The Data You Need to Market To Those Under 25

Do you ever read a statistic that just messes with your head? For example, I recently read that by 2022, 41% of the world’s population will be under 25. Which is crazy!! And creates an interesting marketing challenge. How can you effectively market to a generation who has grown up online and is constantly inundated with content and advertising?

Under 25 Stat 1

People under 25 not only take up a large share of the world’s population but they also make up a disproportionate amount of online and social media users. However, those of us in this age group statistically have shorter attention spans and tend to make decisive decisions about whether or not to consumer content or ads. A study in 2019 found that 64% of 18-24 tune out content from cluttered environments. Leading to 46% of advertisers saying that they have issues getting their content to stand out! Also, a third of advertisers say that it’s a challenge to find effective ad placement sin all the online clutter. What can you do to cut through all the online noise and reach this massive market?

#1 – Find Shared Passions

The sheer amount of product, companies, and information available is staggering. It is not enough anymore to have a good product available anymore, your brand ideals and personality need to match with the personality of your consumers. 56% of Gen Z consumers say that having shared passions and perspectives is a major factor when it comes to their engagement with a brand. However, Gen Z’ers are fantastic at sniffing out inauthenticity. Your brand personality and ideals need to actually be what you say they are. Actions speak louder than words!

What are the advantages of having a well-defined brand personality and ideals? Giving your company a personality makes things like content creation a lot easier. Knowing who you are also can help you make decisions about the direction you want to go in the future.

Under 25 stat 2
And 49% of young consumers say they will evangelize a brand they feel represents their values, likes, and personality.

Don’t be afraid of incorporating causes you care about into your brands personality! 72% of consumers want the brands they care about to be positive contributors to society. We’ve seen in recent years that many brands (especially smaller companies) connect their core brand to a charity or cause they care about. Younger consumers are 69% more likely to buy from a brand that contributes to a cause.

#2 – Choose Quality Locations

Younger generations are big on authenticity, brand trust, and quality. 74% of 18–24-year-olds believe that brands are responsible for where their ads are shown. Which is true! There’s very little excuse for having your ad show up on a website that doesn’t believe in the same things as you. Programmatic advertising and digital display ads give you a lot of control over your ad placement. Nearly 40% of advertisers have faced some backlash for having ads appear near low quality content. 54% of younger consumers say that ads placed near premium content inspires more trust in the ad itself!

#3 – Use Innovative Technology

From AI and AR driven content to native and contextual ads, technologically advanced are advertisements are becoming more accessible. The stats on their effectiveness across the entire marketing journey speak for themselves!

Of the 18–34-year-old’s interviewed:

63% pay more attention to advertisements with innovative formats

70% will consider a brand more if they associate them with innovative and immersive formats

71% say innovate ad formats are more engaging

62% feel like innovative ads formats tell them more about the product or service

63% are more inclined to purchase from brands that create content with innovative tech

#4 – Personalization

Personalized ads are effective for every age group. Gen Z’ers and Millennials are less tolerant of ads that aren’t personalized. Most younger consumers have in innate understanding of how their personal data is used to create targeted ads. Being targeted (or retargeted) based on their interests and past activities are expected. Thankfully creating effective personalized ads are easier than ever to make.

  • What can you do to create effective personalized ads? Start with the information you have about your customers. It’s difficult to know what your customers want if you don’t know who they are. Look at your 1st party data. What are your most common demographics? What are their interests? How would they most like to be communicated with?
  • Use the tools available. Marketing automation platforms and CRMs can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to segmenting data. Many of them are designed to help create simple, personalized messages.
  • Have a well thought out plan. Do you have a mapped-out customer journey? Knowing where in their journey your customers are makes a big difference in the types of personalization that will work for them. Think about nurturing. Pay attention to the details. Make sure that there aren’t little annoying things such as, getting an abandoned cart email even though you’ve already come back to purchase it. Get rid of triggers that are connected to repurchasing products commonly only purchased once.
  • Know when to walk away. Keep your data clean. If someone has never opened an email it might be a good idea to take them off your list. Their data could skew your demographics and could make understanding what personalization your active customers need difficult.

