Notes for owners · Digital marketing
How to advertise to mothers, who are buying for somebody else
She is usually not the user. She books the appointments, remembers the renewal dates and researches for three generations, in ten-minute pieces of a day.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Start with this. She is frequently not the user of what she is buying. She books her father-in-law's health check, renews the family's insurance, chooses the physiotherapist for her husband's back, finds the tutor, and remembers when the car insurance falls due. Your advertisement is read by somebody assessing it on behalf of a person who is not in the room. That changes what has to be on the page, and it changes who your copy should be polite about.
For schools, day care and coaching, the decision is a visit and a catchment, and advertising to parents covers that properly. This page is about everything else the household buys through her.
Who is choosing, and who is being treated
| What is being bought | Who uses it | What she is actually checking |
|---|---|---|
| A health check package for a parent | Her mother or father-in-law | Timing, transport, whether reports come the same day |
| A physiotherapist or a home nurse | Her husband, or a parent | Who exactly comes, and whether it is the same person each time |
| An insurance renewal | The household | The date, and whether anything lapses |
| A tuition or hobby class | Her child | Distance, timing against school transport, who teaches |
| Groceries and the monthly order | Everybody | Delivery slot, and whether substitutions are made without asking |
| A home service | The house | A name, a time slot, and a price that does not move on arrival |
Every row on the right is an operational answer, not a creative one. This audience is buying certainty about an arrangement, because she is the one who will be blamed if it goes wrong.
Her day is in ten-minute pieces
Anything that needs twenty continuous minutes fails. She is deciding while standing outside a class, in a queue at the clinic, or between two things at home.
The waiting block is the one nobody buys. Forty-five minutes outside a dance class, a coaching centre or a paediatric clinic, with a phone in hand and nothing to do. A notice in that room, or an arrangement with the class itself, reaches somebody in exactly the mood to sort out the next thing on her list.
Then the late block, after the house is quiet, when comparisons get made and the order goes in.
So put the price on the page and make the whole thing answerable in writing. A phone call is a commitment of time she is asked for a dozen times a week and refuses most of them.
Dates, not campaigns
Much of what she buys is a renewal or a repeat, and the buying moment is a date she is carrying in her head. Insurance and health cover. The annual health check. Vaccinations. The car service. The annual maintenance contract. A follow-up scan six months after the last one.
A reminder that arrives a fortnight before the date, naming the date, outperforms any advertisement aimed at the same person a month earlier. Most clinics, insurers and service businesses have all of this in their own records and never send it, then spend on new enquiries instead. That is the cheapest unused asset in a small business.
Make the message forwardable
She is the information broker in more than one group, and the forwarded message is how your name travels. What gets forwarded is plain: a price, a date, a place, one photograph, and a phone number. What does not get forwarded is a designed poster with marketing language on it, because passing it on makes the sender look like an advertisement.
You cannot join the group and you should not try. What you can do is give the two customers you already have something worth passing on.
For example, a diagnostic centre in Nagarbhavi could send a health check reminder to every family that came last year. Name the month of the last visit, and put the package price and two slots in the message. It costs almost nothing, it reaches the person who books, and it arrives on the date she was already thinking about it. We are on Outer Ring Road in Nagarbhavi, and the clinics near us that do this quietly fill their weekday mornings while the ones that do not are buying clicks.
Guilt gets screenshot and answered
Guilt. An advertisement implying she is failing somebody gets screenshot and answered in the group, and the answer travels further than the campaign.
A call at three in the afternoon, which is school pickup, or at eight, which is dinner.
A price you have to ask for. She is comparing three places in ten minutes and will drop the one that hides it.
A form with six fields. Two, or none.
What to measure
Enquiries that arrive in writing against those by call. Reply time in minutes after nine at night. How many appointments came from a reminder rather than from an advertisement, and how many came with another customer's name attached. That last number is the one worth growing, and it is the one nobody records. Take the baseline before you change anything and read it monthly.
What to do next
Open your own records and count how many customers from last year are due for the same thing again this year. Send them a reminder naming the date. Then check how many of your enquiries last month arrived after nine at night, and what time they were answered. Book a free audit if you want those two numbers read properly.