Marketing to Women Online

Cause Marketing - When To Ask For The Money

 So your brand has decided to team up with a charity, or perhaps you have your own cause marketing campaign.

When's the best time to ask someone to pull out the cash, checkbook or credit card?

The answer - when the cash, checkbook or credit card is already pulled out.

When someone is already spending money, adding on a donation is much easier than having to make a whole separate transaction.

Brooks Brothers - Make A Wish Example

Here's an example from Brooks Brothers.  They teamed up for a campaign with the Make A Wish Foundation.

Use Blogs As A Commercial and Promotional Idea Generator

Looking for new fun ways to promote your company or products to women?  There is a bevy of amazing, funny, insightful ideas just a mouse click away in social media.

Seriously. 

We talked about how to use Twitter to generate commercial ideas.

Now let's look at...

 How to use blogs to generate promotional ideas

Many companies are reaching out to bloggers to help them promote their products and services.  I follow a lot of women bloggers and see which promotions seem to catch on.

Here's a brilliant example from the folks at CMT Adventure Country.  They created an action figure for Allison Worthington.  Now, the idea alone is terrific. But if you know Alli, it makes it that much funnier.

Use Twitter As A Commercial Idea Generator

 
 
Moms are funny.  Seriously. I'm talking side-slapping, forehead on your desk, spit-out-your-chardonnay funny.  And they do it without even trying.  Just check out the expression on the woman on the right.

Here's another thing about motherhood - real life is far more wacky and entertaining than fiction.  

And yet, look at ads targeting moms.  They are full of bland, predictable, cliche-filled dribble.  (Tell us how you really feel, Holly)

There's no excuse for it.  Especially now with social media like blogs and Twitter.  Today we talk Twitter, tomorrow - blogs.

Anticipate Her Needs and Win Her Business

I recently visited a spa (I know, huge surprise) and was impressed not just with the services, but with one small detail.  In each locker they provide you with a plastic bag.  Right at the point where I am taking off my bathing suit from whirlpool soak and wondering how I'm going to get it back to my room,  there is a plastic bag to carry my wet suit.

Women are often the ones doing the anticipating of needs (you can't survive as a mom without this skill).  So when someone else anticipates her needs, she notices.

Are you anticipating her needs on your website?

A proven way to improve customer experience and increase conversion is to anticipate what your customers need, what questions they are asking, what concerns they have, and to address those needs, questions and concerns at the very place they arise.

Here's a great example from marketingtowomen.ervinsmith.com. 

Are You Driving Away Female Consumers With Your Messaging?

 
The following are true incidents...

A woman and her husband walk into a car dealership. The salesman spends all his time talking to the husband. At one point he suggests the woman go into the showroom to, "pick out her favorite color."  

Only problem was, she was buying (and paying for) the car for herself.  Her husband was just along for the ride.   Needless to say, that dealership did not get her business.

Home owners in a maintenance-free subdivision that catered to many single, divorced and widowed women found letters in their mailbox from an irrigation company reminding them about their winter service.  The letter began, "Dear Sir."  

The women in the community, including married women who'd received the letter, found a more female-friendly competitor and switched their business. 

It's 2010 people.  You'd think marketers and sales people would pay more attention to the messages they send.  But there are two factors playing into marketing messages that don't connect with women.

Part of the problem is your message.  The other part of the problem is how she interprets your message.

Are Women Indecisive?

 
  
I do a lot of work with the financial industry, training people to do a better job of selling to women.   One complaint that I hear often is, "women can't make up their mind," "women are too slow to make a decision," or  "I prefer working with men because they're quicker to pull the trigger."

Just for the record, it isn't just men that feel this way.  Many women in the financial industry have the same complaint. 

Are they right?  Are women indecisive?   The answer is, no.  Women simply have a more deliberate decision making process.   While female clients may take more time to close, they are worth it.  Let's look at why.

Women have longer checklists

When making a buying decision, women have a longer checklist of things that matter to them. 

In Re-Render the Gender, Tom Jordan shares an example of his father buying a condo.  Look at the different checklists of what a man and a woman look for when buying a condo.

The guy takes a look around, makes sure he's getting a good price, and he's pretty much ready to buy.  But you can see that the woman has a longer checklist of criteria that matters to her when buying a condo.  Until she's satisfied everything on the list has been addressed, she's not ready to buy.

Women are more risk aware

Notice I didn't say women are more risk averse.  They are simply hard-wired to plan ahead to try to avoid bad outcomes.  Think back to hunter-gatherer days when men were focused on the short-term outcome - hunting their pray to bring home that night to eat. Women were focused on longer-term objectives, like having enough food to last the winter.  

In a study on how men and women make investments, they measured brain activity in the subjects as they made investment decisions.  In men, the reward center of the brain lit up.  In women, the reward center lit up, but so did the consequence center.

When making buying decisions, she is planning ahead, wondering what will happen down the road, and wondering what might go wrong and who might be affected.

How to speed up a woman's buying process

At this point, sales people have a better understanding of her decision making process, but still want to know if there's anything they can do to speed it up - to get her to "yes" faster.

There are three things you can do to speed up a woman's buying process

1. Address her concerns and objections.   It's important to find out what her concerns and objections are as early as possible.   If a woman says no, it's usually because she has a concern that hasn't been adequately addressed.  
2. Use testimonials.  Have you worked successfully with women in the past?   Get those women to write you a testimonial.  Better yet, have them record a video.  Let those women share, in their own words, what they like about working with you.  Let the women sell you rather than selling yourself. The second reason why you lose a sale with a woman is because she does not trust you.
3. Sell with stories, not facts.  Don't just list out features and benefits.  Share a story about how someone in a similar situation used the product or service. Stories are more memorable and make that emotional connection that motivates women to take action. (And just FYI, stories are a great selling technique for men as well.)

If you care about client retention, you want women clients.

Because women are more deliberate, because they put more time and research into their decisions, they tend to be more confident in those decisions.   Women are more loyal to individual service providers (aka financial service providers) than men. 

If you care about referrals, you want women clients.

Women refer more often than men do.  Ask any woman how she found her financial adviser, pediatrician, hair stylist, and she'll tell you, "a friend recommended him/her."  

When you do a good job with women, they notice, especially if it's an industry, like the financial industry, where she feels she's been ignored, or misunderstood.  If she has a good experience, she's going to share it with her friends and family and recommend you.

The choice is yours.  You can view women as indecisive and not waste your time with them.  But chances are a smart competitor is out there making a serious effort to sell to women and seeing the financial rewards because of it.

 

Great Example of a Website Designed for Women

Do men and women engage with websites the same way?  That's a question I've been studying for the last six years.   I've done extensive research on the differences between men and women focusing on:

• Their communication styles
• Their decision making processes
• Their design aesthetics (images, graphics, colors, etc.)

All of this affects how men and women interact with websites.   There are specific website elements that are especially effective for engaging women visitors.  

U by Kotex uses several of those elements.   Let's take a look.