Reaching Generation Y Online
The Generation Y Factor! If your target market online includes the infamous Generation Y (young adults and teens) then you need to get clued up on what this generation is doing online.
But first, what makes Generation Y different from boomers or Gen X? Well, here’s an interesting quote from Bea Fields on Generation Y’s nature:
“This is the most optimistic generation to ever walk the face of the planet. They absolutely believe that miracles are possible. They refuse to work a job that does not bring them a sense of joy. They care about the earth and servicing their community”. http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9011/1/marketing-GenY.htm
It’s generally accepted that Generation Y have turned off from mainstream media preferring to source a lot of their information from each other. Social networking sites serve this purpose with a lot of information and experiences shared via Facebook and MySpace. :
It has also been suggested that Gen Y is very much an experience culture, so your website may need to address this with ‘experiential marketing’ techniques (basically appealing to the senses in a way that is personally relevant). For more on experiential marketing put the phrase into Google and you’ll get a lot of valuable resources.
As Generation Y are very ‘wired’, extremely media savvy and web literate, it is highly likely that your website will need to pass a greater ‘credibility test’ to meet the needs of this target audience. This means your website needs to be highly professional and very well designed. You will also need to seriously consider embracing social networking as both a participant and an advertiser.
You may want to use your website as a ‘hub’ that links off to your presence in the blogosphere (via blogging) and your presence on social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. This will give you the much needed online credibility that your target market demands. Most of the content from these other sites can also be pulled back into your main website via RSS feeds and embedded code snippets. In particular, the WordPress blogging system has many additional plugins to pull content from these types of sites back into your blog so content is tightly integrated.
