November 14, 2022
5 min read
It seems bizarre to ever imagine a world where you wouldn’t consult Google or the App Store to fix half of your daily issues, but once upon a time new parents would stutter through the first years with little support for the unrelenting and unglamorous tasks that fall into your laps along with your new baby.
But now, the boundaries of technology have raced forwards from the edge of ‘what’s’ possible’, to raising the bar of ‘what’s doable’. And there are some great innovations that are designed specifically for parents, to make those first years easier, albeit never easy.
We’ve collated 3 of our favourites, to showcase the kind of trends we’re seeing in the parenting market. Looking at the apps that are blossoming could tell you more about what trends you can expect to see and anchor your marketing around.
Baby Connect is the ultimate activity log for parents. You can keep a measurable track of everything that a new parent might worry about. By tracking mood, sleep, eating and more over a long-term view, parents are able to gain new insights that they just wouldn’t be able to before.
Similar to other apps for adults, self-reporting our schedules can help us connect the dots between the way we are and feel with the habits that we choose. The same principles apply to newborns, and show that parents are looking to maximise their baby’s quality of life in the easiest way possible. It demonstrates an appetite for parenting brands to use technology to make their lives easier, as long as it’s done in a family-centric way. This could be vital in understanding what marketing will work for new parents, who want genuine support, rather than prescriptive shopping signals.
How does your current marketing strategy stack up? You might think of new ways in which you can offer meaningful support to new parents. If you’ve got data on ways in which your customers can benefit or struggle during those years, why not use the crowd-sourced knowledge to build awareness campaigns or content, so that you can help connect the dots that they might not see as a single unit?
SitterCity connects parents to the right kind of babysitters in their local area. With background checks and reviews from other parents, it provides clarity and transparency to finding the right care for your child.
These kinds of apps are popping up all across parenting. They signal that the old-school ways of finding care for your child just feel outdated, especially given the risks involved with leaving your child in someone else’s care.
It shows us that transparency and accountability are key drivers of modern parenting, And why wouldn’t they be? Whilst relying on your local network for childcare may have worked well in the past, there are tools to enable that on a larger scale, with more accountability, which won’t detract from either parents or caregivers, but rather add.
Can your marketing help enable connections based on transparency? Even if you’re outside the realm of service apps, you can take those core values of transparency and embed them into your marketing strategy through being clear about pricing changes and service offerings. In fact, a recent FanFinders survey found that 46% of parents valued honesty from brands as one of the top reasons they’d keep purchasing during the cost of living crisis.
Think Tinder but for children’s names. This app helps parents connect on the names they can both agree on, without judgement and at scale. It takes all the fun of gamification and helps parents with a personalised service, to help them with one of the most important decisions they can make with their newborn.
The quest for creative solutions to age-old problems tells us that technology provides a role in building more authentic lives and relationships, not just between parents and children, but between each other too.
Does your marketing strategy incorporate authenticity? Personalisation across the board helps parents truly connect to the value your brand has to offer. By giving them content and promotions that are specific to the kind of parent they are, you are encouraging an authentic relationship with your brand, rather than a prescriptive one. And it may mean that you send out less marketing material, but the ones that you do send are going to have true traction, and foster a long-term view of your brand as the family develops.
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