You’ve probably noticed that customers in certain age brackets tend to buy different things. They also use services differently from other age groups. People behave differently all the time but there are trends you can pick up on. This is especially true when it comes to generational targeting. This will make marketing and selling much easier. For example, if you manage a gas station you may notice that Millennials and Baby Boomers fuel up at very different times of day. Hint, they also spend their money differently when they’re in your store. These differences are very easily overlooked when planning promotions and sales, and they really shouldn’t be.
What is generational targeting?
Generational targeting is a form of customer segmentation. It’s quite broad so it generally only works for products that are mass consumed like gas, groceries, clothing, and other day-to-day necessities. Even though people tend to buy these regardless of their marketing, using generational targeting can increase sales and customer experiences.
What can you use it for?
Using generational marketing can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. While larger companies use it for very specific and targeted ads for their target markets, small businesses can use it for optimizing their on-site marketing and promotions. Use generational marketing in your social media accounts to build better relationships with your current customers. They’ll promote your business for you if they feel loyal enough. But how exactly can you use it?
Let’s stick with the gas station example. Say you’re planning a promotion for one of your c-store’s food items. You need to take note of what age ranges tend to buy that product most often and when. Once you have that information, you can come up with a strategy that will target that age range more effectively. Instead of putting up flyers or sale signs everywhere, you can market more effectively by using the times and channels they respond to the most instead. If you’re marketing your chips, and Millenials tend to buy them around 12pm every day, make some social media posts on your page reminding this age bracket that your product is on sale. No matter what business you’re in, try and figure out some customer groups before you run your next promotion.
Not only will this strategy save you the money you’d use to advertise to the wrong group of people, it will convert the people you want to sell to more easily. Generational targeting, more simply put, is using a age bracket’s common habits to sell to them.