Gender is an influential factor when it comes to marketing and a topic worth exploring in any content strategy. Brands and marketers take varying approaches when building a gender marketing strategy, using different methods to try to appeal to men and women differently. How can these marketers increase their success rate? It’s all about the research and developing a fail-proof marketing plan.
Keeping abreast of new discoveries about your target audience will allow your approach to be tweaked or steered in a new direction. Continuing to understand your target demographic, while digging deeper into gender-orientated marketing angles, will add greater insight to the work you do.
Why Is a Male-Orientated Content Strategy Needed?
Whenever you are looking to build a content marketing strategy, establishing the personas of your audience is an important first step. This can mean anything from where individuals are located geographically and the activities they enjoy to the gender composition of that audience.
While some organisations choose to take a gender-neutral approach, understanding gender composition and effectively targeting your audience, can make for a much stronger strategy. Instead of limiting research to a more general approach, understanding gender allows for a greater understanding of the factors involved in making purchasing decisions.
Are Men Overlooked When it Comes to Advertising?
With sectors like male grooming and beauty on the rise, it’s clear that male-orientated markets are definitely worth thinking about. Keeping marketing strategies gender-neutral, in the hope that they will also appeal to men, doesn’t always seem to work. There is a need for strategies targeted at men and companies should be giving as much thought to male-orientated advertising as they would female-orientated advertising.
What Are the Differences in Gender Marketing?
There are plenty of content strategies, advertisements and products aimed specifically at women. Common examples include using certain colour schemes or trying to use more emotive language, images or themes. These differences exist because of the beliefs society holds about gender. For example, it is said that women tend to be more likely to make purchases based on emotions while men gravitate towards facts and figures. These generalisations are partly based on research as well as historic ideas surrounding gender.
Why Is it Important to Have Gender-Specific Marketing Strategies?
A marketing strategy aimed at men isn’t going to appeal to all of the men who see it; strategies based on generalisations negate to consider the individual. So why are gender-specific marketing strategies important? If your service or product appeals to men, or men are your target audience, then doing your research will go a long way. Instead of relying on generalisations and outdated stereotypes, building a content strategy based on collecting the right data is crucial for a tailored approach.
This will make your approach stand out from the competition as you appeal to real people and personas, based on real-life data, rather than dated ideas of what men should respond to. Knowing your audience, the social platforms they use and their purchasing patterns can help inform your own male-orientated content strategy.
Studies That Explore Gender Purchasing Patterns
There are many studies that have investigated the similarities and differences between men and women’s spending patterns and how they shop and make purchases. One study, Web Advertising: Gender differences in beliefs, attitudes and behavior by Lori D. Wolin, Pradeep Korgaonkar, found the following:
“Males believe Web advertising is:
- more enjoyable than magazine and newspaper advertising;
- more useful than newspaper and radio advertising; and
- more informative than newspaper advertising.
Relative to males, females believe Web advertising is:
- more annoying than magazine and newspaper advertising;
- more offensive than magazine, radio, and television advertising;
- more deceptive than television advertising; and
- more useful than television advertising.”
This study suggests that web advertisement is comparatively more successful when directed towards men, because “males (relative to females) exhibit more positive beliefs about Web advertising.”
Although this was published back in 2003 and is based on the web versus traditional media (such as magazines), instead of social media platforms, the study can still be useful. Considering research like this that actually explores male-orientated marketing, based on evidence grounded in real people, will effectively influence your approach.
How Can You Gather Accurate Data and Statistics?
Tracking how customers are interacting with your website and other platforms is a good place to start. You can find out all sorts of information and insights about your audience, such as their gender and age, using Google Analytics.
If you want to go further and find out the finer details behind your current audience, or a potential demographic that would be ideal for you to target, there are other tools and methods you can use. Here at Convosphere, we use a range of social intelligence and audience segmentation tools to gather accurate data that can have a significant impact on a brand’s approach to marketing. Audience insights and profiling also build an accurate picture of your demographic and gives you in-depth and detailed insights towards gender marketing and creating a male-orientated content strategy.
Find out more about our insights and case studies on our blog and learn about how we can make an impact on your brand and businesses.
