What You Should Know About Marketing to Millennials and Gen Z

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By 2025, millennials will make up 75% of the workforce. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? 

This statistic shines a bright light on how our marketing lens should shift as generations age. Before we knew it, Millennials will be three-quarters of the workforce, and in the blink of an eye, Gen Z will be right behind them. So, how do we market to these audiences? What makes them tick? In this article, we share what you should know about appealing to these two age groups. 

But first…

Is generational marketing worth it?

Though many brands are hoping to attract an audience of any age, some are surprised to find that they are only seeing individuals who fit the same profile. Of course, one may think, “Well, that’s the audience that is attracted to our business.” While, yes, there is some validity to that, you may be missing entire generations of people who would be interested in what you have to offer. 

If you’ve noticed that you aren’t attracting the younger Millennial and Gen Z generations, consider these tips. 

5 Things You Should Know About Marketing to Millennial and Gen Z Audiences

1. Your brand story should be authentic.  

Your audience can spot “fluffy” marketing campaigns from a mile away, especially Millennials and Gen Z. They have grown up with a surplus of information on their computers or at their fingertips, giving them years of practice at filtering out what isn’t worth their time. Tell a story that speaks to their motivations and their needs. Provide them with a practical reason to engage with your business because, trust us, this audience wants to feel good about the companies they support. You can allow them to feel connected to your message by crafting an authentic story they can care about.

2. Email marketing is still effective, even for Gen Z. 

Most people assume that Gen Z’s attachment to social media makes it the best, or only, way to reach them. However, according to a recent study by Campaign Monitor, 58% of those surveyed check their email multiple times per day—so there is very little competition for space in their inboxes. Don’t be too quick to assume that traditional marketing tactics are lost on younger generations—those may just be the avenues we need to grab their attention. 

3. Use your limited time wisely.

Make your marketing count. A widely-used and often disputed marketing statistic is that Millennials have a 12-second attention span, whereas Gen Z has eight seconds. Many believe that the issue is less about the ability to pay attention and more about an overwhelming amount of options. Whichever you feel is true, the goal is the same: your time is limited, so use it wisely. Let’s imagine that you only have eight to 12 seconds to make these younger audiences notice you. How are you going to stand out from the countless competitors vying for their attention? 

4. Hone in your customer experience. 

As we discuss the importance of authenticity and helping your audience feel connected to your brand, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention customer experience. Millennials and Gen Z have higher expectations than generations before them—not in a way that feels demanding, but rather they want to feel taken care of by the brands they’re trusting with their hard-earned money. Younger generations are more selective and want to believe that you want to help them solve a problem or meet a need. Analyze your customer experience to ensure ease of use and that each customer feels special and supported throughout the process. After all, who wouldn’t want that in a buying experience? 

5. Focus on diversity, inclusivity, and equality. 

Millennials and Gen Z help us identify areas in our society that need to be more diverse, inclusive, and equal. Though these challenges have long been fought for by many generations, these two age groups are using their social platforms to raise awareness about these issues—and it’s changing our expectations for the companies we support. 

Take brands like Aerie and Target, for example. They identified that their customer base wanted to see more representation. These brands answered society’s call—embracing the idea that humans are diverse, and we deserve to see that in the brands we support. Both retail chains have begun to show greater representation in their marketing, including more diversity in body shape, race, and gender. You’ll notice this change in other areas as well, such as mannequin sizes and clothing options. 

Though these are specific examples, we can learn from Aerie and Target when considering how to speak to our Millennial and Gen Z audiences—through supporting causes they care about and making a genuine difference in the world. 

We Can Help You Reach New Demographics

If you take one lesson from this article, let it be this: these generations want to feel good about where they spend their money. So, let’s do everything we can to show them we’re worth the effort. Do you need help finding the missing pieces to your marketing demographic? Contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation.

Should I Hire an Internal Marketing Team or Outsource to a Local Agency?

