The Millennials is the trillion-dollar market that most brands are dying to attract. However, marketing to Millennials is tricky and is something that every marketer struggles with.

Here we give you five secrets to what Millennials want that would help with your viral marketing campaign.

 No longer is having the latest products attractive to many Millennials. According to a study conducted by PWC, 52% of Millennials would rather spend experience-related purchases.

Millennials want a product not solely for the tangible product itself, they crave the intangibles and the experience that comes with it. Oreo nailed it on the head with their Oreo Colourfilled campaign in 2015 during the holiday season. They allowed fans to fully customize their Oreo packaging online, add a holiday greeting and have them delivered straight to the doorstep.

88% of millennials say that they get their news from Facebook (American Press Institute). With so much content online, your content has to be delivered fast, if not, your brand will be scrolled away with just a swipe of a finger.

Whether it is a video, a picture or a Facebook post, it has to be short and to the point. It has to catch the attention of the millenniums instantly because to them, there is so much more content to look at.

Strongbow’s use of visual content and a short humorous caption effectively captures the spirit of the brand in a glance.

The internet is saturated with so much news and your business has to know what the Millennials care about. This can be topics related to school life, relationships with peer, social issues or a health. By injecting current topics millennials are talking about into your marketing ideas will garner more attention.

Jolly Shandy shares visual content on common situations and problems young people face in their everyday life, effectively engaging their audience who share the same sentiments.

Source: Jolly Shandy Facebook

Millennials will only engage with the content if they can relate to it. So, whether it is the element of surprise or shock or a touch of humour, triggering some sort of emotion will then make the message (and your brand) stick.

Millennials hate the hard selling. Why should they buy your product when there are so many of the same thing everywhere else? What makes the difference is the brand-customer relationship.

64% of Millennials feel an immense urge to make a difference in the world they live in (Intelligence Group). There is an increasing emphasis on supporting companies who are socially responsible and care for their consumers.

Always, a feminine care product brand seeks to empower females worldwide by educating young girls. Their #likeagirl video was a social experiment that showed the drop in self-confidence of young women after going through puberty. This sparked off a chain of social media buzz with many young women posting pictures of them breaking the status quo and gender stereotypes, further reinforcing the message of female empowerment.

Source: spotmegirl.com

Building trust with your consumers and showing them you care for them too differentiates your brand from the rest. Yet, remember that Millennials grew up with technology and research everything before buying. If a brand is unauthentic and doing public stunts just for the sake of it, they can tell.

As computer becomes much smarter now, there is artificial intelligence company in Hong Kong leveraging chatbots to interact with customers and build personalized customer experience. It is also a great way to build better relationship with the target customers.

Finally, as with all marketing, content has to be easily shared. Millennials want to share their life and want their voices to be heard. Viral content is spread by word of mouth and through social media, thus it is vital that your brand is mobile compatible and uses suitable distribution mediums.

The ice bucket challenge to raise awareness for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) caught on really quickly. Big names such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift all joined in. Not only was it easy to upload a quick video onto any social platform, tagging friends to do the same quickly spread the word worldwide.

Source: nydailynews.com

Remember to choose the suitable channel for your marketing campaign to increase engagement with your targeted audience:

Snapchat (16-24 Yrs old)

Instagram(16-34 Yrs old)

Facebook (25-34 Yrs old)

WeChat (18-34 Yrs old)

To recap, this is the Millennial Viral Matrix

Valuable unique experiences

Instant gratification

Relatable content

Authentic brand customer relationships

Likes & Shares

With these features in your marketing campaign, go forth and go viral.

The desire to understand customer journey can lead marketers and business owners to search for more effective methods in their marketing strategies to increase in sales and customer satisfaction.

In accordance to Thunderhead Blog and some researches, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) will be the one of the main focus for marketers in 2017. Why is that? In our previous blog post, Integrated Marketing Stack ( IMC) has introduced the benefits for setting up Customer Journey profiles, highlighting ways of data implementation and process methods. Bearing the common motive with the previous post, this article will aim to run through ways of integrating the customer journey analytics with their marketing plans.

Customer Journey Analytics refers using a CRM and marketing system data to find out a group or individual customer journey over time.

Firstly, by understanding the basis of a customer’s journey, marketers will be able to predict an individual customer journey patterns, so the marketers can tailor specific marketing campaigns or promotions to what may appeal to the targeted customers.

