Today is National Senior Citizen’s Day, and if you want to reach the older generation with your products and services, any top digital marketing agency will tell you that knowing how to market to them specifically based on THEIR NEEDS is key.
When you think of marketing to senior citizens and how the older generation uses the Internet, you may recall your childhood when you watched your grandparents fumble over your Atari or Nintendo system throwing up their hands in confusion. Although older people are grouped into the stereotype of being “tech challenged”, online buyer statistics might surprise you. According to a 2015 report by BI Intelligence, 1 in 4 adults who shop on mobile devices are over the age of 55. In addition, a Pew Research survey on technology use among seniors found that 67% of adults aged 65 and older go online.
Whether your products and services are specifically for senior citizens, or suitable for people of all ages, if you aren’t fine-tuning portions of your digital marketing approach to cater to older buyers, you are missing out on a significant portion of your consumer audience. Here are three tips to help you reach golden age buyers and delight them.
When marketing to older buyers, you will need to use language and longtail keywords specific to their needs and criteria. In some cases the needs of an older buyer may be the same as those of a teen. For example, if you have a retail store that sells sweaters, age-specific needs won’t be relevant. However, if you are a travel agency and you sell vacation packages, seniors will have specific needs that people in their 30s won’t have.
Senior citizens didn’t grow up using the Internet; instead they relied on face-to-face sales, paper marketing, and television adverts. All of these brought a high degree of personalization into the buying experience: face-to-face sales literally brought a human being into the sales process, paper marketing was something physical they could hold in their hands, and television adverts from the 50s and 60s showcased human beings speaking directly to the viewer in a personalized style of TV marketing. Make sure your website or landing pages optimized specifically for seniors take a personalized approach. Have a short video of someone addressing the viewer in a conversational style. The older generation is used to white-glove customer service, so create easy-to-read contact forms to capture their information with a promise to respond within 24 business hours. Include this with a customer-first CTA that emphasizes the client’s care as being paramount to your company.
Make sure your content uses the same language spoken by senior citizens. Avoid saying things like “this product is the bomb” or “customers say our service is off the hook”; these are slang phrases that very few seniors will likely understand. Also avoid text slang such as “ROTFL” or “LOL”. Remember, seniors didn’t grow up with mobile phones and will likely be confused and turned off by this kind of language. At the same time, you don’t need to use slang from the 50s; just be direct and to the point using common language understood by all generations. Really the same rule to blogging for business applies here: write content that will resonate with ALL cross-sections of your buyer audiences.
If you found value in these tips we invite you to download our FREE guide on Inbound Marketing. Learn how to get your content to the right buyers, and how to nurture them into paying customers through marketing automation.
