Youth Marketing: Top Trends

Targeting the youth market as part of your digital marketing strategy involves more than sprinkling your content with buzz words or partnering with the latest Gen Z influencer. 

Effective youth marketing involves strategically analyzing why your brand should reach out to younger generations, and developing tactics to do this effectively. 

Each generation is different and has different interests and pain points so it’s important to understand what makes each one tick from Baby Boomers to Gen Alpha (and the just-born Gen Beta!) 

So let’s take a deep-dive into how to position your brand to appeal to younger generations.

What is youth marketing?

Here’s an overview of the different generations in digital marketing terms, starting with the youngest. These are the broad characteristics of each generation:

• Generation Alpha (born 2010–2024): These are highly tech-savvy; growing up with voice assistants, tablets, and digital ecosystems.They are arguably the generation most impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Generation Z (born 1997–2009): These tend to be diverse, socially conscious, and entrepreneurial. They were the first smartphone generation and are heavy users of social media. They are also known as ‘Zoomers’.
• Generation Y / Millennials (born 1981–1996): They witnessed the rise of the internet, social media, and mobile devices, and are adaptable, experience-focused, and value-driven.
• Generation X (born 1965–1980): Although they grew up with analog technology, they adapted to digital advancements. They tend to be independent, skeptical, and resourceful.
• Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964): These were born after the post-war ‘baby boom’, and grew up with traditional media, such as TV and radio. However, they adopted digital technology later in life.

The newest additions are known as Generation Beta, born between 2025 and 2040

Why is marketing to youth important?

The first question you need to ask is: Are young people my brand’s target demographic? If you’re selling a product or service that’s unlikely to appeal to youth (such as mortgages or vintage cars), then it doesn’t make sense to invest in expensive campaigns that are unlikely to lead to conversions. 

Top tip: When developing any digital marketing strategy, it’s essential that you know your audience. 

On the other hand, if young people could constitute a segment that you engage with, then targeting this highly influential and future-oriented demographic brings several benefits. 

Consider these statistics:

• 91% of Gen Z social media users are on Instagram.
• 86% of Gen Z social media users are on TikTok.
• When they want to discover products, most Gen Z social media users use TikTok.
• Short-form video is the most popular type of brand content on TikTok and Instagram among Gen Z.
• 89% of Gen Alpha TikTok users scroll through short-form content on a daily basis.

Key benefits to youth marketing

1. Long-term customer loyalty: Younger consumers are more likely to stick with brands they connect with during formative years. For example, Nike targets a lot of its products and messaging at younger people, and partners with influencers that this demographic respects.
2. Trendsetting: Younger generations are cultural trendsetters, shaping broader consumer behaviors and preferences.
3. Social media skills: Young people dominate platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, providing direct access to a highly engaged audience and opportunities for organic reach.
4. Early adoption of technology: Younger consumers are eager adopters of new technology and innovations. They provide valuable feedback for optimizing products, features, and user experiences.
5. Creativity and engagement: Younger audiences respond well to interactive and creative campaigns, such as gamification, augmented reality (AR), and experiential marketing. This can help to amplify campaigns through shares, likes, and discussions.
6. Openness to new ideas: Younger generations are more open to discovering and adopting new brands. They embrace innovation and are willing to experiment with unique, disruptive products.
7. Advocacy and social awareness: Younger consumers are vocal about social, environmental, and political issues. Aligning your brand with values such as sustainability, diversity, and inclusivity) can encourage them to advocate for your brand.
8. Multi-channel engagement: Younger people tend to engage with brands across multiple channels, from social media to gaming and online communities. This multi-platform behavior provides opportunities for deeper engagement and storytelling.

key characteristics of youth marketing

Youth marketing aims to understand the behaviors and attitudes of young people, and then focus on what really matters to them. And this involves trying to understand what it is like to be young today. To do this, you need to analyze their point of view.

Personal identity is extremely important to today’s youth. They cultivate an image of themselves and then project that online. After all, youth culture today is internet culture, where young people like to inform and influence each other.

So it’s important for a brand to ‘feed the feed’, and show up on young people’s social media feeds in a way that is relevant and engaging to them. 

