You already know content is king, but what’s not always so clear is who’s reading the content. In particular, many content creators in the B2B world assume that targeting younger readers — including millennials — is a waste of time because those readers are not making the purchasing decisions. But it turns out this is no longer true. While you’ve been busy coming up with a content strategy, millennials have been getting older and replacing their post-college entry-level positions with middle management roles that have a pretty big influence on their company. Here’s what this means for your B2B content efforts.
Millennials Help Make Purchasing Decisions At Work Now
Many businesses are used to targeting baby boomers and members of generation X when it comes to B2B content. But as baby boomers retire and gen Xers move toward the C-Suite, millennials often move into positions where they make a lot of the purchasing decisions or at least influence their bosses quite a bit. After all, the oldest millennials are now about 35, and they just recently surpassed the baby boomers as the largest generation.
Even more importantly, according to Millward Brown Digital and Google’s study, millennials now makeup 46 percent of B2B buyers, while just 13 percent of B2B buyers are 55 and over. In addition, in the last five years, 87 percent of millennials earned management positions, while only 38 percent of generation X members and 19 percent of baby boomers did the same. More millennials are making big decisions at work than just a few years ago, considering that only 27 percent of buyers were millennials in 2012.
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How to Target Millennials With Your B2B Content
If you want to see results from your B2B content, you need to remember that many of your readers are in the millennial generation. But what does that mean when it comes to your content strategy? Well, first you should know that millennials spend more than 17 hours a day on different types of media, which includes social media, blogs, email, texts, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. Of course, a lot of that media usage is simultaneous, since they might be texting a friend or emailing from their phone while watching TV. But either way, millennials are always connected, ready to consume various forms of content.
This means you can never produce too much content because there are lots of millennials out there waiting to read, watch or hear what you have to say. But if you want their attention, make sure you’re using the right type of content. One study found that baby boomers, generation Xers and millennials all find blogs, pictures, comments and e-books to be the most preferred content online. But where millennials differ from the other generations is that they also like audiobooks, with video being extremely popular as well. Their least favorite content types are quizzes, webinars, SlideShares and white papers, so keep those to a minimum as you create content.
Another way to reach millennials is to make your content mobile-friendly. After all, 42 percent of B2B searches are completed on mobile devices, and 49 percent of the people who perform mobile searches do so while they are at work. What are they doing on their phone? They’re mainly researching products, comparing prices, calling or emailing retailers and even purchasing. This means you want to ensure they can read your blog posts, website content, social media posts and more from their phone if you want them to see your content.
The takeaway is that your target audience is likely younger than you thought, so make sure your B2B content appeals to millennials if you want to get results from it. Ensuring that it’s the right type of content and that it looks good on mobile is a start.
