Why Most Businesses Fail To Capture the Millennial Market

Millennials are a misunderstood generation, and many organisations fail to adapt to changing trends. It’s a classical case of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, it doesn’t work. If you don’t adhere to your customer wants, needs, and traits, you won’t sell.

But in the organization’s defense, millennials are a very diverse generation with varying needs and wants. Many businesses try to circumvent intensive research by oversimplifying millennials as these trendy, hip urbanites with lots of cash to burn on things they don’t need. It won’t take long for your marketing efforts to fail if its foundation is rooted in convoluted concepts of customer engagement.

If there’s one thing that millennials hate more than being stereotyped into working the gig economy, then it would be the superficial attempts to lure them into buying more stuff from you with crude ads. Millennials have grown up being bombarded by an endless stream of ads and can navigate through them with the efficiency of a machine! It’s no point trying to retrofit your brand around what you think the millennials want.

Instead, go deep into market analytics and utilize tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence to learn who your audience is, what they want, and what the core principles behind your brand represent. It’s what Netflix did, and it’s what Google and other big tech giants are currently doing with their marketing strategy.

Millennials don’t like reading ads. Period.

It’s the one thing they have learnt to avoid since the early 2000s. They treat them like they would treat an unwelcomed elephant in the room – with profound ignorance. But that’s where videos have come to upend this trend and make your life as a marketer a little easier. Videos, especially live streaming, have become the primary tool which drive your brand’s marketing efforts.

Millennials consume videos, even those spattered with wanton advertisements that inspire them to do a myriad of things you would expect from a typical customer. These include visiting your website for subscription, buying your merchandise, and even becoming part of your organization – all because of a video you streamed online.

Content marketing is the juice that keeps your marketing efforts afloat.

This might seem like an oxymoron because earlier we frowned upon text-only ad spaces, but when applied within the context of original, meaningful, valuable content, words can have a powerful impact on the millennial market.

They are, after all, enormous consumers of content, and if we were to go by industry trends, content marketing coupled with thoughtfully curated videos will go a long way in steering those  mysterious and elusive millennials your way.