the negative Millennial bandwagon. Now I don't know if you've ever seen articles slamming Millennials at all, but the gist is that they're lazy, entitled. People love to hate on Millennials, but what I would suggest to brands is don't fall for that. I think encouraging positivity and light is actually a much better approach when it comes to marketing to the Millennial group.
Practical tip number three, jumping on current events is a good idea but only when you do it your way. So I was at Old Street Station - I'm based around Old Street - and there was an amazing pop-up by a company called Appear Here. They took the election and they popped up a store in Old Street, and it allowed passers by to kind of vote for who they wanted. And you could even take away branded Hillary or Donald Trump cupcakes with you. They leveraged a current trend in their own style.
Number four, become part of their personal brand. So this is a bit of a sneaky one because we're trying to get young people to share stuff, all the time - we don't just want young people to engage with it, like, and forget about it, we want them to be part of our brand journey. So you have to make things visually beautiful. Make stuff worth sharing. A great example of personal and corporate branding, of that marriage between the two, is Buffer's Instagram hashtag #InstagramGold.
The final one is to be open, be useful, and always give back. Successful content in a content saturated world usually has one of two things - either a personal edge or that piece of content is truly and absolutely the most useful version of that piece. It's not enough to be shiny, happy people all the time. You have to be true."
Follow Brenda on Twitter @BrendaIsARebel and read the full article on the Link Humans blog.