Where Millennials Are Getting Their Investment Education

On today’s show we’re talking about putting information where people are looking. Gary Vaynerchuk is the CEO of Vaynermedia, a NYC digital marketing firm. Gary is one of these guys that has the notion of attention deeply ingrained in his being. He tells the story of how when he was a young boy he would run a bunch of lemonade stands. The lemonade stands were operated by older kids. Gary would post signs for the lemonade stands on trees and sign posts. Then he would sit by the side of the road and watch the eyes of motorists to see if they posted signs were catching the attention passing motorists. This is understanding the basics of attention at its most basic level. The fact is, we are overloaded with marketers trying to vie for our attention. So we tune the vast majority of it out. If you as an investor, a sponsor, or a developer want to connect with potential investors, you want to be paying attention to where people are looking. On February 22 of this year Magnify Money which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lending Tree published a paper based on some market research they had conducted with their clients. There are a number of fascinating findings in this report. Nearly 6 in 10 investors 40 or younger are members of investment communities or forums, such as Reddit or a group of like-minded investor friends. YouTube is the top source for investing information among young investors, with 41% turning to the site in the past month. 22% of Gen Z investors say they were younger than 18 when they started investing, versus 8% of millennial investors. In fact, 40% of Gen Z investors say they were encouraged by their parents to begin investing, which backs the earlier start. Only 36% of young investors plan to use that money for retirement. Instead, 35% will primarily use those returns to make additional investments, while 19% will use the money to pay for a major purchase like a home or a car. As an investor, you might be thinking that having a YouTube channel is not the best way to reach your potential investors. You might be thinking that TikTok is an app for sharing short dance videos. But the fact is, a significant portion of the investing public are turning to these sources for information. Now you might decide that your ideal client is not a Tiktok user. But you should remember that Tiktok as 689 million active users on a monthly basis. That may seem like a small number when compared with Facebook’s 2.7B users or Youtube’s 2B users. That doesn’t mean you should ignore those other platforms. But 689 million users is a significant potential audience. You might be thinking that your investors are likely not millennials, and perhaps not even Get Z. There are not that many accredited investors in that age group. We’re really talking about targeting less than 1% of the population. But if you’re speaking to 1% of 689 million people, that’s still nearly an audience of 7 million people. Perhaps you want to be more selective and speak to the top 0.1%, that’s still an audience of 700,000 people. The key is to find the way to connect with people who are out there looking for you. This particular study provides new insights that were not part of the conventional wisdom when it comes to investment education.