Emma Marks always knew she wanted to be an active Mum. But playing games on the floor with her kids for five hours was not part of the plan. Emma had another plan, and it was supposed to keep her business brain active for a few hours a day; but life doesn’t always turn out the way you think it will.
Motivated by the conversations she had, and heard, at her children’s pre-school, Emma started an on-line forum for women with children in 2010. “Mum’s Lounge was designed to provide a safe place where women could relax and be themselves,” explains Emma, “they didn’t need to pretend they were super mums.”
Emma saw a gap in the on-line market for a lifestyle site targeting women… oh, and they just happen to have children; not a mum’s site where everything revolves around kids.
“Having five children doesn’t define me as a person, only as a mum,” says Emma, now Managing Director of Mum Media Group. “Women who become mums often lose their identity because everyone sees them just as a mum, especially their children.
And hundreds of thousands of Australian mums agree with her. Since it launched, Mum’s Lounge has amassed a huge engaged following of women with up to 9 million sometimes reached on Facebook. Mum’s Lounge has 100,000+ Facebook followers, 85,000+ e-news subscribers and 450,000+ unique monthly visitors. In a few short years Mum’s Lounge has set the benchmark for websites of its type.
But that’s not all. Emma has overlayed the highly successful business model for Mum’s Lounge onto eight other sites which now make up the Mum Media Group (MMG) including parenting, fashion & beauty, house & garden, bridal, food & employment & upskilling for women re-entering the workforce.
Thousands of Australian women from teenagers & brides to mums & homeowners now log on every day to at least one MMG site. With over 300 writers nationally, every site posts new material every day which is in turn promoted nationally via 23 separate social media sites.
Emma says MMG sites are highly popular vehicles for national advertisers who want to sell to a variety of the female demographic or who need to survey large groups of women for marketing intel. “We have an engaged audience who talks back to us; this is marketing gold for companies who want to engage women with no wastage in their media spend.”
MMG has now successfully evolved into one of Australia’s leading digital marketing channels with a full-time staff of 14, plus over 300 contributing journalists and other writers. As a successful business model with endless cross-promotional abilities, MMG is in the unique position of being wholly privately owned with an audience of millions of women and homeowners across Australia.
