As a librarian for the past 8 years I’ve had the joy of helping people find books for whatever their needs are. And I’m a huge proponent that reading is a great way to foster lifelong learning.

Do you consider women as a separate segment worth altering your traditional marketing techniques for? About five years ago, my husband & I were at a car dealership looking for a car. One salesman went to crunch numbers & my husband talked with the owner. I sat down in a chair to wait. When the salesman came back he stood waiting for the conversation to end. I approached him & asked him how the numbers looked? He said, “ah, I’ll see what your husband thinks” and made no effort to engage me. I quietly went & sat back down & the minute I could make eye contact with my husband he knew there was no deal. The car was for me & I was extremely insulted to have been slighted. I had met a salesman that didn’t get it (nor get a car sale either!)

Martha Barletta has many great points in her book, Marketing to Women for engaging women. She feels that traditional marketers don’t realize the potential for marketing to women, nor do they know how to effectively do so. The fly leaf has the stat’s that women are making 85% of the purchasing decisions & women entrepreneurs have 70% of new business start-ups!

She makes some great points:

  • Women communicate differently
  • Women are motivated by different things than men & have different perceptions & priorities
  • Women are looking for the perfect solution

I appreciated the last one. I find myself enjoying the search for a product just as enjoyable as the purchase.

So to effectively market a product Martha suggests:

  • effective WOM to initiate interest
  • provide plenty of details about the product
  • provide comparison shopping details for her
  • And offer follow up information – warranty, replacement, tech support, customer service

She also suggests that after the purchase make it easy for the customer to tell her friends. That is the power of the ‘girl friend’ effect. Women love to share their newest find with their friends.

The book focuses on traditional marketing, but does this transfer to social media? I think that many of the points are valid & quite easy to translate over. Andy Sernovitz offers some great tips for various ways in Telling a Friend Word of Mouth. His focus is also on providing great customer service.

Blogs offer great places for providing the comparison shopping information. I’ve seen much discussion on whether you should blog about the competitor or not, but if your customers are women, you may seriously want to consider the service it’s providing to help them make a decision. Because if you don’t, maybe your competitor will?

Online communities are great places to look for conversations about your product. Is your company listening? Can you afford not to? Google alerts can be utilized to pay attention to your product & that of your competitor’s. Remember that many of these communities aren’t being crawled by search engines, so how are you exploring the activity there?

How are you engaging your women customers? I’ve found that games & scavengers hunts are wildly popular with women, whereas men are serious online. So different approaches need to be considered. Facebook has proven to be quite popular for women in our community. In less than a month they’ve created over 30 groups based on their web businesses! I’m proud of their entrepreneurial spirit! And Kaboodle is a shopping based site that women love too! Are you there with them?

I think that companies utilizing Community Managers to gather feedback from their customers will have an edge if their focus is on women. We’re pretty vocal about what we want in our products, so it’s to the company’s advantage to listen & respond. And providing excellent customer service will ensure a long term commitment that will ripple out to family & friends.

I think that the book brought up some excellent points about gender based differences & need to be considered for online marketing as well. Are you considering them? Do you know where your market is at? Are you listening to them?