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Your business has an online presence and you want to reach young consumers. You’ve thought long and hard about your marketing strategy and you’ve allocated a budget. But do you have a strategy for reaching youngsters? Should the 16-25 year-olds be treated differently? We think so. Here are five tips that hopefully will make you think and perhaps even act.

Go online

There are a lot of great tools out there. These tools can help you learn more about your demo and what they like, search for, and want. Take Google Trends, for example, or Google Insights for Search. Both of these tools are great for understanding which search terms are important, what is hot, and what is not.

But most importantly, don’t market far from your purchase path. What do we mean? Well, try to spend your marketing dollars online – where young people spend time. Newspaper, magazine and TV ads might help you build a brand, but they will most likely not drive clicks/traffic to your site. Think of it this way; your for sale sign needs to be close to your house, not four blocks away (not even if your sign has the address on it).

Put your benefits front and center

Attention span = hyper short. Tell them what they need to know, keep it shorter than what you think is short and tell them immediately. You have seconds to convince them to click, so think fast. No one reads, and any nested information is useless. Why should I care about you?

Don’t be everything to everyone

Hot tips; for your search engine marketing efforts – create a landing page that has younger language, images and services. Chances are all your customers are not the same. Remember if they have to look for the part that is relevant to them, they are gone before you even knew they were there.

Partner

You’ll get by with a little help from your friends. The art of partnering should be taken very seriously. Find other trusted sites, blogs, videos and marketers that can drive traffic to your site. This is nothing new, but you might not have a qualified traffic strategy. Do you partner for general traffic or traffic for a specific reason?

Take it easy

Don’t try too hard! Sites that only sell and never listen aren’t any fun. Young users are all about free, fun, fast. Think about it, they grew up with free fantastic services everywhere. If you can’t solve a problem for free, then offer them a taste of your magic for free. Also, keep in mind that these guys have very well developed filters. So go easy on the over-selling banners and “smart” distractions.