MPP – MILLENNIALS AND THEIR PURCHASING POWER

According to Comscore, the millennial generation’s massive size and strong purchasing power, estimated to be $170 billion per year, makes them a valuable segment of the population for marketers to target. But given some of the unique characteristics of this generation, having grown up in the digital and information ages, it is critical that marketers have a clear understanding of this group and how to most effectively reach them through advertising. What are the top products millennials buy? What are the top companies millennials trust when buying products and services? How much does a millennial spend every day, month and year? This and other questions can immediately be answer via the MPP app (Millennials Purchasing Power)

GOAL

The goal of this app is to compile information of every purchase made by a millennial. The users will do their purchases normally, but instead of accessing the online store directly, it will be done through the MPP app. Traditional systems process the data compiled within a year and then report it. With MPP everybody can check how much millennials have spent during the past month or quarter in different categories such as sports, entertainment, food, traveling, etc.

SKETCHING

By developing sketches we’ll be laying the foundation for our future interface. In this step we visually conceptualize the main features and the approximate layout and structure of our application. Once we complete a first rough sketch of the MPP app, the whole team will better understand the mission and purpose of this app.

RESEARCH

We’ll answer several questions and include as much information as possible:

1)   Find out whether there are other apps doing the same thing. How many apps are currently in the marketing archiving purchases made by millennials.

2)   Find design inspiration for MPP app. We need to come up with a logo, font, colors, graphics, etc.

3)   Find information on the technical requirements for our app. We’ll need to decide on a platform (Application Programming interface)

4)   Find out how can we market and monetize the MPP app.

5)   Decide what the app will do for the user (millennial) and the end user (companies)

TEST

Test, test, and test again. How long does it take to load? Millennials don’t have time to wait more than 10 seconds for an app to load. It should me our responsibility to make MPP’s loading experience as efficient and frictionless as possible.

LAUNCH AND WAIT

Launch, wait, and fix problems. Pay attention to comments and use the feedback to connect with customers and make improvements. Users should be able to launch the app, load new pages and make purchases seamlessly without thinking, What’s taking so long? If they have to think that, they’ve probably already jumped to our competitor’s app. That’s how millennials are and think; They hate waiting.

CAPTURE THE METRICS

This is what the companies will buy from us. Apps represent a unique opportunity for brands, and they should not be treated as an app version of the website, especially when the target audience are millennials.  The data collected from our app will help marketers plan and execute successful campaigns geared to millennials.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AND MILLENNIALS

Social Media Marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. Although social media marketing is an integral element of 21^st-century, the literature on social media marketing remains fragmented and is focused on isolated issues, such as tactics for effective communication, or how to produce and execute an effective social media campaign. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is increasingly being used in business to attract attention and gain website traffic. An examination of the digital marketing spending in U.S. from 2014 to 2019, broken down by segment reveals that social media is an area of marketing, which will receive heavy investment in the following years.

However, there is very limited information regarding SMM and millennials. Reaching a young audience who are hard to reach, up to date on the latest trends and often more Internet savvy than the average merchant can be a challenging task. It can be difficult to know what online platforms and marketing strategies will actually reach this audience and what is just a waste of time and resources.
Many experts in the industry agree that reaching the millennials doesn’t have to be an arduous process. It just requires merchants to do some research into what is trendy now online and adapting your marketing so that your efforts are successful at reaching this highly sought after target market.

I present here the top 3 things marketers and merchants should be doing online to keep up with the #millennials.

UNDERSTAND YOUTUBE

YouTube has become a massive attraction for teenagers and twenty something’s alike brands and performers are producing content that is both entertainment and lucrative.

One of the most interesting things for marketers about YouTube is the rise of the “YouTube Star.” These are people who create their own video content and garner millions of subscribers by posting content. From gamers to comedians to make-up gurus, millions of young people are subscribed to channels producing interesting content. People such as Zoella, PewDiePie and Miss Glamorazzi all have millions of followers who look to them for advice and reviews.

One way brands are capitalizing on this phenomena is to sponsor videos. They do this by sponsoring videos and getting YouTubers talking about their products in their videos.

SNAPCHAT

It’s safe to assume that as an eCommerce merchant you are probably on Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the bigger social media sites. And don’t worry millennials are still using them too. However, new social media platforms are taking center stage within this target market. One of them is definitely Snapchat.

Snapchat has fast become one of the most popular ways to communicate and connect with friends and brands are catching on to. Taco Bell leads the way by posting funny images, promoting its products and getting customers engaged with the brand. Other stores soon followed suit and it has become a great way to share a brand story and post creative fun pictures to engage with customers.

REACH OUT TO BLOGGERS

Blogging is still a very popular way to market products to millennials. They prefer the reviews from a blogger than a news story from a well-known news source. Bloggers have amazing influence especially with a young audience. Fashion, sports, beauty, and lifestyle bloggers are all worshiped by their followers and seen as leaders in regards to what’s trendy and what to buy.