Marketing is crucial to the success of a business. It helps you meet your sales goals, increase your brand awareness, and tell your story. Though many understand the importance of marketing’s role in growing a business, few are sure of how to go about it. Should you hire an internal team, or should you outsource to a local agency? For the most robust, effective marketing strategy, we recommend outsourcing. Let’s talk about why.

In this article, we’ll cover a few reasons to consider outsourcing, including:

  • Staying ahead of the curve
  • Getting more out of your marketing budget
  • Having a comprehensive marketing team without searching for employees
  • Focusing on your core business operations

With an outsourced marketing agency, you can…

Stay Ahead of the Curve

A marketing agency lives and breathes innovative tools and effective strategies. They are working daily to research new methods, test the effectiveness of a tactic, and identify the best way to connect with your audience. Not only do agencies stay ahead of the latest trends, but they also invest the time into learning about your internal operations and your target audience’s expectations and needs. 

Agencies live in the marketing mindset, whereas internal teams are living inside of your industry’s world. When you outsource your marketing, you know that you’re working with a team that will identify your vision, build a strategy, monitor that strategy continually, and do everything in its power to deliver results. 

Get More Out of Your Marketing Budget

Can you believe that hiring an external marketing team could actually make your budget stretch further? When you think of it in terms of overhead, you can skip hours of searching for an internal employee and the countless dollars you would spend hiring, training, and managing that new person. 

Having an agency on retainer also ensures that your marketing strategy will not be put on hold when someone leaves your team—allowing you to continue growing even during times of turnover. Finally, consider the continual training costs necessary for professional development, such as conferences and classes, and industry organizations’ membership costs.

All in all, agencies bypass your overhead costs and provide you access to a diversely talented and well-trained marketing team that always has a finger on the pulse. 

Have Access to a Comprehensive Marketing Team without Hiring 

An agency removes the need to hire someone to fill every role—content, digital marketing, graphic design, photography, web development, and so on. You will have access to each of these skills, all in one place. It’s as simple as that. In Green Apple’s case, we approach each new client strategy by handpicking a team of marketing professionals to fit your business’s specific needs. We serve as a full-service, one-stop-shop for all things marketing, and you’ll find that it takes the stress off your plate. Rather than piling marketing tasks onto your to-do list, you know that an agency is already five steps ahead of you. 

Focus On Your Core Business

Your business’s core operations are where you want to spend your time. If you’re a roofing company, for example, you don’t want to spend your days wading through marketing tasks, nor should you have to. When companies have the internal capacity to tackle their core focus, that’s when they reach their highest potential. An agency identifies that potential and makes sure that your marketing aligns appropriately. You, on the other hand, focus on what you know and what you love doing. We take care of the rest. 

Are you ready to take your business goals to the next level? Contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation. To have marketing insight sent straight to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter—The Core.

4 Creative Ways to Be More Agile & Effective with Marketing in 2020

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If there’s only one word I’m encouraging business leaders and marketers to value in 2020, it’s agility. The business world is changing faster than ever before. As marketers and sales professionals, we must stay vigilant to what today’s customers want and how they communicate. This is why being agile is the most important part of any marketing plan you could put together for 2020. It’s essential to be able to pivot without abandoning your entire strategy.  

4 Creative Ways to Be More Agile & Effective with Marketing in 2020

So how can you be more agile in your marketing efforts this year? Here are a few creative practices you can consider: 

  1. Shorten the planning process for your campaigns. If you typically plan the whole year, instead, consider planning the first six months. If you plan by quarters, try six-week campaigns. Shortening the length of your planning process will cause you to systematize the way you evaluate campaigns with a more agile approach.
  2. Make sure you’re continually looking at the data to analyze campaigns. Companies that adopt data-driven marketing are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year. By letting data be the diplomat, you will be able to see what’s working and what’s not.
  3. Set weekly stand-up meetings with key leaders. Communication is the key to agile marketing. One recommendation I often give is to conduct 15-minute check-ins with the team to briefly discuss work from the previous day, in addition to plans for that day. This strategy allows you to address any hiccups and resolve them as quickly as possible.
  4. Celebrate collaboration and teamwork. A team that enjoys working together will be more willing to embrace an agile approach. In closed teams, it’s easy for people to start pointing fingers at the other. But creating a culture of collaboration and teamwork will cultivate an environment where everyone is willing to work together despite their differences or setbacks to accomplish a goal. 

