Demographics is an important part of your small business marketing campaign because it’s how you determine who the members of your audience are according to a few characteristics, wants and needs.

For 20 years, marketers have become better at reaching the right individual or business decision-maker because of two factors: the growth of the internet and social media, and people’s willingness to post and re-post endless amounts of data about themselves 24/7.

The kind of demographic information companies can get today is very precise and segmented well. That makes it a lot simpler and cheaper to identify those who might be interested in what you offer. This article will tell you all about audience demographics and how to leverage them for your business marketing.

What are demographics?

Demographics is the science of who and what exists within a geographical region. The more data we have, the more people and institutions we can cut into smaller common classes of individuals with similar characteristics.

Companies use demographic data to:

• Know what products and services different sets of customers need and are able to pay for.
• More precisely segment marketing efforts, and therefore lower lead or sale costs.
• Monitor society’s shifts and what needs to be changed (used in PEST analysis).

What is demographic data?

Below are some demo data/variables (also called fields):

• Age group
• Gender
• Race
• Ethnicity
• Location
• Marital status
• Education level
• Occupation
• Employment status
• Income level

Demographic information is usually obtained from a small number of different sources, such as censuses, surveys and government documents.

The breadth of demographic data about people has increased in recent years as search engines, social media and list service providers have come on-board.

For instance, besides typical demographic data, when people volunteer their data on Facebook, it now obtains the following information about each user:

• Relationship status
• School attended
• Academic background
• Job title
• Industry worked in
• Employer name
• Net worth
• Homeownership status
• Household composition
• Ages of children
• Political affiliation
• Entertainment preferences
• Dietary preferences
• Hobbies and interests
• Favourite brands
• Preferred retailers and e-tailers
• Favourite sports teams
• Web history
• Technology used to go online

Because there’s so much data out there, the businesses can identify which consumers they want to target as never before 20 years ago. Regardless of how small the population you’re targeting, Google, Facebook and other companies will let you find them and then sell to them via advertising.

But you do not have to only advertise with Google and Facebook. You can speak with one of the hundreds of list owners and brokers in the US. They buy subscriber lists of internets and print magazines for all kinds of topics and sell them to other companies.

You might for instance purchase an email marketing contact list of horse owners based on age, income level and geographical region to advertise your new saddle range and execute the campaign yourself.

These fields from business and corporate demographics (firmographics):

• Company size
• Industry
• Products or services

B2B data is also a lot more specific now than it was 10 years ago, for many reasons:

• The amount of firmographic data — which includes hierarchy of management structure — that LinkedIn owns.
• Wider availability of company information issued by government entities in other countries.

So, if you’re looking to sell a new document management system to chief information security officers of West Coast law firms with 100+ employees, now they’re much easier to come by. You might market to them on LinkedIn or purchase telemarketing data to call them to schedule appointments.

This kind of targeting is the future of B2B email marketing, too. And companies are writing way less emails than 10 years ago. They are getting far more responses and quality leads, because they’re getting way better ones. They just don’t know who their emails are coming from, so they probably don’t need anything.

Some uses of demographic market segmentation by businesses.

Demographic segmentation — segmenting people or companies according to their demographic traits.

A luxury jeweller, for instance, targeting consumers in the Northeast could segment this huge market by state (city) or income bracket (the poor consumer may not be able to afford the jewellery company’s goods).

Demographic marketing and segmentation optimize your marketing campaigns, allowing you to narrow down your market to a targeted, open-ended customer.

5 main segments for demographics

There are five segments in consumer demographics: age, gender, income, education and occupation.

Targeting one demographic trait can be profitable, but going for all five is probably better. Your target audience the better able to exhibit consumer behaviours, desires and needs that are common.

Additional types of market segmentation

There are 5 other forms of market segmentation, aside from demographic marketing:

• Psychographic segmentation: This based on subjective variables such as personality, values, interests, lifestyle, beliefs, priorities, motivations and attitudes. A payroll vendor using psychographic market segmentation, for instance, can target business owners who want to be tax-advanced as much as possible.
• Geographic segmentation: In this one, you segment your customer base by country, city, ZIP code, weather, environment (urban or rural) or location. An electric scooter company targeting the people of crowded urban areas is an illustration of geographical market segmentation.
• Behavioural segmentation: Consumer behaviour segmentation is applied here. It needs marketing studies about the consumer behaviour of buying, spending and brand-building. Any brand that targets consumers who bought a product from the same brand or one of their competitors has behavioural segmentation in its marketing mix.
• Firmographic segmentation: Businesses are a target for this method. Firmographic targeting of firms by industry, location, size, and revenue. An energy broker might, for instance, target industries and manufacturing firms because their bills will be a lot more than offices.
• Market segmentation: You can use this method very well in case of social media marketing. Because when you reduce the number of people that you target in a social media campaign, you will not only get higher click-through rates, but you will also save on marketing.

Why demographics matter in marketing?

You’ll find people who will buy from you, know what they care about and have a product or service that they’ll love when you know the audiences.

Also, demographics have the following use:

• Business plans: Demographics allow you to know what size market is likely to exist for your business plan.
• Market research: reveals which subsets of the consumers will likely purchase your product or use your service. You may find the groups you thought would be most responsive to your business aren’t so interested as you thought and the groups you thought would be less responsive are very responsive.
• Branding: Knowing the age, class, sex, and other demographics of your current customers and prospect group, you can build your logo, images and branding so that it appeals to your best customers.
• Use of Media: Demographics enable you to know what to do with your ad dollars. – If you have an older target group, social media won’t work as well as you would like as the audiences are younger on social media (but that’s changing).