References

Social Media Marketing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing

Digital spending in the United States from 2014 to 2019, by segment

http://www.statista.com/statistics/275230/us-interactive-marketing-spending-growth-from-2011-to-2016-by-segment/

Millennials

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

The Marketer’s Guide to Reaching Millennials

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/marketer-s-guide-reaching-millennials-150131

Next-Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2012/Next-Generation-Strategies-for-Advertising-to-Millennials

YouTube

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

Chasing Their Star, on YouTube

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/business/chasing-their-star-on-youtube.html?_r=0

Zoella

https://www.youtube.com/user/zoella280390

PewDiePie

https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie

Ingrid Nilsen

https://www.youtube.com/user/missglamorazzi

Snapchat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapchat

Why Taco Bell Went Loco for Snapchat

http://mashable.com/2014/05/29/taco-bell-marketing-strategy/#xsmRdfnwgiqj

Top Millennial Blogs to Subscribe To

http://www.ploymint.com/top-millennial-blogs/

TOP 3 REASONS MILLENNIALS SEEM TO BE LAZY AT WORK

There is no doubt that millennials are challenging the traditional notion of work. The traditional system of Monday – Friday 9-5pm is in jeopardy, as millennials become the largest fraction of the U.S. workforce. Right now more and more businesses are struggling with the demands and work ethics of this diverse generation of workers. If you are one of those struggling to understand this complex generation and need ways to engage with them, here are three reasons why you might be failing and think of the whole generation as lazy and non-work driven, while the reality is quite the opposite.

1.    They no longer value the traditional workplace rules.

Strict dress code? Reprimands for being late 10 minutes?

Have a close look at their productivity time instead! You might be working for 8 hours and accomplished X amount of work. However, millennials probably did the same amount of work in just 6 hours. Try to understand their perspective. If you fire this employee, you’ll probably end up hiring another millennial.

2.    They believe in life, not work-life balance

Work is not everything millennials want in life. Work is not everything millennials wan in life. They would like to have time for their friends, hobbies, and other small pleasures. They work to live, not live to work. You’re probably thinking on retiring from this company; they don’t.

3.    They value intangible work benefits more

A millennial job seeker is armed with technology and the Internet. They can get to know all the tiny details about your company, including reviews from former and current employers, before committing to the job. Instead of a fancy desk, pension plan, and annual bonuses, they are more attracted by intangible benefits like a friendly work culture, a lack of micromanagement and bureaucracy, freedom to listen to music via headphones, and more.

PROFILE PERSONA: MILLENNIAL

Socially speaking, millennials are the most diverse generation to date. They are physical symbol of a dynamic cultural shift in America.

Name: Joshua

Title: College student

Where does he/she work: Work-study – Library

Age: 22

Gender: Male

Location: New York

Marital status: Single

Education: Some college

Primary goal: Finish College and find a job

Secondary goal: Buy a car

How you help achieve these goals: Educating him/her and helping secure a professional job

Hobbies: Video games and basketball

Favorite music: Hip-hop

Favorite movies: Sci-Fi

Religion: Agnostic

Working environment: Prefer working from home. If they need to be in an office they prefer working on their own listening to music on their earphones.

Common stereotype: Lazy, narcissist, jumping from jot to job.

HOW TO CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN

Coming up with an effective social media strategy is not an easy task.

If you’re starting from zero, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself.

It’d help to have a plan. A set of instructions will be very helpful.

Starting at the ground floor and building up, here’s a set of how-to instructions of how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch. I like to think of this plan like an instructions manual: Be familiar with all the pieces inside the box, and start building your new machine or piece of furniture.

I have here five simple steps for an effective social media marketing plan. I call this, the 5Ps:

STEP 1 – PURPOSE

What is it you want to accomplish with this social media plan? More traffic to your blog? To grow social followers? To increase sales? Get more people subscribed to your email list?

We don’t all want the exact same results from social media, and knowing this beforehand really matters. Write down what you want in general (i.e. more traffic). Then, write down what you want in specific (i.e. 100 new followers on Facebook each month).

STEP 2 – PRODUCT

Everybody knows his or her product, but it’s really important to have it in writing. For example: I sell healthy muffins, high in fiber, and low in sugar for people who want to change their eating habits or are willing to maintain a healthy lifestyle while enjoying some carbs.

