You might think that marketers would have developed a highly evolved strategy to sell products and services to a demographic that makes up just over half of the Earth’s population.
But it turns out that the trusted “strategy” when marketing to women is actually something akin to “slap a pink bow on it and call it a day.”
Although most efforts when marketing to women fall painfully short of creative (and effective), it turns out that content marketing is actually the perfect strategy for reaching the female demographic.
Marketing to Women: What Women Want
Pink is Ineffective and Sometimes Insulting
At the heart of content marketing is the idea that communicating deeply with potential customers and clients is beneficial to sales, and that well-educated consumers tend to be more loyal.
Well, pink marketing can do the exact opposite of that.
It turns out that something like 90% of women feel like businesses and marketers don’t understand the needs of the female demographic.
Why is that?
Understandably, women, like any other consumers, want information about the products and services that they’re spending their hard-earned cash on. Women don’t particularly care if something is pink. More important factors in women’s purchasing decisions include things like information about multiple functionality, features and pricing, as well as stuff like size and weight.
Enter Content Marketing
If giving potential clients and customers more information sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’re already thinking about content marketing. Women want information, not color schemes.
In fact, Jack Morton, a brand experience agency, put together a guide to marketing towards women last year, seen below, that recommends providing education and information as the number one way to market to women.
Another guide on marketing to women, this one by the Outdoor Foundation, highlights transparency as a big way to get women’s business.
What better way might you supply more insight into the workings of your business than by writing about it (or paying somebody else to write about it for you)?
The Bottom Line
If you want to reach out to a female audience, “pink and frilly” is not the way to go.
But blogs, eBooks and guides?
They’re absolutely perfect for giving women the information that they want when they’re making a purchasing decision.
A Woman Photo via Shutterstock
Great piece here, Amie. I for one actually love the color Pink, it’s my favorite color and would be effective in catching my attention, it always does. But I can see how it could be offensive to other women. Just because your girl doesn’t mean that they’ll automatically respond to the color Pink. Thanks for sharing your insights with us.
Ti
I like pink too, and color schemes-they catch my attention. Then I want details & facts. What is the reference for 90%?
Here’s the article I got the 90% stat from, if you scroll down you will find 5 different primary sources 🙂 http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/01/24/the-top-30-stats-you-need-to-know-when-marketing-to-women/
I agree with you, Ti! I believe the color scheme is as important as the content, in fact, it’s a part of the “cover” that people definitely judge. But like you, I also agree that assuming ALL women like the color pink is offensive.
I do wonder though how much using the color pink is ignorant on the marketers’ part, don’t they use strategies that help them determine what will work?
Right on the mark with this piece. Sounds like you are a viewer of The Balancing Act on Lifetime TV. Where we work to find trusted solutions to everyday challenges that women have and also help companies whose products are something that we can recommend engage in the content on our show,
Thanks for the interesting post. I completely agree with what you are saying. I for one, am not a fan of pink, although I still like feminine styles. I do feel the comment “It turns out that something like 90% of women feel like businesses and marketers don’t understand the needs of the female demographic” is a little misleading. The link doesn’t show any reference to the way the info was gathered or measured making it pretty useless.
Being FOR a specific demographic is a really smart strategy. A smart marketer once said, “if you’re FOR everybody, you’re really FOR nobody”. Segmenting a marketing campaign to a specific demographic will add clarity to a message and can be a very search engine-friendly thing to do…in which case PINK is irrelevant!
Agreed that many marketers slap a pink bow on their campaign and call it a day. However, we’re getting away from that – women are much more complicated than that these days. Our best advocate when marketing to women is other women. They’re chatting to each other all day – on text, on social media, on blogs. Use your customers as brand advocates – ask them for feedback, have them share their experiences, reward theme – and you’ll create very brand loyal fans.
There’s a a number of great tips for content marketing to women in this post: http://www.punchbowl.com/trends/blog/post/white-paper-10-content-marketing-strategies-to-help-brands-reach-moms
Thank you for tying in the importance of content marketing with buyer persona in this article. Content marketing is not promotional. It is informational, adds value, and helps the customer make a better informed decision. It just so happens that women tend to research and compare products before buying them, which is why content marketing should be used when marketing women-specific products and/or services.
This is a useful article, thanks.
I love pink! As a man I’m continuously disappointed that so few marketers fail to utilise my favourite colour.
What is with this social defect where we’re so compelled to segment groups of people based on colour? This is the 21st century, I thought we were past that bullshit. 🙁