Marketing to Multigenerational Audiences

A key to successful engagement in public relations is to provide meaningful content that also takes into account the evolving habits, preferences and values of today’s multiple audiences. One useful way to define those audiences is to understand how members of each group have been influenced by the era in which they were born and raised, and how their experiences growing up have shaped their view of the world says BurrellesLuce PR agency.

Identifying Generational Markers
While there is some debate as to the start and end dates of each generation, these are the generally accepted demarcations usually associated with each American age cohort:
* The Silent Generation or Traditionalists (born late-1920s through 1945)
* Baby Boomers (born 1946 through 1964)
* Gen-X (born 1965 through 1980)
* Gen-Y, or Millennials (born 1981 through 1993)
* Gen-Z, or Generation Next (born 1994 through 2004)

Winning Tactics for Communicating With Multigenerational Audiences Today
1. Understand your audience by demographic. Determining the gender, age, and other key characteristics of your core audience is the first step in building an effective campaign. By working with other departments within your organization, you should be able to construct a clear picture of your target market and be confident that you're proceeding in the right direction. Even a little research can go a long way when getting to know your audience.

2. Consider audience traits in shaping messages. Take, for instance, Gen-X and the ramification of communications via geo-location sites such as Foursquare—understanding the distinctive preferences and values of each group can help you form messages that are precisely aligned with each constituency.

3. Avoid unexamined assumptions about an audience’s preferred media channels. It’s risky to assume that all members of a generation would rather receive, say, an email instead of a phone call, even if their generation is perceived as preferring one over the other. Instead, begin to build your own library of research (including customer surveys and testimonials), which can be a more reliable guide to the preferences of your target audiences.

4. Identify the generations most responsive to calls to action. It may be that you are aiming a product promotion toward Gen-X, but it is really the Baby Boomers who are the most responsive. Rather than continue to push the brand on someone who isn't interested, recalibrate the campaign to focus on those who are listening and engaging.

5. Look beyond generalizations. While some Millenials, for example, seem to need more attention and praise than, say, members of the Silent Generation, there are always exceptions to the generalizations. Gen-Yer Kristin Piombino, editorial assistant for Ragan.com, challenges people to move beyond "millennial myths and stereotypes" in this article. "We don’t want you to treat us differently than anyone else in the office or look at us like we’re another species," she states. "We just want your respect, and a chance to prove ourselves."

Indeed, respect and being heard are really what any audience or person wants, regardless of generation or industry. You must truly listen to your audience and view your constituents as individuals with specific needs—and not just another set of data—to enhance the conversation and foster engagement with important communities across multi-generations.

Netflix Teaches a Valuable Lesson in Social Media Marketing

If you are a successful online movie streaming service with a DVD rental wing, are facing incredible pressures from competition and changing technologies and need to increase your prices and differentiate your service then it’s only natural that you will be using social media marketing with every breath, right? Well, umm…maybe not. This is a lesson Netflix simply forgot to take into account says online strategist David Amerland.

When Netflix decided to change its name to Qwikster not only did it lay itself open to just about every joke you can imagine concerning the company’s literacy but it also, it seems, forgot to trademark the name and did not check to see if the name was available in social media. The result of the oversight is nothing less than disastrous. Qwikster, is a handle already owned by a Twitter user who has a joint-smoking Elmo (the Sesame Street character) as his avatar. The account belongs to a student by the name of Jason Castillo, whose Tweets around recreational drugs, sex, games and music have a surreal, hypnotic quality all of their own and are a world apart from the mundane concerns surrounding the renting of DVDs or the streaming of movies.

Without a trademark on the name and with Jason Castillo actively posting, Twitter can do nothing to make him close his account or hand it over. Amusement aside, this illustrates first, that even a company like Netflix, which in many ways ‘gets’ the web, has not yet made social media marketing part of its DNA. Second, that the moment you take your eye off the ball and forget that we live in an age where social media is pervasive and capable of creating a massive boost or being an unforeseen hurdle, that’s when you are most likely to stumble.

Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO recently had to use Google’s social network, Google+ to apologize to Netflix users for the rise in Netflix prices and also explain why it was necessary and why the company had no option but to do it. He also posted an apologetic note on the Netflix blog. His opening confessional tone aside, it is clear that had there actually been thought put into social media as a valid means of communication from the very beginning, Netflix would now not be in hot water with its users nor would it be the butt of jokes concerning the pot-smoking Elmo’s Tweets.