Communications with customers always comes as priority for business owners and our society becomes more driven by the web and social media, so it drives the marketers to reach out to bigger audience group by placing their brand/business on the web. The web has become competitive as the real world, and by making your services/products available online simply isn’t enough. Marketing campaigns and advertisements remains essential, yet to stand out from different competitors, marketers need to have some effective strategies in maximizing the business’ exposure. Social media marketing have proved to be a major factor in boosting brand exposure and sales, and many marketers aim to reach out to more potential consumers by adapting social media.

Marketers will need to pinpoint their consumers’ thought process prior the purchase decision, i.e. what made the customer search for this particular service/product, what are their alternative choices and considerations? In many cases, longer customer journey usually revolves around products with a higher price point, whereas shorter customer journey belongs to single purchases usually with a lower price point. Through comparison, customers who are motivated by desires instead of needs tend to spend a lot more.

For example, Ben wants a new car, his current one is rather old but still fully functional. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision as his car is still fully function. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision even his car is still fully function. Before making the purchase decision, he began to research what are available on the market. Thought the process of the research, he needs to consider whether he wants to go for something different that will suit his lifestyle or go for his regular choices. He will weigh in the pros and cons of whether to go for electronic or petrol, hybrid or regular, finance, rent or lease etc. Every time he sees a pro, he will weigh in the con to see which is the best cost for his money, and as natural consumers we all go through that. With CJA mapping out customer profiles, marketers can appeal to consumers like Ben before he even begin his research.

Based on the previous example, from mapping out individual customer journeys like Ben’s marketers are able to predict future interests and patterns of Ben’s life cycle as customer. For instance, marketers may be able to predict when is the best time to appeal to Ben, based on the information of when he had purchased it. This prediction depends entirely on the product, therefore when applied to other products such as mobile phones, the life expectancy of the product is much shorter.

Through identify segment groups and gathering more customer profiles, marketers can set up dashboards that not only summarized groups of individual customer journeys, but also with insights and comments that allow marketers to customise and generate solutions that appeals to individual customers. Based on these touchpoints, marketers will be able to get an update and further understanding of their target audience, allowing them to re-position themselves in the market to appeal more.

Consequently, with all the information gathered through CJA, marketers can adapt the appropriate methods to their customer groups. These insights are pivotal to future marketing activities, and the more you gathered the more connected you customers will be. At the end of the day, all marketers have same goals in maintaining and strengthening customer relationship in maintaining customer bonding and their loyalty.

The end-of-year holidays are great time, not only for the shoppers but also for the businesses as this provides an ideal time to grow your following, boost sales, and increase engagement.

This is the best time to unleash your innovation and launch a marketing social media campaign to engage more visitors to your business and start making them your loyal consumers. You’l want to think of as many as ideas as you can for the coming holiday marketing campaigns on social media platforms. Exploring the ideas of best social media campaign, you’ll be able to pick a good mix of campaigns that won’t wear out your audience.

Aiming to help you get the best idea for your marketing campaign this festival season, we bring to you the list of some most innovative and result-oriented ideas for social media campaigns to give boost to your sales and increase visibility in your target market.

So, let’s start exploring the best 10 ideas to get your creative juices flowing! Be sure to try a mix of different campaigns over the holiday season like Christmas campaign, Halloween campaign etc, so you get plenty of feedback about what works best for you.

One of the easiest Christmas social media campaign ideas to run is a comment giveaways. It is usually easier for your target audience to take part in the campaign and easier for you to track entries easily.

This campaign has a lot to like about it:

1. The instructions and the prize should on the photo itself.

2. The picture should be eye-catching and very well staged.

3. Questions should be simple: What’s your favourite holiday treat?

With photographs, it’s easier for you to provide everything that is needed for the promotion, making it useful to re-purpose on the leading social media platforms like Instagram, Tweeter etc. Keep these things in mind when designing your own Christmas campaign.

It’s always easy to start with a simple, easy to run and manage Facebook Like or Comment giveaway campaign as this brings more visitors to your campaign and help turning them into the real buyers. You can simply ask your fans to do one (or both) to be entered.

When preparing a Black Friday Comment or Facebook Like campaign, make sure to public the instructions that are easy to understand with should offer valuable cool prizes. This simplicity helps your campaign get over 10,000 likes!

Instagram hashtag giveaway idea is one of the best social media campaigns. Thansgiving and jewellery are great visual opportunities, and Instagram is one of the most result-oriented platform for a #hashtag giveaway.

