If your business is not using inbound marketing currently, then you are behind the curve. Hard selling finds itself losing steam, especially with the tech savvy millennial crowd. Who wants to be sold to when there is literally an infinite number of choices for every product on the market today?
If you want your business to have its share of this influx of new money to these young and inpatient people, then you must learn how to market to them through social media using inbound marketing and aggregating those efforts. Here are some top tips on how to do just that.
Find the Preferred Social Media Hangout of Your Target Audience.
The millennial generation is hardly a homogenous one. As a matter of fact, the real-time distribution of highly personalized products and services across the Internet causes people to form tighter niche colonies than ever before. If people can have exactly what they want when they want it, there is no room for a generic product or a generic marketing scheme.
An Example: Facebook vs. Instagram
Although the same company owns both Facebook and Instagram, the audiences they attract could not be more different. If you are looking for a marketing platform, you likely will focus on one or the other.
For instance, Facebook tends to attract people above age 25, while its sister network Instagram appeals to the teenage crowd up to age 21. Facebook draws more white males while Instagram appeals to black and Hispanic people. Depending on the product that you are trying to sell, you will focus your marketing efforts on the platform with the audience that is your target.
Aggregating the Data From Your Chosen Social Media Platforms
Although we simplified the previous example in order to showcase the difference between social media platforms, the truth is that certain social media platforms will have some overlap of demographics. In order to fully maximize your online ROI, you must learn how to aggregate this data and prioritize your marketing based on the market share of your demographic that each social media platform holds.
There are many data aggregation programs you can take advantage of for just this purpose; there are also many analytics programs that the major search engines give away for free. If you do not mind the lag in the data, all of the major social media websites are plugged into the major search engines, with Google of course having the most robust reporting system.
One of the easiest ways to determine if the demographic of your audience represents itself inside of a particular social media platform is to look at the social leaders within that platform. If the top performers on that platform are within your demographic, you can bet that their audience probably overlaps with the audience that your products and services are attempting to reach. In many cases, you may even have an opportunity to reach out to these content creators for an inbound marketing opportunity, an opportunity that this article will explore more deeply in the paragraphs below.
Inbound Marketing and Social Media
The hard sell is a marketing technique of the distant past, especially when you are referring to the millennial generation. Inbound marketing is not only more effective, but it also costs much less both in the short-term and in the long-term.
Inbound marketing is an umbrella term that means you are bringing people into an interest of your overall brand. The purchases come after the potential customers become more familiar with the overall brand. In many cases, the millennial generation supports a business just as much for its social outreach and company culture as it does for the actual product and service production. This is, of course, assuming that your product or service is at least competitive in the marketplace.
Once you have located the social media platforms that your target audience prefers, you must learn how to use the technique of inbound marketing within that context. There are some very simple examples that we will explore below.
Content Creators and YouTube
The opportunities for content creators on YouTube grow with each passing year. As the mainstream moves away from traditional television and radio outlets, it finds its way to YouTube more and more. Forbes predicts that the average American will watch 30 minutes less the in 2015 and 30 to 45 minutes more of online content within the same reporting period. The vast majority of this watch time is watching content creators on YouTube, especially with the recent announcement of the paid subscription service, YouTube Red.
Creating an ongoing relationship with a top content creator on this website saves you money over time. The videos that a content creator makes do not ever leave the Internet. You also avoid the hard-sell. Although content creators are required by the government to disclose if a video is sponsored, there are ways to get in contact with a content creator for a completely natural inclusion of your product or service without this announcement being necessary.
Content creators also charge much less than television networks at present. This is only one of the ways that a company can use inbound marketing, target the millennial generation and reduce maintenance costs using social media.
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