With that being said, it would behoove your company or business to have a female-driven millennial marketing campaign in mind.

For some agencies, marketing to millennials can be intimidating. According to a NewsCred study, 30% of millennials flat-out refuse to read content that doesn’t either entertain or inform them, 60% will only share content that is thought-provoking and intelligent, and 70% share content that makes them laugh. That is a pretty tall order.

However, marketing to specifically millennial women might be a little easier. After all, since “70% of millennial women consider shopping to be entertainment,” you have ample opportunities to put your company in the line of fire. 

Here are some tips on how to get to know female millennials to make the most out of your marketing campaigns:

Great Personal

If you take anything away from this blog post, this is it. Millennials want you to get SPECIFIC. Part of the reason your marketing campaign isn’t working is because it’s too broad. Millennial women want to feel like their brands “get” them. Know your audience well, and create smaller segments or niches to make them feel like they have your full attention.

According to NewsCred, “Sephora is doing an amazing job with this by using their “Beauty Insider” in-store buyer rewards along with their customized skin tone-matching technique to target products to specific shoppers based on their previous purchases and coloring.” If you don’t have the technology to personalize your product this way, you can start by personalizing your emails. “That will give you on average a 26% higher open rate.”

According to NewsCred, “Sephora is doing an amazing job with this by using their “Beauty Insider” in-store buyer rewards along with their customized skin tone-matching technique to target products to specific shoppers based on their previous purchases and coloring.” If you don’t have the technology to personalize your product this way, you can start by personalizing your emails. “That will give you on average a 26% higher open rate.”

Social Media

Millennial women make up the majority on social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. Both of these as well as Facebook and Twitter are fertile grounds for brands to grow awareness as well as click-throughs. To get female millennials to engage with your brand, create lots of opportunities for open communication: Get them talking about your product, commenting on and sharing posts and reviewing your products online. Find ways to be part of their ongoing research and dialogue by responding to comments. Create hashtags and giveaways. Optimize all your content for multiple devices, and make sure your content is shareable. And finally, use attractive photos and aesthetically pleasing graphics to coincide with your brand’s theme. Millennial women are attracted to beauty, and we look to create beauty in our surroundings. Naturally, they want products, services, and offerings that look and feel professional. 

Millennial women are attracted to beauty, and we look to create beauty in our surroundings. Naturally, they want products, services, and offerings that look and feel professional. 

Be Inspirational

If you want your brand to succeed, make it inspirational. This generation of Millenials believes they can change the world or at least make it a better place. They’re thinking big, optimistic of the future, and are looking to be inspired. 

According to YFS magazine,”think of your brand as a movement and work to build a platform for realizing your customers’ aspirations. The goal here is to align your product or service with a bigger idea that transcends any single transaction.”

Diversity

43% of millennial are not white, according to a 2014 Pew survey. Since authenticity and relevance are two of the most important factors for successful content marketing, marketers should be doing their best to reflect the diversity of this generation. This includes race, gender identity, sexual orientation, family makeup, body type, and cultural background. 

A great example of a company utilizing this approach to marketing is  Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. With a clear agenda in mind, Dove features women of all sizes, shapes, and races. They not only show the value of millennial women through this campaign, they also showcase the realistic variety of women’s bodies. Campaigns promoting self-love, diversity and embracing your natural body are embraced by millennial women because they have been void of them for so long. As I mentioned before, millennials want to be inspired. 

The post Marketing to Millennial Women appeared first on Media Partners Worldwide.

Women’s History Month had its origins as a national celebration in 1981 to recognize the successful and impactful history of women in business in the United States of America. Congress passed Pub. L. 97-28 which authorized and requested the President to proclaim the week of  March 7, 1982, as “Women’s History Week.” Later, in 1987, Congress designated March the month to celebrate Women’s History for the entire country, after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project.

To show how far women in business have come, here is a historical look provided by National Women’s History Museum’s online exhibit. To see their exhibit visit slideshow.

History of Women in Business

This exhibit defines the term “entrepreneur” to refer to a woman who had an idea for a service or product and started a business of her own. American women have owned businesses as far back as colonial settlements.

Women did not historically use the word “entrepreneur” to describe their businesses until the late 1970s; before that, they called them “sidelines” or part-time projects and understood entrepreneurship to describe what men did.

But looking back, it is clear that the history of women in business ownership deserves a place in the broader history of entrepreneurship; hence the use of the term in this exhibit.

