Attracting Female Consumers

[paul]

What would be innovative ways to attract female consumers for particular women oriented site ?

[kev woodman]

Pictures of shoes and/or kittens

More seriously, if your content is directed at a female audience do you need to do anything beyond the usual?

[Administrator]

I would say that you need to add something that looks good for kids and products or information about growing kids.

Most of the married womens will get attracted. If you make a website to sell undergarments and advertise sexy pictures then that wont work. Womens have soft corner for childrens and thats the best way to keep them binded with your website.

I have a proof of this as the worlds biggest forum with maximum number of posts and members is a forum for kids and womens only. I want someone else to find out and give the link over here for that forum.

[kev woodman]

Isn't that a little sexist?

If you look at the way underwear is marketed it is full of 'sexy' pictures because they are aspirational, they are not aimed at a male audience (have a look at magazines aimed at women).

Certainly a site offering information for mothers and children could be popular with them but that's just because the audience has been properly catered for. As an example, if you were creating a networking site for women entrepeneurs sticking a kiddies corner on there would look, at best, patronising.

[Administrator]

Have you ever seen your Sister, Mother, Girl Friend or Female Friends browsing a website that has sexy pictures on it ?

If you wish to sell Ladies Garments to Males then you can put some sexy pictures on your website to let the guys purchase sexy garments for their Girlfriend or Wife, but to bring female visitors to your website and make them bookmark your website for daily visit would need something that wont humiliate them.

One should analyse living style of other females in society whom you meet / communicate on daily basis if you want to bring them to your website and make them permanent member of your website.

[Peter]

I think the promotion techniques for a women oriented site would mostly depend upon the type of site and the age group of women you are targetting. A site with information about growing kids would mostly attract married women in the age group of 25-35. Different types of sites have different targetted consumers, so once we recognize our target audience in accordance with the theme of our website, promotion becomes much easier and effective.

[paul]

Yeah, in some degree society and particular culture have different roles and expectations for the sexes and so on particular site content is often void of human feelings, motivations and characters that make topics interesting to a particular targeted audience as Administrator has pointed here, If you little go on for hypothesis, Women, are motivated more by conversation and dialogue, while men,are motivated by sharing their point of view. Women like stories, men like stats. Often they have different communication styles. I need a proposal suggesting a possible correlation between multiple phenomena and avenues that can impact women audience of all age group. BTW I am impressed by how articulate and perceptive the responses to this post have been. Thanks all who responded here, and I am still awaiting for more reply from other members in this board.

[kev woodman]

re: 'sexy pictures'

I think you'd have to define what you class as sexy. If you're talking about pictures of attractive women in underwear then I think you'd be hard-pushed to find a lingerie site that didn't use them. And yes I have seen my wife surfing sites with this type of image e.g. Next, M&S, Top Shop etc. Suggesting that aspirational pictures 'humiliate' women goes against decades of marketing experience. As I said earlier, all you need do is have a look at the advertising in Elle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour etc. to see this. These magazines are aimed at a female readership but all contain 'sexy' images of women. As luck would have it I went out for a meal with a group of friends tonight and a quick straw poll showed that out of 7 women present, four had bought clothes, including underwear, and had used sites like Victorias Secret and Next. None of the seven males had bought lingerie online. All of the women expected to see pictures of models wearing the underwear. As an aside, only one said that she would be interested in a site that had content directed at mothers and/or children.

re: paul's comment

Interesting point about the type of experience that the different sexes might appreciate though Paul. I think that the content you create should appeal to your audience, irrespective of whether that audience is male or female. But that the delivery of the content could be diifferent is fascinating. I'm not sure wether any usability studies have been carried out on women's experience of the Web. Maybe Jakob Nielson at " useit.com/ " has done something?

" sosig.ac.uk/iriss/papers/paper55.htm " might help but it's a bit out of date (199 or there's some eye-tracking studies at " eye-square.com/documents/EyeTracking-ResearchApplications.pdf " .
Above site has some stuff which is probably more relevant, it's been referenced in a lot of other articles as well.

I hadn't really thought about a difference in experience/expectations between the sexes before so thanks for a really interesting post

[Pumazooma]

I think it's quite interesting that without actually saying what the site is about you've all jumped to the conclusion that it's babies, kids or underwear

I think any site is attractive as long as it looks nice and has things that the target audience want to read. Make it easy to navigate, bright and inviting. All the usual stuff that makes you want to stay on a site once you've found it. I think what would turn them away is dark colours, space/metal, all that blokey stuff that tech, gaming and sci fi sites tend to look like.