This Week in Marketing: Gen Z and Beyond

Remember how terrified the media was of millennials? This generational cohort was destroying industries left and right, refusing to work the way their parents and grandparents worked, buying avocado toast instead of real estate 😱 … if we could harness the energy needed to write all those millennial scare articles, it could run New York City for a month.

Fortunately for millennials, now it’s time to panic about a new generation. Gen Z is hitting the workforce — in fact, the oldest Z-ers are pushing 30. Marketing to these digital natives can be a challenge, especially for B2B, but best practices are beginning to take shape. 

Forward-thinking leaders are adapting strategically, shifting their models to account for future buyers while also planning around the changes in buyer behaviors taking place.

Check out our pocket guide to Create Content that Resonates with Gen Z, and read on for more insights from marketing articles this past week.

What to Read

Three Tips For Building A Gen Z Marketing Plan (Forbes): This quick guide from PR expert Kristen Wessel is refreshingly free of scare-mongering or sketchy generalizations. Instead, she focuses on three types of messaging and three tactics that have proven successful. One no-brainer: short-form video content.

Three Ways Marketers Can Better Engage Gen Z Talent (CIM): What’s scarier than marketing to Gen Z? Working alongside them, of course. But if you lead with purpose and empathy, says  MaryLou Costa, you can easily relate to the twenty-somethings in your workforce.

What Types of Videos Are B2B Buyers Watching? (Marketing Charts): We may have Gen Z to thank for the rising popularity of video marketing, but they’re not the only ones watching. This chart shows that product reviews and demos top the list for B2B video marketing, but tutorials and webinars are close behind. 

How to Optimize Your B2B Videos for Different Social Media Platforms (Michaletz Zwief): Agency Michaletz Zwief shares tips on aspect ratio, length and more for the major social media platforms. For LinkedIn, approximately one minute is the sweet spot, but make sure to have a solid takeaway in your first 10 seconds.

What to Watch

As the great Yogi Berra said, “Ninety percent of this game is half mental.” Whether you get a buyer’s attention with a video, interactive asset, social media post or good old-fashioned whitepaper, the decision to buy is a complicated set of chemical reactions in the brain. In this video from MarketingProfs, Kenda MacDonald digs into the neuroscience of making a purchase decision, and how marketers can make deciding easier. 

What to Know

If you’re still thinking of Gen Z as kids on TikTok, this Gen Z on LinkedIn infographic can help. Here are two highlights that show Gen Zers on our platform are here for serious business.