Dear Champ-

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed lately with trying to get up to speed on all the marketing options available to me. I think it’s time I put a marketing team in place…
any suggestions?!

– Jerad in Jacksonville

Jerad, for an exorbitant fee I would be happy to take on all of your marketing challenges and make them go away. But I digress.

As you’re pulling together your masterpiece of a marketing team, make sure you have one of them who falls into the category of millennials — the cohort of Americans born between 1980 and the mid-2000s and the largest, most diverse generation in the United States.

Research shows that this group is more tech-savvy, creative, career driven and has invested more in human capital than previous generations.

Here’s what I’ve discovered over the years.

They bring fresh perspective

It takes a team with a diverse set of personalities and skills to make great content. Each person has a unique point of view that is based in part on their age — how they grew up, what was going on in the world when they were kids, the pop culture that shaped their thoughts.

They’re hybrid marketers

Millenials are Internet natives who grew up engaging with multiple social channels. They’re accustomed to having the entire history of human knowledge a click away, and they know what makes content findable in the digital noise. They understand how social media, SEO, lead gen, content marketing and PPC all work together.

They value authenticity

They’re not content with being cogs in the machine. But if truly inspired by the company they work for, they’ll sing its praises through every available social media outlet. Millennials make great brand ambassadors; provided, of course, that your company is keeping it real.

They speak your audience’s language

Millennials have a purchasing power of $1 trillion annually. And the B2B buying power of millennials is only going to keep climbing. If you are going to speak to millennials, it’s not enough to replace your Vanilla Ice jokes with Eminem references. Millennial marketers can engage your audience in a thoughtful, believable, sincere way.

Non-marketing is the only marketing we know

As social media natives, they’re used to brands building a relationship, rather than pitching a product. They’re not just comfortable building a brand together through dialog, it’s the only way they know how to do it. For millennials, the present state of content marketing is not the end of a journey. It’s the starting line.