Are you building the confidence of female buyers?
Posted on July 3, 2008
Filed Under Financial Planning, Marketing Collateral, Women's Market |
When it comes to financial planning, U.S. women may lack confidence, but are serious about building their financial knowledge, especially about planning for—and living in—retirement. That’s the bottom line of a new study from Allianz Life.
This comes as little surprise, of course. But what’s really interesting is that almost half (46%) of the 1,443 women surveyed turned to the Internet first for financial-planning information. That compared with 34% who approached family members; 30%, financial advisors; 26%, banks; and 22%, friends.
But when Allianz asked women which information source was most effective, the Internet plummeted to twelfth place. The most effective sources, they said, were those involving human contact.
It’s no wonder women were more positive about human contact. The study found that 44% of the women said financial-planning information is overwhelming and too hard to sort through, 36% said it was complicated or hard to understand, and 32% said financial materials are really boring and dry.
Allianz said one of its key take-aways is the need to deliver more content through human contact (read: distributors). That may explain why their U.S. web site doesn’t provide any financial-education web content explicitly for women. However, given the company’s desire to better communicate with them, this may be shortsighted. A competitor, Prudential Financial, has a similar women’s research project going, and has created a robust companion web site.
If you’re thinking about targeting the female market, the Prudential site is a great exemplar. It engages women with informative content about how to manage the financial impact of family relationships, plan for key financial goals, and learn about investment and insurance products . The site is also replete with life-stage and planing checklists, calculators, and interactive guides.
Women may prefer human sources of information, but that may be because many insurance company web sites haven’t gotten their content act together. If that’s the case, what are you doing to set your company apart as a provider of financial products and advice for women? Publishing overwhelming, complicated, and boring materials is no way to engage with women. And it doesn’t work too well with men, either.
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