KBI Market Shift: Three Steps To Help Build Your Brand With Millennials
We live in an innovative world connected through multimedia and smart devices, so kitchen cabinet manufacturers need to shift their marketing efforts to reach today’s audience. They need to adapt to the changing dynamic of how consumers research and purchase products.
KBI companies that once focused on reaching the baby-boom generation must now target millennials. According to the Pew Research Center, millennials — who our company defines as those ages 20-36, exceeding 75 million people — have surpassed baby boomers (ages 53-71) as the nation’s largest living generation.
To that end, millennials form the largest addressable market for brands to target. For many companies, connecting with millennials is a challenge: They must promote their brand in a way that enables it to stand out from the crowd. In short, brands need to understand millennial buying behaviors and adapt to how they both consume and share information. This is critically important in order to build relationships with consumers and make a lasting impact.
To help reshape your marketing efforts to be more millennial-focused, here are three components that are driving results.
- Know Your Numbers
Know your audience analytically. Start with a strategy to determine what your brand is and who you’d like to target. Like any other marketing effort, branding is only as effective as your audience insights. A deep understanding of your target audience is essential when developing a strategy on how to best engage them. Figure out what they think, feel and resonate with and what you want them to think, feel and believe about your brand.
In addition, it’s important to understand trends. Utilizing big data and analytics will make sure your message reaches your target audience. Every social profile online can be mined for rich data. In particular, identify influencers that align with your message and prepare lists of audience demographic data, including age, sex, race/ethnicity, nationality and reach, engagement and amplification. Leveraging exhaustive data and analytics provides brands with the information needed to make the right outreach decision in a micro-targeted, hyperlocal way.
- Get Visually Social
“The social channels most popular with millennials are visual. They are the first generation to grow up with smartphones, which means web-connected cameras and video in their hands at all times.” If your customers love to post, share pictures and stream video, it makes sense to invest in visually impactful assets to promote your brand.
Millennials consume content in a different way than past generations, and information resonates with them more thoroughly via images and video since it is easier than skimming text.
As digital marketing evolves, visuals elevate in stature as a millennial targeting tool. In fact, visual communication has grown as corporate social media accounts and individual websites are highlighting images and video more often. With the rise of visuals, brands have tools to quantify the results and validate the direct impact it has on sales.
3D rendering is the best alternative for KBI manufacturers to create visuals. There are many convincing reasons why 3D rendering is superior to kitchen cabinet photography: time spent on the creation of marketing visuals, considerable lower costs, flexibility, and ability to make design changes on the fly.
- Engage And Empower
Today’s consumers like to participate and have input. They prefer to feel as though they are part of the process and are quick to provide opinions on new products.
A robust online presence is critically important in promoting today’s brands. Having an online platform with a static website and sparse social channels can do more harm than good. Strategic marketing campaigns elevate a brand, generate a high level of awareness and encourage engagement through active social channels.
Active social channels leverage big data and analytics to provide more reach, deeper engagement and exponential amplification of a brand’s message. In addition, unique hashtags empower participation and positive sentiment. Social channels integrated with visuals and grown organically enable a brand to shape its narrative and interact directly with consumers. All of this allows for brands to see the power of engagement in real-time to drive results.
In the past, organizations have been successful in growing brands via print and other traditional means. However, with millennials making up a large addressable market, companies must resonate with the ways these customers consume and engage. A strong focus on expanding awareness within targeted demographics, along with visual content can help companies build their brand amongst millennial consumers. Driving engagement within target market segments, influencers, bloggers, traditional media and empowering consumers to be a part of your story, will help amplify your company’s message and elevate your brand.
So, make sure that all your cabinet images, videos, illustrations, e-books, and other visual content are the highest quality they can be. A custom-made, high-quality piece of visual content can be all you need to make the sale!
References
Article initially published on Forbes
