Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that
Firstly, whatever your product, it needs to adhere to these rules:
Millennials have absolutely no tolerance for things that are slow. With every brand courting them, and offering other experiences they can choose to spend their attention on, there is absolutely no chance they will stick around for an experience that doesn’t load quickly.
Optimizing your product for speed is vital. If it’s a video, consider uploading to a platform like Vimeo, or YouTube. If you’re running a publication you should be optimizing your website for Google AMP, and Facebook Instant. Don’t forget to optimize your digital marketing content: flipbooks, brochures, reports, and magazines to load fast and look great on any device. Anything that can make each experience they have with your product, wherever they’re coming from, fast, and satisfying puts you in a position to satisfy a millennial audience.
Millennials are the smartphone generation. As a millennial myself, I know I almost exclusively listen to music, listen to podcasts, use apps, read articles, and surf the web on my phone. On top of that, it’s almost always while I’m doing something else like commuting, or streaming something on another device.
If you are targeting a millennial audience, there is absolutely no excuse for not building your site to be optimized for mobile. In fact, you probably want to consider building your site first, and foremost for mobile, then adapting it for the desktop. That’s how important that platform is to this audience.
While Facebook’s recent algorithm changes mean there’s diminishing incentive to share to the platform for brands and publishers, it doesn’t mean millennials will be running to your homepage anytime soon.
The reality is that they’ll still usually be referred from social media, a search engine, or an aggregating service. So, it’s up to you to try and both attract them to your site, and retain them when they get there. No matter which way they get in.
If you’re a publication, autoloading the next article beneath the current one, so that they can effortlessly scroll from one to the next, is a start. Just make sure that next article is closely related to the previous one. Try, and get them to sign up to an email newsletter, so that your newest articles, or product news will be right in their inbox.
Do whatever you can to keep them around on your site, and coming back, building your rapport, and trust with them.
Looking at the homepage of most people’s smartphones, it’s clear most of us don’t need any more apps.
While apps provide great advantages when it comes to controlling the user experience, and collecting user data, they’re just not something people are keen to download more of.
As mentioned in the section above, millennials are unlikely to even find your brand, and its content, anywhere other than social media, or Google. So, focus on other ways you can retain them without bombarding them with ads for your app. Or, worse, blocking them from viewing your content unless they download it.
Unless you are some sort of subscription service, do whatever you can to reduce the friction between them discovering your brand, and consuming your product.
Millennials seem like they live hectic digital lives, full of loud social media channels, and brands constantly yelling at them. And, well, they kinda do. Which is why the only things that cut through for them are high quality products with a clear focus.
There’s no shortage of sites that shamelessly try to capture clicks, rather than deliver true value. Millennials have enough options for those sorts of experiences in literally every other part of the internet. Provide what they prefer: a straightforward focus on delivering a specialized product that’s purpose built for them.
Remember, millennials want to feel special. Delivering content that feels specifically tailored to them will mean they feel like they’re getting something that gives them a unique perspective on the world that, maybe, puts them a step ahead of the next person.
Make them feel like a trendsetter.
Think fast fashion brands like H&M. As soon as a trend has caught on, there’s something new in the pipeline for next season.
This doesn’t mean you should be endlessly pivoting its product, or changing its design aesthetic. Rather, it means that your style guide should be clear on the fundamentals of your brand and user experience, while have built in flexibility that allows for some elements to be constantly changing.
Maybe you change the product’s color palette every few months. Or, the shape of your buttons alternates, or animates differently. Or, each of your feature articles is completely bespoke to match its topic like Bloomberg Businessweek did for many years with its cover.
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