Written by a Gen Z BBS consultant  

Gen Z live and breathe digital literacy with a fluency that is almost incomprehensible to those who came before them. To cut through to the generation that grew up alongside the internet, there must be a change to community engagement and digital PR as we know it.

If this audience is a key target for your brand, knowing how to communicate in a way that engages and resonates with Gen Z is essential to set your brand in good stead for future business.

Gen Zers were born between 1997 and 2012: to put this into perspective, the oldest members of this cohort were only 10 when the iPhone launched, and media consumption rapidly and irreversibly changed.When lockdowns from the COVID pandemic were in full force, most of this group would have been in their formative school or university years.

The pandemic saw classrooms replaced with lessons over zoom in lone rooms, and Gen Z’s crutch of content consumption skyrocketed. The social media habits they developed in these years have stuck with them post-pandemic.

There are many ways a brand can communicate with Gen Z; this blog will focus on how to cut through using earned and owned media.

What can be used to your benefit is Gen Z’s – more than previous generations’ – likelihood to interact with online content and branding, however, their need for fast-paced media means traditional news media is simply not enough for young audiences. If not already, it is making its way out the door.

Instead of willing them to ‘grow-up’ and engage with traditional news media, it may be more effective to bring your branding to the platforms they already dominate.

It’s not that they don’t care, this generation is outspoken and passionate about global issues. The problem is that news isn’t being delivered to them in a way that they’re willing to engage with.

With 90 per cent of this generation active on some form of social media, there’s no fighting it – it doesn’t matter the industry, if you want your business to prosper beyond the next few decades, multimodal communication is essential when speaking to Gen Z and younger.

More than a third of Gen Z gets their news from TikTok, and an educated guess would find that a good portion of this group wouldn’t be seeking out news, but are rather stumbling upon it.

Perhaps it is simply the state of the world today, or perhaps it is the internet allowing every issue to be amplified to the nth degree, but Gen Z is noticeably more vocally socially conscious than their predecessors. They aren’t disinterested in business and current events, just disengaged – the conversation needs to be happening on their turf.

So how does your brand communicate with an audience who is constantly bombarded by noise, but who listens to and absorbs very little of it?

The education of the next generation of businesses and customers is too important to leave to chance. With all this in mind, here is how your business can cut through to the next generation of customers and clients:

Make the shift to multimodal

This doesn’t mean a complete change to your offerings, but incorporating digital and visual media and utilising social platforms will unlock an entirely new customer base. Gen Z is more likely to retain information and engage with content if it is communicated visually. Succinct content is also better received by Gen Z – it seems that if a TikTok video does not win attention within the first three seconds, users will simply scroll past. The ABC’s use of reels and ‘The Daily Aus’s’ thriving Instagram news service have successfully executed this approach.

Be transparent about your values and your vision
Video communications that display authenticity and personality, be that through a mascot or a key figure in the business, will make you memorable in the overwhelming barrage of digital content. This means taking yourself a little less seriously. Keep your traditional media for your traditional audiences, but for Gen Z, you might have to loosen up and buy into whatever the trend of the week is.

Let them do the talking
User generated content levels the playing field between business and customer, facilitating conversation and building trust – it also lets them do some of the work for you. This could be from something as simple as encouraging a conversation in your comments, to holding competitions where users have to post some form of brand-relevant content to enter.

BBS can help you with your content strategy and community engagement. Please don’t hesitate to contact us to find out how your brand can engage with Gen Z.