Marketers and companies – What Are Demographics?

Companies use demographics for the following four main purposes in order to make a marketing strategy:

• Social media marketing: Knowing which social platforms your followers are on and the manner in which they consume each of those is how you can better produce and post social media content.
• Ads: Websites, radio stations, email newsletters etc generally also have audience demographic data. Read their media packs to see which advertising sites should be expected to have the best ROI.
• Marketing campaign photos: Branding is no longer optional and if you know the demographics of your audience you can choose to speak to your target consumers in words as well as pictures. This should be part of your buyer personas which we will cover later.
• Advertising and marketing photographs: Would you put ads for a product with an almost entirely rural market in subways or buses? This is why the ads in public transport are specializing in movies or apps ­ and it’s because people in the cities consume these goods and services more than those who live in the countryside.

Demographic market segmentation examples

Consider every demographic group to determine how to invest your marketing dollars. Here are some examples:

• Age groups: place ads on the most watched media types for your audience like booking TV time or scheduling Direct Mail for older adults who want to apply for Medicare.
• Genre: You can also use gender to see whether a social network would prefer to showcase your product on men or women. Suppose for instance a cosmetic brand selects a platform with more women and a necktie brand selects a platform that has a majority of men as its users.
• Race and ethnicity are a politically hot demographic because brands are being pushed to protest racism. Brands should know the experiences of customers and be in their voice on marketing collateral. It’s particularly the case when a product is targeted to a particular group, like Black women shampoo.
• Location: This is why a retailer might during the winter place digital ads for its gardening products to Southeast consumers, but its snow blowers digital ads to people in the Northeast or Midwest.
• Marriage is a great demographic for a couple’s resort.
• High school is also good for publishers who market YA books, children’s picture books and political essay series.
• Work is relevant for non-consumer campaigns. — for a school supply business, it could be worthwhile to go directly to teachers since they tend to fill up their classrooms.
• Employment status could be useful to a payday advance company seeking out applicants for job roles with traditional low pay.
• Income level information used by luxury goods and services firms to market online and offline.

How to gather, use and store demographic data 6 tips!

These are 6 ways to increase your revenue with demographics and a who your business is for.

1.Customer relationship management (CRM) software

You can do a demographic report of your existing clientele and those who have not purchased from you yet. How much you can do is based on how much information you’ve gathered about them.

If you’re shopping for CRM software, please choose the one that gives you the most flexibility when it comes to the number of records you have per client and makes it easy to find clients by groups with the information you have.

You will also need to decide what demographic data you’re collecting and update collection forms to add the fields.

Consider geographical location for a demographic use-case. You might syndicate a webinar via your CRM software, but hold separate webinars for customers and prospects on different time zones. Also, you can track who visits your website more often than average and also use your CRM to find which customers and leads are closer to making a purchase.

Today’s CRM software also gives you information about what demographics are most receptive to your advertising. And with that data you could invest more time and energy in those groups to drive sales.

2.Consumer and demographic data analysis

To enlarge customer profiles, you can send customer and prospect data to consumer and demographic data analysis companies. If these analysis companies will give you the data you have, you may be able to discern this about people’s particular situation in order to segment them:

• Chance of Purchasing Certain Products/Services.
• Traffic in their area (so they know where the store should be)
• Local crime, health and education data.
• Socioeconomic makeup of neighbourhoods
• Individual net worth

For instance, if you’re an online merchant of luxury clothing, this type of data can help guide where to build new shops or where to advertise.

3.Buyer personas

A buyer persona is a list of every possible guess you can make about an imaginary customer. Product teams and marketing teams benefit the most from buyer personas. Personas are about giving the statistics some character and personality, so that you can better know your ideal clients, their desires and pain points.

A buyer persona contains the assumptions of a perfect customer’s age, education, employment and income, marriage, car type, life problems, places to seek guidance and hobbies and interests. A lot of companies just load a photo off Google images of how they imagine a person in a persona will appear and call them by name.

For the inspiration of your buyer personas, demographic data is usually a great source of information where you can spot common traits among your prospects.

4.Customer care/sales team regular contact

Most people and companies are open to contact after purchase. They feel like they are valued by that company. Not only does calling give you an opportunity to assemble the demographic data you have on each customer, but it might open up upsells you never would have considered before.

If you have an in-house team for this, great. Otherwise, you can outsource it to a call centre. Learn more about which call center will be right for your business in our guide.

5.Social media advertising

Facebook and Instagram offer the most demographically filterable targeted ads to consumers and brands. You’ll have to create a social media account for your business to use their services.

After that, you will need to join the advertising networks of each platform you would like to market your products/services on. Select your business’s best interests’ demographics, budget and upload the campaign art.

6.Third-party data providers

There are hundreds of expert B2B/B2C data suppliers in the United States from whom you can purchase lists of targeted email, telephone, and postal marketing contact information.

While their lists are not as granular and detailed as the advertising systems of social media platforms, direct marketing is a cheaper path to your end market.

If this is the way you go, be extremely specific with every list owner on what you want so you don’t end up purchasing data that won’t generate anything back.

Costs of running an email marketing campaign are low and inbox delivery rates are high — it all depends on your email marketing platform.

Marketing succeeds because demographics matter.

You must know who they are if you’re going to have marketing that appeals to them. That means data such as who they are, where they’re from and what they like. The more data you have on your target demographics, the better able you are to customize your marketing materials to not only get them but also keep them. If you’re ready to make your marketing even better, implement a few of the tips above and get started in taking advantage of your customers’ marketing demographics.