The TRUTH About Marketing to Women
ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Before I can reveal the truth about interactive marketing to women, I have to expose the lie.
The lie is this: Interactive marketing to women is part of the “new” social media focus.
The operative word in that sentence is “new.”
The truth is: Yes, interactive marketing is part of the “new” social media focus, and yes, as Martha Barletta and Michele Miller and Mary Schmidt will tell you, women dominate all things social, but interactive marketing as a tool to reach women is not new. It’s been around a long time and you should be exploring all of the interactive options available, if you really want to reach women.
I recently returned from a two-day seminar on marketing to women where we learned a bit about women’s brain chemistry and how women are designed to be interactive, from birth. Women, we learned, really are better at multi-tasking, because we use both sides of the brain at the same time. Women aren’t really more talkative than men, but we use more words when we do talk, hence, we’re seen as more talkative. When you see us, heads bent in chatter, as we move across a club or restaurant on our way to the ladies’ room, it’s not because we get lonely. It’s because we like each other’s company. We like being interactive.
That’s why we’re the dominant sex participating in social media, today, and why your interactive marketing should include social media. However, that does not mean you should forsake all other interactive marketing opportunities. It does mean that you need to create interactive campaigns that work – online and off. This requires finding out where the women you need to reach hang out. Once you know that, the next step is to get out and meet them there!
I’m betting you can find a majority of your women customers online at Facebook, or Twitter, or on their own or someone else’s blog. But, I will bet my shoe allowance that they also hang out at … the local Starbucks, at the food court of the mall, or on their best friend’s deck (this being spring, and all). Women hanging out together, talking (about you) is nothing new!
Companies with real insight recognize the power in learning how women act when they’re together. They understand the value of combining different methods of reaching women, using our innate desire to hang out together.
For instance, Method products, which offers cleaning products to detoxify your home wanted to get attention from Moms, those super-hero gals of kitchen and bath, but they were so new to the world of “green” that their limited budget did not include TV (still a viable marketing tool, folks), nor did it include the cash needed for a major direct marketing campaign.
Their answer was to reach out to Mommy bloggers in a blogger out reach campaign. But wait; even after a successful campaign engaging Mommy bloggers to test their “green” products and blog about them, they recognized opportunity to do more. Method created offline meet-ups. In Chicago, Minneapolis, and several other cities, they invited the Mommy bloggers to meet each other face-to-face, and to bring friends – to exchange toxic cleaning products for more earth-friendly Method cleaning products.
Success? You bet! There isn’t a Mom alive who would turn down an invitation to meet their online Mom-buddies, offline. Whenever you can get the social media thing – the blog thing, the Facebook thing, the MySpace thing – to spill over into the real world, you have happy women. You can read more about Method here.
In the end, the truth about interactive marketing to women isn’t that we like hanging out together. It isn’t that we’re multi-tasking queen bees and that we’re so social we dominate the net. It’s this: women can’t do anything without being interactive. Even if that means being interactive with the dog (yes, we talk to our dogs as if they were human); being interactive with our plants (yes, we talk to our plants as if they were human); being interactive with the laundry (no, we don’t talk to the laundry, but we know it likes being folded just so).
If you can’t create a good interactive marketing campaign that engages your female audience – you aren’t trying very hard. Get to us where we live (some of us live online), create a good reason for us to go to your store or your website where you’re introducing product or your new toy and make sure there’s something special there for us when we get there. Something we can share. When you do this, you will uncover ambassadors – those women willing to chat you up to family and friends just because she likes you.
Once you understand that women are interactive by nature, you should be able to engage your women customers by meeting them on their terms. The old adage, “telegraph, telephone … tell a woman,” still works. Try it.
Reader Comments.
Yvonne,
You’ve always been so great speaking at ad:tech about the subject of marketing to women. I also recently interviewed Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution, who is an expert in brain science and the differences between men and women in social media.
You can listen to the DishyMix interview here:
http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/232-dishymix/episodes/3072-joseph-carrabis-founder-nextstage
Thanks,
Susan Bratton
CEO
Personal Life Media
Host, DishyMix: Success Secrets from Famous Media and Internet Business Executives
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