Most salon owners and employees are not marketers by trade, yet they bear one of the business’s most important responsibilities: To find, appeal to and retain customers with little more than words and pictures. Consistently, marketing is mentioned among the top challenges for small businesses, especially as they try to connect with a generation of young adults unlike any that came before — the millennials.

Every news outlet loves talking about millennials. You can’t turn on the TV, the radio, or open a browser without happening upon someone’s guesses about their motives, their prospects, or their flaws. And with Forbes estimating that this generation will make up 46% of the workforce by 2020, more marketers are wondering how to make customers out of these unique consumers.

Speaking as a millennial myself, I think it’s our relationship with technology that sets us apart. At the same time we learned how to write, we learned math though computer games. We wrote our first essays on Microsoft Word. Our first bibliographies included Internet websites. We hung out with out friends online after school, sending instant messages even more than we passed notes. We’ve all had cell phones since we were teenagers. Now adults, we easily adapt to the latest changes in technology because it has grown alongside us.

Millennials are an enthusiastic generation of consumers who value loyalty and form unique attachment to the brands they support. If you want to maximize your impact on these influential young adults, it’s time to throw out the old model of marketing. Our marketing experts show you how.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.