With the world’s most tech-savvy generation yet rapidly entering the consumer market, many brands are quickly becoming aware of the need to shift their marketing strategies to appeal more to Gen Z and their fellow digital natives. However, it’s not just the younger consumer who is demanding a different level of service and attention. Across the board, consumers from every age group are embracing technology like never before. Referred to as ‘Gen C’ or the Connected Generation, it’s time to change things up – no matter what your target demographic might be. Here’s how you can go about it.
Offer transparency and easy access to information
Connected consumers share a few traits in common, and one is that they’re generally mistrustful of bold claims or anything that sounds too good to be true – they’ve been exposed to too many marketing gimmicks and outright scams to be taken in again. The moral of the story for brands is that it’s crucial to back up any claims you make, ensure that it’s easy for consumers to gain access to that information, be transparent, and avoid potentially misleading or dishonest assertions at all costs.
A great example is offering a complete digital product guide for everything you’re selling online. Even if consumers don’t actually want to read up on every minute detail, it quickly conveys to them that you have nothing to hide and want to enable them to make an informed decision. If you’re offering a service, a comprehensive FAQ and lots of useful posts, blogs and articles on your website can achieve the same effect. As a rule, avoid overcomplicated language and jargon.
Offer innovative payment options
Gen C consumers are accustomed to choice – and that extends to how they eventually part with their money. If at all possible, offer multiple payment options on your website or on your electronic invoices, and give consumers the option of paying a once-off, annual or monthly fee where appropriate.
Optimize for the best customer support
Making sure the customer’s journey doesn’t end after you’ve made the sale is marketing 101 – and that means offering ongoing customer support. It’s hard to do this, however, unless your own in-house IT processes are working smoothly. Salesforce provides tips about customer service. Whether it’s putting internet redundancies in place to ensure you remain connected even when your main ISP is experiencing problems, or that you’re backing up all your customer’s data in a safe and secure manner, partner with a reputable IT company such as IT services Perth to keep your IT house in order.
Create an app
While it won’t make sense for every company or industry, having your own app can be beneficial in a lot of ways – especially if you’re the first among your competitors to do so – or at least do so well. People spend a lot of time on their smartphones, and a whopping 86% of that time is on apps rather than browsing the web. There are lots of things you can do with an app – using it as a kind of portable loyalty card, offering freebies or running promotions, allowing them to manage their payments or update their info, and of course, buy your products. If you’re able to gamify the app in some way, you’ll find it a lot easier to promote too.
Optimize for voice search
Another knock-on effect of soaring smartphone usage is a change in the way consumers search for information online. The rapidly growing adoption of voice search presents an important SEO opportunity for businesses by incorporating more long tail keywords into their content. This is because people tend to use more words in a query when they’re talking than when they have to physically type out each word. Keep this in mind when creating new content or updating your old posts by ‘writing like you speak’. AI technologies like Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa are encouraging this trend, so it’s well worth revisiting your digital marketing strategy to take advantage.
Get to the point
Like it or not, tech-savvy consumers are an impatient bunch who expect to get the information they’re looking for virtually instantaneously. When structuring your content – either for social media, in marketing material or on your website – address the issue quickly and concisely before going into more detail. If they can’t ascertain within seconds that you’re a valuable resource and have the answers they’re looking for, they will click away. By providing a combination of quick-fire answers followed by more in-depth discussion for consumers who want to learn more, it’s entirely possible to establish yourself as the go-to resource in your industry.
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