One of the challenges of youth marketing is that it’s different being young today than it was even last week. Today’s youths and tomorrow’s youths could have very different values and perspectives, as sociopolitical backdrops constantly evolve. 

This is why it is worth investing in qualitative and quantitative research to better understand the unique behaviors, attitudes, and life stages of young audiences. 

Use behavioral data to define audience archetypes. You can then target based on interests and actions, rather than age alone. Then select the marketing channels and social media platforms that align with your audience’s preferences.

How can you tune in to the young people in your target audience? Here are our ten top characteristics of the youth point of view:

Foster a community – online and offline

Youth culture is a creator economy

Youths expect speed, savviness, and smarts

TikTok plays a central role in youth online life

Youths need cultural editors

The internet goes beyond geographic boundaries

Youths admire health, aesthetics, and lifestyle

Hone your visual signatures

Dial up the vibes to the max

Youths care… and want you to care too

1. Youth culture is a creator economy

Young people tend to see themselves as online content creators and influencers. Popular culture today has become a creator economy. So young people spend a lot of time creating content to share with others. 

They also want to earn social currency by sharing every aspect of their lives with their friends. For example, if they try something new, they like to create content about it and share this with their friends and peers so that they can introduce them to new experiences. 

This enables them to position themselves as being ‘in the know’ and providing commentary on the latest trends. This can be a great opportunity for your brand to increase its reach through word of mouth.

Ask yourself: How can you play into young people’s desire to create and their desire to influence?

Examples:

• Trying new things
• Visiting new restaurants
• Sharing product empties

2. Young people expect speed, savviness, and smartness

Because they are digital natives, young people expect their requests to be met, quickly. They want seamless, efficient digital experiences, so your brand needs to prioritize a strong online presence and intuitive platforms.

Speed

Young people like to be able to interact with brands and manage their shopping at speed. So brands need to make sure customers can buy their products and services with minimal hassle. Drone deliveries are a response to this need, for example. 

Savviness

Young people are extremely tech savvy and know how to efficiently organize their digital wish list. For example, they create wish lists on Google Maps and share these with their friends, in order to get recommendations on places to visit or events to attend. 

Smart

Young people know what technology can do. So their expectations of you, as a brand, are very high. They like hyper-convenience, so they are drawn to tools or services that do more than one thing. They expect the tools to deliver on many things at the same time. 

This smartness (as well as the cost of living crisis that young people experience globally) has also led to the rise of ‘smart spending’. They are always on the lookout for the best deals and alternatives to expensive brand purchases. 

Examples

The Too Good to Go app alerts people when there’s food for sale locally at a discount because it’s near its expiry data. This is very popular with the next generation and is a good example of how savvy they are. Not only are they saving money by using this tool, they’re also avoiding food waste!

Pandabuy is another example of savvy spending. Young people like to search online and find the best deals. This has led to the rise of ‘dupe’ shopping, where people buy cheap fake alternatives to expensive designer brands. 

3. TikTok plays a central role in youth online life

TikTok is huge with young people, especially Gen Alpha. Just look at the ‘TikTok Made Me Buy It’ trend machine! This is a viral movement where users showcase products they discovered and purchased due to content they saw on TikTok.

These videos often feature enthusiastic reviews, unboxings, or demonstrations, leading to a surge in sales for certain items, especially beauty products, gadgets, and home essentials.

Of course, what’s trending on TikTok this week will be different from what’s trending next week. So, if you want to elegantly inject yourself into this platform, you need to be quick and tap into the cultural conversations of the moment. Of course, there’s a fine line between the right time and the wrong time. Make sure you have culturally-aware marketing experts who know best how to tap into what’s going on. 

Example

BookTok is a very popular TikTok trend (also found on YouTube as BookTube). Creators who focus on reading books have had such an influence over people’s reading habits that the publishing industry has seen something of a disruption. This also reflects a shift away from screen time and a return to reading traditional books.

4. The need for guidance

Because they spend so much time online, youth people are often in danger of suffering from content overload. This has led to the rise of cultural editors, or niche influencers, who can filter out all the good parts of the internet from the bad, and the great from the good.

