Ashley Miles, EVP, Refinery29, helps identify unique ways to connect beauty brands, like P&G, Revlon, and L’Oreal, with millennial women, triggering brand relevancy and sales. As a busy millennial mom herself — leading Refinery29’s North America brand efforts and, of course, keeping up with her global vintage discovery passion — Ashley understands the complexities of connecting with this empowered generation. Here, Ashley writes about dissecting beauty brands’ objectives and addressing the struggles and needs of target consumers to effectively capture their attention.
Millennial women strive to have personal connections with the products they purchase.
Millennials have more access to information than any generation before, which means they are thoughtful about the choices they make and evaluate how to maximize the value and impact of those choices. Such an informational-overload mindset impacts everything from what they spend their money and time on to the quality of brands they decide to align with. In other words, for millennial women, everything is personal.
At Refinery29, we consider the way we communicate with the millennial woman to be both an art and a science. In addition to creating deep-rooted, personal connections through carefully crafted stories, we aspire to creatively bring our editorial to life with beautiful visuals and breathtaking video narratives. The science is how we use real-time marketing intel, analytics, reader comments, and our 1:1 audience panel of R29 power users to inform our craft, making sure we deliver exactly what she wants.
The millennial generation has more spending power than any other generation in the marketplace today, spending more than $600 billion each year. Therefore, it’s critical to understand how to best engage — and maximize — your brand’s impact in order to break through the clutter.
Here’s what you need to know to effectively target and connect with the millennial audience:
1. Tailor content to her individuality.
Self-assured and confident, millennial women prefer to challenge the traditional, mass-market notions of “pretty.” Wearing makeup is not a means to validation or a way to fit in. Rather, beauty is considered a vehicle to self-expression.
As the most diverse generation in American history, they want content that’s uniquely representative of their individual identities and preferences. Understanding how they’re distinctly singular — each with her own individual tastes and styles — is key to engaging with this generation.
Beauty content steeped in individuality and self-expression is key. Stories should reflect a true understanding of how beauty isn’t one-size-fits-all by reflecting a range of skin tones, hair textures (and length!), and levels of DIY expertise, to name a few.
Story example: How To Find The Best Makeup For Your Skin Tone
2. Don’t preach.
Find your brand’s unique voice. Refinery29’s genuine and relatable editorial tone keeps readers interested by offering practical, fresh solutions to universal beauty problems and trends. The goal is giving readers the tools they need to make informed choices as the best friend or confidant that they can trust — not a stranger forcing an agenda. One way to achieve this is by letting the tastemakers do the talking.
Story example: 15 Red-Carpet Beauty Tricks You HAVE To Try
3. Stop selling your product, and start selling service.
Content should be resourceful and emphasize personal experience. Selectivity is key here — Refinery29 editors are incredibly conscious of including items with varying price points, as well as brands that genuinely reflect our editorial mission and point of view.
Why is this so important? Eight in 10 women agree that they “embrace technology and seek out ways it can help them be more efficient and productive.” Rather than pushing your new product because it’s, well, new, make sure you’re providing a service that meets a need or solves a problem. Then, include your product as a helpful tool to get the audience there.
Story example: What Your Spring Beauty Game Is Missing
4. Listen up!
It’s important to have an open dialogue with your consumers and ensure you’re creating content that really serves their lives and needs. At Refinery29, we gather feedback from a number of channels — from comments on articles and social media to insights gathered from shares and views. We’ve taken it one step further with Mad Chatter, a digital community for the Refinery29 audience, serving as a forum to gather opinions on brands and products and really listen.
With Mad Chatter, we’re able to learn what’s most important to our readers and communicate with them directly through polls and real-time commenting. Why is this important to our mission? Mad Chatter allows us to have direct intel and then respond with branded content that’s tailored to readers’ interests. This generation needs to feel that their opinions are not just heard but valued.
Story example: What Nobody Tells You About Turning 30 — Except Us
5. Be agile.
Aligning with of-the-moment topics that matter most to readers is critical to our success. The real magic happens for the beauty brands who marry an always-on conversation from a trusted source with real-time content marketing that captures trends and buzz-worthy moments. It’s a dual approach that helps brands build a long-term relationship with their audience, while staying relevant 100 percent of the time.
Seventy-four percent of women believe they’re more experimental than their mothers and 40 percent of women “don’t have a beauty routine that they stick to religiously.”
Keeping your finger on the pulse of pop culture and sub-trends — from new contouring techniques seen on YouTube to celebrity beauty trends from the red carpet — and leaving room for agility and experimentation help expand your reach and allow you to tweak your focus based on the fluctuating preferences of your target consumer.
Story example: The Korean Beauty Secret That Can Transform Your Face
6. Stay away from scare tactics.
Don’t try to scare your consumer into buying your anti-aging products. Instead, be an honest resource by offering bona fide solutions. It’s important to embody the spirit of graceful aging, rather than pass judgment or shame readers into listening to one-note recommendations. Millennial women are all about inclusivity, being body-positive, and breaking away from dated notions of aging. Brands need to be able to couch for everyone’s beauty objectives, be it using Botox and Retin-A or not.
Story example: Why I’ll Never Look Back After Trying Botox
7. Get to the (right) point.
Remember: Millennial women do not take marketing jargon at face value. They identify a commercial asset very quickly. They prefer honesty, first-hand accounts, and surprising collaborations, which strike a chord faster than traditional advertising. Our focus at Refinery29 has been finding those brand synergies and picking out the details and messaging that we know our girl will deem to be cool and resourceful. Hearing about a buzzed-about product or brand through the lens of her “best friend” — like Refinery29 — helps solidify the legitimacy and efficacy of the beauty brand.
Why is this so important? Eighty-six percent of women prefer ads that feature valuable information, and 70 percent believe that visuals featuring complete looks, as opposed to piecemeal installments, inspire product purchases in order to achieve a similar effect. Modern women are highly sensitive to marketing tactics. So, when a brand collaboration is informational or beautiful (or better yet, both), millennials are more likely to engage with it.
Story example: How To Style Your Hair Like A French Girl
8. Speak to her how — and where — she wants it.
The millennial woman discovers content across multiple platforms, and it’s important to tailor creative content to suit each platform’s aesthetics and purpose — particularly when it comes to social media. Whether you’re using a website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, or the next big thing, it’s important to be conscious of how to best tell your brand story and how that medium enables you to do so.
For example, beauty brands should use Instagram or Pinterest for showcasing inspirational beauty looks and use Facebook to post snackable video content. Key words to remember: useful, quick, easy. For example, we’ve adapted our Beauty Prep School video series into to-the-point, 35-second clips for Facebook.
Source: Refinery29 Her Brain on Digital: Inside the World of the Millennial Minded Woman, March 2014
