HubSpot - ✊🏽 Old marketer shakes fist at cloud

Lesson 1: Gen Z is upending the traditional marketing playbook.

“This whole entire generation is about to turn all of our business models on their heads,” she says. And not in the distant future — it’s happening right now. If this newsletter was a horror flick, a Gen Zer would be looming silently behind you.

Gen Zers complete 60% of the buying journey before they ever interact with a sales rep — “a self-supporting service generation,” as Novoselsky calls it. She thinks it’s the “very opposite of everything that businesses have built.”

At Hootsuite, Novoselsky is constantly rethinking the push model of marketing: “If you do some activity in the product, I send you an email. If you click here, I push a call to you.”

That’s too aggressive for this generation. “Gen Z really wants to be put in control. That starts by arming them with data in the places that they want."

For instance, Hootsuite has adapted its product development by always sourcing the reasons it’s using AI in its product.

“If we tell you that you should add this to your post to make it perform better, we’ll give you data,” she says. Citing articles, or even just telling users what Hootsuite is hearing, gives the product “just a little bit more of that transparency.”

Lesson 2: Give nine times before you take once. 

“Fun fact,” Novoselsky tells me, leaning in. “2024 was already the first year that there were more Gen Zers in the workplace than boomers.” And something that really stood out during her focus groups, she says, “is that Gen Z is a generation of contradictions.”

“They grew up with a phone in their pocket, but they don’t want to talk.” (Honestly same, and I was very much born before 1996.) “They don’t want to be sold to."

“There's this thought process on social to constantly get out there and pitch your product and pitch your wares,” Novoselsky says. “It’s really exhausting to constantly be interacting with a commercial. It's not the best way to build a relationship.”

You wouldn’t come up to me on the street and ask me for a favor — you’d reach out over email or text, introduce yourself, get to know me, have coffee with me. And then maybe you’d ask if I could help move your sofa this weekend. Nine gives, one take (plus the traditional pizza and beer, tyvm).

For marketers figuring out what “giving nine times” looks like for their brand, Novoselsky advises, “On social, what’s really been eye-opening for us has been just listening.”  

Lesson 3: Invest in your employees first.