“If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you can rock the world,” says Aileen Lee in her recent TechCrunch guest post, “Why Women Rule the Internet.”
This declaration is music to my ears and one of the primary reasons I have joined organizations that truly prioritize building relationships with female consumers. Building programs that tap into women’s interests and fuel social engagement programs is a key element in realizing this goal for brands.
As the article shows (read the full article for specific statistics), women are the majority of users on social networking sites, and spend 30% more time on these sites than men (source: Comscore). We have known for a while that women hold the purchasing power in households, and now we are seeing this trend expand to high-revenue E-Commerce sites (for example, Gilt Groupe says women are 70% of their customer base and they drive 74% of revenue).
“Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce.”—Aileen Lee.
What is happening now — as more women spend more time on more social networking sites for more reasons – is that women’s purchasing power now goes well beyond the purse … into women’s relationships.
In fact, Lee cites research by Robert Dunbar that “that women are able to maintain quantitatively more relationships within every ring of closeness than men.” Also, a recent poll of SheSpeaks members [https://www.shespeaks.com/pollsdetails/138483/144596] also shows that staying connected with friends and family is one reason that many of the respondents use social media.
Consider how important relationships are in social networking, and you see that women and the relationships they bring with them are key to expanding brand visibility and company growth through their powerful Word of Mouth.
Although not everyone agrees with the sentiment of Lee’s article (just read the comments!), in my opinion and experience, she is right on target. Build relationships with your women consumers, and you will see exponential returns (Return on Relationship: ROR).
Before you go any further in implementing your current marketing strategies, ask yourself: What are you doing to connect women with your brand/product/service? What are you doing to make sure women are engaged in all aspects of your product and service cycles? What are you doing to build and nurture relationships with the female consumer, and empower them to spread the word?
Why?… because Women ROCK!
Originally posted at SheSpeaks