How Digital Strategy Can Reach Teenagers

How do you reach teenagers and how do you keep their attention? Teenagers are connected 24/7, spending their time online through apps and social media.

This is why it is not always easy to cut through and get the attention you want. Plus, you are dealing with a very critical audience. A lot of content plays on stereotypes and other assumptions about teenagers that results in an approach that repels the exact audience you are trying to reach.

An example of a platform that was challenged with reaching millions of teenagers, from different age groups and cultural backgrounds, is sense.info. With more than 4.000.000 visitors, this platform is the go to place for answers about sex and relationships. A recent redesign of this platform has led to a massive increase in unique visitors, of which 56% come from mobile devices.

The success of the redesign is based on 4 pillars, says Pim van Helten, CEO at DPDK.

1. Intuitive User Experience (UX)

How do you remain recognizable, stay interesting and reliable? In order to answer these questions you need to see how your audience feels about it. Before redesigning sense.info, it became clear that packed websites with extensive menus were not seen as reliable or user-friendly. In the concept phase, we tested two different UX-concepts to find out what the preferred navigation structure (horizontal or vertical) is, how teenagers search for information and how they felt about the design. Multiple tests provided the insights needed to develop the final concept.

2. Accessibility

Teenagers favour using their smart phones above any other device so the platform design is based on a mobile-first strategy. Teenagers are also impatient, so you also need to think about the structure in which you present content. Information needs to be compact and structured. Make sure web copy is written with impatient readers in mind and that the lay-out is easy to scan with supporting images.

3. Personality

How do you attract teenagers to your website? Research shows that users of sense.info are interested in reading about other teenagers’ experiences. Personal stories on the platform create recognizable and concrete tips on how to handle specific situations. Collaborating with vloggers and asking them to share personal stories, such as the first time they had sex or coming out of the closet, also work well. Videos on YouTube generate a huge amount of traffic and add value to other content on the platform.

4. Interaction content

The most popular part of the website are the 3D sex dummies of a boy and a girl that teenagers can undress to explore all the erogenous parts of the body. Statistics show that teenagers spend an average of two minutes on this part of the website.

You can see the dummies on your mobile or desktop. A lot of time was invested on the design and interactions to ensure that discovery met expectations. Crucially, users are not distracted by other content on the site.

Sense.info has been nominated for a prestigious Lovie Award, proving that today’s teenagers are not looking for flashy, shiny websites. Smartphones are small and teenagers are impatient. In addition to that, teenagers are very confident about their own digital skills but in the end they still need structure and a clear overview. If you are targeting teenagers you need to take them seriously and involve their priorities in the design process. 

Pim van Helten is creative strategist & CEO at digital creative agency DPDK