Want to reach millennials? Start blogging

There are 80 million millennials in America.

With roughly $200 billion in annual buying power, that generation has a huge impact on how marketers are crafting their content.

Many are attempting to reach them with dated strategies. These young consumers, however, come with their own set of rules, which marketers must learn in order to connect with them.

Traditional marketing won’t work

In the age of television and radio, it was all about “push marketing.” If you had a product you wanted to sell, you pushed it out to people through TV and radio ads.

Now, marketers must use “pull marketing”—building relationships with those who need what you have to offer. Millennials won’t respond well to being a member of a large target audience. They want to be catered to more directly.

To reach millennials, focus on depth, not width.

Millennials want relationships with brand managers

Marketers are failing to reach millennial consumers, because they don’t invest adequate time into building genuine relationships with them.

In order to persuade them and grab their attention, your strategy must involve understanding them in a way that goes beyond push marketing. Push marketing is lazy, and many of its traditional tactics have proven to be ineffective at capturing millennials’ attention.

CONFERENCE: Join us McDonald's HQ and learn how to use storytelling to drive employee and customer engagement.

According to a recent survey, only 1 percent of millennials said a compelling advertisement would make them trust a brand.

They don’t want “one-way communication.” Build trust through dialogue.

Connect through blogging

Blogs can provide an authentic interaction between brand managers and millennial consumers.

Nearly 35 percent of millennials rely mostly on guidance in blogs before they make a decision to buy a product, compared with the 3 percent who rely on TV news, magazines and books.

In the past, older generations relied on traditional media. Today’s young consumers are looking to blogs. Why? These consumers seek to communicate with people, not ads.

Successful business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers all understand that persuading millennials to follow through on a call to action is easy once a relationship is established. A blog is how you can build that relationship.

Vincent Carlos is a writer, thinker, reader and runner. A version of this post originally appeared on his blog.

(Image via)

from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2bhCWq0