How Women Respond to Your Message
Since women make about 80 percent of all purchasing decisions, it’s important to understand who your market is as you seek to cater to the women in your audience. It honestly doesn’t matter if you sell motorcycles, dry wall, or digital products, understanding how women respond to your message should be an important aspect of any businesses marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most marketing out there either condescends to women, or just doesn’t understand women at all. They act like women can’t buy anything when in fact, women are doing most of the buying.
Use Case Studies
Women often like reading or watching true case studies of others using the product or service that they’re interested in purchasing. Hearing or reading the stories about others will make them feel more trusting in order to make that final decision to buy a product. If you want a woman to be interested, give them a great story with an emotional tie in that shows how the product or service benefits other women like them, and you’ve got them hooked.
Include Statistical Data
In addition to being emotional, women are also very smart. Using statistics to promote your product or service will help them make a choice faster. When a woman sees the numbers in black and white, and can justify the truth of the numbers, she’s more likely to choose to buy than if she cannot justify the purchase. Women don’t buy expensive handbags just for their looks, they buy them because they are durable, functional, and look good.
Study Your Audience
If your audience is mostly women then you need to study them. Send them surveys; ask them what they want. You may be surprised. Women love to tell their story, to feel appreciated and valued, and by asking them what they think you’ll make them trust you that much more. Life experiences are usually very important to women, so learning what those experiences are, and how you can tap into those experiences will make you a very powerful force when marketing to women.
Avoid Being Condescending
Dell had a famously terrible marketing campaign where they tried to appeal to women by making their computers pink. Women hated it, and the marketing campaign was a huge failure. It seems that many companies just don’t understand women at all. They think that changing a color suddenly makes it more appealing to women.
The fact is, most women don’t even like the color pink, nor do they subscribe to the idea of traditional femininity when it comes to technology. Don’t be condescending. Women understand how their technology works, how their cars work, and how everything works just as much as men do. If it’s not a good product, painting it pink won’t work.
The truth is, for many products men and women want the exact same thing. However, women are generally a bit more picky and pay more attention to detail overall than men. A good example is how women see a new kitchen compared to a lot of men. Men cook too, but women still see everything different. They see storage needs, counter space needs, and so forth along with the beauty and functionality of the lines of the space.
So, if you want to appeal to women, you need to give them everything a man wants, then a little extra. Pay closer attention to small details that make a product work even better, perform even more, and provide an even better value.