Millennials' Influence on Digital Marketing

Millennials, Generation Y, twenty-somethings, and thirty-somethings. Whatever they’re referred to as, they’re now statically the movers and shakers of social media.

Reports from Crowdtap, a social-influence tool for marketing, indicate that men and women aged 18 to 36 are on any different kind of media for 17.8 hours per day on average. That means observing a lot of digital advertising in many various forms.

Some of the hours represent overlap with different forms of media – such as watching two hours television while scrolling on Facebook – which count as four hours all together, but two “real” hours during the user’s day. Clearly, this indicates that the user will receive double the advertisements (or more, depending on the activity) simultaneously.

"Millennials are always on," says Anna Kassoway, Crowdtap's chief marketing officer. "Some of it is passive consumption. A lot is media hours that are overlapping."

In looking at the numbers on Crowdtap’s report, it’s obvious that for a large number of millennials, their top priority is social media.

• 71 percent said they daily engage with social media
• They spend an average of 5.4 hours daily on photos, social media posts, blogs, emails, texting, and speaking to other people about media, equaling 30 percent of their entire everyday media consumption
• Still, 33 percent of millennials’ media consumption is through traditional methods – radio, print, and television.
• 40 percent said they trusted information accumulated by user-generated content than from other forms of media, including magazines and newspapers.
• And 30 percent said they remember user-generated content better than other sources

So what does this all mean? That millennials are slackers with nothing but social media on their mind? Not at all. Quite the opposite, actually. Instead of just consuming news, almost half would trust news generated from multiple sources thanks to the fast-moving pace of social media. It also means that digital marketers must do double duty and ensure that their research is thorough. As it is, most marketing companies currently allocate most of their budget to sending advertising messages, but some predict that will change. “Influencers” will come into play who will shape their peers’ perception through content generated by other users. Produce just the right hashtag, tweet, post, or picture, and there’s a good chance social media, and in turn millennials, will propel a marketing idea from obscurity to viral in no time.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232062