Is it effective?

Is it effective? Yes! From that survey of consumer between the ages of 18-34, 58% said that a personalized ad helped them make a purchase decision. 42% also said that they had clicked on a sponsored ad in the last 6 months!

In my experience, a lot of companies panic when thinking about marketing to young consumers. They feel like they need to be relatable or “cool.” That often comes off as disingenuous and is easy to see right through. It’s far more effective to instead focus on building a relationship with them. Make it easier for them to see who you are and what you stand for. Chances are they care about the same things you do!

 
 

What Do You Need to Create a Successful Podcast?

Successful Podcast Featured

Nearly 51% of adult Americans listen to podcasts!  

Here’s the steps you need to create your own successful podcast!

Step One: Get Over Your Fear!

The first step to success is to just start! There’s a lot of fears people have about starting a podcast.

“My voice sounds weird.”

“I don’t have enough technical know-how.”

“The equipment is expensive.”

“A podcast is time consuming.”

Chances are that once you get started, those fears will dissipate!

Step Two: What Do Want To Say?

One of the most important things about starting a new venture, like podcasting, is to have a mission. For example, our podcast, BeGrowthDriven, was started because our mission as a company is to help business grow. We wanted to connect like-minded business and entrepreneurs to share advice and recourses. That goal informs all the decisions we make about the podcast.  

How to you want to help your audience or customers? What is the goal of your business? You can expand on that to create your podcast’s mission.

From our BeGrowthDriven Podcast, Episode #14: “the Fear of Podcasts”
There are many inexpensive tools available.

Step Three: Record Your First Episode

You don’t need expensive equipment to get started! (Though podcast mics start at like, $30 on Amazon.) Here’s what tools we have found to be helpful.

Part of recording your episode is the editing and mixing side of things. It’s totally up to you how much editing you want to do! It all depends on what you want the feel of your podcast to be.

Step Four: Publish Your Podcast

There are many directories to publish podcasts on. That big three are iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Doing well on iTunes/Apple Music is the goal. Around 70% of all podcast listens and downloads happen through Apple. It can be trickery to get monetarization on Apple than on Spotify or Google. So, having your podcast available on as many platforms as possible is good idea!

It’s also a good idea to publish three to five episodes at launch to give your new listeners something to listen to.

Step Five: Promote, Promote, Promote

Podcasting has been around for a long time so there are many recourses and tools available for promoting (or learning how to promote) your podcast. Here’s some tips and tricks

  1. Tap into your guest’s audience

Chances are if they are a good fit to be a guest on your podcast, there audience could also benefit form your content. Make it easy for your guest to share out pull quotes, images, and links from their episode.

A BeGrowthDriven promotion on Instagram
  1. Use social media.

This is kinda a no brainer. Podcasts can be slip into so many different types of content that is easy to post them across many different platforms. Pull quotes do great on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Links can be shared on twitter and Facebook. Twitter also has a great SoundCloud integration you can use.

Social media can be used to promote the episode ahead of time as well as sharing past highlights. Social media also is great way to connect with fans and listeners one personal level and add another channel for them to interact with you.  

Step Six: Repurpose Content

Podcast content can be repurposed into many other different types of content. We’ve already talked about pull quotes and highlight clips, there’s way more things you can do. For one thing, it’s common place to film the recording of the podcast. That video can be put on YouTube. And video highlights can be put on social media. Putting the video on YouTube also gives you some accessibility features such as closed captioning. Since YouTube is owned by Google, videos on YouTube boost your overall brand SEO which as far-reaching benefits.

Another helpful way to repurpose podcast content is to have the podcast transcribed. If you don’t have time to do that yourself, (understandable: it’s time consuming) companies like Rev.com or Fiverr offer cheap transcription services. Once your podcast is transcribed, it can be used as blog content to make it accessible on another channel and boost SEO.  

Step Seven: Get Featured On Other Podcasts!

A great way to promote your podcasts and reach new audiences is to be a guest on other podcasts! The podcast community is well connected and worth tapping into.

Do you have a podcast? We want to hear all about it!