Knowing your Customer Demographics

As a business owner, success compels you to know who your target audience is. Market research is only the tip of the iceberg, knowing your customers demographics will make or break your marketing campaign.

Wikipedia describes customer demographics as the gender, age, race, income, mobility, disabilities, home ownership, location, educational attainment, and employment status of a consumer.

Determining these classifications can help the right marketing campaign triple in profits. However, not knowing your target audience could also cripple a campaign.

You may feel that your products appeal to many people, that does not mean that you should market to everyone.

Your brand will thrive if it has the right target audience.

What Is A Target Audience?

Eventually you will need to sit down and identify the people that buy your products the most.

Segmentation or targeting your main buyers will help you build your company at a fast pace. With the right audience, you can impress your clients/customers and attract even more potential buyers.

How Do You Identify Your Target Audience?

Focus on what problem you are solving for your customer. If you have just launched your product or service, then the best alternative is to research your competition. This process can take time and is a difficult task. So avoid assumptions and build your analysis on facts.

Once your business grows, you may want to re-evaluate your target market and make sure that their demographics have not changed.

Your target market is a major part of your business. Knowing who your main buyers are and refining your audience will keep you on a productive path.

Years ago the average marketer would target broadly. Sending direct mail to a local community or subdivision. During this time, people were harder to get in touch with and lived for word of mouth marketing. However, this method cost businesses a lot of money.

Now as a business owner, you have the opportunity to use demographic tools like Facebook to specify your target audience. You can interact with specific demographics based on their personal engagements. For example, a new mom or student who is getting ready to leave for college.

So How Exactly Does This Kind Of Targeting Work?

This method is a form of data mining marketing. It differs from traditional market research. Data mining will allow a business owner to use computerized tools that provide insights about their potential buyers.

For example, if a credit card company used data mining as a marketing strategy, they could determine a client’s buying habits from their credit card purchase history. This will allow the company to create targeted ads and make recommendations based on their purchases in the past.

Defining Your Target Audience

To clearly define your target audience, you must ask the questions that matter.

The questions can consist of:

How will these features benefit my client/customer?

Where do they like to shop?

Are they more comfortable with offline or online marketing?

Be specific with your questions. Customers can go into so many categories. There is an endless amount of variables and segments you can place them in. Some of the most common ones will consist of gender, age, location, marital status, occupation, hobbies and income. 

Demographics is the key to your business success. Knowing how to place your customers into segments and targeting groups will offer a long-term solution to your business growth. This can impact other business opportunities, cross promotions and up selling.

Defining your target audience is an art. And narrowing it down can tremendously enhance your business. As the marketplace continues to change and shift your ideal customer will evolve. Get ahead of your competition by studying them regularly.