Taking a more agile approach to your marketing campaigns isn’t easy, especially if your team isn’t familiar with the approach. While you may not be able to direct the daily activities of your sales and marketing departments, taking time to consider these ideas will help you set the tone for greater collaboration within your team.

How Marketing Can Directly Impact Revenue with Sales Enablement

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Directly tying your marketing efforts to revenue generation is a challenge for almost every business leader and marketing manager. In today’s world, there are so many factors that influence a potential customer’s decision, so utilizing proper marketing tactics is essential. It’s the only way to know if the time, energy, and resources you invest are making an impact on the bottom line. 

One of the simplest and most effective ways for marketing to directly impact revenue is to focus on sales enablement. Essentially, sales enablement is equipping your business development team with assets that make them more efficient and effective. This includes content that helps prospects to answer the questions they ask, solve their problems, and build the case internally with their team.

But, what’s the best thing about sales enablement? All of it can be tracked, measured, and attributed to the bottom line. 

How to Create Sales-Enablement Tools That Directly Impact Revenue

How can marketing equip your sales team with resources that make them smarter and more efficient and effective? Here are a few important considerations when creating your sales-enablement assets: 

  1. Sales Enablement That Answers Potential Customers’ Biggest Questions. The most effective sales-enablement tools proactively answer the questions of prospective customers. This includes assets such as answers to frequently asked questions, at-a-glance competitor comparisons, and statistics that add credibility.
  2. Sales Enablement That Comes in Different Formats. Every customer is different in how they prefer to consume content. The good news is that you don’t have to create all of these resources from scratch. Re-organizing the content you create into various formats is one of the simplest ways to maximize your content marketing efforts. Equipping your sales team with content in various formats such as ebooks, case studies, blog posts, videos, webinars, and infographics is key.
  3. Sales Enablement That Is Easy to Find and Simple to Use. Sales enablement tools are effective if your business development team actually uses them. That’s why it’s critically important to create sales enablement tools that your team can use. Make sure everything you create is easily accessible, consumable, and shareable.
  4. Sales Enablement That Makes Your Business Development Team More Efficient. Marketing automation and technology have opened the door for new levels of sales enablement. Not only can you create resources for sales to use, but you can also send it on their behalf. Finding simple ways to leverage marketing automation to support your sales team will save them a tremendous amount of time and enable them to focus on having meaningful conversations with potential customers. 

The great thing about sales enablement is that all of it can be tracked. You can see what potential customers are consuming. You can know what content is influencing their decisions. You can share that information with your sales team to help them be even more effective. While marketing might not be able to take complete credit for “closing the deal,” empowering your business development team with sales-enablement tools that can be tracked and measured is a meaningful way to directly tie your marketing efforts to the bottom line. 

