By Lee Odden

While many B2B marketers are focused on Boomer and Millennial age senior marketing executives, what are B2B brands doing to connect with the next Generation of buyers? You know, those junior marketing pros born after 1997 aka Gen Z? Content Director at Semrush, @LenoxPowell, shared useful insights about connecting this up and coming group of customers that includes buyers of B2B products and services.

First, you should know that GenZ is a large cohort – 32% of the global population, with massive spending power.

Second, you should know that GenZ are definitely not Millennials 2.0.

While Millennials are aspirational, idealistic and adapted to tech, their brand expectations are about storytelling On the other hand, Gen Z are authentic, pragmatic, and visual first about technology with brand expectations are about storyliving.

Don’t worry, I had to look up “storyliving” too. Jeff Fromm describes it as, “StoryLiving™ is about what companies do, not just what they say. It is not just being unique, but also meaningful and acting in the interests of many stakeholders.”

Ahh, that makes sense. However, I don’t think GenZ has the market cornered on a trend towards consumers caring more about companies acting authentically and meaningfully in the interests of their customers.

So, what’s the marketing opportunity for Gen Z? 

1. A whole new mindset
2. New opportunity to be creative
3. New loyal customer
4. New advocates for your brand

There are important shifts in social platforms with Gen Z: they are not on Facebook or Pinterest.

For Gen Z, TikTok is the new Facebook. TikTok is about fun, unpolished content which Gen Z loves. TikTok is expected to be the 3rd most popular social network by the end of 2022 and potentially displace Facebook and Twitter.

Some forward thinking businesses are starting to take Gen Z opportunities seriously and doing things like hiring Chief TikTok Officers. (Personally I think that’s just a gimmick – no one hired Chief Facebook Officers or Chief LinkedIn Officers – why should they do that with TikTok?)

How do you go viral on TikTok?

• Speak right away. 1 in 3 viral TikTok videos focused on a person speaking within the first 3 seconds.
• Let the music play – More than half of viral TikTok videos used music as their primary background sound in the first 3 seconds.
• One to one – 60% of viral videos featured one person visible on the screen
• Keep it real – Create videos that portray real people with real lives

Is TikTok the new search? Younger users search on TikTok more than Google. TikTok surpassed Google as the most visited domain in 2021. “Gen Z “hates searching Google because crappy SEO blogs bury the answers they are looking for underneath keyword stuffed garbage”.

A study by Fractl found that Gen Z loves long tail search. The length of their search queries are much longer than Millennials and other generations.

Words to consider in your content for Gen Z include – “best”, “cheap”, “how to”, “top”.

Content doesn’t always need to be …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog