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The connectedness of the Millennial market may require you to create more complex, interwoven communications strategies than you’re used to. It also means that you have a new marketing tool at your disposal – the consumers themselves. Taking advantage of influencers and utilizing your brand advocates is a powerful strategy.

The 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that Millennials trust “a person like yourself” and industry or academic experts over virtually any organizational operator, such as the CEO of a company. This kind of influence is crucial in making buying decisions, and it’s something that marketers need to be both aware of and ready to use.

Influencers are consumers who have amassed large, loyal followings on various social platforms. High star power actors are one form of influencer, but for Millennials, those that hold the most power are consumers who have built organic followings by sharing great content. An example of a modern Millennial influencer would be a consumer who has built a YouTube following by sharing reviews of a particular line of products. The influencer gains trust above the brand because of the implicit honesty and integrity of these reviews.

Identifying key influencers

Consumers aren’t as interested in traditional advertising messages as they once were. Of course, paid campaigns still serve a major role in the consumer buying cycle, but identifying influencers within your existing audience is more important.

The following sections offer a few helpful tactics for finding influencers.

Create a loyalty program

Loyalty can’t be bought, but it can be encouraged. Establishing a loyalty program is an excellent way to

❯❯ Encourage repeat business

❯❯ Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)

❯❯ Build a relationship with your Millennial audience

Because relationships are crucial to the survival of your brand, a loyalty program will help build those relationships. Hopefully, those relationships will lead to the cultivation of brand advocates. Those advocates can then help build your brand by introducing it to new circles of consumers.

Customer lifetime value is defined as the net profit generated by your brand based on the entire relationship of transactions with a customer.

Identify your brand advocates and brand defenders

The goal of any brand should be to turn prospects into customers and customers into brand defenders. A brand defender is a customer who not only advocates on behalf of your brand and acts as a pseudo-sales agent, but also defends your brand in times of crisis.

BRAND ADVOCACY CYCLE

The easiest way to understand the brand advocacy cycle, shown in the figure, is with an example. Assume that a consumer – I’ll call her Jane – is in the market to purchase a new phone. Jane has never owned a phone, so she has a completely objective viewpoint of every brand in the market. This point in the cycle is the awareness stage.

As Jane begins to learn more about each brand by reading reviews, asking friends, and visiting brand websites, she moves into the understanding phase and onto interest as she narrows her choices. She decides on an iPhone in the trial period, sees what it can do and how powerful the product is, and moves in to belief.

As Jane continues using the product and becomes more enamored with what it can do, she moves into affinity. Next time she needs a phone, she goes with the iPhone without a thought. That’s the loyalty stage. It’s hugely valuable to a brand to get customers to this point. Loyal customers mean greater lifetime value, and it’s far less expensive to keep a customer than it is to convert a new one.

But when Jane begins telling her friends about the iPhone or writing about how much she loves it, thereby becoming a brand advocate, the value increases enormously. And when she goes to the next stage, actually coming to the brand’s defense when other consumers speak negatively about it, that’s when the greatest value can be reaped from the consumer.

Brand defenders are not only loyal consumers who will advocate on your behalf as pseudo-sales agents, but they will also help you handle a crisis if one ever comes up.

A pseudo-sales agent is a consumer who acts as a brand advocate. She works to spread your message without the need for an incentive. An affiliate shares your message and product in exchange for some form of payment or revenue. A pseudo-sales agent works to spread your brand’s name throughout her social circles strictly because of her relationship with your brand.

One of the best examples of brand defenders in action was evident during Apple’s notorious Bendgate affair when the newly released iPhone 6 phones were bending in owners’ back pockets. Despite a clear issue with the product, Apple’s brand defenders rushed to their side. They insisted that the root of the problem was consumer misuse rather than a product defect. It’s rare that a brand reaches this level of advocacy. But, if you can cultivate brand defenders by identifying and nurturing your existing brand advocates, your long-run success is assured.

Implement an employee advocacy program

Employees are consumers, too, and marketers often forget about the power of activating their Millennial employees. They relay positive experiences with your products and share them with their social circles. This word-of-mouth marketing helps you take advantage of the massive social reach existing right within your organization.

Encouraging and perhaps incentivizing employees to share content is a powerful way to build your presence, foster brand awareness, and prompt adoption from a new user base.

Communicate with your detractors

It’s all too easy to brush off criticism and focus on new customer acquisition. But communicating with detractors shows that you care.

Often, when customers complain, their goal is to be heard rather than to remedy a bad situation. Attempting to improve these transactions goes a long way toward creating new brand advocates and defenders. In addition, addressing an issue quickly and effectively can prevent it from spiraling out of control and becoming a costly mistake.

Nurturing relationships

Millennials see relationships as a significant part of the buying process. The irony of this is that this demographic is more price sensitive than its predecessors, yet Millennial consumers are willing to pay a slightly higher price if they have a relationship with the higher-priced brand. This mindset isn’t one that marketers are familiar with. However, marketing to Millennials doesn’t require a completely new paradigm. It simply requires marketers to dig much deeper into the mind of the Millennial consumer.

Brand familiarity is not the driving force behind a Millennial consumer’s decision to purchase; quality matters considerably more than the brand name or logo. Reaching Millennials requires careful planning.

Here are several ways to nurture a relationship with a Millennial consumer:

❯❯ Personalization: The key to successful relationships with Millennials is personalization. (For more on relationship building, see Chapter 3.) The modern product and service market seems to endlessly expand, which means that there is virtually no product on the market for which there isn’t an alternative. Therefore, after you have the attention of your wider audience, tailoring your content to the tastes and preferences of the individual will help build loyalty.

❯❯ Brand experience: What kind of brand do you want to be? Are you authoritative or neighborly? Is your content factual or conversational? Building a brand persona is an important step in the process because it helps you shape the consumer’s experience with your brand. That experience, which is covered in detail in Chapter 11, will be a driving force behind establishing a relationship and will work toward building loyalty with your target Millennial audience.

❯❯ Cause alignment: Millennial consumers connect deeply with brands that associate themselves with causes. Just because Millennials possess this consumer trait doesn’t mean that you should exploit causes for the purpose of building relationships with Millennials. However, if your brand does support a cause, it’s certainly a means of connecting more deeply with certain segments of your Millennial audience.

❯❯ Responsiveness: Traditionally, a curtain has been in front of the big, powerful brand. Now that curtain has been lifted, thanks in large part to social media. Communication with a brand is easier than ever before. A certain sense of satisfaction comes from receiving a response from a brand. Therefore, responding to your audience members when they reach out can go a very long way toward nurturing budding relationships.