Customer demographics form an essential part of small business marketing. They help you spot the individuals in your audience by categorizing them through their key characteristics and preferences.
Here is a list of the main roles that customer demographic data plays in marketing.
- They explain what your target audience and target market are made of.
- They segment your customers by identifying their individual characteristics.
- They make your marketing efforts more relevant and effective.
- They help you refine your marketing budget to make more informed and targeted investment decisions.
- They help you identify how to engage your audience.
This post is for small business owners who want to improve their marketing efforts by targeting various customer segments more effectively. That’s why we will be discussing the benefits of using target customer demographics in building marketing strategies.
You must have seen advertisements that don’t seem to be made for you. They seem to be targeted to customers from a different segment. If you have experienced this, it means you have witnessed the power of customer demographics in business marketing.
Customer demographic data helps businesses narrow down who they need to show their ads to get the best results. This saves them money and time by assisting them to avoid showing their ads to those who are not interested in the products they are selling. After all, not everyone can be interested in buying a certain kind of dress or installing a particular new app on their phone.
An intelligent entrepreneur would probably use target customer demographics from the very beginning of developing a marketing strategy. He would probably gain an edge over his competitors by harnessing the power of customer demographic data and using it from the beginning of his market research.
Before we talk about the importance of using customer demographics in marketing, let’s define this term so that you have a better understanding of it.
What is Customer Demographics?
Customer demographics refer to the statistical data related to the unique characteristics and identities of individuals targeted by a business. They describe who these individuals are, how they live, what they do, how far they have studied, how much they earn, and the kind of lifestyle they have.
Customers are often segmented based on customer demographic data. This means the audience you are targeting is divided into small groups with the same characteristics. For example, a company that sells luxury jewelry and targets the people of the Northeast may categorize the audience by their location or income level. This kind of segmentation streamlines the marketing efforts of the business to direct the marketing messages towards the most relevant and narrower customer base.
There are several different ways a business can segment its target audience based on customer demographics. The five main components used for such segmentation are as follows.
- Age group
- Gender
- Income level
- Education level
- Occupation
Each of these components of target customer demographics has merits in developing a marketing strategy. Any business would focus on those components that most strongly determine their consumer behavior and needs.
Besides segmentation based on customer demographic data, a business might segment its audience in the following ways.
- Psychographic segmentation
- Geographic segmentation
- Behavioral segmentation
- Firmographic segmentation
Each of these types of segmentation has its own benefits. However, customer demographics segmentation is the most commonly used type of segmentation, as it is relevant to almost all businesses.
Importance of Customer Demographic Data in Marketing
Target customer demographics are essential in identifying people who are most likely to convert into customers. These are the people who match your buyer persona. In other words, they best fit your idea or version of an ideal customer.
Customer demographics inform you about your marketing and advertising strategies from the bottom up. Pushing a product in the face of an unrelated or unreceptive audience can waste a company’s financial and human resources. It is best to do your research first and figure out sufficient customer demographic data before launching your first marketing campaign.
Customer demographics impact the following aspects of a business.
1. Business Plan
A business plan is a document that primarily explains how your company will generate revenue. To build your action plan, you need to ensure that your target audience knows about your products and services. Thus the foundation of most business plans is identifying the target customer demographics that will be focused upon in the company’s marketing campaigns.
2. Market Research
When you do your market research, it is easier to gather data to know which segments of the market you are targeting. Limiting your research to your target customer demographics, you can tweak your efforts to get the most relevant and valuable insights. It also helps identify subgroups among your audience that is most likely to respond to your promotional campaigns. This helps you prevent sending out messages to those portions of the audience that are likely to be unresponsive.
3. Visual Branding
Creating branding visuals and images that your target audience can relate to is vital in marketing. When you clearly know the customer demographics you are targeting, it becomes easier to build these images and visuals in a way that your audience can resonate with them. When you know your existing customers’ age, gender, social class, and other critical demographics, you can fine-tune your marketing visuals to make them more effective.
4. Media Use
If your customer demographic data shows that your existing customer base is skewed towards the older generation, tactics like Instagram or TikTok marketing might backfire. Social media audiences from these platforms are generally the younger demographic. Similarly, placing women’s wear ads in a men’s magazine won’t make much sense either. If your data determines most of your target audience to be women, there is no point in running ads on media that are mostly viewed by men only. Knowing your customer demographics allows you to make the best media use in marketing.
Using Customer Demographics in Marketing
Here are a few ways in which target customer demographics are directly used in marketing.
1. Social Media Marketing
Most social media platforms give access to detailed customer demographic data, especially if you run ads on them. For example, when you run Facebook ads, you can view valuable insights about the audience of your ads through the Facebook Ads Manager. You can use these insights in designing effective social media campaigns for the future. For instance, if your target market comprises mainly women, and you notice that the user base of Pinterest is primarily women, running Pinterest campaigns might be particularly useful for your brand.
2. Ad Spends
When you know the customer demographics you are targeting, you can be more informed about your ad spend strategy. For instance, age group can be a particularly powerful demographic in determining your ad spend. Some older adults have great spending power, while the younger generation might generally be tighter on their budget.
3. Image Placement
Knowing your customer demographics helps you determine where to find the most relevant audience for placing your marketing images when it comes to public transit ads. For example, you would never place ads for a product in subway stations of a rural area if most of the people using the product live in urban areas. If you target urban residents, you wouldn’t want to waste your resources displaying your product photos to the far-fetched rural regions.
4. Website Content
The kind of content you type or upload on your brand website would greatly be determined by your target customer demographics. For example, if your target customers are children, you can make your website as colorful as you like.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If you target professionals, your website must look neat, informative, and well organized.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If you are running an eCommerce website to sell consumer products targeted to a particular niche, you want to ensure that your site’s search feature is effective. Your site visitors should be able to conveniently find the products they are looking for to buy from your online store.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
The simplest way to design the most appealing website for any customer demographics is to use our ready-to-use website templates. At Strikingly, we offer templates divided into different categories.
Image taken from Strikingly
If you need a website to showcase your services, you can select a template from our ‘service’ category. If you want to sell products directly through your website, select from our ‘store’ category. By choosing a suitable template, you can save hours and hours of work creating your web design from scratch.
Strikingly is a website builder that offers technologically advanced but easy-to-use tools for professional web development. We update our features regularly with the sole objective of providing our customers with a smooth experience of building and maintaining a website on our platform.
