For decades now, marketers have sought to find the soul of the mum. After all, she is a key decision-maker in the household with thousands of dollars at her command. Oftentimes, the marketers have gleefully embraced the stereotype of the “cleaning mum” or the “grocery-buying mom.” But at other times, they have battled the archetype demons in a quest to find the “real” mum, with only limited success.
Earlier this year, Mouths of Mums called the grocery-buying mum a myth and proceeded to offer another – the Price Princess, the one in constant pursuit of the best bargains. Now, MumsNow throws up another tantalising one: the Facebook Mum.
MumsNow surveyed over 1,000 mums on their social media habits and may have struck gold. It found that 99% of the mums surveyed had a Facebook account, and 50% spend between 1-3 hours a day on the site – mostly outside business hours. What’s more, 87% shop online and 73% read blogs. Mums in business are twice as likely as others to be themselves blogging, while those not in business are more likely to be reading forums and reviews.
Social media use defines mums
“Our findings are important because businesses that target Mums on social media need to be engaging their community at the time that best suits the Mums, not the business,” said Mary-Anne Amies, a co-founder of the joint venture between Motivating Mum and Wise Up Marketing.
Amies says MumsNow’s research “discovered patterns of behaviour within this target group that will drive businesses to change the way they engage with this audience, allowing them to increase awareness and drive their customers to online and in store purchases.”
So, who is MumsNow’s Australian mum?
She’s between 30 and 39 years, married, educated with two children under the age of four, works part-time or is self-employed. She’s busy alright, but has the ability and the willingness to squeeze out some “me time.”
Also, the average Australian mum is techno-savvy. More than a fifth (22%) own an iPhone, 12% own an iPad, 8% own other smartphones and only 6% use a standard feature phone.
MumsNow co-founder Alli Price says the research arose because of a lack of up-to-date data on how mums use social media to interact with brands.
“It has been long known that mums are often the key decision maker behind purchases,” she said. “However we felt that there wasn’t clear research into how social media was affecting pre-purchase behaviour and how mums were using social media to engage with brands prior to purchase from an Australian perspective, so much data is released from American research but we believed it wasn’t representative of how our Aussie mums behave.”
MumsNow says it plans to conduct similar surveys of Australian Mums every 6-12 months to bring new insights and data to businesses that seek to engage this market.