Simple Hashtag campaigns on Instagram are great type of social media campaigns. When launching a campaign on Instagram, make sure to display clear instructions on the image itself, and there won’t be a need to worry about crambing instructions into the description-comment fields.

This Cyber Monday, consider launching a simple Twitter giveaway as this is one of the easiest way for fans to enter. Visitors find it easier to enter into the Retweet campaign and enjoy great benefits that you may be offering.

Try asking for tweets for some simple questions that people might find enjoyable to answer like ‘what is your favourite style?’ Try offering prize descriptions as well as the full instructions for the tweet.

Of course, end-of-year being the biggest buying season of the year, you will want your target audience to buy. No matter you are going to launch the social media campaign on Facebook, Twitter or any other platform, there’s so many ways to attract buyers:

1. Free shipping or buy one get one free offers

2. Early bird or limited quantity sales

3. Site-wide discounts or category discounts

During the New Years, you can always run a big new year sale and drive more people to your business to sell more without causing a damage to your financial chart.

You can ask for a ‘thumbs up’ for people ready for a giveaway. This is one o the best ways to engage more visitors as that’s an effective and emotional way to get people to like, comment or share the post.

You can call it a human tendency, people are more likely to check the products that are listed under ‘limited time discount’ banner and hence this can be the best social media campaign to grow your sales and financial revenue. To drum up business during potentially slow periods, try offering a large discount good for a specific time period.

Try using the following ideas:

1. Free shipping or buy one get one free offers

2. One day only or limited quantity sales

3. Site-wide discounts, special purchase items, category discounts

BOGO or buy one get one, is the most result-oriented way to bring more visitors to your business via the social media campaign. This lets more buyers to buy more products that are listed in their budget. ‘Buy one get one’ are simply irresistible way to get sales-weary people to click.

What’s your New Year resolution? Ask your target audience and in turn you can be offering some giveaways that they would love to enjoy on this New Year. You don’t need to sell consumer products to run effective giveaway. Anyone, including a medical office can give away something that its patients may want!

Try offering something ‘daily sales for everyone’ on social media Instagram to bring more visitors to your store and sell more this festival season. This may be the best result-oriented Christmas campaign as online buyers just love to shop through the Flash Sales.

Try a different type of promotion daily such as:

1. Free shipping

2. Giveaways

3. Buy one get one free offers

4. Sitewide discounts

Try using the above mentioned ideas for social media campaign and you’re likely to experience a great difference in the sales and increased number of customer engagement.

Mid-Autumn festival is fast approaching and as marketers, it is the perfect time to capitalize on the holidays. Regardless of industry, some creativity is all it takes to make your brand relevant to the upcoming festival. Take inspiration from the following 10 seasonal advertising ideas that have worked for these companies.

A huge name in the coffee scene, Starbucks launched their own line of mooncakes, each one stamped with their signature mermaid logo. Flavours? Of course they included a coffee one. Their Facebook post garnered over 20 000 likes and shares making them the top Facebook post of the month in Hong Kong (Socialbaker).

Coming up with seasonal advertising is not just about differentiating your product, but also triggering emotions. As Wechat marketing is essential in China, Kate Spade launched a sky lantern flying game on Wechat to allow users to virtually release a lantern, written full of well wishes into the sky. A long tradition in China, this game effectively allows anyone celebrating the holiday anywhere in the world to join in and share their lantern (and the brand) with family and friends. This is one of the most successful cases when using WeChat for Business.

Read More: How to Go Viral on Social Media?

Angry Birds, the phone app game is the most downloaded game, possibly of the century. When mid-autumn festival came around in 2011, the Rovio team decided to celebrate with its 3 billion players. The Angry Birds Seasons app successfully incorporated seasonal marketing, aptly fitting in with the festivities. Golden eggs were replaced by golden mooncakes and the game has 34 oriental stages to get through.

This company decided to include everyone, including the furry friends in the celebration of Mid-Autumn festival. They came out with animal friendly mooncakes stuffed with pork and chicken and even donated them to local animal shelters.

Read More: 5 Successful Content Marketing Cases 2016 (Hong Kong)

A good marketing idea for smaller companies – take advantage of the festivities to send a message across to your audience about what your company stands for. New World Department Store China Limited has done just that, reminding the public to go green with their Moon Cake Box Recycling Campaign. To incentivize participation, they give away complimentary gifts and vouchers that can be redeemed at any of their department stores, for every mooncake box collected. In their 5 years of running the campaign (2011-2015), they have collected over 28,000 boxes, successfully making a difference and marketing themselves as a company that cares.