1910-1939

Up through the nineteenth century, women-owned businesses primarily included taverns and alehouses, millinery and retail shops, hotels, and brothels, and were often operated as a way to provide an income for women who found themselves without a breadwinning man. Business, then, was a way for a woman in potentially dire circumstances to provide for herself rather than become a social burden. 

From 1900 through 1929, Progressivism, feminism, consumerism and immigration all gave rise to a climate that was not only conducive to women’s entrepreneurship but also highly accepting of them. Like many women’s ventures at this time, their primary markets were typically other women, but New Women entrepreneurs often tinged their businesses with a sense of purpose beyond simple economics.

1940-1959 

World War II was an important expansion period for the history of women in business as it brought many women into the workforce, filling jobs so men could go off and fight. That same patriotic fervor also inspired many women to consider starting businesses of their own. The Boston Globe’s “women’s pages,” for example, featured Polly Webster’s column, “War Time Wife”, packed with tips for weathering the hardships of the war years—including how to generate income from home-based businesses. 

When World War II ended, women were pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, and many went straight into entrepreneurial women owned businesses of their own.

The Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs and state officials—first in New York and then nationwide—ran workshops for aspiring female entrepreneurs with advice from trailblazers such as Elizabeth Arden and male business leaders. There were advice books and free pamphlets. Reader’s Digest included women entrepreneurs among the winners of its 1946 competition for best business ideas. The press hailed women entrepreneurs for helping to rebuild the economy by increasing the number of women-owned businesses from 600,000 in 1945 to nearly 1 million by 1950.

By the 1950s—the age of celebrated domesticity—the home became the new site of, and justification for, starting a business. Everywhere women turned, they received messages that home and family were their primary roles. But the baby boom and an assortment of new consumer goods—from cars to clothes to appliances—also meant that even middle-class families needed more cash. Women stepped up, often capitalizing on homemaking skills to build businesses. They defined their home-based businesses as part of being a good mother. 

1960-1979 

By the early 1960s, the changing social and cultural landscape provided new incentives for would-be women business owners. Divorce rates escalated during the 1960s and single mothers struggling to balance child-rearing and their new roles as providers saw in business a possible solution. Women, like beauty maven Mary Kay Ash and advertising executive Mary Wells, started women owned companies of their own as a way to assert their independence in the male world of business.

The Civil Rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s brought a new sense of purpose and a language of rights and empowerment to women entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, the result was a change in the way women understood themselves and their ventures, seeking not just to start businesses but to be seen as equals in the world of enterprise.

Feminists founded businesses along movement principles, such as publishing ventures that would give voice to women’s words and perspectives, including the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the Feminist Press, and Ms. Magazine. Women entrepreneurs also began to move beyond traditionally female categories and into previously male bastions of technology, metals, and finance.

1980-1999

By the 1980s, the hard work of the previous decades was paying off: women entrepreneurs like Martha Stewart and Vera Bradley…owned 25 percent of all US firms. What’s more, the public and politicians widely acknowledged that women entrepreneurs were a vital component of the nation’s economy. New initiatives, including how-to seminars and government programs, sought to ensure that women had the resources necessary to start and grow their businesses.

In 1988, urged on by the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), Congress passed The Women’s Business Ownership Act, which ended discrimination in lending, eliminated state laws that required married women to have a husband’s signature for all loans and gave women-owned businesses a chance to compete for lucrative government contracts.

2000-Present Day 

This look at the history of women in business shows it’s been a bumpy ride for women entrepreneurs in the 20th and early 21st century: on the upside, their numbers continue to grow, and Key Bank, Goldman Sachs, and other institutions have increasingly launched financing initiatives targeted solely at would-be women entrepreneurs.

Technological innovation ramped up fast as the 1990s became the 2000s. That not only enabled women entrepreneurs to break into technology-based businesses in record numbers but also to use technology to start, run, promote and accelerate all types of companies. With faster and cheaper Internet, cloud and mobile technologies, women can manage a business from anywhere, with far less startup capital. 

But small and big, women’s ventures came to comprise 30 percent of all U.S. businesses—many of them today in categories that were once men’s alone. The lesson they teach is the power of possibilities and passion for transforming lives.

The next century promises to be an even brighter chapter for the history of women’s entrepreneurship in business.

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The post Women’s History: The Rise of the Female Entrepreneur appeared first on Media Partners Worldwide.