Digital Media Buzz > Cutting Edge Technology Targets Female Demographic

Cutting Edge Technology Targets Female Demographic

By Barbara Gengler

With women playing an increasingly crucial role in purchase decisions, ads targeted to their specific interests are helping build brand trust and boosting their online experiences.

Prospectiv is one marketing company using these tools. PrismPro is Prospectiv’s proprietary targeting engine that groups Web users into thousands of segments, based on geographic, demographic and lifestyle dimension, using anything from whether or not somebody owns their own home and if they have children, to whether they live in Boston or New York.

“We use those demographics to put people into buckets and then we target based on those buckets,” says Jere Doyle, Prospectiv president and chief executive. “Literally we have thousands of those buckets because what you do is basically overlay 25 different characteristics on people and maybe you and I have exactly the same 24 out of 25 and there’s one that’s different. I’m male and you’re female and that would put us in two different buckets even if we have everything else exactly the same.”

The technology, Doyle says, allows a health care client, for example, to say I want a client with a particular condition, whether it be asthma or allergies, or Kraft can say I want to acquire people who cook.

Doyle spoke about the company’s focus on females, 25 to 55 years old, who are making the purchasing decisions or buying the products. Eighty-five percent of women in the U.S. make the purchase decisions in a household, according to Don’t Think Pink, by authors Lisa Johnson and Andrea Learned.

“We put the stake in the ground and told people what we do about three years ago,” Doyle says. “But we’ve always focused mainly on the female population, the female audience, that’s where our sweet spot has always been.”

He says the company does a lot of research on what makes females do things and over the last six months Prospectiv conducted surveys and studies on what women think about online coupons. “We asked do you trust online coupons and we found that 76 percent of females told us they did trust online coupons and online couponing is one part of our business that we do for a lot of our brands.”

Doyle says the survey found that moms trust coupons more than single women without children, 79 percent of moms trust coupons versus 66 percent of women without children at home.

“So when we’re sitting with a client and talking to them about maybe building their subscription database, we may suggest that they use a coupon as a mechanism or means to generate interest to join a subscription list,” he says. “I think that’s what makes us pretty unique is we’re really diving in and asking women a lot of questions to find out what’s motivating them to make purchasing decisions.”

Bravado! Designs marketing manager Alina Szober says the company faces the unique challenge of having an extremely specific and oftentimes very difficult market to precisely target: pregnant and nursing moms.

“Drilling down even further, ideally we want to reach these women and begin building a relationship with them in their third trimester of pregnancy,” she says. “Knowing that this is our sweet spot, the return on investment for programs that can get this specific is proven for us — Prospectiv’s capabilities in this area to segment consumers and target messaging to this level of detail are absolutely critical for us to build not only the quantity of names in our email database, but most critically the quality of those names.”

Another customer, Kelly Cates, manager, Web development, brand relationships, direct sales at Hanes, says in the acquisition campaign the company ran with Prospectiv, Hanes goal was to reach winter sports enthusiasts. “Their targeting technology allowed us to reach new people and successfully add to our database with highly engaged and qualified consumers,” Cates says.

Similarly, Nestle generated more than 200,000 registrations for Nestle Very Best Baking. The campaign averaged a 22-percent conversion rate overall with 15 percent failing in the MVC (most valuable consumers) category.

Doyle says the company has a very robust analytics program, which runs back-end analytics to measure things like campaign performance. “I think the success is measured based on our repeat campaigns and on our longevity with our clients,” he says.