Content needs to be created for a particular target audience – and it isn’t alway easy to get content marketing for millennials right, particularly if you’re not in that age bracket yourself.

A millennial is defined as someone born between the years 1980 to 2000. These are people bought up with technology. It is estimated that millennials receive 5,000 marketing messages a day. To get noticed amongst all this information requires great skill. Here are some top tips:

Adverts do not work

Many of the marketing messages that millennials receive are selling messages. Ads on mobile phone applications, social media and websites that millennials visit are largely invitations to buy things. Most of these messages are simply ignored by most millennials.

Your business will not get great results by buying advertising space aimed at millennials. Carefully constructed content can reach this audience.

Non-commercial content

The best way to reach millennials is to publish non-commercial information that millennials find valuable. Your brand can be mentioned, but not directly promoted. Content needs to create conversations. Content can promote debate and controversy to create impact and engage readers as long as the readers do not feel they are being dictated to or preached at.

Co-creation

The UK Youth Trends Report 2015 discovered that short, succinct and two-way content appeals to the 16 to 24-year-old generation.

Millennials like to co-create content. Social media content should invite comments.

Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool. Not all crowdsourcing is about funding new start-ups. If a new product is being launched, then crowdsourcing can come up with suggestions for the product name.

Millennials are influenced by their peers more than brands, so creating spaces on social media where people can interact with their friends and followers will result in positive attitudes to your business.

Stimulating conversation and co-creation result in millennials having positive feelings about brands and this makes them more likely to become customers of those brands.

John Murray

John is every inch the wordsmith and loves a game of Scrabble above all else. With experience writing for newspapers, John’s time at university was spent studying Creative Writing – something which comes across in his love of the pun.