GenX has more Affluents than Baby Boomers

Part of media strategy includes understanding the generation shifts in the consumer marketplace. For years, the Baby Boomers have had the majority of Affluent status in America. A new report shows that Generation Xers have recently become the majority, which is a first.

According to the Center for Media Research, the 2015 Ipsos Affluent Survey USA reports the following generation breakdown for American Affluents.

American Affluents by Generation (At Least a HHI of $100K)
Generation	Share of Affluent Population	Median Self-Reported Annual HHI
Millennials (18-33)	25%	$516K
GenX (34-50)	37%	$552K
Baby Boomers (51-69)	33%	$913K
Seniors (70+)	5%	$1.42M

The Affluent group consists of the top 23% of American households. This group is defined as adults living in households with a minimum annual household income of $100,000.

While the GenX population has topped the largest share amongst the Affluent, the Baby Boomers and Seniors still index high on the annual household income.

In addition, the study reflects how even people within the same generation can respond more like other age groups. Findings show that the younger side of GenX acts similar to Millennials in the marketplace, and the older side tend to be more like-minded with Baby Boomers.

Marketers will have to absorb this generation move and evaluate what this will mean for a brand. Strategies may have to be altered.

Discovering Trends of Social Networking Users

Pew Research has recently reported that 65% of American adults are social networking users. Here, I’ll dig deeper into Pew’s study and share today’s trends amongst social media users.

Age: Unsurprisingly, young adults (ages 18-29) rank number one when it comes to social media users with a sturdy 90%. Looking on the opposite end of the spectrum, users 65 and older have made the biggest jump from 2% in 2005 to 35% in 2015.

Gender: Gender doesn’t hold a huge difference when it comes to social networking. Today, 68% of women and 62% of men use social media.

Socio-economic: Much like the 65+ aged social users, there has been a leap in the number of users coming from low income households (households making less than $30,000 a year). In 2005, only 4% of low income households used social media compared to the 56% that are users now, in 2015. Seventy-eight percent of those living in the highest income households use social.

Racial and ethical: Race comparisons hold relatively steady across the board with 65% of whites, 65% of Hispanics, and 56% of African Americans using social media.

Community: A consistent trend is that of users’ living communities. Only 58% of rural residents use social media compared with 68% and 64% of suburban and urban residents, respectively.

Education: The current 2015 trend is that the more education a person has, the more likely  they are to use social media with the numbers standing at 76% of  those with college or graduate degrees, 70% with some college education, and 54% with a high school diploma or less.

With these trends and percentages, marketers can target their audiences specifically and predict the trends of the future. 

SEO of The Future

Just when marketers begin to really understand Search Engine Optimization, it changes. Not a huge surprise as it is one of the leading tools in digital marketing, an ever changing apparatus.

Christine Birkner reports for Marketing News on the six new rules for SEO in 2016. Birkner sites the director of audience development at Moz, Cyrus Shepard, as he discusses the declining importance of simply getting a click on an ad. Shepard notes that advertisers are now able to track a viewer’s activity after a click, making the activity following the click more important than the click itself. Marketers must have a clear intention of what they desire from users to be able to track success more closely.

Next, is the diminishing importance of keywords for a SEO campaign. As Google’s technology improves, the ability to decipher between quality matches and flukes is becoming simpler. Today, instead of having to put a keyword multiple times within your ad/article/website, Google is able to better determine the relevance to a consumers’ search query. With that, search queries are typically (75%) between three and five words long which can help marketers know what to include in their content.

User experience is becoming more and more important as the amount of information in the digital world continues to expand. Original content is far better than re-used content. It’s as if the consumer is a self-centered teenager who believes the world revolves around them; the more marketers can make a user’s experience precise and tailored to their liking, the better.

In the same way that original content is superior, unique images are preferred by users as well.

Martin Laetsch (director of online marketing at Act-One Software Inc.) has discovered that there has been a significant difference in the size of articles that are successful as of late.  Two or three years ago, a 300 word page was a pretty common length. Now, Laetsch is noticing the popularity of 1,200 to 1,500 words performing better in search.

Optimizing for mobile might be an obvious rule of SEO, but it is a very important one. With users consistently utilizing mobile devices, marketers are required to adjust.

Birkner quotes Shepard saying, “In the past, it [SEO] was about marketers trying to promote what they wanted people to see. Today it’s about delivering what people actually want to see…” SEO is fitting in with other forms of marketing by encompassing the attitude that it’s all about the audience. Laetsch puts it well when he says, “It doesn’t matter how high you rank if your target audience goes to your site and they’re not happy.”

While clicks are great, it’s what happens after the click that truly matters.