4 Simple Ways to Up Your Millennial Marketing Game Millennials are the largest generation on social media, and that's why it's a bad idea to ignore them.

There's a real battle for attention, out there. One of the reasons why a lot of traditional marketing techniques have been downplayed in favor of digital marketing is that, these days, practically everyone is on the internet, and brands deem it fit to allocate more resources to where they are more likely to get the highest return on investment.

Social media marketing has proven to be one of the right ways to do digital marketing. Besides being super-efficient, this form of marketing seems like the right way to go because the major social media platforms have received both good and bad press about how easy it is for them to attract users and keep them coming back.

With a lot of experts reeling out advice on social media marketing, the issue of how best to market to millennials has received quite a lot of attention. As of today, millennials are the largest generation on social media, and that's why it's unwise to ignore them. Here are four simple, yet effective strategies to creating marketing campaigns that resonate with millennials.

1.) Run challenges to engage and convert your audience.

When browsing Facebook or Instagram, millennials are not necessarily looking for things to buy. With that in mind, it's important to think creatively about the types of campaigns to launch that both stand out from the noise and engage with your millennial targets to make them believers and ultimately buyers/customers. It's been found that challenges and contests perform well, as people love to be dared to act (remember the ice-bucket challenge?) and usually enlist their friends to join them (amplification effect). A renowned digital marketer, Hadi Labarang, gave me a few rules to follow for this to work.

Give before you ask: The challenges provide the perfect time for you to showcase your brand and deliver a lot of value to your prospects and engage with them through avenues such as Facebook/Instagram live. You'll want to ask them to participate and to answer their questions in a timely fashion. People love to feel special.

Personalize the experience: An easy way to do this is to use chatbots and built-in artificial intelligence to create a sense of personalization at scale.

Think strategically about the transition to your sales pitch: Introduce the opportunity (the service or product you are selling) in the first days of the challenge. It's important to be transparent; there's nothing worse than thinking you are getting something for free and then being asked to pay for it.

2.) Be simple and conversational.

Millennials are unimpressed by marketing techniques that are obviously out for their money without being appealing. Moreover, it's pretty difficult to get their attention as they are faced by a lot of clutter on the different platforms they engage on. (According to one study, the majority of millennials' news-gathering efforts is based on their social media usage.) So what can be done to cut through the clutter?

First, it is important to state the obvious: the majority of social networks provide users with the opportunity to upload content of various forms: images, videos, GIFs, plain-old text, and so on. As a marketer, this many opportunities spoil you with alternatives on ways to reach your audience. However, with great power comes the need to not shoot your self in the foot. You've got to know just how to deploy the alternatives the right way, so your content creation spend doesn't go to waste.

Related: 12 Tips and Tools for Managing Multiple Social-Media Accounts

To get the attention of millennials using social media content, you must keep your messages simple and conversational. For one, it's been argued that millennials dislike jargon and would rather be enticed by brands that use their lingo. When you think about it there just might be no better way to get people's attention than speaking to them in their own language.

Also, keeping your content, be it images, videos or text, conversational is very likely to melt the hearts of millennials. Millennials wish to be talked to, and although you've got to sell your product, you need also need to think how its benefits them. Creating conversational content humanizes your brand and has a far greater impact.

3.) Develop a chatbot for your business.

A really good chatbot can go along way to being conversational. Chatbots have become an integral feature of quite a number of social platforms, the most noteworthy of which is Facebook. Their relevance is based on some rather unique reasons.

First, some chatbots afford you the opportunity to acquire more customers by showcasing your product catalog to users and giving them the option to buy. This is relevant especially on a platform like Facebook where users are given the option to buy products without them leaving Messenger.

Related: 7 Facebook Messenger Marketing Strategies You Can Try Today

Second, chatbots help qualify and deliver a personalized experience to prospects by engaging with them, which is key to supercharging conversations. They do this by allowing you to segment your users based on actions they've taken. This, in turn, allows you to deliver content based on their needs.

Chatbots also help to attract repeat visits and new customers with a click of a button. Using bots, it becomes very easy to send promotions and coupons and making it even easier for the users to find and redeem them.

To top all of these, chatbots create a version of 24/7 availability. They allow your business to communicate with prospects or existing customers whenever they reach out, which gives your business a strategic advantage. Fortunately, non-technical teams can create chatbots quite easily by using drag-and-drop solutions. To up your marketing game, you know what to do with this.

4.) Connect with prospects on WhatsApp.

With over 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide in 2017, according to Statista, WhatsApp is an opportunity businesses cannot afford to ignore.

Since many millennials use WhatsApp to engage with loved ones and to also stay on top of happenings in groups they belong to, it is a no-brainer that gearing your marketing efforts to millennial prospects through the platform is bound to be effective.

Related: The Co-Founder of WhatsApp, Which Is Owned by Facebook, Tweets '#deleteFacebook'

More so, Facebook is starting to offer businesses the opportunity to advertise on WhatsApp through Facebook Ads Manager, and although this is still very much in its early days, like every trend, early adopters face some risks. But they can also reap the most benefits, if they can align their strategy to the platform.