In marketing, it pays dividends to be future-facing and create a strategic mid-to-long term plan. And the teenager of today is inevitably your target customer of tomorrow.
Long before they set out to join the workforce, earning their own money to spend on goods and services, or embark on running homes of their own, teenagers already wield significant power over the decision-makers in their households. According to a US study on teenage consumer spending, the ‘in-betweeners’ have more than $200 billion in purchasing power. With this in mind, it is vital that your company acts to either grab teens’ attention now or win their interests in a few short years.
Communicating with teenagers is as much about the ‘how’ as the ‘what’. Attracting a very media-savvy population, who are highly distracted and let’s face it, media saturated, needs to be about much more than just advertising your products and services to them. These active folk are busy juggling exams, university applications, hectic social lives and multiple extra-curricular activities. How can brands be heard above this commotion in order to not just get noticed, but to communicate meaningfully?
Content marketing and the teen market – insight:
I recently spent almost a full day with my seventeen-year old niece, let’s call her Jessica. It was an eye-opening experience. Jessica owns her own high-end laptop with high-speed connection and a top-of-the-range smartphone.
I noticed that apart from concentrated bursts of homework and study, Jessica barely touched that magnificent laptop. Instead she was seemingly surgically attached to her BlackBerry, receiving and sending an endless stream of instant messages and regularly checking her social media accounts – in particular Instagram, to which she uploaded several photos throughout the day and viewed several videos. Instagram’s new 15-second video format is potentially an exciting one for advertisers targeting the youth market – it is little wonder that a US confectionary brand had rolled out a campaign before the ink on Instagram’s press release had barely dried.
And Jess’s smartphone use is apparently fairly typical, of US teens at any rate; a study by Pew found that 37% of teenagers own a smartphone, with many using it as their primary source of accessing the web.
Today’s teenagers are stuck like glue to their mobile or smartphones, and this has a major bearing on how marketers should be trying to reach them. Teens engage in very high rates of text messaging, indeed SMS may still be a vastly underused marketing channel. Around 98% of text messages received get opened, yet only one fifth of marketers report having ever run an SMS-based campaign.
Video also plays an extremely important role in teenage smartphone use. Not only are the yoof uploading and viewing short-form videos on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, they are also spending time in their bedrooms watching full-length films on their phones. Pre-roll ads may be a useful way to reach the engaged teen enjoying some downtime.
There are a variety of ways to incorporate video into your own corporate website; think engaging employee testimonials about working for your company, case studies of real, devoted customers enjoying your product or service and beyond to quirky branded animations – the only limit is your own creativity. But video content needs to be pushed out beyond your own website to meet teenagers in their natural online habitats, bearing in mind that this now means creating mobile-friendly video. Get it right, and you’ll be connecting positively with your future customers and employees.
Photo: Garry Knight
