Using the Internet for everything from shopping to writing blogs, mothers’ behaviors online are diverse. E-mail is the top online activity for moms — 85 percent of online moms use e-mail, according to the Marketing to Moms Coalition — followed by paying bills or banking online (64 percent), reading news (57 percent), researching products (49 percent), shopping for children (45 percent), and shopping for self (44 percent).
Moms get social
While online, moms like to interact with others, and have taken to social media sites. A recent comScore survey, in fact, found that 69.4 percent of U.S. moms visited one or more social media sites in March 2009.
Moms also have increasingly turned to blogs as an outlet to share their feelings. According to a January 2009 survey from BMS Media, 58 percent of online moms named blogs as their favorite type of online content. And 35 percent said they'd read a blog in the past week.
Marketers have taken notice. Wal-Mart has formed its Elevenmoms initiative, a community of mothers who blog about money-saving tips, and General Mills has formed MyBlogSpark, a network of bloggers who are given access to review new products and services from the company for a network of members.
Selling to moms online
Mothers are online to shop, too. Consider the following: A recent survey from Experian Simmons found that 70 percent of mom Internet users made purchases online in the past 12 months. And they're spending money. Thirty-eight percent said they spent at least $200 on online purchases over the past year, and 13 percent spent $1,000 or more.
Knowing this, marketers have begun targeting their campaigns to this influential demographic. But in most cases, they're not doing a good job of it. According to the Marketing to Moms Coalition, just 54 percent of moms felt ads were effective in targeting them. The report further revealed that 87 percent of moms felt that showing a mom having fun with her kids is the best way to reach them, followed by showing them multitasking (86 percent) or by making them laugh (84 percent).
As for what tactics marketers should use, moms surveyed by Experian Simmons were most likely to click on Web page links (43.1 percent), followed by sponsored search results (41.9 percent), e-mail ads (24.3 percent), banner ads (20.6 percent), pop-up/pop-under ads (15.6 percent), floating ads (13.4 percent) and full-motion video ads (13.3 percent).
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