Eight Ways to Reach Teens
What marketers need to know about teenagers' use of devices and media.
What marketers need to know about teenagers' use of devices and media.
A U.S. teen’s average daily media consumption consists of 200 minutes of television, 52 minutes of computer usage, 6 minutes of mobile voice activity, 96 text messages exchanged, and 25 minutes of console gaming, according to Nielsen. To put this in context, there are 33 million teens aged 10 to 19 in the U.S., according to the census, and teens spend 44 percent of their day on school and homework and 19 percent of their day with media only, according to the Ball State University’s September 2007 “High School Media Too” study.
While Morgan Stanley’s recent teen market’s media consumption analysis by articulate 15-year-old Matthew Robson caused a stir, his findings are consistent with Nielsen’s June 2009 “How Teens Use Media” report and Experian’s “2009 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report.”
Five Ways Teen Will Be Teens
Examine Robson’s teenage perspective on his peers and their activity, and you’ll find five teen behaviors that haven’t changed from their boomer and Gen X parents’ teen behaviors. Rather, the devices and how teens use them have. These differences have significant impact on how marketers reach teenagers:
Marketing implications: Add targeted text campaigns to reach teens, and use other mobile marketing formats to attract them.
Marketing implications: Assess potential to provide or sponsor music and/or ringtone downloads. Incorporate music-related marketing, such as tour and live event sponsorships and tie-ins.
Marketing implications: Engage teens’ base of friends through social bookmarking, forward-to-a-friend, and IM. Distribute samples to teens via their online friends and connections. Consider relevant, integrated product placement opportunities in targeted games.
Marketing implications: Assess potential for product placement within movies and outtakes. Remember, this placement’s reach continues via other screening opportunities, such as DVDs and television. Use video outtakes to sell movies and related products. Test sampling consumer products at teen-oriented movie showings. Use DVD packages for related and targeted marketing, such as package inserts.
Marketing implication: Consider the pricing impact of teen-related offerings.
Three Ways Teens Are Like the Rest of Us
While teenagers don’t want to hear that they act just like their parents, here are three insights that hold for both groups:
Marketing implication: Ensure that advertising targeted at teens relates to their specific needs and interests. Use creative to make advertising break through.
Marketing implications: Consider ways to offer news content to reach a teen market to build your brand for the long term while meeting teens’ financial constraints. For example, offer school subscriptions or integrate your content with a textbook publisher.
Marketing implication: Assess where and how teens will use your Web site or media placement. Let this influence how you present your marketing message.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Teens may not want to hear it, even if they act a lot like their parents did or currently do. For marketers, what matters most is engaging the teen demographic and building trust so that you’ll have a customer for life.
Join us for Search Engine Strategies San Jose, August 10-14, 2009, at the McEnery Convention Center. Spend Day 1 learning about social media and video strategies with ClickZ.