How To Build An Online Marketing Strategy When Marketing to Women

There are millions of online shoppers eager to buy products and services, but only a few of them will be your target market. If your target market is women, you should really consider a multi-channel online marketing strategy that will drive qualified traffic to your website. Qualified traffic increases the likelihood of turning visitors into paying customers. Generating huge amounts of unqualified traffic won’t result in sales, it will only result in noise. There are three basic steps in creating an online marketing strategy to target women.

1. Understand Your Market – In its basic form, your target market is of course women. Based on your resources, knowledge and customer database you could fine tune your market based on demographics.
2. Evaluate Different Paid Traffic Generators – Some forms of qualified traffic generators will require financial investment, some will be within your budget and some won’t.
3. Evaluate Different Organic Traffic Generators – Organic traffic generators are sources which drive free traffic to your website.

Evaluate Different Paid Traffic Generators:

Search Engine Paid Ads – Although both Yahoo and Bing have their own versions of paid ads, Google’s AdWords is by far the biggest. The idea is simple. You select keywords which best describe your products and are therefore more likely to convert visitors into paying customers. Each click will cost you based on keywords competition and your website. While AdWords content network (ads on other sites) has an option to target visitors by gender, the search network does not. To work around this, select only those keywords that potential women customers will search for and use the right wording on the ad explaining who this product is aimed at. If you are new to AdWords, help is at hand using AdWords online help tutorial.

Affiliate Networks – The principle behind affiliate marketing is that through banner ads you can reach your target market while they are surfing a closely related site. For example, if you were able to sign an online women’s magazine to take part in your affiliate scheme, they will display your banners and when visitors who come from your affiliates make a purchase, you’ll pay a finders fee also known as ‘affiliate commission’. Sounds great, no? The problem is that in order to attract the big players and generate qualified traffic, you’ll need to offer high commission rates and normally have a recognized brand name.

Evaluate Different Organic Traffic Generators:

Natural Search Results – The holy grail for most online businesses is getting this channel working right. There are couple of reasons why that is, however the most important is the fact that it’s free. The second, is that no matter how much investment you pour into paid ads, some web users will only click on a natural search result. On the surface, getting this channel working right has no or little costs but that’s not entirely the case. The key to building natural traffic is selecting the right keywords to optimize your site and providing great content together with building the number of links pointing to your website. To market to women, you’ll of course need to select the right keywords and put them in the right position across the site. Google has a really useful guide which is a must-read for anyone trying to optimize their site for natural search.

Social Networks – While social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can often result in large amounts of web traffic which seems qualified at least in terms of gender, it’s often not the case. Web users clicking on paid ads or natural search results intend to make a purchase but web users coming from social networks think about almost anything but buying at that moment. Therefore you should consider whether it’s in your best interests to actively pursue traffic from social networks.

When building an online marketing strategy specifically targeting women, you should weigh up every channel on a case by case basis. In fact some products within a product line might suit one channel, while other products might not. Keep an open mind and whenever possible experiment, if you don’t try, you’ll never know!

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Guest article by Michelle Strassburg Head of Sales and Marketing at online wooden worktops vendor Wood and Beyond. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing.

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Tagged as:  marketing to women · Online Marketing