With over-50s in Great Britain the fastest growing technology adopting group, it is becoming more and more important for marketers to reach and engage with this increasingly key audience. This infographic and research from Kantar Media looks at how best to engage with this often over-looked demographic. Kantar Media’s latest TGI Clickstream study reveals that […]
With over-50s in Great Britain the fastest growing technology adopting group, it is becoming more and more important for marketers to reach and engage with this increasingly key audience. This infographic and research from Kantar Media looks at how best to engage with this often over-looked demographic.
Kantar Media’s latest TGI Clickstream study reveals that 70% of 50+ year old British adults have used the Internet in the past 12 months, an increase of 28 percentage points since 2005. Looking more closely at TGI Clickstream’s insights, exactly how the over-50s engage with the internet is revealed.
View the infographic with key trends for the over 50s in the digital age below:
TGI Clickstream combines the full range of offline consumer insight from Kantar Media’s TGI study with metered internet usage (sites visited, time spent, number of visits etc.) from almost 5,000 respondents (rising to 10,000 by 2015), providing a complete understanding of consumers’ lives.
While over-50 web users are continuing to embrace the Internet, they seem to be using it only when they need it. They are 23% more likely than the average British adult to go online once a day. Once they are online, however, they are online an average of 139 minutes per session. One reason for not logging in more often may be their perception of Internet safety. They are 25% more likely than the average adult internet user to strongly agree it is important to trust the web sites they visit.
Much TGI Clickstream insight shows that tech savvy over-50s do not spend time idly surfing the web, rather they go online for very specific, practical reasons. Using computers in particular for communication and banking, 84% of over-50s use e-mail while online and 65% log on to pay their bills. More than half of this group indicate that when they need information the first place they look is the Internet. In terms of e-commerce, they look at online as a virtual browsing window. 71% often refer to the Internet before making purchases and 62% go online specifically to compare prices.
For marketers, one of the most important factors to be aware of is how this group comes across new sites. Nearly half use search engines on their home page when looking for specific topics. On the other hand, 28% discover sites through word of mouth, turning to friends, colleagues and family for recommendations and advice.
Once this group is online, they tend to log on to web sites that are familiar. Nearly half of over-50s tend to visit the same set of websites when they are on the Internet, particularly those on finance, news and magazines. When it comes to finance, over-50s are twice as likely as the average to visit saga.co.uk and more than twice as likely to visit nsandi.com. This group is also 72% more likely to visit readersdigest.co.uk and more than two and half times as likely to visit Telegraph Gardening.
This trend of reading the online versions of magazines and newspapers is growing amongst this age group. More than a quarter of over fifties say they read less print newspapers and magazines now they use the Internet. Marketers could go further and use Kantar Media’s Ad-Vantage solution to target a specific consumer group like this online with the exact cookies required to reach them, instead of relying just on consumer web-based behaviour for online targeting.
Source: Kantar
