(Newswire.net — February 24, 2020) —
In the past two decades, businesses have increasingly spent all of their efforts in trying to attract the millennial crowd. This is for good reason – the first wave of millennials joined the workforce in the early years of the new millennium and today make up for the market that is most attractive to the average business.
This is about to change. In the last two years, the earliest of the Gen Z crowd have made their way to the earning class. Gen Z typically refers to people born from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s. So starting now, for the next couple of decades, we are going to see the emergence of a new class of buyers who have lived all their life in the digital era – an era when internet and later smartphones have been ubiquitous.
So what does this mean to your business? “A good number of people applying to our courses today come from the post-millennial generation. In order to reach them, we have to adapt our marketing strategies accordingly”, says Rob Evans, the founder of Graviteq, an Australian rope access training company.
Now for one, not having an online presence is not an option any more. The new wave of customers don’t view digital presence as a comfortable alternative. They consider the internet as the primary avenue to do business.
Secondly, if you are still old school and deal primarily in cash, better watch out. Digital payments, including cryptocurrency, is what the new wave of customers are going to transact in. If you do not have an option to accept digital payments, then your customer is going to look for alternate providers.
But this is not all. The emergence of Gen Z is also going to dramatically change marketing strategies for all businesses.
The newer social media
MySpace gave way to Facebook which has been ceding territory to the likes of Instagram and Snapchat. With Gen Z entering the workforce, newer social media channels are going to serve as the battleground for advertisers. This would mean that advertising on TikTok and similar newer social platforms is going to become more mainstream and expensive over the next few years. If you are still spending extensively on platforms like Facebook, it is high time you allocate a part of your budget to understand these newer platforms. They will be your mainstay sooner than you expect.
The newer ways to search
For a long time, businesses have relied on manipulating the Google algorithm to get their websites to rank on top of search. Unfortunately, this is no longer enough. While the Gen Z buyer continues to use Google for seeking information they need, they do not necessarily visit the Google.com website for this. Instead, they rely on smart assistants like Siri and Alexa to find the information they need. If you need to be seen, it is important for your website to be designed for use by AI and IoT driven systems.
Also, SEO is no longer what pertains to search engines like Google. There is already an evolution in this space with marketers specializing on Amazon search optimization and ASO (App Store Optimization). The Gen Z crowd consumes a larger pool of media formats and your marketing is driven by this. You may now need to optimize your podcasts for listings on Stitcher or your images on Pinterest. Luckily, many podcast platforms offer a variety of features like podcast analytics tools which can help you grow your brand and optimize for your audience of listeners.
The increasing influence of Influencers
Influencer marketing has been around for more than a decade now. However, what started as a discreet marketing channel is today a full-fledged industry with several celebrity influencers raking in millions of dollars each year with their social media endorsements.
The growth trajectory of influencer marketing is surprisingly aligned to the growth of the Gen Z audience. As more of this market enters the workforce, we are likely to see an uptick in the use of influencers in marketing your product.
So why exactly is this the case? One of the primary reasons for this is that for the younger crowd, social media is as big as traditional media in terms of content consumption. Consequently, social media influencers have taken over the role played by celebrity endorsements to millennials going all the way back to the boomer population.
The impact of Gen Z on marketing is an interesting thought project to anyone in the industry. Getting your processes right could set your business on track to cater to the demands of the next generation of buyers.
What other changes do you see coming to marketing in the Gen Z era? Share your thoughts in the comments.