STEP 3 – PEOPLE

Discover your audience. Be clear regarding who your customer is. Narrowing our audience instantly makes us more strategic. Audiences have needs and preferences that are unique to them.

a)    Construction workers

b)   High School Students (ages 12-18)

c)    Working moms

d)   Hardcore video gamers

e)    College students

f)     Children (ages 5-10)

g)    Small businesses (1-10 employees)

STEP 4 – PLATFORM

You don’t have to be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, and 3 blogs. You only need to be where your audience is. You need to be where your potential clients are. You should be on the same network as your audience, of course. And there’s the intimidating statement: Know your audience. You are not selling your products to everybody. You do have a specific audience for that specific product. Therefore, you have a specific platform for that specific audience. For example if your product is geared to teenagers and young adults your best social media platforms are Snapchat and Instagram. You should choose the social network that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve in social media.

STEP 5 – PROCESS

a)    Assemble a team. Everybody is good at something find 1-3 people who will write the content, take photos, upload/schedule content, etc.

b)   Create an editorial calendar and schedule your content at least one month in advance. Plan accordingly so that all your platforms are covered throughout the month.

c)    Decide what the content will be: Photos, blog entry, videos, news, and/or promotions.

d)   Build relationships with your audience

e)    Maintain a consistent message. The voice you choose for Facebook may not work for Instagram or Snapchat.

f)     How often should you be posting? You’ll answer this question when you discover your audience and platform. For example once a day on Facebook is more than enough. However 5-10 times on Twitter would be ideal. Also 1-3 times per day on Instagram sounds logic. Again, it all depends on your specific audience.

MY THOUGHTS ON AVATARS

Avatars were useless for me. These sort of cartoons that may or may not look like you were not of interest for me. I didn’t need them. Avatar is also the title of a movie. Yes, I loved it. So what? Avatars were still irrelevant for me. I started this semester and oh boy, here we go again with avatars. I don’t care about avatars. Avatars are… wait, what? Oh wow, really?

I’m 40 years old and I finally understand what avatars really are! Better late than never right? This module was and eye-opening experience and I have a few things to share here. These thoughts have no particular order or structure. They’re just some thoughts.

“Reading gives us the insight of a priest listening to an author’s confession, except the confessional is no longer a quiet sofa or library… The confession booth is the Web, where everyone confesses.” This reminds me of how technology has changed the way we communicate and how the concept of “private life” is no longer that private. At least the definition of private has evolved to a more intimate “private life,” such as your sexual life. In the past we used to have our diaries and nobody was allowed to read them. Our personal diary was for us. Nowadays everybody, but especially millennials, feel frustrated when nobody likes his or her new pillow, bathroom mirror, or new lower back tattoo photos posted in social media. In the past those things were part of your “private life.”

This quote from Oscar Wilde was shocking and made me think that millennials do many things that are not real, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” That quote is so old, and yet so new. Take a look at this video:

https://youtu.be/KRkHbUjzCs8

Many people talk in their own person and that’s the reason they are not real. They fake it and lie. Thanks Oscar Wilde, you died 116 years ago, but you’re officially a 2.0 novelist, essayist, and poet.

MY SNIPPET

The Social New Yorker

The Social New Yorker (born March 22, 1976) is an online marketing specialist focusing on young adults, bestselling author, and public speaker. He helps entrepreneurs across industries establish strategies to maximize the power of social media and increase the success of their online marketing efforts.
Learn how to market to one of the fastest-growing and most influential consumer groups in the world, millennials.

Types: Millennials, Motivational Speakers, Online marketing, public speaker. 

MILLENNIAL LATINOS AND ENTERTAINMENT

I’ve always wondered why certain celebrities say that Latinos, especially younger generations such as Millennials, aren’t united and don’t support each other. Especially when it comes to Hollywood.

You can’t blend entertainment with charity or support. It’s unfair to blame the community for our flopped ventures. The bottom line is that Latinos (focusing and defending millennials here) consume the same content everybody else does. It has nothing to do with who is in front or behind the camera. To Millennial Latinos, just like everybody else, content is king. If the content you create and present doesn’t pick up legs, it’s no one’s fault but yours. It’s extreme narcissism to think otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, your work might be brilliant, but just like any product out there, if people don’t want it, it shouldn’t push you to condemn them for it.

Latino Millennials and millennials in general (that’s why I love millennials) will watch a movie or a show with any ethnicity or race leading it, as long as it is what they like. Did Chicanos stop watching the Fast and Furious films because Michelle Rodriguez is Dominican and Puerto Rican? Did Cubans stop watching Ugly Betty because America Ferrera is Honduran? Did it stop people from watching San Andreas because the Rock is Black and Samoan? Did Mexicans or Dominicans stop attending Broadway’s Hamilton just because the main character is Puerto Rican? Absolutely not!

If our publications, networks, movies, and shows are tanking it is because people aren’t interested. It’s unfair to say that it’s because “we fight too much with each other.” That internal disagreement when it comes to entertainment is a myth. Especially since no one has shown any significant material effect from it except for anecdotal experiences—not even one study. Things will never change about it because it’s grasping at straws. You can’t make something happen or change that doesn’t exist.

