Target Your Social Marketing to Each Generation (It’s Not Just for Millennials)

Remember when Facebook was just for college students? No longer – and that’s how your social marketing should work. Here’s how you can target all ages.

Millenials don’t exist. But neither do Baby-Boomers or Gen-Xers. At least, not the way Time Magazine or CNN or any major news outlet depicts them.

Generations are just groups of people. And people respond and react to historical events around them. How they respond to historical events is literally how you define a generation.

So, how do you market to different generations? You treat each generation as people. People with different viewpoints and different skill sets. But they are still people as people have been for centuries.

Let’s look at each generation and see how social marketing can help you reach out to each.

1. Social Marketing To Millenials

Let’s start with the “easiest” and most obvious group: Millenials. It’s easy to characterize millennials by their stereotype. Besides, there are 80 million of them in the U.S. alone. That’s a huge demographic to hit.

But most people, including Millenials, miss the mark when marketing to Millenials.  The New York Times demonstrates how many markets misunderstand Millenials, saying “Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of millennials said they would rather make $40,000 a year at a job they love than $100,000 a year at a job they think is boring,”

Notice the adjective at the end of the sentence. Can you see a plaid shirted, skinny-jeans-wearing “Millenial” talking about how their job is “boring”? Yep. That shows that the statistic is not about the numbers, but about the perception they want you to see.

A Search For Meaning

The reality of Millenials and their jobs is probably closer to the fact that the $100,000 job is meaningless. While the $40,000 job provides meaning. See the difference?

How does this apply to social marketing? Millenials are not on the web searching for “fun and excitement” any more than any other generation. They are looking for meaning.

Why do you think the shift in social marketing and SEO recently has been away from spammy robot-like marketing and more toward authenticity? Millenials won’t put up with that kind of B.S. They can smell “fake” from a mile away. Fake is meaningless and hollow to them. It adds nothing to your life.

Be A Real Person When Social Marketing

This is true for all generations, really. But, even if your company is more than one person, create a personality around it. It’s like fiction. In fiction, you have a narrator. The narrator is a character either inside or outside the story.

Create a narrator for your brand. Pretend, no, believe they are real. If you begin posting on social media for your brand as if it were a person as opposed to a corporate construct, you will convey authenticity.

If you treat Millenials like people and act like a person with your marketing, you will find the real people behind the generational tag knocking at your proverbial doors.

2. Social Marketing To Gen-Xers

Guess who is a major Generation-X member. His name is Barack Obama and he is the 44th President of The United States. And what truly characterized his presidency all the way from campaign to final stretch? Pragmatic hope.

In the early Nineties, this generation was characterized as the rebel generation. They grew up in the Reagan Era and played their grunge rock as loud as they could to drown out the world.

That’s the stereotype of them. Since Millenials have eclipsed their popularity, it’s no longer popular to “try and figure out” Gen-Xers.

In reality, they are easy to characterize. They are the truly hopeful strategists of all generations. And 80% of them are on social media. This means that social marketing is still strong for this group.

How does it work with Generation-X? It’s easy. Show them the value in your product to advance their situation in life. Show them the practical uses of your product. But do it in an authentic way.

Is your product environmentally conscious? Will it change the way they live? Gen-Xers might bite.

3. Social Marketing To Baby Boomers

How do you spot a Baby Boomer? They’re standing on the street looking confusedly at their mobile device. Whoa, wait. That’s totally unfair. Why? Because it’s actually not a true representation of Boomers.

You might be surprised if you’re a Millenial, but as of 2014, a majority of Boomers were on social media. A 65% majority. And it’s been two years since then. That’s forever in the tech world.

But, when it comes to social marketing, this is probably the most ignored sector of society. But, this is really going to send you scurrying back to the drawing board (a concept only Boomers would understand, am I right?), 50% of all consumer expenditures come from Boomers.

And they represent some $15 trillion in financial worth.

Hold your horses. Before you start spamming Boomers on their social media sites with “social marketing” understand one thing. They see social media as a way to keep up with long lost friends more than they do as a marketplace.

They are also very loyal customers. Brand loyalty huge among Boomers. This is what that “Like” button is for on your Facebook page. If you can get Boomers to participate on your Facebook page, make them feel as if they are loyal customers for engaging. Then you suddenly have a ton of social marketing capital on your hands.

How do you do this? Give them great deals if they post on your page. Let them try things out for free. And, if you’re local, promise them a friendly conversation if they come into your store. They really do value face to face interaction over digital interaction.

Conclusion: Don’t Focus On Stereotypes

The true fault of most social marketing to generations is the hyper focus on stereotypes over reality. It comes across as “trying too hard” just as bad as Taco Bell tweeting “bae.”

Don’t be Taco Bell tweeting “bae.” Treat generations like people and you will always win.