Creating Engaging Content For Millennials: The Next Gen of Marketing

StumbleUpon recently worked with DataScience to redefine Millennials, break the stereotypes, and assist marketers in reaching and engaging with them more efficiently. StumbleUpon created both an infographic and a white paper sharing the results with marketers to create engaging content that reflects the tastes of this increasingly growing and influential population.

Millennials have $1 trillion in purchasing power, are highly educated, and they will soon represent over one-third of the population--and the workforce. They are in important segment of the population for nearly every marketer.

Here are some key insights on Millennials:

Millennials Don't Mind Ads

As more and more curated content arises on mobile sites, and the thirst for fresh content continues to grow, users are starting to see sponsored content. Because "sponsored" has the connotation of advertising, the assumption might be that this content is avoided, sees less views or clicks, and has low engagement. This assumption is wrong.

Millennials care less if its sponsored content as long as its good content. Users often will be served a sponsored stumble, and 52 percent of Millennials will thumbs up a sponsored stumble, vs. other generations--this is huge. Creating quality, mindful content specifically tailored to not only targeted demographics, but to cohorts and clusters of users that have similar tastes, will boost engagement. We found that the word "sponsored" doesn't decrease engagement if the content is the right content.

What Is Good Content?

Of course people want good content. The next question is defining that elusive subjective question of "What is good?" We found that Millennials have several passion subjects, and tend to want to read and watch content focused on these topics.

Millennials tend to enjoy causes, humor, self-promotion, and pets. Just look at how much attention Internet celebrities like Grumpy Cat get, and how many views the funniest Super Bowl commercials receive each year. When creating good content, brands need to be thinking around how their target demographic identifies with the brand, and what content is most appropriate.

Millennial males, for instance, identify with humor; 88 percent believe that's their strongest trait. This is why Dollar Shave Club crushed it with their humorous commercials targeting their core demographic of young men, who also want to save money. Millennials also are crazy about pets, with 52 percent claiming to have a dog or cat. Anyone on the Internet knows how viral a good cat video is. (See? Grumpy Cat.)

Media companies have started to tell stories, rather than try to sell something. Agencies have started partnering with brands to tell better stories and use channels like StumbleUpon and BuzzFeed. Brands like Red Bull and Unilever have started to understand that storytelling is key in leveraging their brands on discovery engines like StumbleUpon.

Mobile Is the New Standard, Content Is More Important

If you want to find animals, you need to go to the watering hole. Millennials are on mobile. They expect instant information at their fingertips.

Marketing on mobile is tough; banner ads are ignored, and as any mobile users knows, the ads just haven't reached a level of maturity that connect with mobile users. Creating content for mobile that audiences can connect with is the best way to reach mobile audience. Whether it's the right video, article, sound clip, whatever, creating consumable mobile content is what has the best KPIs, versus the low clicks on a banner ad.

A La Carte Content

Millennials aren't known to like having prepackaged goods selected for them; they tend to be selective and like to choose their interests. When going to discovery and content engines, they like to define their tastes and choose the topics that they like, and don't want to read or see topics they are uninterested in.

This gives marketers an opportunity to be able to mine that data and see which groups like specific topics. If 22-year-old college-educated males are your target audience, and on most of these engines they tend to choose humor, sports, and cat videos, then your brand should be focusing on that specific content.

Be Authentic

The most important advice StumbleUpon can give is to be authentic. Millennials appreciate something that's real, not staged, and is interesting. Taking a risk and putting something up that is a little risky can have a huge payoff.

One Fortune 500 B2B CEO recently shared at a conference that his company's most engaging piece of content wasn't an overproduced commercial, but a five-second Vine video that was authentic.