We are different people-from different cultures and different tastes. One thing that unites us is the same taste for pop culture. It transcends nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, and sex. Nothing else. Nothing more. Yes, we are united in the struggle to be validated, but that’s as far as it goes when it comes to business and entertainment. Give people what they really want. You can’t force or guilt them into action. 

Muhammad Ali is also an amazing example. Latinos in general are as devastated with the news, just as the African American Community is. We don’t isolate news and follow the ones that directly affect Latinos. We follow the news that directly affects our neighborhood, city, and country.

Go back to the drawing board, learn from your mistakes, erase them and start anew. We’ve been down this road before. Why do we keep harping at it? Stop it. Latino Millennials are smarter than this. Millennials chose Bernie Sanders over Marco Rubio, not because they hate a Latino, or because that Latino is a Republican. They just didn’t have any connection with Rubio. It’s very simple. They were not willing to support a Latino, just because he is Latino. We all as Latinos see the big picture and for Latino Millennials, Rubio was not a good fit. 

Another thing: Whenever you feel the need to blame anyone for your failures, always punch up. Never punch down. The people above are the ones making decisions without being conscious of what will or will not work. Sometimes they are conscious and create these failures before they launch just so they can continue to leave us out. It’s not the community’s fault. There’s nothing honorable, respectable, admirable, or even Christian-like about blaming them for it.

Punch up. Not down. The pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps angle is wrong–even when it comes to entertainment. Latinos are better than this. Let’s act like it.

MY DISAGREEMENT WITH ZINSSER

On chapter 9 of “On Writing Well,” by William Zinsser, he said something that I found extremely shocking and I tend to disagree. He says, “Most of us are still prisoners of the lesson pounded into us by the composition teachers of our youth: that every story must have a beginning, a middle and end… That’s all right for elementary and high school students uncertain of their ground.”

Traditional colleges teaching writing in 300 levels still teach a traditional system of beginning, middle and end. So it’s not just elementary and high schools. My brother is in college right now, and his essays must follow that structure. My first semester at Quinnipiac pursuing my Master’s, I took a class and my professor also followed this system. I can’t imagine myself going to my professor and saying I was not planning to follow the structure just because William Zinsser said is not necessary. I work for a college in New York and I know all professors follow this format.

Also, scripts in film follow this structure as well: SET UP, plot point, CONFRONTATION, plot point, and RESOLUTION. It’s a standard in the industry and I don’t think it will change.

I love Zinsser’s book and learning a lot from it. It’s one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a very long time. However, based on the same quote mentioned before it seems that the book is not intended for younger audiences, “prisoners of composition teachers of our youth.” If a college or high school student reads this book in a traditional institution he/she certainly will have problems to succeed in English Composition class.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’m a Public Relations & Social Media Coordinator with a proven track record of successfully growing, engaging, and monitoring conversations online, generating content, and identifying growth opportunities.

I possess extensive experience across film, broadcast, and multimedia platforms. I also serve as a research analyst, producer, manager, and consultant. I have become extremely skilled at building and nurturing relationships with sources, fellow producers and reporters, CEO's, and analysts, many of which the working relationship has continued for several years. In addition, I am an expert in managing teams, resources, and field events.

My skills include extensive knowledge in the financial markets, media industry, U.S. and Latin American economies, B2B and B2C marketing, research analysis, new media platforms, and pop culture.

Curriculum Vitae

EXPERIENCE 

Algonquin College
2013 - Present 
Social Media Specialist
Represent the College in all outward facing social media sites. Maintain, develop, and schedule social media calendar and related activities throughout the year including press releases, blogs, tweets, etc, in coordination with Marketing and Media Relations.

Olinville Media Group 
2009 - 2013
Design social media campaigns and strategies for independent films. Perform monthly social media metrics; generate reports to identify opportunities for community growth. Statistics provided to clients show a 30% increase within a 3-month period. 

New York Network 2.0  
2000 – 2009
TV Producer / Economy Expert
Responsibilities included field production such as Presidential Elections, G20 meetings, OPEC meetings, and Financial Markets Events. I also generated content to drive conversations on the website and blogs. Event producer for C-level executives across a variety of disciplines. Created agendas and supervised conferences on site. Focused on relationship management with key speakers, sponsors and conference attendees (250+ / conference). Attendance increased by 20% due to a most effective social media marketing. 


EDUCATION

B.A. Journalism
Grace Period University
May 2000

SKILLS 

Proficient in Social Media Management Tools: Sprout Social, Salesforce, HootSuite, Social Radar, Google Analytics, Social Report, comScore. | Fully bilingual in Italian. Knowledge of: Adobe CS5, Adobe Premier, Adobe Audition, Final Cut Pro, WordPress CMS, Microsoft Office.