As digital natives, millennials will perceive your company through a screen. If their first encounter with your company is successful, they will inevitably interact further with your brand through any of your other online presences, which, if structured correctly, all should point back to the root of your company’s online life: your website.
Having a well designed and captivating website is crucial to how millennials perceive your company on a long term basis. Any evidence of a legacy website elements leaves a lasting impression on the millennial viewer; they instantly feel as though your company is out of date, out of touch, and therefore forgettable.
A modern, captivating, and successful website has a consistent set of three qualities that are easily attainable, especially with modern web technology.
Here are the three most important attributes your website needs to reach millennials:
1. Responsiveness
Responsive design in a website is easily the most obvious way to showcase that your brand is up-to-date. When evaluating responsiveness in a website, we are talking about a website that responds to the size of the browser and formats the content accordingly. This means one website looks great on a computer, a tablet, and a phone, all using the same code base. Web developers can accomplish this through a few different methods: device queries and browser width. A great responsive website can use a mix of both without depending only on 1 method. For example, the format of bluebearcreative.co changes as the browser width changes (go ahead, try it!) while some content is replaced depending on the device you’re on (i.e. the background video on the homepage and the size of the images for the rest of the website)
2. Uncluttered Design and Messaging
Back in the ancient days of the web, where everything was statically placed and definitely not responsive, it was acceptable to cram as much information about your company on to each page a viewer might see. This is a trend that has thankfully ended, yet it still appears in the wild, much to the web developers disgust. Not only should your design and messaging be reflective of your brand, but it should be communicated as clear and concise as possible. As soon as someone loads your web page, whether it is on a phone while they are waiting for a dentist appointment or on their computer while catching up on email, you have an extremely limited time to communicate who you are and what you do as a company. Millennials especially have a short attention span and limited tolerance for a cluttered, confused website. Make sure you can quickly define what you do in two or three sentences max, making that the most prominent information on the page. Once you’ve captured their attention, millennials will continue to cruise through your website, picking up additional details that they need.
3. Consistent Branding
Once a millennial lands on your webpage, are captivated by your initial design and messaging, they will likely browse through a few more pages and sections of your company’s website. If they travel through your website (and web presence, as a whole) and any part feels out of place, they will feel like they have been catapulted into another area run by a different company. Consistent branding implemented correctly keeps what you do and who you are in the back of the viewer’s mind. Millennials especially are sensitive to this, so be careful to make sure the website is cohesive and consistent.
Marketing to millennials is more than just posting to Facebook and Twitter. No matter what platform you decide is best for your company to reach millennials, whether that be Instagram or Snapchat, the root of your digital presence begins at your website.
