For years we’ve been hearing that marketers target the young while ignoring their grandparents.

If that’s true, then why does this happen? Is it because the people who create the ads are young themselves? Is it because they realize that brand loyalty is established at an early age? Or is it because marketing to youth is more trendy, more fun, more hip, more graphic and more outrageous? Well, whatever the reasons, if you’re catering to the youth market to the point of ignoring the older market, here’s what you’re missing:

Every 7.7 seconds someone in the United States turns 50. The 50+ population controls more than $7 trillion in wealth and is responsible for 50% of all discretionary spending. Bring in the 40-50 age group and you have a population of Americans that accounts for 73% of all direct marketing purchases.

Certainly, that’s a potential that marketers can’t afford to ignore, yet Internet marketers often miss this potentially lucrative market. They may think older people aren’t online, while in actuality, the over-50 age group is 30% more likely to make purchases online than younger groups.

So just as you are careful in choosing the television stations you advertise on and the music you play on your on-hold message, if your product or service is important to the older demographic (like health and fitness products and information, retirement assistance, travel, opportunities to make or save money, and things they can buy for their children and grandchildren), you need to learn everything you can about your audience and design your web site to draw those people in.

For example, your web site should not be overly busy or full of unsubstantiated claims. It should use images of real people who are older but are still quite active. And it should be filled with content that will answer the viewer’s questions, and stick to the facts. An integrated marketing firm can help research your potential market and make these determinations, as well as evaluate your web site and make design changes that will make it appealing to the potentially lucrative older demographic.

Information for this article was gathered from PowerHomeBiz.com™ and CatalogAgeMag.com

Did you know? Consumers use the Internet to gather product information even more than they use it to make a direct purchase, which is confirmed by the findings of The American Interactive Consumer Survey conducted by The Dieringer Research Group and reported in the Research Brief of the Center for Media Research. Consumers who researched products online made offline purchases of $180.7 billion, compared with just $106.5 billion in direct online consumer spending.

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