How to make your marketing fit for 2016
Businesses must rip up the rule book if they want to start marketing to millennials and grab their attention through creative, mobile methods.
That's the view of Mark McCulloch, founder of We Are Spectacular, and speaker at next week's Digital Summit.
Ahead of his appearance at the event on 25 May at Kings Place, London, McCulloch has explained his tips for marketing to millennials and future proofing your business.
He said: "As American marketing business guru Gary Vaynerchuk says, we all need to start marketing like the year we are living in and not a cut and paste of last year and the year before because it is the path of least resistance.
"Most people reading this will just find it too difficult, but for those who are willing to change things up a gear, blow shit up (like BrewDog states in its charter), realise that marketing and PR is dead in most of its traditional guises and start thinking about your team of marketers as attention traders and task them with this KPI, attention."
Five ways to market to millennials
1. Start from the start. Rip up your current marketing plan and start again, thinking afresh about your audience, where their eyes spend their time and market to that. I promise you, it will be very different.
2. Think how you can grab their attention on their phones. This is your ad space. This is really the only space that matters to drive acquisition/new sales.
3. Stop sending out press releases and question the value of your PR agency immediately. Engage with a content agency or create content yourself using one of your talented team members who has a passion for this. The new PR brief is to get your brand mentioned on BuzzFeed, reddit, Mashable, Techcrunch, VICE, Kobini and Huffington Post. This is where the establishment of Daily Mail, Telegraph, Metro etc get half their news these days. They are scouring the internet for great content, not printing press releases about your next opening, your guest ale or your new menu.
4. Create entertaining and valuable content for them that imparts knowledge they can use, gets them involved or is so fun that they will share it.
5. Never ever sell to them. They can see through that. They don't care. You will have to work harder to give value, create a real relationship and then ask for a sale.
