Marketing to Young People

Marketing to young people has become a hot topic lately, driven by the evolution of the internet into a more pervasive medium of communication, which many think offers a direct pipeline to young audiences.

If only it were that simple. The youth crowd is notoriously difficult to reach, and has been for some time. There are entire firms built around the elusive task of marketing to young people, so it’s no surprise that most companies that market internally find capturing the youth market one of the biggest challenges of their entire marketing programme.

In some ways, however, it is indeed that simple. The plain fact is that young people have been quick to adopt the internet, and digital media as a whole. There is little need for statistics to bear this out, but if you are in need of convincing, consider that a staggering 99 per cent of people between 18 and 24 years old in the United States are on digital media.

Add to this the fact that young people around the world have been picking up the internet at a faster rate than expected, and the tools are readily available for firms to reach out to a younger audience no matter what country they are from.

The internet was a great gift to marketers looking for a more direct link to the world of young people. With the rise of interactivity on the internet, now, more than ever before, marketers can reach young people where they spend the most time and, frankly, where they have their guard down the most.

The first essential fact that companies need to remember is that young people don’t want to be sold. A July study from Tamar indicates that only four per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 give credence to paid search results when looking for information online. However, this is nothing new. In fact, a major premise of youth marketing has been basic psychology.

Being young is a struggle to craft ones’ own identity, and to differentiate ones’ own identity from that of your parents. As such, the best practices of youth marketing have long included defining products as an alternative to the stuffy old products that older people use. Youth-marketed products are positioned as fresh and fun alternatives, and, ultimately, as products that will aid young people in their search for finding identity.

However, the problem that is emerging is that companies are getting lazy on these practices, and simply recycling their old campaigns. As with many other social or digital media campaigns, firms have developed an irrational exuberance for the tools. Rather than focus on integrating best practices of youth marketing with the tools of digital media, it is easy for marketers to simply rely on their link to young people through digital media to make sales.

As anyone who has been in business knows, however, selling doesn’t work like that. Gaining 2,000 leads does not mean gaining 2,000 sales, and therefore companies must be extremely cautious on simply relying on the digital nature of their marketing strategies to reach younger people.

Young people also have a very specific and broad selection of digital media sites that they visit. The same study that found that 99 per cent of people aged 18-24 year olds are on social media, also found that only 22 per cent of them are on Twitter. So just going after the ‘big names’ won’t work. It’s important to craft a very detailed and specific plan – based in extensive research – to determine which sites your firm’s target audience is on. Car enthusiasts and writers frequently and entire different web of sites, blogs, and forums.

Once you develop your message and find your audience, you need to engage them. Engagement on digital media has become both a cliché and a truism of social media. Everyone hears that it is necessary ad nauseam, but very few companies actually do it. Classic examples of companies talking at their audiences through social media include Nestle’s Facebook arguments over their logo, and Belkin’s pay-for-review blog postings.

For youth marketing, however, the task is much more difficult. Young people are unusually attuned to their social media spaces being taken over by corporate advertisements. As the first adopters of many digital environments, young people are somewhat nostalgic for the days when they did not have to listen to companies selling to them in these spaces. So, it first pays to listen to what your audience is talking about, and then provide them with valuable content – from videos to contests, or anything in between.

Whatever you do in your efforts to reach out to young people, however, remember never to talk down, or even at, younger buyers.

They get enough of that at home.

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