Many people have chanced upon the term “customer demographics” at some point, especially if they have read marketing-related materials. Indeed, ordinary folks don’t need an understanding of customer demographics as it serves little purpose in their day-to-day lives. But to business owners trying to set a marketing plan and marketers trying to implement such plans, customer demographics is one of the principal holy grails. Don’t be intimated by its technical-sounding name. This post will guide you gently through the essentials. Let’s start with the most fundamental question–what is customer demographic?
What is a Customer Demographic?
Demographics is statistical data associated with a populace and specific groups that constitute it. In marketing, customer demographics are statistical information regarding individual identity and identifier. Customer demographic data includes
- Age, gender, education, marital status, and other essential information
- Specific location of residence and associated details like zip codes and postal addresses
- What a person wants to purchase, things like electronic goods, furniture, clothing, etc.
- Lifestyle information like “is the person a DIY(Do-it-yourself) person and cord cutters?”
- The type of buyer the person is. Are they online shoppers, or are they looking for great deals?
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Typically, businesses and marketers collect data through website forms that users fill out while registering their accounts. The other primary source of customer demographic data is online surveys. Businesses can choose to survey themselves or purchase the information from trustworthy and secure third-party specialized firms.
What Do you Need to Know About your Target Market?
One critical part of marketing is defining your target audience. The target market determines critical how’s and where’s to crucial marketing questions. The following tips should be immensely helpful for you to determine your target market:
1. Assess your existing customer base
To define your target market, try to figure out who your existing customers are. Try to know why they chose your product or services over your competitors. Try to identify patterns, like interests and characteristics common to a large group of your customer base. Analyze the customers who bring you the most business. This will help you identify other potential high-value clients who bring a large number of sales.
2. Examine your competitor’s target market
To find your target market, it is beneficial to find out the market your competitors are targeting. Try to determine who their existing customers are. However, don’t try to target that market. Instead, try to find a niche audience within that market that competing businesses are ignoring.
3. Perform an analysis of your product or service
Make a list of essential features of your product or service. Then, ascertain the benefits of each feature. Figure out the people who stand to gain the most from the benefits of using your product. This will give you a general target market that you can refine and hone in.
4. Choose specific target demographics
Once you have ascertained who is likely to need your product, you need to determine who is most likely to buy them. Doing so involves several customer demographics data that we discussed earlier. Such factors include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income
- Education
- Family
- Occupation
- Ethnicity etc.
Try to assess the psychographics of these people or the personal characteristics of your customer demographics. These include:
- Attitude
- Personality
- Interests and hobbies
- Lifestyle
- And behavior
Let’s then identify how products and services will complement the consumer’s lifestyle and the various questions associated with the interactions between your product and service and your target market.
5. Assess your choice of specific customer demographic
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Make sure you have identified your target market accurately by assessing the answers to the following questions:
- Is the audience broad enough?
- How much need do they have for my product or service? Will they be able to identify such needs?
- What influences the purchase decisions of my target market?
- Is my product or service affordable for the target market?
- Can and how will I reach out to them?
Resist the temptation to be too specific, and remember you can and should target several niche audiences with separate marketing messages. The applicability of messaging is a good indicator of the segmentation proportion. If the same message is relevant for multiple niches, you have drilled down too deep.
How Does Knowing Your Target Customer Demographics Help?
Finding out your target customer demographics makes many parts of starting and running businesses easy. It proves to be helpful in the following business activities:
- Creating a business plan
- Conducting market research
- Creating brand image
- Using media
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What are The Marketing Benefits of Knowing Your Target Customer Demographics?
- It helps in social media marketing
- Proper budget allocation and ad spending
- Frame relevant marketing messages and creates campaigns around them
- Placement of advertisement images
How to use your customer demographic data?
Your customer demographic data will be immensely helpful in analyzing the whole market.
You might want to target particular market locations due to the nature of your business. We also carried out market segmentation by dividing the target market into specific demographic criteria.
If you want to go back to that step, gathering the maximum possible data will make the whole process significantly easier. Research on things like
- Previous research
- Census data
- Graphs
- Infographics
- Marketing research studies
- Charts
- User research
- And geographical analysis
You can enhance the accuracy and specificity of your customer demographic data by digging deep into customer trends, city-based charts, buying patterns, triggers for customer behaviors besides studying customer behavior in general.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Customer demographic data helps us to make campaigns and create content that is more accurate.
How to Manage Customer Demographic Data?
You can also increase your revenue by proper management of customer demographic data besides gaining more significant insights into your customer. Some tools to make the most of such data are:
- Your CRM System
When you have a database of information regarding your existing customers, you can perform demographic analysis. The degree of utility from such customer and prospect data depends on quantity.
Accordingly, try to choose the CRM that offers the maximum flexibility on the quantity of stored client record data. Determine the demographic data you want to collect and create necessary forms with relevant fields. Demographic data helps geo-customize your marketing activities, like multiple schedules for webinars according to time zones.
Most CRM software these days provides insights into demographics that respond to your marketing campaigns the most. Such information lets you optimize campaigns by devoting more time and effort to marketing to groups that are more likely to make a purchase.
- Professional and Consumer and Demographic Data Analysis
You can also use the service of professional data analysis firms to segment your audience more accurately and productively, leading to more sales. Demographic data analysis is a potent tool that can take your marketing efforts' effectiveness to a whole new level. The specificity that you can go to with professional analysis is pretty impressive and include:
- Purchase likelihood
- Identify suitable store locations using traffic density
- The local health, crime and education situation
- Neighborhood socioeconomic specifics
- Individual net worth
- Create Buyer personas
A buyer persona attempts to create a specific fictional representation of your ideal customer. Your marketing teams and possibly your product development team also benefit from the buyer persona you make based on your consumer demographics data. It gives greater insight into the pain points of customers and their aspirations. Buyer personals help you not only know your customers but also to build empathy towards them. And remember, being close to the customer, and understanding them helps you address pain points more effectively leading to greater sales figures.
Buyer personas can get quite specific, and marketing team members have even been known to live in a particular suburb to understand the buyer persona in even greater detail. Your customer demographic data is the basis of the educated guesses marketers make while framing buyer personas.
- Contact with Your Buyers Regularly
Most buyers are open to contact once they have made a purchase. It is recommended as it gives a greater user experience by suggesting that buyers and their opinions matter to the business. Besides that, such contact also gives you a more significant amount of data and information about the people buying your product or service.
- Collaborate with Third-party Data Providers
Almost every market has data suppliers that provide both essential B2C and B2B data. You can buy email lists and other contact details from such suppliers. Be careful, however, about relevant legal statutes. The legalities of privacy and other personal data-safeguarding norms vary from country to country so, you should remain alert. However, as a general rule of thumb, you can generally mail customers without a request from their end as long as you let them opt out of your emails. Execution costs of email marketing campaigns are low, and if you choose your email marketing software carefully, you can get very high inbox delivery rates.
Now, that you have determined your customer, gathered existing customer data, and leveraged them to the fullest, you can patiently wait for the results to affect your bottom line positively!
