MILLENNIAL MARKETING 2020: Why Millennial Shoppers will buy (OR NOT) your products?
The #62 edition of MTL+ECommerce (held at Lightspeed’s Montreal office) was focused on Millennial shoppers and included talks around app marketing, influencer marketing, and ads automation.
To help us better understand how to reach Millennials, Dave Haber, CMO at Mylo, and Simon Lejeune, Head of Client Acquisition at Hopper, shared with us their experience and winning strategies.
Table of Contents
Diversify your Marketing Mix
Mylo has been able to become the #1 saving Canadian app in 2 years since it launched in 2017. An impressive achievement especially knowing that the players they are competing with for app installs and user acquisition are financial institutions with much larger marketing budgets.
To be able to compete in such an environment and grow so effectively, they have to be creative in the way they introduce new people to their platform. As Dave explains in more detail, they have to rely on different marketing channels and tactics, which all align with Mylo’s core values.
“Mylo has 6 core values that we use to make all of our decisions, that are core to our marketing teams and guides all of our growth initiatives”
One, in particular, caught my intention and touches on the importance of diversifying their marketing plan. As mentioned by Dave, “The first value is about making an impact.
If we want to achieve our social mission of helping Canadians achieve their financial goal, we need to be able to reach millions of Canadians, because we want to help all of them”.
You may wonder how one could possibly make an impact on such a large scale. Well, we have a few insights for you.
Mylo had to rely on a few marketing channels, with paid media representing the largest portion of their marketing investment. The majority of their activities are happening on Facebook, Instagram, and Google UAC for app installs.
However, these channels have some challenges that are out of their control: they are expensive (they have the highest cost of acquisition) and they can be highly volatile depending on seasonality or competitor activity.
As a result, it forces them to diversify their marketing plan with a mix of earned media strategies (public relations activities and influencer marketing) and owned media (social pages, email list, website).
Millennial Marketing: Human centered and value oriented
Another value of Mylo that Dave discussed is the importance of being human and building trust with your customers.
“When you are asking people to trust you to help them solve their financial problems and trust you with their money, it’s important that we be empathetic, compassionate, and relatable”
A great way to do that is by providing a great customer experience. Mylo has a dedicated customer support team that is responsible for helping their clients when needed.
Many efforts are also placed in conveying the human nature of their brand, mostly communicated through their videos. Videos are their number one content format in terms of paid media acquisition, used on Facebook, Instagram, and Google (Youtube and Search).
They use a mix of educational videos explaining how Mylo works and more of an inspirational video highlighting the feeling of proudness when we do manage to save money for the first time, explained by real users of the app.
These videos are used throughout the customer journey, educating users on the first touch and connecting on a more human level through remarketing initiatives.
Focusing on retention first, conversion second
As explained by Simon, Hopper became competitive and the #1 travel marketplace on mobile in the USA & Canada by focusing on retention before conversion.
“Every 9 hours, Expedia spends our entire marketing budget but yet Hopper has more app installs in the USA & Canada”
By being an app-only business, Hopper is able to build longer relationships with its users using their first-party data to personalize their experience. It also enables them to leverage notifications to encourage users to come back to the app regularly, focusing on a customer-first approach.
As a result, 60% of Hopper bookings are made from repeat users without any money spent on paid media. This focus on retention enables them to have a higher lifetime value per user (LTV) and allows them to invest in new channels without having to rely on Google.
Therefore, the majority of their marketing investment made towards user acquisition is on social media where big players such as Expedia are not present. Their paid media mix includes Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tik Tok – Vertical videos on Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok being their top performer.
Leveraging creative automation
In recent years, many improvements have been made to the advertising platforms, especially towards automation and artificial intelligence.
For instance, today, Google and Facebook pretty much take care of the optimizations for you by interpreting the data and making changes accordingly. This gives advertisers the time to put more effort into creative optimization which is where the biggest impact is seen.
Some great examples were presented by Simon, such as their dynamic template ads, generated automatically through their unique Hooper ads engine. It is a collection of scripts that automate most of their social ads and that is connected to Facebook, Snapchat, and Pinterest ads API.
This enables them to create multiple variations of an ad that are tailored to their customers, dynamically updating details such as user destination, currency, language, flight prices, etc.
However, after doing many iterations and reaching a saturation point, they started exploring user-generated content and influencer ads, which perform incredibly well for them.
The Future of Influencer Marketing (Millennial Marketing)
Another interesting topic that was briefly discussed that I want to quickly touch on was deepfake ads & voice cloning.
The new improvements in AI regarding deepfakes are very impressive and can generate any face that you want, which can then be used by digital advertising professionals.
This could mean that instead of testing thousands of faces in your ads, you could simply share your AI model to Facebook that will then serve an ad with the face of the person they believe will perform the best.
Voice cloning could be also be used to generate many variations of a video without having to pay for talent, simply buying voice licensing, making influencer marketing more accessible to all.
That’s a wrap! I hope you all enjoyed the edition #62 of MTL+ECommerce as much as I did, learning from experts in the industry and connecting with like-minded people. The next event is in April and we hope to see you there.
This post is written by Doriane Nasarre, Marketing Director & Account Supervisor at Dialekta
You may also enjoy these articles
Meet Doriane Nasarre
Doriane Nasarre is a Digital Marketing Specialist, with over 6 years of experience in the industry, especially in retail. She has collaborated with both national and international brands, shaping their marketing strategy and helping them scale their business. Find her on LinkedIn here
Follow Us
Do you want to grow your Business ?
Register today to receive exclusive tips and content not found on the blog & Get the best insights & Strategies from reknown digital Marketing experts & successful entrepreneurs delivered to your inbox.
1 Comment
There are many ways to generate leads on social media with unpaid promotions, but all we need to know is have to understand. Subscribed your blog for more information..