Step two: Get them interested
Your ad is right there on the page and it's relevant. It's something the Millennial will like and even benefit from participating in, and it's just begging to be clicked on. The problem is getting the Millennial interested enough to actually pay attention to it and hopefully click through to your campaign. To do this your campaign needs to catch her attention and get her interested quickly before her ever-moving eyes flick to a new page. Here's how you do it.
Have a conversation
Introduce yourself and your brand; let the Millennial know who you are. By introducing yourself, I don't mean haplessly flashing the brand name in the ad, but rather informing the user about the product or service you are promoting. Medium agnostic advertising can be a turn off -- it's kind of like when picking up a chick at a bar, what works better: a cliché one-liner or genuinely going up to someone and introducing yourself? --so make sure when you are inviting the person to interact you make it specific to the medium you are advertising in. Using creative that is educational and innovative will make the user comfortable with your brand and will have a higher chance of creating brand loyalty.
Once you've opened the flow of dialogue, let the Millennials talk back. Enable comments, reward participants and make it easy for them to share your campaign with their friends. Give them the URL for their blog, a widget, an embedded code. The more they can talk about your brand on their MySpace pages, blogs, online journals, the better for you. An easy way to get onto those pages is to get viddy with it.
Getting viddy with it
What's sad is that the pun in this subhead is already too old for a lot Millennials to remember: The growing and ever-changing vernacular and pop-culture consciousness means that to keep the monkey, I mean Millennials, happy, you have to be just as hip and with the times as they are. This ad created by Canadian agency BOS hits the target of what's hot now with viral videos. The video plays off the acronym, "WTF," to promote a new Cheetos colored mystery drink at Mac Convenience stores.
If you don't already have a YouTube account, well, good God man go create one! Link it to the brand's site, and integrate the video theme into the rest of your campaign. Sheesh!
The aforementioned OPA report found that 40 percent of Millennials pay attention to advertising on the internet mostly when their attention is driven to a product or service they want to learn about, so it is very important to create robust consumer websites so once they do click through they will find the information they were looking for. This is where Mac Convenience stores' campaign falls flat. The company created this hilarious video campaign but when you go to the site there is no information about the drink or the videos.
Blogs are best
Thirty-four percent of Millennials use the internet when deciding to make a purchase and 31 percent of Millennials use the internet when forming an opinion of your product. They're going to research your product whether you are speaking about it or not. The best way to get them educated about your product is to blog about it!
Dave Wilkie at Dexterity Media has a great list of blogging best practices and Michael Mattis, Yahoo!'s search marketing manager, wrote a recent piece for iMedia listing 7.5 helpful rules towards creating a corporate blog. It's a relatively inexpensive way to have a conversation with your potential consumer. Most importantly, Millennials want to know that your company is human; meaning they want you to interact with them, respond to their comments and acknowledge their existence. We like attention, remember?