Your startup is working on appealing to millennials, but for some reason you’re seeing more work than results. It’s frustrating because of just how many millennials there are out there, and you know they could benefit from your product or service. The value is real and you’ve got some super intelligent people on your team. Yet despite all ads, website content, and social media presence, sales to millennials remain flat.
To engage a millennial audience, you must recognize the importance of diversity and inclusion to this generation.
Why Diversity Is Important to Millennials
About 44 percent of millennials are members of a minority group, meaning this is the most diverse generation America has ever seen. Purely from a numbers perspective, it’s easy to see why a group of diverse individuals would put a premium on companies that include people of varying ethnicities, cultures, and backgrounds.
About 83 percent of people feel marketing messages are more likely to have a positive impact if they accurately represent modern society.
Given these factors, over 91 percent of marketers say there’s still a lot of room for growth when it comes to portraying diversity in ads.
As society becomes more diverse, millennials want to see this reality reflected by brands. Millennials are a value-driven generation that believes a company’s level of social responsibility is just as important as its offering(s). Millennials have grown up in an interconnected world, and, at least in America, they were taught to believe in fairness and equal opportunity for all.
The fact that millennials are digital natives plays a big part. Through the internet, this generation gets input from people all over the place. On Facebook, you can be friends with someone whose skin color, gender identification, and culture are completely different from your own. On Instagram, you can follow and be followed by a diverse array of people; likewise on Twitter.
In a study of millennials conducted by the Atlantic Marketing Group, participants were most likely to purchase items their friends “liked” on social media (primarily Facebook, but also Twitter and YouTube — the study was released in 2013 before Instagram was huge). The influence of friends was more important than celebrity endorsements, TV commercials, and emails. This finding corresponded to other findings in literature on this subject.
In other words, social media facilitates easy connections with a diverse array of people, millennials are very active on social media, and their purchasing decisions are influenced by what their friends like.
What Your Startup Can Do about It
The value of your product or service is important, but for millennials, there are thousands of products and services to choose from. Alongside showcasing the value of your product, showcase how you value diversity.
Start a conversation
Having a conversation with people is a way to get them interested in what your brand has to offer. As an entrepreneur, you know the market and the numbers you need to hit. Harness your knowledge of your target audience to start a conversation. Through conversation, you introduce people to your brand. The numbers come later.
The conversation can involve blog posts, social media posts, webinars, videos, and white papers. Make the topic of conversation something that minority members of your audience are interested in discussing with you and each other (e.g. If you’re a tech company, a blog post could be something like, “Why Don’t Tech Companies Pay Women As Much As Men?”).
Most importantly, think about issues that you and your team care about and are affected by, and how these issues connect to diverse audiences. Start a conversation about these issues.
Express your values
Use your website as a place to express your values. Make it easy for users to navigate to the values page; include pictures of your team and a thorough write-up on what you value in people, non-profits, causes, and fundraisers.
The values page isn’t a place to sell anything, it’s a place to express yourself as humans. Be sure to include input from as many members of your team as possible. If your values page is compelling and real, users will stay on your website to find out what else is going on.
Values are part of branding: about 66 percent of people want brands to take a strong stand, and 58 percent want brands to handle social media controversy head-on. Don’t be afraid to voice your values on social media.
Make sure your team is diverse
If you express support for diverse cultures and ethnicities, yet you don’t hire and promote minorities, you’re being inauthentic. That’s bad for business. Your brand could receive bad press, and your conscience will feel the twinge.
Set that aside for a moment — Forbes’ Anna Johannson reports that “companies in the top quartile of diversity are 35 percent more likely to have above-average industry returns.” Diversity is good for business, in part because it brings bright minds and new ideas to the fore.
Embrace Diversity — Let It Shine in All Your Endeavors
Let’s go back to one of the statistics from earlier in this piece: over 91 percent of marketers say ads could be more diverse. The problem with that is diversity is not an advertisement. It’s not a strategy for selling more stuff to people — it’s an ongoing process, a value you must embrace and bring to fruition in your company.
Do your best to bolster minorities inside and outside of your organization and let your actions proceed from there. Millennials who value diversity will take notice. As for millennials who don’t value diversity, they’ll still be happy about the value of your product or service.
