When it comes to your mobile marketing strategy, new research shows why marketing toward women is more important than ever. As Beans has written about before on this blog, women and moms are a key demographic in the marketing world. Not only are women overall much more active and engaged with brands on social media than men, but moms are also top users of social media and mobile devices, and they love to recommend and gain recommendations for brands. With this new study, we see a similar trend amongst women on mobile devices.
Mobile Use: Women vs. Men
This study, conducted by Time Inc. and Nuance Digital Marketing, first found that 60% of women consider their mobile phone the most important device in their life, compared to 43% of men. 87% cannot imagine life without it, 78% look at it first in the morning, and 98% carry it with them wherever they go. 72% of women use their mobile phone for social media, 88% for texting, and 55% for shopping.
Speaking of shopping, this survey found that while men do use their mobile phones to make purchases, women use them throughout the shopping process. 32% use their phone for product wish lists (compared to 26% of men), 23% collect coupons (compared to 14% of men), 46% make shopping lists (compared to 38% of men), and 52% share photos of what they buy (compared to 35% of men). In addition, 17% of women will use apps such as Foursquare to find discounts (compared to 14% of men), and nearly 50% of women would rather use their phone for shopping advice than a sales associate in the store.
This data is interesting in comparison to another study that found that more men actually make purchases from their mobile phones than women (22.2% of men compared to 18.2% of women). The trend is the same for tablets, with 20.4% of men making purchases compared to 16.9% of women. However, these numbers shift toward women for younger consumers (ages 18-24). In this demographic, 21.6% of women and 21.3% of men have purchased via mobile and 19.8% of women and 14% of men have purchased via tablet.
Marketing to Women
These numbers show that despite the fact that men have controlled the mobile purchasing scene, women are rising to the dominant position. Not only are younger women edging out men in terms of making purchases, but women are also much more engaged in the buying process from start to finish. This means that advertisers need to focus their mobile marketing efforts on the female demographic.
As the first study above also found, women welcome ads that are non-intrusive - 41% like ads where they can control the experience as well as those that provide location based-offers, and 52% likes ads that are relevant to the content they are currently consuming. However, 91% hate intrusive mobile ads. For advertisers marketing toward women on mobile, the key is both relevance and user-friendliness. Your ads should be relevant to both location and context while providing a good user experience.
How has your brand targeted women on mobile devices?