4 Smart Ways B2B Marketers Can Target and Engage Younger Buyers

It’s no surprise that Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and baby boomers engage with brands differently. In fact, MediaPost reports that 53% of Gen Z and 56% of millennials have bought through social media in the past three months, compared to just 29% of Boomers. 

Meanwhile, a separate survey by ZeroBounce shows that Gen Z favors email at work despite their fascination with instant messaging. This study found that “42% of Gen Z consumers surveyed say email is their favorite work channel, twice as many as those who say the same about Slack or WhatsApp.”

So, the big question clients often ask us is this: should email and other content be tailored toward the different generational groups?

Based on what we’ve seen and heard across our client base, including top telecom providers, the answer continues to move in the direction of “yes.” The ZeroBounce study reports that 34% of Gen Z is influenced by content geared toward their generation, compared to 24% for millennials, 23% for Gen X, and 21% of boomers.

It’s About Feelings

What do Gen Z and millennials buyers want from the brands they do business with? A recent Adweek article states that younger consumers build trust differently than their older counterparts. “Gen Xers and boomers judged brands based on how the products performed; many of today’s youngest consumers assess brands based on how the brands make them feel.”

As you prepare to engage these younger buyers, don’t forget that they value much more than product performance. They want to feel good about your brand, what it represents, and what you’re selling. In other words, they want to understand and trust almost every aspect of your brand.

Four Ways to Target Younger Buyers

Here are a few tips from our team on tailoring your B2B customer acquisition and lead generation campaigns for younger buyers:

1. Take Steps to Know More About Them: Whether your acquisition marketing is of the B2B or B2C variety, it's valuable to get to know your prospects better to target and engage them more effectively. When building custom audiences for clients’ cold email campaigns, we use a B2B2C data strategy to gain a more complete personal-professional view of each prospect. This approach involves layering demographics, such as marital status, children, income, gender, and age, into your B2B audience profiles, which include job titles, business email addresses, and much more.

The age attribute is key – it’s where critical generational tailoring comes into play with your content. For younger buyers, zero in on facets of your company that will appeal to what they value, such as social responsibility. And be transparent and authentic with your marketing – make it less about selling and more about carefully building a trusted relationship, which takes time.

Also, be aware of generational channel preferences, as noted above. Email is the universally preferred channel for B2B, with a recent consumer study by Twilio noting that 79% of respondents said email is their most preferred channel. From a generational perspective, 70% of Gen Z respondents prefer it, along with 77% of millennials.

2. Mix Things Up, Use Multiple Touches: While email may be king, decision-makers (especially the younger ones) rely upon multiple channels for information and communication. In addition, today it takes 10 or more touches to reach and engage a prospect-- and they’re not all email touches, or in some cases, not even digital. It can take different types of media, including direct mail, to successfully reach a prospect.
   
   One of our differentiators as a performance marketing agency lies in our "one-two punch," which combines email with triggered programmatic, social media outreach, or both.  By strategically placing programmatic ads in front of users who have previously engaged with email or social content and vice versa, you maximize the chances of conversion. Using a tailored approach to triggering, you stand to increase the number of prospect touches, gain efficiency in your targeting, along with scalability, and more. There are privacy laws to consider, making execution of this approach complex, with specialized expertise around anonymized data and other factors a requirement. Our OMI team has that expertise.
3. Level Up Your QR Code IQ: QR codes are having a moment, and marketers like leveraging them because of the customer insights they provide. Not surprisingly, some email recipients won’t use them because of factors like age, device, location, or industry. If you’re targeting Gen Z and millennials, however, rest assured -- they’re likely to be comfortable with QR codes.
   Pro tip: We’ve seen higher conversions and improved campaign results overall when a phone number or URL is included in the content alongside the QR code. We also recommend scaling your acquisition campaigns first with multiple verticals and, from there, segmenting audiences into smaller groups based on age and other factors that determine which prospects are more likely to use a QR code.
4. Find Ready-to-Buy Prospects and Segment Them by Generation: A strategy we use to double down on campaign ROI is matching digital intent insights to prospect data from the OMI Living File®  B2B2C database. The database can be segmented according to a variety of factors, including age. Combining intent data with our B2B2C prospect data gives marketers the capability to scale their email acquisition campaign reach to more custom audiences that are in-market for their offers while remaining in compliance with privacy requirements. Relative to younger buyers, your creative process can include looking at the age group of the recipients within the custom in-market audience and aligning your content approach to generational attributes that will best capture their interest.
   Side note: All 162+ million contacts in the OMI Living File® database are verified, constantly updated, and ready for campaign activation across CTV, email, social, programmatic, and other channels. The database offers manager, director, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace. Ask us about our 95% email validity guarantee.

 

Reach out to our team today to find out more. Go here for our acquisition email case studies.