Establishing a Voice for Your Millennial Audience

Your involvement in the share economy and targeting of Millennials doesn’t mean you need to change the way your business operates. The share economy, like any strategic tool, is something that you apply to a particular segment of your audience. Creating a voice for these users is an important part of your strategy.

Creating your brand’s voice specifically for the share economy means focusing on two priorities:

• Mapping out your target audience: Target a very specific segment of your audience with the content you create.
• Creating a content strategy: Focus on the sharing element of your business.

Mapping out your target audience

The first step to launching a campaign that leverages the sharing economy is the identification of a viable audience. This audience may consist of existing customers, or it may be an audience affiliated with your industry. Regardless of where the audience comes from, you need to identify certain traits to ensure that the audience you target with your offers is a viable one.

As you put together a targeted campaign, you’ll find that the majority of the audience identification process will take place on your new media ad platforms. The most valuable of these platforms related to narrowing down the audience will undoubtedly be Facebook. The following steps help you narrow down your audience:

1. Select a general audience of Millennials that is either saved or segmented based on a particular age range.

   Start with a broad focus and narrow down. In this particular case, you should either begin with your general Millennial audience, or just select an age range.

   

2. Start targeting a specific set of share-based interests.

   Here, you can see a few examples of share-based interests, but you should expand on these interests so that they include any share economy-associated interests.

   

3. Target interests and behaviors affiliated with your brand or industry.

   After you complete the general share economy targeting, you should include interest categories associated with your brand or industry.

4. Select specific placements to develop segmented content strategies.

   Content will vary from one medium to the next. Segment your efforts to reach users with your share economy campaign on all current media.

Creating a content strategy for Millennials

At this point in the development of your share economy campaign, you hopefully have accomplished three crucial tasks:

• You identified your brand as having the right characteristics and the potential to leverage the popularity and value of the share economy.
• You developed a target audience that is likely to engage with your brand in this share-focused campaign.
• You developed content specifically geared toward the traits that define the share economy.

Several standardized elements of your share economy-focused initiative includes your objectives, target audience, and KPIs. The content is going to be particularly important because its structure, layout, and calls-to-action are the driving force behind the framing of a share-based campaign.

Consider the following to help you communicate that the focal point of your content is sharing:

• Create stand-alone landing pages. Your landing pages should remain separate from your other campaigns. One of the fastest ways to lose your audience’s interest is to bait them with content that highlights some information and then sends them to a landing page that doesn’t feature anything matching that content.
• Highlight the share aspect. Use keywords like “share,” “participate,” or “join” to encourage users you sent to your landing page to take part in the share-oriented environment you created for them.
• Integrate a community conversation or activity feature. Your audience may be reluctant to join your community if they don’t have enough information to make a decision. To avoid this issue, highlight topics that are popular right on your landing page. Also, offer prospective participants a glimpse into the community to allow them to see what’s being discussed.
• Provide detailed instructions. Millennials are intuitive, but you shouldn’t take their tech-savvy abilities for granted. If you provide a platform where people upload information about how to do something better, walk them through the process to display it. The upload or communication process may be straightforward and familiar, but don’t assume that they can figure everything out on their own.

  Your share economy campaign relies on user-generated information and content. You want your audience to participate as much and as frequently as possible. So, if detailed instructions are one way of encouraging participation, make them as detailed as possible, even if you consider it overkill.

• Highlight the benefits of sharing. You need to demonstrate to your target audience that sharing provides value, something to keep in mind when you’re creating content for your campaigns. You also have to highlight the value of your target audience’s specific participation. Audience members are going to ask why they should spend their time sharing about brand. You have to answer that question before they’ll take the time and effort to engage.
• Consider an incentive-based initiative. One of the fastest ways to drive up participation in any campaign, including a share economy-focused initiative, is to provide your Millennial audience with some sort of incentive or acknowledgment. It doesn’t have to be anything grand, but it should be something that highlights the individual user, like a leaderboard or a Contributor of the Month program.
• Communicate with your audience as a peer. You want your community to establish a real relationship with your brand. To build up the community as quickly as possible, communicate with participants on a peer level. If you hide behind a corporate persona, you can’t encourage real relationships.