How Marketing Can Create Company-Wide Collaboration

a round wood table in a warm lit room with three men gathered sitting with white papers scattered
Creating a culture of teamwork and collaboration is one of the most important things you can do for your business. Here are a few reasons why…
  • 75% of employers rate teamwork and collaboration as “very important.” (Source)
  • 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failure. (Source)
  • Collaborative teams are 5x higher-performing because they feel motivated towards a common goal. (Source)
And, while every leader agrees that collaboration is important—creating a culture of teamwork has gotten increasingly difficult in a world where employees can work from anywhere and open offices don’t seem to be working. How Marketing Can Create Collaboration Across Your Company Creating a collaborative team environment is no simple feat, but it’s possible. Here are a few ways in which marketing can play a unique role in supporting this effort:
  1. Constantly remind employees of your mission and vision.
Your mission and vision statements won’t sink in if you promote them once or leave them on your website for others to read. Employees need to be constantly reminded about why they show up to work every day in order to increase teamwork and collaboration. Marketing can support this by looking for creative and engaging ways to keep your mission and vision top of mind for employees.
  1. Encourage creative problem solving and brainstorming.
Collaboration and teamwork works best in environments where creative brainstorming is a regular part of the business. Because of where they sit in the organization, marketing can lead out in this by pulling together leaders from different areas of the company to address issues your company is facing.
  1. Share knowledge, insights, and resources across your organization.
Does your account services team know everything that’s happening in marketing? Does your sales team know all the impressive results you’re getting for clients? Marketing can help bridge the gap by collecting all this information and dissemination throughout your organization.
  1. Celebrate the impact your company is making.
When morale is low, productivity suffers and collaboration decreases. Marketing can play a role in improving morale by regularly celebrating the growth and success your company is experiencing. Celebrating the exciting things that are happening across your business on a regular basis is a great way to create a culture where people are on board and excited about the things that are happening. Whether you’re a large corporation or a small startup—these are a few simple ways your marketing team can play a role in creating a more collaborative culture. Collaborative companies are more productive companies. Leaders who know this invest time and resources in creating environments that are conducive to teamwork.

7 Steps to Develop Your Go-to-Market Strategy


You have an idea for a great new product or service. You might have already invested time and money developing the solution. But, how do you get the word out?

Whenever launching a new product or service, the last thing you want is to waste time and resources investing in marketing tactics that don’t work. To avoid this, it’s important to craft an intentional plan that will help you rise above the noise and reach potential customers.

7 Steps to Develop Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Here are seven steps you can take to develop your go-to-market strategy for a new product or service:

  1. Identify your specific decision-makers and buyers. First and foremost, it’s important to define who you’re trying to serve (and who you’re not) with this new product or service. Knowing your ideal customer is foundational for marketing in ways that resonate with them. Everyone on your sales and marketing teams should take time to identify as much information as you possibly can about your target audience.
  2. Determine the specific pain points and messages that resonate with buyers. Knowing your ideal customer and their pain points are essential for determining the messages that will resonate with them. Before you launch your product, your sales and marketing should know (and agree) on exactly who you’re trying to reach and how you are uniquely positioned to help them.
  3. Understand your buyer’s journey. Intentionally considering the experience you’re creating for potential customers during the buying process is one of the most valuable things you can do before launching a product or service and is one of the best ways to spend your time. Not only will this help you create a buyer’s journey that potential customers actually enjoy, but it will also help you define the processes and systems you’ll need to create it.
  4. Define the relationship between sales and marketing. Marketing and sales teams should work together to achieve your goal. Without absolute clarity on the business objectives or specific products/service lines you want to grow, both sales and marketing teams are left guessing what will actually move the needle. This is true for businesses at any point in time but is especially important when launching a new product or service.
  5. Generate interest and develop a plan to increase brand awareness. Once you’ve laid the initial groundwork, it’s time to start thinking about your specific marketing tactics. Whenever you’re thinking about brand awareness, don’t neglect the simple but often overlooked ways to reach customers. Take time to learn from the successful campaigns and mistakes other brands make when it comes to brand awareness.
  6. Create content that connects emotionally with potential customers. How do you create content that cuts through the noise and actually gets read? Consider how you can use content to create emotional connections with potential customers. Begin weaving these strategies into your marketing efforts to appeal to their emotions. Brands and products that evoke our emotions—such as Apple, Disney, and Google—are always effective when launching new products or services.
  7. Determine how you will leverage data to evaluate and optimize your efforts. Now that you have a plan in place, the final question is: How are you going to measure and optimize along the way? Creating a data-driven marketing culture is essential for the long-term success of your product. Without knowing what you will measure before you start, you won’t know how to improve your marketing efforts along the way.

Without taking the time to think through these seven steps, it’s impossible to know if you’re chasing the wrong audience, you’re too early or too late to the market, or the market is already too saturated with similar solutions.

