The title of the article is “Reaching Gen Z with Influencer Marketing; Four Trends for Success.” By Nicolas Miachon, Forbes Council. The article was retrieved from Forbes website. The article is about how marketers can reach generation Z. Teens are among the individuals who fall in the generation Z era. The starting years of birth for generation Z are between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s which are the starting years of birth for most teens (Vema, 2018). Therefore this article is about how to reach teens using influencer marketing. There are four trends provided in the article that can help marketers to market effectively to teens. According to the article, if marketers who intend to reach this generation must to be ready to learn their world. Leaning their world involves using the following four trends described in the article.
Article Summary
The first trend is getting familiar with new platforms such as TikTok. Research shows that marketers had not heard about TikTok in 2017 even when the platform had more than 190 million users. TikTok is a platform that falls between Snapchat and Vine which allows a user to record a video of approximately 16 seconds of him or her playing with filters, lip-synching, dancing and many others. According to the article, the platform was the most downloaded app that does not fall into games on Apple’s app store in the year 2018. This article proposes that a marketer should let influencers reach the teens for them using such websites since adding new contents to the site might be a bit difficult ( Miachon, 2018) . To work with the influencers, a marketer should make its marketing campaigns like a game, funnel traffic to many channels, let them be creative and know their audience.
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The second trend described in the article is getting into gaming early. According to the article, video games are the trend for teens that marketers tend to ignore. A Pew study in 2018 revealed that close to 98% of the teenage boys play video games using some fashion form. The girls also are not very far as they follow closely with 82%. This is enough explanation to show the growing popularity of streaming sites such as Twitch where teenagers play and watch live video games. This is a big opportunity for marketers ( Miachon, 2018) . The methods to work with influential games include logo displays, promotional codes, and giveaways.
Making use of multichannel networks is another trend to help marketers reach teens according to the article. There are firms that group various influencers on YouTube to maximize their power of advertising, cross the audiences and film in a shared studio. Regarding reaching teens, multichannel networks allow a marketer to monopolize various niches. There is the multichannel of Machinima for instance where makes have access to multichannel massive distribution in the online gaming niche. A research done by Adweek revealed that 50 % of teens aged between 13 and 20 cannot live without YouTube ( Miachon, 2018) . The author of the article insists that this is an organized manner of working with influencers of YouTube which can be helpful since it is indispensable for targeting teenagers.
The last trend provided by the article is creating partnerships with influencers on Instagram. The platform is designed basically for influencer branding and marketing. Instagram has a mobile-first design, discoverable, shopping tags, and integrated analytics. Instagram influencers can be described as the voice of teens in several ways. They make use of microblogging and storytelling to capture various values held by teens ( Miachon, 2018) . Marketers can, therefore, tap into this by making use of Instagram influencers that represent their beliefs with advocacy, diversity, and authenticity being some of the core values.
Application to the Class
The first aspect of this article that is applicable to this week’s class is the variety of customer knowledge which can be used to identify the teen segment of customers. The first category of knowledge concerns demographics. This includes knowing the nationality, religion, and race of a customer. The gender, size of family, age, occupation, income and other are also important in this aspect. In this case, the demographic used to identify teenagers is age and income partly. This knowledge can assist in knowing the needs and demands of a particular customer (Mishra et al., 2018). The other knowledge category concerns the behavior of the customer, the pattern of decision making and the product usage of the consumer. This relates to this week’s topic because teenagers have got behaviors that are different from other age groups. For instance, their pattern of purchasing decision making is different from that of adults. According to the article and this week’s topic, marketers can use this knowledge to reach the teenagers effectively. An industry that has used this knowledge is the smartphone industry. The smartphone industry, for example, is producing mobiles that have access to several social websites and have play store where games can be downloaded from.
A marketer can also use psychographics to determine the segment of teenagers. This is where the marketer will determine the opinions, interests, activities, and lifestyle of a consumer. One of the activities of teens is playing games and it has been included in the article as one way of reaching teens through influencer marketing. Teens also are receptive to advertising by mobile as compared to the older consumers. This is one aspect studied in this week applicable in the article. The mobile subscribers between the age of 12 years and 17 years watch about eight hours of mobile video envy monthly. This is expressed in the article where it is stated that 98 percent of teen boys and 82% of teen girls play video games. The other aspect discussed in the article related to the week’s topic is social media. Teenagers are among the age groups that are regular users of social media (Vema, 2018). Therefore using Instagram to reach the teens is one way of incorporating social media into the marketing strategies of a company.
The other thing in this article applicable to the class is positioning. Positioning is defined as the process that a marketer uses to know how best to communicate the attributes of their products and services to the teens as per what was learned in class. This is based on the competitive pressures, customer needs, messages that are crafted carefully and the communication channels that are available. Product positioning is considered a significant aspect of marketing to teens. The article brings this aspect by introducing the topic of influencers. According to the article, a company should work with influencers because they can be able to position their advertisements and campaigns to fit the preference of teenagers ( Miachon, 2018) . The importance of positioning is that it ensures that the messages of marketing resonate with the target customers. They, therefore, are compelled to take action. Effective positioning also conveys to potential customers why a company’s service and the product is better than the options of competitors asked on the knowledge the company has regarding the needs of the audience. Positioning also helps a marketer to consider how the company’s offering is different from other offerings that consumers can choose from (Mishra et al., 2018). Through positioning, a company is able to convey the value-added and differentiating aspect of a service or a product to the targeted consumers. Positioning messages are designed to show how a service or product is different to a particular group of consumers who are teens in this case.
References
Miachon, N. (2018, October 9). Reaching Gen Z with Influencer Marketing: Four Trends For Success . Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2018/10/09/reaching-gen-z-with-influencer-marketing-four-trends-for-success/
Mishra, A., Maheswarappa, S. S., & Colby, C. L. (2018). Technology readiness of teenagers: a consumer socialization perspective. Journal of Services Marketing , 32 (5), 592-604.
Verma, H. V. (2018). Psychology of Cool: Meaning and Marketing. Journal of Business Thought , 4 , 6-16.
