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The ten principles of marketing to Generation Z

Our MD, Richard Bradford, spoke as part of the panel at ICEF Berlin's Digital Day. The focus was on digital marketing to Gen Z. Here are all the things that he may have said, or may have omitted. But this is what he meant!

Managing director of Disquiet Dog, Richard Bradford speaks on a panel on Digital Marketing for the Education Industry at the international education event, ICEF Berlin in November 2022

Our venerable and venerated MD, Richard Bradford, recently took part in a fascinating panel discussion at the ICEF Digital Day at the International ICEF Workshop in Berlin recently, discussing how to market to that ‘hard-to-reach’ Generation Z.

Now, the first thing is to define Gen Z - it can be a little imprecise, but for our purposes, it is those born in the decade after the turn of the century. At the top end of the range they may be around 23, but the key thing here is that they are a student generation. And for those looking to recruit students for English language schools, they are the consumer.

That doesn’t mean they are the only target for marketing efforts - you will want to aim for their parents, their teachers, their schools and colleges, and the agents who work with them. But they are, obviously, the single biggest element of the audience mix.

And the tricky bit is that they are increasingly separate from the generations above them in the way they find information and the mix of media and platforms that they use and trust. If you’re aiming specifically for Generation Z, you’ve got to do things a little differently.

So here are a few things to think about.

Beware of generational generalisations

Any Gen Z person reading this will disagree with plenty of it. There’s lots of nuance in their habits that we can’t reflect in a few hundred words. They don’t move as one like a murmuration of starlings, so don’t treat this as gospel, treat this as a prod to make you challenge the marketing assumptions you made about millennials, generation X, boomers and any other demographic you have thought of.

Mobile, mobile, mobile

Generation Z were raised on their mobiles. They were given their phones earlier than their millennial siblings and have a dependency as a result. We can debate whether that’s healthy another time, but they’re normally around 12 when their parents give in to the pestering. As a result, 79% reckon they, like literally, cannot exist without their phones.

Like, they would actually die. Low key, not joking.

What that means in marketing terms is that anything you do should be driven by the fact that it’s going to be seen on mobile. So it has to be created with that in mind - video-led, highly visual and pithy.

Be interesting

On the next broad assumption that this generation watches everything on their mobiles, then you are competing in the exact same space as everything else - their Netflix and Disney+, their friends, their social media… you are battling in an attention economy. So you cannot afford to be dull. The content you create to deliver your message needs to entertain or no-one will watch. It also needs to inform, or no-one will take in the message. They are online 10 hours a day, (ten! hours!) - so the opportunities are there, but you’ll miss them if you’re dull.

Be trustworthy in your values

This is a generation that wants to trust brands. They are also a generation facing challenges like no other - climate change, globalisation, pandemics, wars, you name them - and they want to be on the right side of history. They don’t align themselves to political movements, but to themes and causes. So, put simplistically, if they have a choice between two organisations and one is taking genuine action on, for example, the climate crisis, then their choice is clear. That’s not to say green-washing, LGBTQ+-washing or any other kind of smokescreen will work. These are customers savvy beyond their youth. You have to mean it.

Get the platform choices right

It’s more than likely that you, as an individual, are familiar with all the wrong places. You’re on Instagram? They’re on TikTok. You’re on Facebook? They are on Be Real. It’s a truism that just as the marketeers get to a platform, the audience has started to move. So you have to be agile, to try out new places that are unfamiliar and see what works. Iteration after iteration of platform strategy.

Because search is changing

Being visible on these ‘newer’ platforms is also key because Gen Z are shifting search habits. They may still go to Google for ‘news’, but searches for more personal and lifestyle topics are moving. While YouTube remains the second biggest search engine on the planet, the searches on TikTok are growing rapidly. Forty per cent of Gen Z-ers uses TikTok as a search engine over Google. So If you’re not there, you’re invisible.

Get the influencers to work

The juxtaposition of trust and platform (and the possibility you might struggle to convince on both) is the influencer model. Gen Z trusts influencers more than they trust brands and professional media. That can work in your favour if you can get those who have the ears and eyes of your audience to deliver your messages. These influencers don’t have to be the sort with 20 million followers - that mysterious cohort of massively famous people who are utterly unknown to anyone over 25. They can be ‘micro-influencers’ who reach specific markets or even [your own students who can bring their not-quite-peers behind them])https://www.disquietdog.com/blog/can-your-audience-make-tiktok-work-for-you). Not sure where to start? It might finally be time to take that intern a little more seriously.

Say the right things

Content, you’ll be reassured to know, remains king. The issue here is what the right things are and how you say them. Market research should tell you the hierarchy of messages, whether your students care more about the wider experience than the qualifications, whether where they live is more important than where they study. And create messages (video, mobile-led and so on) which hits the spot on those core topics. And get the editorial tone right - you need authority, you need to be comprehensible to a different audience, and you can’t be patronising. It’s tricky, but well worth the effort. And the best way may be to use their peers, as influencers. As above.

It’s a conversation

Engagement remains key here. There’s always a healthy lack of respect for authority from this age group, and they will have questions. And these may be asked by email, in comments on videos or on social media platforms. Monitor them and respond to them, and as quickly as possible. An organisation which listens and answers will feel human and caring and that goes an awfully long way in any customer interaction.

And don’t forget the customer journey

In all that hopping across platforms and creating content in new formats, don’t forget the conversion. At some point you are likely to want to get them onto your own website, and get them to explore, sign-up or become part of your world somehow. So, is your website up to it? This audience is used to apps and sites with smooth customer journeys honed by developers working with the data of billions. You might not have had that sort of user research to smooth out the bumps in your own website. But it still needs doing because, again, you are competing for attention with some of the most efficient online spaces in the world. A poor user journey and its allied frustrations can really cost you. If you reckon your website is feeling its age and that we might be able to help, let’s have a chat.

It’s a different world in Gen Z land and the only way you’ll navigate it is by playing catch-up with apps, influencers and formats which are alien to you. Anyone who says they have all the answers is fibbing to you, but we, old as we are, can help you get through this strange new world.