It’s something of a touchy issue in our enlightened age, but marketers would not be marketers if they did not consider their customers’ needs, wants, and interests when developing content – needs, wants, and interests that often correlate to gender.
So, considering men and women, how do we make the most of your content marketing efforts? First, consider why you would even want to market differently…
Tailoring Content Marketing
If technology existed allowing every single article to be custom-written for a single, thoroughly-researched individual in a time-efficient and resource-efficient manner, marketers would fall over themselves to get it up and running for their campaigns. And indeed, in certain markets, doing this manually is viable – look at any successful B2B cold email campaign. But here, we’re talking content marketing, where such a thing is not possible.
Instead, we need to look at groups. Statistically significant, groups are easily reached more personally than universally applicable marketing content, without sacrificing much efficiency. This is where we come to segmentation: young vs. old, affluent vs. poor, and, of course, men vs. women. Segmenting your market maximizes the efficiency of lead generation from your content marketing. Without tailoring your content by groups, you allow sales to wash away on a wave of genericness.
So we should write different content for men and women?
Gender is not always significant in segmenting prospects. Selling razors or personal care products? Gender is a huge deal. Selling more esoteric goods or services? Gender might be somewhat important. Selling high-end, specialty equipment? Gender probably does not matter.
The key to strong content strategy is your ability to identify segments that do matter for your business, industry and sales model. Target those segments effectively and efficiently. Here are a few of the most common ways businesses segment their prospects:
- Demographics: Your basic segmentation by age, religion, occupation, education level, or, of course, gender. You can leverage roughly the same thing in B2B markets by looking at firm size, revenue, etc.
- Geographics: Segmentation by location; the best content to market your business to someone from a city may be different from the best approach for suburban or rural prospects. What works for Tennessee guests may bomb for New York guests.
- Behavioral: This is an excellent way to shape your content marketing efforts. Divide consumers into groups based on their feelings about, knowledge of, and use of your product. Developing strategy for this segmentation method is easy since these factors often influence how guests access your site: the keywords they use to search, for example, or the hashtags they follow on social media.
- Lifestyle: Also known as psychographic segmentation, this involves dividing prospects and customers by looking at their interests, activities, opinions and hobbies; not necessarily things that obviously influence their interest in your product, but that might influence the best content to draw their attention. If you have a strong social campaign accompanying your content campaign, this can be extremely potent.
- Benefits: This is segmentation for a savvier class of customer, dividing prospects based on the benefits they are seeking from your product or service. Like behavioral segmentation, this is ideal for content marketing, as it is very easy to detect and funnel prospects based on their point of origin.
How to Find Data
Your ability to accurately segment your customers and funnel them to appropriate content will be largely dependent on how advanced the back end of your site is. If you’re collecting huge amounts of usage information and can easily crunch the numbers on different types of visitors, you’re already where you need to be. You will also want to start making surveys and follow-up calls a part of your sales process, to better shape your understanding of the groups that exist and how they matter.
Remember to keep an open mind. For example, you might find that you have a strange overlap with some other hobby or activity, and that lifestyle segmentation based on whether someone enjoys indoor or outdoor hobbies has an immense impact on your sales figures.
Developing Authentic Content
Think back to our initial consideration for a moment: content marketing for men vs. women. If you’ve identified gender as a meaningful division between customers in your market, it’s time to develop appealing content. And that is where many marketers fall into the trap of insincerity.
Writing content for a market does not mean playing into stereotypes – if prospects detect that they’re being targeted haphazardly based on gender, race, political interests, or any other factor, they’re going to lose faith in your brand, content and company.
So one thing should never change in your content strategy: write good content offering value to every potential reader – segmentation should be a matter of prioritizing information or headlines. Do it right, and the benefits become instantly clear.
Do you create different content for men vs. women? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Share them by leaving a comment below:
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