In light of the Mid-Autumn festival, Nestle came up with a whole new way of eating their yogurts. In their Facebook post that received almost 20 000 likes and shares, they featured a simple Do-It-Yourself recipe to make yogurt mooncakes. Not only is it festive, it increases the value beyond the traditional use of your product for your consumers.

Read More: 5 Reasons You Should Outsource Your Social Media Management

Marriott Tang’s “ Jewels of Mid Autumn” mooncake contest gives customers a chance to take home their own box of Marriott mooncakes by guessing the name and ingredients of the mooncake in the photo posted on Facebook. Running a Facebook competition allows you to engage directly with your customer to form relationships. Not only does it bring about brand awareness, it is also nice to give back to them.

Known for their quirky products and sense of humour, Goods Of Desire lived up to their name, launching a line of mooncakes shaped like butts. That’s certainly one way to catch the attention of your audience. (The Pronunciation of “15th Aug” in Chinese is equivalent to Butt.)

2-Michelin star Yan Toh Heen offers a mooncake baking workshop allowing their customers to create their own customized mooncake with any chosen inscription. Mid-Autumn festival celebrates togetherness and offering an experience your consumers can share with the ones they love makes the festival all the more special.

Not using marketing automation today is a crippling setback for businesses.

Marketing automation helps your small business tap right into the power of technology, and systematize lead generation. For business owners continuously strapped for time, cash, and resources, it’s a blessing.

IDC group, in fact, opines that if you don’t use marketing automation, you are already behind the 8 ball. See Source.

Marketing automation is an interplay of a set of processes, systems, and strategic concepts all working together to meet the goals of your business, without you ever lifting a finger (at least, that’s the goal of every business that seeks to automate the marketing function).

Marketing automation is not truly hands-off, “set-it-and-forget-it” endeavor:

• It demands development of systems and processes.
• It requires onboarding of team members, employees, staff, and vendors.
• After it is set into motion, it needs testing, tweaking, and re-deployment.

If you manage to do it right, however, marketing automation truly works wonders for your business. At best, here are four different practical use cases that it has the power to influence:

According to Email Monday, a lead generation survey (2014) reveals that more than 26% of marketers surveyed use marketing software to automate and manage lead generation.

Also, more than 36% at least tried using marketing automation software.

The Aberdeen Group’s State of Marketing Automation report 2014 states that at least 70% of businesses, however, swear by the efficacy of marketing automation and are in the process of using a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).

Marketing automation bring efficiency into your sales processes, aligns marketing efforts with that of sales, and obviates the need to do many tasks manually.

By automating most of the digital marketing channels where manual labor is either enhanced or removed completely, the entire digital marketing engine gets to run smooth, efficiently, and relentlessly.

Blog posts happen on schedule, social media accounts are flush with content, and emails go out automatically based on user-generated triggers.

Since manual input is not necessary and because systems and processes are more reliable with automation software taking over, brand awareness is more pronounced and continuous.

What price do you pay for that?

One of the most critical areas of marketing where automation really shines through is lead nurturing by engagement.

Since not all your customers are ready to pay the moment your ad shows up, email marketing is the best way to keep your leads nurtured.

Why, you ask? Nurtured leads are more sales ready. On average, DemandGen reports that sales opportunities increase by 20% compared to non-nurtured leads.

The more nurtured your leads are, the more “trusted conversions” you are likely to see.

You think your users will use what you just built? Hold on a sec.. it might not be as easy as you think. To design the best product customers like, these are the four major steps you need to work on.

“What you think does not really mean what users would think.”

Fully understanding about your audience and the”battlefield” that you are entering is crucial for the success of your project, Yes yes, it is definitely a war zone out there. Knowing your target audience and your competitors can help you get into the mindset of your users.

“Data does not mean information”

After you have absorbed all the information from the market, now you have to dig out what is useful for you and the product/ services that you are building. Persona analysis and customer journey mapping are great ways to understand about the thinking and action process of your audience.

“Design is not just about lines, colors and buttons”

You can now finally start sketching out the buttons and icons based on the list of requirements that you have came up with. Your wireframe can then turn into a functional prototype within a few hours. Really. Building this prototype allows you to see and feel what your end product would look like, before actually spending a long time developing the actual UI layout pages. You can then proceed to UI design.

Do you have a social media crisis plan? Most businesses do not and that can lead them vulnerable to big problems. In social media, anything can spread like wildfire and even the smallest misstep can turn into a huge debacle.

