Marketing to Women Online

Effective Engaging About Us Pages

Who says About Us pages need to be boring?  Who says they need to be full of corporate speak and cliche filled drivel talking about "Providing cutting edge turnkey solutions for our clients" and "Friendly knowledgeable service" and "our mission is......."

Mideastyouth.com uses comics on their About Us page to communicate to a young audience who doesn't want to read lots of boring text. 

How else could you convey your story on your About Us page? 

Male vs. Female Business Owners - Who's More Successful?

  

I've been hearing a lot about a recent Wall St. Journal article, Why Are Women-Owned Firms Smaller Than Men-Owned Ones.  Sharon Hadary shares this troubling news:

The phenomenal growth of women-owned businesses has made headlines for three decades—women consistently have been launching new enterprises at twice the rate of men, and their growth rates of employment and revenue have outpaced the economy.

So, it is dismaying to see that, despite all this progress, on average, women-owned business are still small compared with businesses owned by men. And while the gap has narrowed, as of 2008—the latest year for which numbers are available—the average revenues of majority women-owned businesses were still only 27% of the average of majority men-owned businesses.

What's going on here?  Could it be that women and men have different measures of success?  Different goals when they start a business?  Sharon Hadary shares this research in the article:

BlogHer 10 Recap - 2400 Descend on NYC

 
  
"Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Note:  Due to security concerns for the speakers, there is no video taping or photography allowed for this session.  If you're caught doing either, your equipment will be confiscated"

It was a strange thing to hear at a BlogHer conference.  This is a conference where sharing is not only allowed, it's encouraged.  2400 women bloggers and attendees blog, Facebook, Tweet, FourSquare and Flickr their asses off.  

But not at this session.  These speakers were the International Activist Blogger Scholarship Recipients. They came from countries like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. For the women on stage, preventing their images from appearing online was a matter of life and death.

That really brought it home for me - why I was attending BlogHer 10.   In the elevator, someone asked me what the conference was all about.  My answer - women who are changing the world one blog post at a time. 

Blogher 10 Key Takeaways

Image Test - Which Woman Converted More Visitors?

They've got a great test over at Which Test Won comparing the conversion rate of two different images of women in debt.

One is a sad younger woman, the other a slightly older woman in a grocery store.

I won't spoil it for you. Go over and see if you can guess which version had a 33% higher click thru. 

And be sure to read the comments to get some insight into why one image performed better than the other.

Marketing Healthcare to Women

 

Speaking at a financial event last week I heard an interesting stat - the two industries women are most unhappy with are:

• The financial industry
• The healthcare industry

This actually made me happy since these are two industries I'm focusing on heavily.  I believe there's a huge opportunity to do a better job of connecting with women as clients, patients and consumers.

Marketing healthcare to women

Jamie Dunham has a great post on her blog - The Lipstick Economy talking about what women want from healthcare marketers - Marketing to Moms:  What Women Want In Healthcare. 

Health care reform is a lead story on every news outlet in the United States, and interestingly enough, the “experts” all seem to be legislators, insurance representatives, physicians and professional organizations.  Strange, isn’t it, that the primary health care decision makers, women, are not being heard.