Here are some lessons taught by Netflix’ social marketing faux pas:

1. Use the social media channel correctly. Social media is a communication channel first and foremost. Marketing on it is incidental and incremental, requiring a lot of effort for relatively little appreciable return. Communication however is instant.

2. Make communication with your public a core activity. Do not treat social media communication as something you bolt on as an afterthought. Social media is about creating transparency and a two-way conversation. Try to use it as a new form of Press Release and it is likely to explode in your face.

3. Create a dialogue. Does any company have a 100% grasp on its customers? They all work with a marketing persona in mind, yes they all have a certain demographic profile they operate with and yes, again, every company has some idea of the age-range and income of its core customers, but all of these figures make sense only when viewed from a distance. You’d be pressed to find a single person who precisely fits any demographic, marketing persona or even age-range income combination (though, it has to be said the latter is usually the ones which come closer because of their built-in imprecision). To suddenly have the ability to really talk to customers on a daily basis about what they like and dislike concerning your products and services is something which last century we could only dream about.

4. Be enthusiastic. Communicating like there is a gun being held to your head hardly makes for successful online communication in any channel. This is the real-time web! There are great opportunities to utilize social media correctly. Do it like you really care.

5. Respond to feedback. There is no point in saying you are listening if your behavior shows you are prepared to do nothing about it. You have to show what you are prepared to do and why when you take no action that is the right thing to do.

6. Show you are human. You may be corporate. You might be a one-man operation. You might, even, be part of a large conglomerate worth over $7 billion a year. If you are not prepared to put a human face to your communications, admit mistakes, explain faults and give well-reasoned arguments for everything, the only thing you’ll do is manage to alienate your customers.

Social media is still new. Communicating with customers is not. However, the latter has always been governed by what has been possible to communicate through the channels. We should expect many more mistakes to be made in the near future but as we learn from each one, the excuses for us getting our social media strategy wrong will at some point begin to wear a little thin.

6 Tips to Improve the Effectiveness of Your Banner Ads

When searching the web, you probably have come across your fair share of banner ads, most of which you don’t even notice and many you find intrusive or annoying. Can you recall the last banner ad that you saw? How about one you actually clicked on?

The average click through rate from banner advertising on the internet is 2.1%, says Brittney Smith, Marketing Analyst for the 60 Second Marketer. You want viewers to not only see the ad, but also to interact with it. In order to boost the effectiveness of your online advertising, take a look at these six tips to help get you the response you’re looking for:

1. Make it quick. Gaining the attention of the viewer occurs within the first few seconds they glance through the webpage. The message needs to be kept as simple and concise as possible. Shorter ads will be easier for the consumer to remember.

2. Location, Location. Your banner will fade into the background of the page if the message is not relevant to the audience viewing it. Targeted placements are crucial if you want to reach people who will be receptive to your message. Be selective where you buy ad space. A successful response does not include a 16-year-old boy clicking through on your banner ad directed towards mothers.

3. Intrigue your audience. Using simple animation can increase your response rates by 25%. Adding a bit of creativity to the ad can go a long way. If you have the proper resources available, consider using rich media, with sound and other special effects, to set your ads apart from the rest of the clutter. Make sure the animation or images are useful, not annoying, to consumers. “Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.”

4. Develop follow-through mechanism. If you are looking for a specific action from your users, be sure to create follow-through mechanisms that lead the consumer where you want them to go, whether that is the company’s homepage or a landing page specific to the banner.

5. Test your banner ad. The most important factor in the effectiveness of a banner ad is to test and optimize across several fronts. The performance of your banner ad can vary greatly from one design to another along with the size and placement within the website. Be sure to constantly monitor the ad once it has been placed.

6. Keep consistent with your campaign. Your banner ads should not simply be a one off, but be integrated with your overall marketing campaign. Banner ads need to support and tie in with your other marketing such as email and direct mail.

Banner ads can be a useful addition to your ad campaign, but a futile venture if they do not expose the brand to users or drive them to action. When creating banners, consider the users’ interests and what you want the end goal to be. The performance of your banner ad can always be improved through revision and if used properly can be an effective tool. Banner ads can offer a layer of interactivity to the consumer that they do not get from traditional media. Users can spend minutes interacting with these ads, so make each second count!