Why Empathy is More Important Than Ever for Marketers

The rate at which technology has evolved over the past few years has impacted every industry — especially marketing. Today, businesses are trying to find ways to leverage technology to reach more customers. Marketing automation, search engine optimization, business intelligence, chatbots, and voice search have become important topics for many marketers. However, in a world where information is a commodity, you need to be more than a source of facts and figures. This is why it is more important than ever for marketers to understand, embrace, and incorporate empathy. 3 Ways to Gain & Incorporate Empathy Into Your Marketing The good news is that empathy is something that can be learned. Here are three exercises you can use to cultivate your empathetic skills and incorporate them into the ways they engage with potential customers:
  1. Get face-to-face with the prospective client. Most marketing teams don’t get a lot of face time with current or potential customers, but their entire job is to create messaging and campaigns that resonate with these people. Taking time to actually sit down with a potential customer can be extremely valuable for marketers. It helps them understand what a “typical day” looks like for them. It provides insights into what really motivates them to make decisions, rather than guessing. Face-to-face conversations allow for the fullest interaction, and the closer you can get to one, the more effective you’ll be.
  1. Don’t be afraid to find out why you didn’t win the business. When it comes to knowing why a prospect didn’t buy from you, most marketers have to rely on insights from the sales team. However, salespeople don’t always get the real reason. Being a little further removed from the sales process often provides an opportunity to gain valuable insights. This is a valuable way marketing can play an active role in truly understanding the real reasons and motivations of why a prospective client didn’t buy from you.
  1. Consider what their real problem is. Here’s the difference between great companies and good companies: Great companies solve the real problems facing the customer. Think about Chick-fil-A versus a typical fast food restaurant. One provides a transactional experience, the other does everything they can to go above and beyond to make life easier and more enjoyable for the customer. Chick-fil-A understands that they’re doing more than providing people lunch. The real problem they are solving is making the act of eating more enjoyable and a less stressful part of life—and everything they do is centered around this objective.
By taking the time to gain and incorporate empathy into your marketing efforts, you’ll be much more skillful at creating messaging that resonates with your audience. Once you can understand their emotional motivations, you’ll be able to market more effectively and efficiently.

How to Create a Data-Driven Culture for Growing Your Business

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In today’s world of advanced analytics and dashboards, creating a data-driven, decision-making culture has become a popular topic of conversation for business leaders and marketing professionals. However, there can be a lot of challenges when trying to implement a culture where data is the diplomat when it comes to making strategic decisions. While there’s always a balance of quantitative data and qualitative experience, businesses that use data to drive their strategies and decisions see tremendous growth. Companies who adopt data-driven marketing are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year. And yet, 87% of companies say data is the most underused asset in their marketing efforts. How to Create a Data-Driven Culture for Growing Your Business So, how do you change that reality and create a data-driven culture in order to grow your business? Here are a few keys:
  • Make sure key stakeholders are ready to embrace fact-based decision-making. It’s unlikely that everyone will naturally embrace the shift toward data-driven decision-making. For some, it won’t seem natural. While you don’t need everyone’s buy-in to start changing the culture, you do need the key stakeholders to get on board. It’s very important that the commitment to data-driven decision-making permeates from the top down.
  • Pick one objective or area to start improving first. Figuring out where to start can be the most overwhelming aspect of making the shift. Business leaders can often suffer from paralysis of analysis when trying to figure out where to start. If you’re trying to become a data-driven culture, it is important to think of things in stages. Start small with one area that might be a priority for the entire organization that has enough data.
  • Don’t forget to communicate “what’s in it for them.” People are more accepting of change when they understand how it makes their lives better. Whenever you’re trying to shift the culture in your organization, don’t forget to communicate how data-driven decision-making will specifically help each person. It could be that data helps them close more deals or prioritize their time more effectively. Answering “what’s in it for them” is essential for getting buy-in from people who might seem resistant.
Many business leaders still rely on their gut to make important decisions. Rather than leveraging the data they have a source for objective insights, they’d prefer to rely on their intuitions when developing their strategy. However, creating a culture where everyone understands the value of data is crucial as things become more competitive.

