Demographics is a Marketing Advantage

In a highly-competitive marketing realm, analyzing demographics to come up with key conclusions and supercharge a target audience is a crucial must. Using certain analytical tools, marketing research specialists take advantage of the power of target demographics to create effective email marketing campaigns, content marketing initiatives, and a set of actions that allow companies to provide a tailor-made experience to customers.

By reading this demographics article, you will have the chance to understand how demographics is being currently used to target specific sets of people, allowing them to have a full-blown, customer-centered experience.

What is Demographic Targeting?

First and foremost, it’s important that we get to understand the definition of demographic targeting. Demographic targeting or demographic segmentation is a type of market segmentation according to family size, religion, gender, age, ethnicity, education, and even income. These data can effectively be segmented into different markets, helping companies target customers more accurately than ever before.

It’s typical for marketers to actually combine different variables to get to define a demographic profile. This profile provides specific info regarding a typical member of a given group of people, allowing marketing analysts and demographics experts to paint a picture of what the average consumer of that particular segment is like. For example, marketing pros may want to target a middle-class single male with a high school education.

What is the aim of targeting in marketing? The most important goal is to be able to determine which subgroups or segments appear to exist in the whole population. The second is to be able to create a crystal-clear picture of the traits and characteristics of a typical part of one of those marketing segments.

Once marketing professionals get enough data about a particular group of consumers, they can start developing specific marketing campaigns and an overall marketing strategy, taking that particular demographic into account to have a better chance of coming up with a successful marketing campaign.

A well-defined and meticulously researched segmentation allows companies to be sure they are able to devise a pitch-perfect marketing strategy, ensuring the right customers get to experience the best marketing campaign for that specific group of people. Ultimately, a thoroughly well-crafted target segmentation allows for tailored messages, more leads, increased loyalty, amazing customer retention, cost-efficiency, and a whopping revenue increase, promoting business growth.

What is the Value of Market Segmentation?

It seems clear that market segmentation is a crucial aspect of creating a marketing campaign.

But why is it so important? Because it’s been proven to help companies connect with clients much faster, ensuring they offer the right experience to a particular group of interested consumers. Customers who feel like brands are connecting with them at an emotional and empathetic level will be more prone to purchase products and to remain attached to a brand, allowing companies to take full advantage of the boon of customer loyalty.

It doesn’t really matter whether or not the company is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. In fact, market segmentation and the whole planning and implementation of marketing campaigns should always be based on the customers.

The essential thing about marketing is that it’s all about establishing a relationship with people, forming an everlasting bond that allows companies to have a stable revenue stream. Once market segmentation has been performed, marketing pros can get to learn even more about customers, constantly improving and tweaking their marketing strategies. Indeed, they can get to know about the customer’s lifestyle, their choices, why they make a certain decision, their daily routines, etc. All this incredibly invaluable data can be used to a company’s advantage.

What is the value of market segmentation for customers? Market segmentation allows customers to have access to a wider array of services or products.

What is the value of market segmentation for companies? It allows marketing professionals to create better marketing planning initiatives since any reaction to a specific marketing activity can be predicted based on target demographics.

In addition, target segmentation allows companies to really know which types of customers are more likely to purchase a specific product. Finally, marketers will also be able to become more focused on their activities, getting more sales and higher profitability at a lower cost, optimizing their game.

What are the Types of Market Segmentation?

It is typical for market segmentation types to be divided according to a major factor: whether the marketing plan is a B2C or a B2B initiative. B2B market segmentation is usually segmented into personal characteristics, purchasing approaches, operating variables, demographics, and situational factors.

As for B2C market segmentation, it is segmented into demographics, geographical aspects, product field behavior, motivation, social value groups, and even psychographics.

Major Advantages of Demographic Segmentation

There is a wealth of different advantages to market segmentation. First, segmentation allows marketing teams to know the info they need is quickly available to them. All they need to do is make intelligent use of census data to be able to determine how, who, and where they want to market their services or products.

In addition, it provides a much better understanding of the competition, allows marketing professionals to gain competitive advantage and to know how it can be best applied. Indeed, companies get to fully understand what the customers need, produce more effective marketing campaigns and optimize resources.

Another massive advantage of targeting is the following: the fact that it almost guarantees amazing loyalty and huge customer retention. When companies decide to dedicate a large swath of time to focus on consumers, their needs and desires, customers will tend to be back for additional business. The sense of trust and loyalty is extraordinarily important and that’s why customer retention through market segmentation is an effective way to create a successful marketing strategy.

Now that we know the definition of target demographics, what is market segmentation, and the advantages of both, it is important to effectively understand how to use demographics to create a profitable marketing initiative.

How to Use Demographics to Understand Your Target Audience

Analyze the Realm

This is the beginning of this project. The first thing you need to do is to actually go through some research, checking the demographics of a particular region, country, or parish you’re planning on targeting.

It’s time to find out as much as you possibly can about the population makeup.

That means you should focus on the following key aspects of market segmentation:

• Gender
• Age
• Occupation
• Income Level
• Family Environment
• Education

Spending time online and taking as much data as possible from censuses, previous research, infographics, graphs, charts, past marketing research studies, user research, geographical analyses, and others is a fundamental part of this stage. Market segmentation specialists investigate city charts, customer trends, popular buying patterns, customer behavior, behavioral triggers, and plenty more aspects to be able to create a highly-specific and super-accurate idea of their target audience.

Focus on Customer Needs

Why do people leave their homes in the freezing cold, spend hours in the food aisle and decide to purchase product A instead of B? Why does it matter if the carton is orange, green, or silver?

Getting to know the psychological factors that lure people into specific products is a major step in the target demographic technique. Marketing pros get to consider all of the reasons why some people might want to buy a specific product. For this reason, they must dive into their priorities, requirements, tastes, needs, etc.

How to do this market research? At this stage, there needs to be some type of communication with prospective customers. It could be a conversation, a quiz, a phone call, or a survey which will allow marketers to collect customer data and which help professionals understand everything they should know about customer behavior to add up to their whole research.

Once the key demographic factors have been taken into account, marketers assemble what is known as a customer profile. This is basically a focused statement that will describe the target audience in perfect detail. The profile is consulted, checked and analyzed time and time again, ensuring marketers get to know full-well what their customers want and who they are, creating tailor-made marketing campaigns that yield results.

Geography and Lifestyle

Another key aspect in the customer segmentation and target demographic game? To get to know where and how the target consumers live.

They could be urban youngsters who love to stay up late and dive into nightclubs. They could be wealthy retirees who live off a generous pension and focus on buying products which advertise health-related aspects.

Are they politically liberal or are they conservative? Do they spend 10 hours working or 10 hours watching TV?

This information will allow target segmentation professionals to create a highly-customized marketing campaign that hits all the right notes through effective use of targeted power.

Targeted Marketing Rules

Targeted marketing is cost-efficient, allows you to craft tailored messages, ensures direct targeting yields faster results, gets more leads, increases customer loyalty, and supercharges the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

By using the massive boon of demographic research, you get to understand what your target customers look like, what they need, their behavioral patterns, their buying patterns, and what type of marketing strategy to go for. This means that, by performing a remarkably thorough market and customer research, you get to create tailor-made marketing initiatives that not only become highly-profitable but also ensure tremendous customer retention and business growth.