It’s always best to be prepared ahead of time and have a plan for how to handle a social media crisis so you can protect your brand’s reputation. Follow our five steps to managing a social media crisis to create your plan.

Before you handle the problem, you have to know that a problem is occurring. It’s critical for your business to use a social media listening tool and constantly monitor your social channels. You can set up your brand name as a keyword so you are notified when anyone is talking about your brand on social media. There are many social listening tools now that make this process automated and easy to monitor. Some of the more popular ones include Hootsuite, Social Mention, and Mention.

The first step you absolutely need to take if a crisis breaks out is to respond on the platform where the crisis began. For example, if a viral tweet is running rampant, respond on Twitter. You can spread your message to your other sites but begin addressing the situation where it began. Silence will only make fans and followers more suspicious. The best course of action is to respond and then try to take the conversation off the public forum. If it is one individual person who is having an issue, provide a contact number or email and find a way to have the conversation offline. This way you can handle the situation without the entire world watching your every response.

Take responsibility of the issue immediately, even if the issue is not your fault. Trying to share the blame will not work in your favor. Accept responsibility, ask forgiveness and be committed to it. Don’t make the situation worse by apologizing for the sake of apologizing and then never fixing the problem because in this day and age, the truth will come out. Transparency is key.

This is when you take back a little bit of control of the situation. Create a website or a page on your website, with all of the information on the crisis. Include your acknowledgement and apologies, key facts, how the company learned of the situation, who responded, how you responded, next steps and contact information. This tactic will help you save you time and allow you to direct anyone with questions to the source instead of answering questions in real time. It also shows you are committed to fixing the problem.

Once you have handled the immediate situation, circle back with your team and use it as a learning moment. Evaluate what worked and what could have been done better. Look at response time, who was involved and determine if you were missing any steps in the process. Document everything and use it to strengthen your social media crisis plan and your social media activities.

Hopefully you will never need to use this social media crisis management plan. But in this day and age where information spreads at the speed of light, it’s essential for your business and your reputation that you are prepared to handle any social media situation.

Are you looking for result-oriented ways to gain popularity on social media? Contact us to schedule a free consultation!

Anyone in business knows the higher up you get in a company, the less it is about the little details and more about the digital strategy. But when it comes to digital marketing, many companies want to hear what the return on investment, how it is helping the business, and why they should continue to pay for it. Your boss cares less about the little details and just wants the big picture. Many times your boss will have plenty of prepared questions they want you to cover in your meeting. These questions include:

Instead of answering this question point blank, give them the stats first including:

• What is our cost per lead?
• How many leads are we generating?

When it comes to these statistics, you are going to want to give them the number of leads your digital marketing efforts are generating and how much you are spending overall. This lets them compare it to their traditional marketing and sales acquisition cost to see if it is better or worse. We suggest you also know these numbers to be able to compare them, in order to come up with a digital marketing budget.

When it comes to your digital marketing efforts this can be a loaded question. It is best to keep it to terms your boss will understand. Using a bunch of acronyms like PPC, SEO, SEM, and SMM can only lead to additional questions. You also want to make sure you are only describing the pieces that are working. You don’t have to include all the modern techniques that have either failed or you are considering trying. If you think it will succeed, your boss will too.

Depending on the type of boss you have, some will care about your digital marketing efforts and others will not. More and more companies are starting to realize the power of digital marketing. But if you have a boss that asks this question, it is best to be prepared with a short simple answer, that is in terms they will understand.

A few example answers could be:

• Digital marketing is a great way to interact and engage with your customers on a new level.
• More and more customers are looking online for information about products and services and we want to make sure that our information is available to them.
• Customers are more likely to purchase from a company that has a current digital presence including social media sites and a blog.

This may seem like a curveball question and that is exactly what your boss is hoping for, to catch you off your game. Many presenters choose to not touch this question because the answer seems obvious to them. But by not having an answer prepared, your boss may feel he can replace you with someone else who can do it for much less, for example, an intern. This is your opportunity to tell him how you are contributing to the bottom line and how your unique knowledge of digital marketing applies directly to your industry. Your boss will appreciate how you tied back your knowledge specifically to your company’s statistics and industry.

As a digital marketing agency, we have prepared many of our clients for this discussion with their boss. We understand that the higher you go in a company; the more focus is put on the bottom line. That is why we make sure our clients have solid, measurable goals that are set for them to be able to take back to their boss and prove the value of digital marketing.

Sound like what you have been looking for? Contact us today! We can get you the measurable results you have been looking for.