5 Questions Your Marketing Should Answer for Prospective Customers

The digital world has changed the way we make purchasing decisions, including B2B businesses. Consumers and potential clients are more in charge of the buying process than ever before. In fact, it’s been reported that “57% of the purchase decision is already complete before the customer even calls the supplier.”

If this is true, that means potential customers are expecting to be able to answer the questions which were formerly answered directly by a salesperson. This is where marketing comes in.

5 Questions Your Marketing Efforts Should Answer for Prospective Customers

Whether it’s through your website, email marketing, or advertising campaigns, here are five questions your marketing efforts should be answering for prospective customers:

  1. Why should we trust you? More than likely, your business is just one of a dozen or more options that customers can choose from. Why should they choose your business and trust you to solve their challenges? The best way to increase trust and help people understand why they should choose your business is to position yourself as an expert and share meaningful insights. Numerous studies have shown that when the brain recognizes that someone is an expert, it is far more likely to comply with that person’s suggestions.
  2. Why should we choose your specific product or service? There are two primary reasons people choose a particular product or service: cost and differentiation. To differentiate your product or service, potential customers must understand your unique value proposition. Your value proposition is a unique value that a buyer desires and will receive from your company, product, or service. Think of the word “only” and how you can apply it to your business, products, and services.
  3. Why now? Overcoming the lack of urgency is a challenge for many B2B marketing and sales professionals. While you don’t want to become an overbearing hustler (that doesn’t work), you need to help your customer realize that embracing change now rather than later is in their best interest.
  4. Is it worth the investment? When you are asking buyers to purchase something from you, you are also asking them not to do something else. The most effective way to answer this question is to appeal to the emotional reasons people buy. Knowing this, identify ways to start creating emotional connections with prospective customers to increase their likeness toward making a decision.
  5. Is it worth making a change? People have a natural aversion to change. The brain is wired to associate a high level of risk with accepting a new idea or purchasing a product or service. The most compelling ways to incite change is to find problems by challenging the status quo with insights that compel your buyers to think about how they can improve themselves or their business.

2 Simple Marketing Metrics Shifts That Could Make a Huge Difference

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There are literally hundreds of different marketing metrics that businesses and agencies measure on a regular basis. From website traffic to keyword rankings to the number of marketing qualified leads—businesses spend countless hours breaking down the metrics to determine the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

The real challenge isn’t the amount of information; it’s knowing what to do with it all. Many organizations are constantly measuring their marketing efforts, but they just don’t know how to use their data to achieve their objectives. While marketing reports might be helpful in evaluating campaigns—the real question is how you’re going to use that information to reach your ideal customer.

2 Simple Marketing Metrics Shifts That Could Make a Huge Difference

As an agency, it’s easy to get caught up in “reporting the numbers” when we send over a weekly or monthly report. However, here are two shifts we’re trying to make with our clients when it comes to measuring marketing effectiveness:

  1. Always look for ways to translate data into actionable insights. Rather than spending all our time crunching numbers, we should focus more on translating our marketing results into actionable insights. We should take time to truly understand what’s going on and what we’re doing about it. What are the 2-3 things you’re going to continue because of the results from last month’s marketing efforts? What are the 2-3 things you should think about changing? At the end of the day, we should approach marketing like a learning lab—constantly evolving our strategies based on what we’re learning as we go.
  2. Find your North Star Metric. If you could only measure one metric to evaluate your marketing, what would it be? This is the idea behind the North Star Metric. The idea originally emerged from Silicon Valley and has become a popular concept among startups and growth hackers.

In order to determine the single most important metric for your marketing efforts, you should look at how your product delivers value to your customers. For example, the North Star Metric at Facebook is the number of daily active users. Everything they do is built around increasing that number. In many cases, identifying a North Star Metric creates a level of focus and intentionality that helps everyone prioritize the things they’re working on and improve your ability to achieve that goal.