Next Gen Marketing with Amanda Swanson and Emily Osburn // Cornerstone Hot Takes

Hey, GonzoBankers. Tony DeSanctis back for another discussion. I wanted to follow up on the marketing discussion we had last year. We’ve got Emily back to keep us up to date on Gen Z.

$147 billion in annual spend now. Emily, what’s the latest on the Gen Z side of things?

The biggest thing when you’re trying to reach Gen Z is just making sure you’re being authentic. Traditional, old-school selling and marketing buzzwords don’t work for Gen Z. It’s really important that you share your values and prioritize a lot of storytelling in your marketing and in your content.

Great. So important. I wanted to make sure we touched on Gen Z. There are a couple of other generations, despite what the media might tell you, that we have to pay attention to.

So I brought in the big guns. I brought in our marketing ninja, Amanda Swanson. Amanda, thanks for joining us. You’ve got three big topics, or three big tips, for folks when they’re thinking about their marketing strategy. Can you share those with us?

Yes. Thank you, Tony, for having me on.

The first and foremost one for marketing tips for 2024 is really focusing on your brand awareness and building your brand story. This allows you to build that emotional connection and customer loyalty, and consumers are really looking for good brand stories that they can resonate with.

To marketers out there, it is really starting to think about that top of the funnel, really knowing who your target audience is, the benefits of your brand, what really motivates those consumers to purchase from you, and then building out that brand character.

Number two is really developing that quality of thought leadership versus quantity. So building that thought leadership in your marketing and in your brand. Consumers are looking for memorable, attention-grabbing content that really speaks to them like humans.

The third one, even though I hate to say this, consumers are really having that consumer, and I would say digital, fatigue. A few years ago, I predicted that coming out of the pandemic, a lot of consumers would want to have more human interactions. Here we are. It’s here today in regard to that digital fatigue.

It doesn’t mean going away from digital altogether. It’s really creating that great customer journey that makes us, as an individual, aware of your brand, but also connecting that physical human interaction going forward, which includes that offline interaction as well.

Amanda, thanks. I think we talk, and we’re going to talk more about this in Digital School and Payments School, right? Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. The top and bottom being the most critical, right? That top to represent the brand.

Exactly.

What Emily’s saying about being authentic, and then the bottom of the funnel is those one-on-one relationships and making sure you’re building those.

One hundred percent agree. Bottom of the funnel is really understanding the data about your existing customers and then being able to take that data to bring it back up to the top of the funnel and really target the clients and the customers that you’re wanting.