Understanding Women
Find women fascinating but mysterious? Well, it may not help you understand your wife or girlfriend, but Seana does have some advice on targeting women online.
Find women fascinating but mysterious? Well, it may not help you understand your wife or girlfriend, but Seana does have some advice on targeting women online.
Women are no longer a mystery — well, at least not online. Having worked with a lot of consumer brands, I’ve often had to target women. After plodding through books, focus group tapes, and Web sites, I still couldn’t really find much information about women online. But I finally uncovered a few gems while digging around, so I thought I’d share them with you.
Solid demographics are probably the easiest numbers to come by. For example, we know that women have a dominant presence on the Web. In the U.S., women outnumber men, and the population on the Internet mirrors the population at large. According to ACNielsen, 52 percent of women are online (67,380,376). Many other countries mirror such usage numbers.
Female At-Home Internet Users
Of the total users in selected countries, female at-home users make up the following percentages:
According to @plan, 86.5 percent of women online are 18 to 54 years old. The largest group of women online are the 35 to 44 year olds. The exact numbers are:
It’s hard to tap into attitudinal attributes of women online. Over the years, I’ve spoken with endemic sites such as iVillage/Women.com, as well as portals and niche sites. In addition, I’ve conducted campaigns geared toward targeting women — for clients in the financial, consumer, healthcare, pharmaceutical, and business categories. So, I figured I’d save you some time and share some more qualitative data:
Women say that they feel confident and in control while online. They feel as if the Web makes them more knowledgeable, and they feel a sense of accomplishment. The unlimited choices online give women a sense of empowerment.
According to @plan, women embrace the Web as a multipurpose tool. They use it for research but hone in on information within news, parenting, personal fitness, healthcare, meal planning, and entertainment channels.
In a study by Content Intelligence, most women were found to have used the Internet for less than three years, in comparison with only 35 percent of men. However, women are more likely to become frequent users. They are also said to dominate e-tail spending.
Planning Media for a Female Audience
Here are the top 10 tips on planning media geared toward a female target audience:
Millward Brown and Intelliquest recently conducted a study looking at women’s interactivity and receptivity. The findings were positive:
Have you had experience targeting women online? I’d love to hear what worked, what didn’t, and what you’ve learned.