How to Market to Gen Z

Understanding Gen Zers

Gen Zers are an exceptionally diverse and complex group of people. If you want to connect with and sell to them, it’s crucial to understand their characteristics and preferences so that you can develop informed, effective marketing strategies that they can ultimately relate and respond to. Some defining traits include these:

• Gen Zers are digital natives: They’ve grown up in a world entirely immersed in and driven by technology, so they’re perfectly comfortable existing in the digital world. They’re highly tech-savvy and completely at home navigating various digital devices and platforms.

• Gen Zers are socially conscious: They want to make a difference in the world, and as a result, they’re passionate about social and environmental issues and inclined to take action to effect change.

• Gen Zers are unusually individualistic: They’re keen on expressing their unique personalities, particularly through their clothing, music, and lifestyle choices.

• Gen Zers value authenticity and transparency in the brands they support: They’re skeptical of traditional advertising, prefer to engage with brands that are genuine and honest, and react very favorably to the realness of user-generated content.

• Gen Zers are constantly connected to the world through their smartphones and social media. They typically rely on multiple social media platforms to connect with friends and family, stay informed, and discover new products and services.

Marketing to Gen Z

To effectively market to Gen Z, businesses need to take a different approach than they have in the past. Here are some strategies to consider for yours:

• Create honest, socially responsible content
  As mentioned earlier, Gen Z is passionate about social justice and environmental issues. Gen Zers want to know what your brand stands for and what your company is doing to make a positive impact on the world.
  
  So, make sure your business is actively addressing these concerns, and highlight your social responsibility efforts in your marketing messages. Focus on creating honest, transparent, genuine marketing content that showcases your values and mission and synchronizes your business with your customers’ persuasions and expectations.
  
  On Snapchat, use your Public Profile to position and convey your business’s personality and values, and to communicate your commitment to social responsibility by engaging with your customers.

• Use social media platforms
  Social media is an essential part of Gen Z's daily life. For that reason, you should leverage platforms such as Snapchat to reach this demographic, making sure your marketing efforts are optimized for your platform of choice.
  
  Craft and utilize creative and engaging content to capture Gen Z’s attention, including short-form videos and influencer partnerships, both of which tend to be strong performers in this context.

• Embrace video content: It’s no secret or surprise that Gen Zers prefer video content over other types of content — they’ve grown up in the thick of social media’s ascension and radical image-capture technology evolution.
  
  Focus on creating engaging, compelling, and informative videos that are intentionally brief (remember short attention spans) and showcase your products or services in as interesting a light as possible. As we’ve seen at Snapchat, Gen Z’s extremely keen on user-generated content, so you can expect better results when you choose to go down that road.

• Provide personalized experiences: Gen Z is more interested in meaningful experiences than material possessions. They prefer and expect personalization: customized approaches that cater to their (and their friend groups’) unique preferences, interests, and tastes, and align with their values. They can largely see right through fluff. Instead, they want realness, they want truth, and they want personalization.
  
  When those demands are met, you stand a great chance of landing a new customer. So be sure to use technology to enhance the customer experience and make it easy for Gen Zers to interact with your brand on their terms.

• Partner with influencers: Gen Zers trust influencers, value their opinions, and respond to their direction much more so than they do with any given corporate entity. It’s in your best interest to invest time and effort into pinpointing and developing relationships with strategic influencers, and partnering with them to promote your offerings.

Gen Z and Snapchat

When it comes to marketing to Gen Z, Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms among this age group. While 9 out of 10 young people are on Snapchat³, you won’t find that same enthusiasm on other social media networks: a majority of daily Snapchat users ages 16 and older don’t use Twitter every day, and nearly half of them don’t use TikTok either.⁴

Why else is Snapchat so popular among Gen Zers?

1. Snapchat allows for quick, easy, fun communication through images and videos, which aligns with Gen Z's preference for visual content.

2. Snapchat's ephemeral nature and emphasis on in-the-moment sharing resonates with Gen Z's desire for authenticity and realness in their online interactions.

3. A lot of Snapchatters’ time spent on the platform involves connecting with close friends — who, incidentally, they say are 4X more influential than celebrities or influencers on their purchasing decisions.⁵

4. That word-of-mouth activity helps make Snapchat the #1 platform where people enjoy sharing their shopping experiences and purchases they love.⁶

How can businesses like yours leverage Snapchat to reach this coveted audience? In light of what we’ve covered in this article, a wise primary strategy is to create engaging Snapchat ads that resonate with Gen Z's preferences and values. For example, say you want to run a Father's Day social media campaign targeting Gen Zers. Within your ad creative, you could include messaging along the lines of “Celebrate the dads that make this planet a better place.”

Some more really good reasons to lean on Snapchat for Gen Z success:

• Snapchat is heavily used by Gen Z: Snapchat has 293 million daily active users worldwide, and 58.8% of Snapchat members are ages 13-24 - occupying the Gen Z demographic.⁷ So if Gen Z is one of your target audiences, advertising on Snapchat can help you reach them more effectively than other platforms.

• Snapchat offers a range of unique advertising options that are well-suited to the preferences of Gen Z. For instance, you can create short, engaging video ads that appear between users' stories. And you can employ "Sponsored Lenses" to create interactive augmented reality (AR) experiences that users can share with their friends

• Snapchat's "Discover" section offers a space for businesses to create and share their own content, such as articles, videos, and quizzes. Lean on Discover to showcase your business’s brand personality and connect with Gen Z on a deeper level, building long-term engagement and loyalty.

• Snapchat enables you to target users based on their location, making it a powerful tool for geo-targeted marketing campaigns. Take advantage of this feature to reach Gen Z Snapchatters in a variety of locations, from countries and states to cities and towns, increasing the likelihood of conversion and building brand awareness.

Connect with Gen Z like never before.