Here at Mykidstime we keep a keen eye on our stats and what our audience is up to. As the digital advertising landscape continues to shift so quickly businesses and brands who wish to target Mothers, the key decision makers in most households, need to understand what works to engage Mums. Here’s Why Content and not Display Ads Will Win the Battle for Mums’ Hearts.

#1. High Value Content Drives Brand Trust

Content helps to humanise a brand and build relationships. Building relationships earns trust and that in turn creates brand advocates. Building a trusted brand takes time but high quality useful content helps speed up that process.

Each year we run a Userneeds externally benchmarked survey to check how our users are viewing our website. This also gives us insight into how they view our brand and our content.

Mums would like to see more content and particularly video content (Mykidstime Userneeds Survey 2015 of 1228 respondents)

#2. Mums Are Just Not Interested in Display Ads

It’s the reality that banner ad click rates, while never great, continue to decline daily. With Ad Blocking expected to reach 100% by 2018 (M2Moms conference 2015), business and brands need to change how they reach out to mothers.

Quality, authentic content will always blow past banner ads. In our opinion and based on our experience at Mykidstime, content and social media are the keys to reaching mums as display becomes less relevant.

A content article on Mykidstime can achieve 5.37% CTR – compared to 0.04% CTR on Banners.

#3. Mums are Moving Away from Desktop to Mobile

Mums are on smartphones and devices, and they are reading content on their phones and devices. They read this content while waiting in the car at school, at the side of the swimming pool, in the evening after bedtime.

Currently most of the advertising placed is either not in mobile friendly formats or the CTA does not go to a mobile optimised site, so you are missing a huge opportunity to reach mums.

Between 60-70% of Mykidstime parents use phones or devices to access content. 91% of Mykidstime tablet users are female, 90% of Mykidstime mobile users are female compared to 81% desktop.

#4. Engaging Authentic Content Performs Well

High quality, authentic content for parents can achieve great results if positioned correctly and distributed through social.

So what do we actually mean by that:

• it is snackable, i.e. bite-sized content pieces that can be read quickly;
• it is well structured for reading on mobile and tablets;
• it avoids the blah advertorial/press release format;
• it delivers something to the reader, some solution to a problem they have or some way of them becoming better people or it entertains them.

Content articles are 100x more read than advertorial on Mykidstime.

#5. Social Media is the Key to Reaching Mums

Mums spend time on social media as having kids curtails social lives! We see them on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter predominantly, with younger mums on Snapchat.

They access social via their smartphones and devices sometimes more than 5 times a day according to our latest survey of parents on mobile.

Tapping into them as influencers through their social media network is the key. Getting them to share content that positions the brands favourably in other parents’ minds.

Top Performing Content on Mykidstime

So what do parents read on Mykidstime? Here are the top sections viewed on Mykidstime in 2015

• Things to Do
• Competitions
• Back to School
• Food and Recipes
• For Parents

and here are the top 5 articles in 2015

• www.mykidstime.com/for-parents/last-time-poem
• www.mykidstime.com/for-parents/10-hacks-for-parents-for-organising-toys
• www.mykidstime.com/for-parents/hot-toys-christmas-2015
• www.mykidstime.com/for-parents/childs-name-hottest-baby-names-2015-list
• www.mykidstime.com/for-parents/what-time-should-kids-go-to-bed-at

All of this content engages parents because it either solves problems they experience in day to day lives or makes them curious about their parenting and what they should be doing better.

Our Recommendations

1. Build in content to each digital campaign but make sure the content is useful to Mums in solving their day to day problems or appealing to their curiosity, those are the keys to successful content.
2. The title is as important almost as the content itself. Put yourself in mums’ shoes and ask “would I click on this?”
3. Link through and branding has to be in the opening paragraph or screen, mums don’t always scroll down, they browse in a hurry on the move, in the park, at the school gate, at the side line of the soccer match etc., and you will deliver better stats/results on campaigns using this technique rather than an end note “brought to you by”.
4. Content can be repurposed particularly high quality seasonal content, often brands have content available; it just needs to be tweaked to be engaging to Mums.
5. Define targets for the content part of the campaign based on page views and dwell times.

Would you like advice and help on writing content for parents? Contact us today and we can help.