When they need to find something, young people turn to these niche influencers to guide them. This is why it’s so important for brands to connect with influencers and content curators to ensure you show up in the right social media feeds.

Top tip: Use our Influencer Marketing Brief Template to help you find the right influencer for your brand. 

Example

James Hoffman has become a very popular niche influencer. He was a World Barista Champion in 2007 and now what his content is all around is sharing coffee knowledge. He talks not just about the coffee itself, but all the paraphernalia that surrounds that coffee. So this is the area that he owns as a creator and influencer. 

5. The internet goes beyond geographical boundaries

Geographical boundaries don’t exist when it comes to influence. As Jane notes, “Good content is good content. It doesn’t matter where it starts out. If it’s telling us something as a worldwide audience, that content is going to speak to us.”

Brands that are born in a local market can now explode online and suddenly become global. Brands now need to be ready for this sudden growth by ensuring that they are capable of growing at scale.

Example

K-Beauty is a very popular Korean skincare brand. It established Korea as the world’s leading skincare geography after the brand surged as a result of everything that was on TikTok. This is a great example of a brand that was born to cater for a local market becoming a global phenomenon. 

6. A healthy youth aesthetic

Young people particularly value health, aesthetics, and lifestyle. If you can speak to all three, your brand is going to thrive with the youth market! 

This is a very health-literate generation. They reject stressful, ‘heavy’ lifestyles and seek out healthy alternatives. As Jane notes, “Healthy for a lot of young people is not just ‘healthy’. It’s trendy, it’s cool, and it’s fun. But it’s not puritanical.” So, consider the lifestyle that your brand wants to be associated with, and give your brand a role within that lifestyle. 

This aesthetic has also, paradoxically, led to the popularity of ‘unhealthy’ lifestyle choice. So the brands that are winning are those that are delivering novel experiences on both sides of the health spectrum. 

Example

The Mukbang trend is where people post videos of themselves consuming junk food. It explores the guilty pleasures of consuming unhealthy food. For example, people livestream themselves consuming Raising Cane’s fast casual food. If you’re in that food and drink space, consider how your brand could show up in this world.

7. Hone your visual signatures

Visual signatures are important to the younger generations. These are simple visual elements that can be easily identified and emulated. They can be made up of many elements: color palette, logo, icons, typography, images, as well as gestures and actions in short-form videos. 

If your brand can create a visual signature that resonates with the youth market, it could soon become an online trend. 

Young consumers are drawn to visual aesthetics that resonate with current trends, such as minimalism, vibrant color palettes, or nostalgic designs. They develop instant recognition for the brand and can create a deeper emotional connection with the audience. Content that uses this vibrant visual branding can then be shared across social media.   

By staying relevant, interactive, and aligned with youth values, brands can leverage their visual identity to create a strong, lasting impact on young consumers.

Example

Charli XCX inspired an online sensation through her 2024 Brat album. The so-called ‘brat summer’ was built around the vibrant green album color and became a celebration of positive vibes and carefree lifestyles and was notably picked up by the Harris election campaign. Interestingly, Charli XCX herself wrote the creative brief and chose the iconic visual signature.

8. Dial up the vibes to the max

Gen Z and Gen Alpha can be very creative, and they enjoy creative content. Also, they want to be absolutely immersed in experiences with all their senses engaged. Remember, this is the generation that grew up with ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) content on their phones.

What does this mean for brands? You need to think about using all five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and feel) to improve the brand’s ‘vibration’. 

You could create virtual reality experiences that engage multiple senses. Or you could tell a story about your brand, again appealing to many senses. Include the details that bring the story to life. It could even involve creating immersive art experiences around your brand! 

Examples

Mr. Foggs Society of Exploration offers a multi-sensory re-creation of the experience of a traditional Victorian pub. As well as savoring a range of food and drinks, customers can immerse themselves in a bygone age.

Conclusion

If you bear in mind these ten characteristics when you ‘feed the feed’, you increase your chances of engaging a younger audience. Deliver a product or a service or experience that young people are really excited about. Then they’ll share and review it, driving interest and love for your brand online. 

Remember, however, that you have to deliver compelling digital content so that you’re easy to discover. Make yourself part of these conversations that happen both online and offline.