Marketing to kids and teens can be a bit of a sticky situation. Depending on who you talk to, they could have some very passionate feelings about the ways in which youth are being advertised to and how it’s affecting their view of themselves and of the world. While this is an issue worth contemplating, there’s no denying that marketing to kids and teens is going to happen, whether it’s direct or indirect. So if you have a business that could be used by kids or teens, it’s important to know strategies to successfully and ethically market to them. To help those is this situation, here are three tips for advertising to teens using digital marketing.
Come To Them Where They Are
When advertising and marketing to teens on the Internet, the biggest way you can give your business an advantage is to know where teens are spending their time online and coming to them in those venues. According to Louise Julig of Social Media Examiner, 80 percent of teenagers spend their time online using various social media platforms. For this reason, it’s vital for your brand to have a strong social media presence if you want to find online success with teens.
Some of the platforms your brand should be using include Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. By being an active participant in these online communities and allowing teens on these platforms to have interactions with your brand here, you have a better chance of having success with your online marketing tactics.
Create the Right Kind of Content
According to Jonathan Prezant of Direct Marketing News, marketing to teens is all about content. However, using content marketing strategies to reach a teenage demographic can be harder than it may initially sound.
Prezant states that content focused on teens needs to be engaging, entertaining and—above all else—shareable. If teens feel that content you’re producing would be enjoyed by their friends, they will share it via their own communication channels, getting your brand and messaging out to even more than you could yourself. However, they want to engage with content on their own terms. Being too overtly promotional could end up taking your brand in the wrong direction, so be careful.
Don’t Forget About Their Attention Span
As is now pretty well known, the attention span of teenagers is not what it used to be. In fact, according to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, the average attention span in now only 8.25 seconds. This means that in order to have your marketing efforts to be worth anything, you have to get your point across in that time frame. Luckily for marketers, the ways in which marketing has evolved has made it so this is definitely possible. Social media, ads, content and more are all about having a compact and clear message. So as long as you are able to distill your marketing into a few words or images, you should be able to continually market effectively to teens.
With evolving technology and an ever-changing world, reaching out to teens as a business requires both knowledge of the basics of marketing as well as how to use current tools to push your messaging. Use the tips mentioned above to help your company find the most success possible with a target market of teenagers or kids.