Mom Marketing Trends

Stay-at-home-moms Dominate Social Media

Mothers that stay home with children have an extremely difficult job. Cooking, cleaning, teaching, playing chauffeur and occasionally peacemaker can be all in a day’s work. That means a little leisure time can go a long way; hence the staggering number of stay-at-home Moms joining social media sites.

A Retail Advertising and Marketing Association study showed that more than 60 percent of stay-at-home moms are more likely to use Facebook, more than 42 percent are more likely to use MySpace and nearly 17 percent are more likely to use Twitter. That's compared to average adults – 50 percent of which use Facebook, 34 percent that use MySpace and 15 percent that use Twitter.

So what factors stand as the underlying reasons behind these trends? Staying in touch with friends and family has become easier with social media, and the concept spans generations. Instead of moms hanging laundry in the back yard and gabbing or burning up the phone lines all day, they can accomplish the same on Facebook or MySpace. Moms use social media for advice. Instead of living through “old wives tales” or taking a wild chance, Moms can seek out legitimate opinions from peers and experts on any subject. Nearly 94 percent of the Moms surveyed said they seek advice before buying products or services, and more than 97 percent said they give advice on products or services purchased.

Social media has a 24-hour per day availability. It proves very difficult to check or update various profiles during the day when kids need full attention, so Moms usually update whenever they find a free moment or late at night.

Social media trends will come and go as the sites develop and become even more integrated in our everyday lives. What started out as the meeting place for hip, young, Internet savvy young adults has become the new marketplace for the 35+ crowd. No wonder that marketers searching for stay-at-home Moms have turned their intense focus on social media sites.

Marketing to African American Moms

Known to marketers as The Big 3: Asians, Latinos, and African American dollars mean big business. Marketers have strategically targeted these growing demographics with great success rates for a number of years. As the conversation between consumers and brands moved online, ethnocentric tactics took a back seat. Companies just dipping their toes into Facebook, blogs, and Twitter probably won’t be thinking too much about reaching their exact or even secondary targets. If campaigns for minority groups prove few and far between, what chance do African American women (a minority group of a minority group) stand in the online marketing space?

Well Pepsi knows exactly how to properly leverage their online presence, and recently began their push towards an important target for them, African American women. In 2010 Pepsi will engage African American women through a number of vehicles, especially social media sites and community building. PepsiWeInspire.com features six themes: Love, Laughter, Hope, Joy, Beauty, and Wisdom. Each tenant has an African American celebrity as the featured blogger; so far actresses Raven-Symone, Queen Latifah, Taraji P. Henson, and singer Keyshia Cole offer their personal thoughts and have been featured in the campaign’s print advertisements. The “We Inspire” campaign proves to be a natural offshoot of Pepsi’s overarching and eternally optimistic “Refresh Everything” initiative.           

General Mills, J&J, and P&G all serve as pioneers in the wooing of mommy bloggers using social media, but Pepsi is the first company to specifically target African American mothers. A campaign centered around six positive themes, and asking a group of women to highlight encouraging stories from their lives makes for a strong increase in brand equity for this target market. If Pepsi succeeds with this campaign I expect a lot of other brands to jump at the chance to plan strategic social media tactics directed at a very niche audience. In the end, the real winners will be the consumers who become closer to each other, and ultimately the brands they love.