Quiz: What are the pitfalls of marketing to women? 

How to avoid the pitfalls when marketing to women

1. Know your customers: who influences, buys, and uses your products?

The first art to master is knowing your customers. It’s critical to have some sense of how gender shapes the group you need to address. Look at your data to understand how the women in your customer group behave and if they buy your product for themselves or others. This will help pinpoint the gender dynamics at play, and how to focus your marketing to women: as influencers, buyers, or users.

Ask:

• What proportion of your customer base is women?
• How does this compare to your competitors’ customers or the population at large?
• Are women the primary decision-makers?
• To what extent do they influence purchases of the product?

2. Know why she buys

Even more than products, you’re in the business of selling solutions to problems. You need to have conversations with your customers (focus groups, questionnaires, digital surveys) to identify the real pain points that your product addresses.

Ask:

• Do you genuinely understand what those problems are?
• If you don’t know what problem you’re solving, what’s stopping you from finding out?

3. Treat women as knowledge customers and incentivize brand advocates

Research shows that women are typically more knowledge-based and relationship-focused in their purchasing decisions; tending to seek the advice and opinions of other women (eg by reading or posting on social media).

Ask:

• What are you doing in your marketing efforts to treat women as knowledge customers?
• Are you doing enough as a brand to encourage influencing and brand advocacy?
• Are you effective in your use of platforms and technologies that encourage women to engage with your brand and with each other?

4. Avoid ‘gender-washing’ and embrace blurred boundaries

All women are not the same – there are as many differences between women as there are between men and women. Think about women’s different roles – they might simultaneously or at different times be leaders, experts, executives, mothers, partners, daughters, or friends.

Ask:

• Does your brand treat women as one homogenous demographic, or do you proactively look for differences?
• Does it acknowledge multiple – and often blurred – roles when you communicate with women?