Citrus Marketing Breakfast - SheSpot Women + Technology
'The Woman Behind The Screen' research report was a quantitative study of 5,435 Australian women conducted between July 14 – August 15 this year. Data was captured through four of the key SheSpot digital properties ensuring a broad representation across women 18 – 65. 'The Woman Behind The Screen' report 2011.
Who is SheSpot
Since launching in 2009, SheSpot’s portfolio of sites have become premium destinations for women in Australia and New Zealand. An addition to the KidSpot group, SheSpot is an original vertical content portfolio in Australia – a media model that helps premium brand advertisers connect with women spanning all of her intererests.
Time online
In terms of general online access, the report found women now spend an average of 19 hours per week online, (with this number dramatically increasing during child-bearing lifestages). This time was dominated by Search and Social based activities, with 40% of women's online time being used for social networking, of which a massive 80% of users spent time on Facebook. Looking at Twitter, whilst still relatively low in terms of adoption accounting for only 16% of users, SheSpot found adoption of this platform to have doubled in the last 6 months.
Mobile attachment
SheSpot's research focussed on how women's behaviours have been changed by technology - clearly mobile, and in particular web-enabled mobile was going to dominate the findings, and provided some interesting insights. Some key stats around web enabled phones, particularly an expectation that 66% of women will own a web enabled 'smart phone' within 12 months (with 53% already owning one), supported the insight that women have adopted smart phones as an 'attachment device', a rare and tricky status to attain. 51% of women surveyed described their relationship with a smart phone as one of "love" and "could not live without it".
Multi-taskers
Findings also found women to have established this dependency on the phone through its ability to support their multi-tasking lifestyles, with common usage environments including, lounge rooms, in the car (slightly worringly!), watching TV, and whilst grocery shopping - the latter two clearly presenting opportunities for marketers to align themselves with messaging and tasks relating to these activities. Particularly when overlaid with findings around women's primary motivations for using smart phones being; the level of involvement it offers, making life easier and entertaining them.
Apps opportunities
Other findings included adoption of mobile applications, where clearly there is still a struggle for app creators to maintain long term engagement with users with application trial rates still far outweighing adoption or long term usage rates - not only bolstering the case for regular updates and content freshness, but also encouraging us to think twice as whether applications are a better option than investment in content streamlining and optimisation of oft under considered mobile sites.
Shopping behaviours
The role technology now plays in the purchase cycle was another key area explored by the research. Among many interesting behavioural and category based insights it was interesting to see the impact technology is having not only on the research and consideration phases of the purchase funnel but also the pointy end of the funnel, with over 60% of women now using online means for activities relating to price comparison and purchase decision, such as, receive price alerts on favourite items or stores/brands (66%), save and maintain shopping list (64%), download coupons (62%) and tracking sale items (61%). Also, surprising to some was the finding that over one in five (22%) have used the relatively new online barcode scanning technology to find the best price available.
The research provided a rare in depth study into the ever evolving behaviours and attitudes of women and their increasing dependancy on technology for ever facet of their busy lives, and offered us many insights as marketers as to how we can align both our strategies and tactics to best meet their needs. Everyone attending, including a broad category representation, took away something useful, who knows maybe we're closer to 'What Women Want', and it turns out it doesn't include Mel Gibson!
Many thanks to Pru and the SheSpot team for providing us an extremely interesting and insightful breakfast presentation! Look out for the next session early 2012!
Contact us to learn more about the Report
