Thursday, June 21, 2012

Moms Use Social Networks. A lot.


If any of you have Facebook friends who have kids, it’s probably no surprise that moms are among the most active groups on social networks.  In fact, forecasts show that 82% of moms who have internet and children under 18 years old will use social media this year, up from 79.1% last year.  Even more staggering, 80% of moms are more likely to use social media versus 55% of the general population.  Marketers would be especially interested to know that moms are more likely than other segment to “like” brands through social media outlets.  These numbers make sense when we think about the fact that moms, particularly first-time mothers, tend to seek out a lot of new information about everything from how to take care of their babies to products they should and shouldn’t use, and they rely on one another for opinions, advice, and feedback.  The 2nd most effective factor that affected purchase decisions among mothers earlier this year is the opinion of other mothers, only preceded by product reviews.

This is an incredible opportunity for marketers.  I found this information especially interesting given that we will be creating a digital marketing plan for a company whose primary demo is mothers with young children.  This data also emphasizes that importance of integrating social media touch points in marketing outside of the actual social network site.  For example, simple tactics like including facebook/twitter/Pintrest buttons on the website or within email marketing makes it easy for consumers to click to share and spread the word while they are interacting with the brand.  Also, this indicates that the mom segment may be an ideal one to engage in a social media campaign that incentivizes them to share news about the product with their peers in exchange for some kind of reward, like a complimentary product.  The sampling ideally would further the viral effect by getting users to recommend the product to others.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Carmen,
I thought your comments here were very interesting.
Moms are using social media for information-gathering and product referrals, but there is also a huge population of MommyBloggers on sites such as www.blogher.com.

The opportunities for marketing to this segment are huge. Moms typically have money to spend, specific needs (that are common and easily identified), and not much time on their hands. These factors combine to create a marketing opporutunity that has a lot of value for the customer. Making it easy to order, sending reminder emails for staples such as diapers and formula, and suggesting other items for cross-sell/upsell are just a few easy additions that can have a big positive impact.

More low-hanging fruit is the whole idea of tracking customers' kids' ages. This is a the holy grail. If a marketer knows the age and sex of a Mom's children, they could effectively set up an entire lifecycle campaign as the child grows.
Over 70% of US household spending is done by women, and those who are figuring out the marketing recipe are finding themselves in very lucrative waters.