Are You Conversant with Millennial Culture?

Guest contributor Denessa Munsterman of PCMS Consulting says:

It's imperative that your marketing strategies include the Millennial generation. How the Millenial generation approaches milestones in their lives can often seem foreign and unintuitive to older generations.

Numbering 105 million, Millennials are larger the Baby Boomer generation, and 20% bigger than the Gen-X population. And Millennials are aging into home buying. According to NAR, among buyers under 32 years of age, 79% are first time buyers. While all generations of buyers use the internet as the first step in the home buying process, younger generations typically purchase through the internet.

Millennials rely on their peers when making decisions, and they leverage their social networks for help with that decision-making. So when choosing an agent, young buyers rely on referrals from their personal networks, while emphasizing honesty and trustworthiness as qualities they want in their agent (NAR Report, 2013 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends).

• How are you going to capture that business?
• Do your agents know how to leverage social media to attract this up-and-coming generation that has a tremendous amount of spending dollars, and who are looking to purchase their first home?

You and your agents can do both by committing to a comprehensive social media strategy. Your social strategy should be focused on providing personalized service, insight and guidance to these first-time Millennial buyers.

The good news is the evolving technologies the Millennial generation relies on are perfectly suited to real estate marketing. Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube (or Vimeo) Facebook, Vine – even Tumblr. All of these social media channels offer real estate professionals the perfect stage for marketing their services, educating consumers and ultimately, building life-long relationships.

84% of Millennials are social media users, and the networks they use evolve and change. It's important to keep track of these trends, so you know where to find them. It's also important to continually educate yourself on the nature of these emerging social media channels – they all have their own unique online cultures. How the Instagram community interacts is different than the communities of Facebook or Pinterest.

The technology you use should make you more efficient, increase mobility and improve your productivity; however, the sheer amount of available social media strategies can often leave you and your agents floundering. Keep in mind what these new technologies should do: Help sell more homes. Hopefully they help sell more homes and create happy consumers.

Social media should not supplant real life interactions; it should be used instead to support them. The trick is to craft guidelines for your business that uses social media to generate new clients and then ensure that your agents connect with those relationships offline as well as online.

Millennials are inclined to active participation with the brands that attract their attention – passive marketing does not interest them. Ultimately, you want to create an emotional connection. Social media helps create and nurture relationships so they consider your company first and foremost when they are ready to make a commitment to buy or sell property.

To view the original article, visit the PCMS Consulting blog.