Understanding Demographics and Psychographics for Marketing

Let's talk more in detail about demographics, psychographics, and interests. Demographics are the statistical characteristics of a population that marketers use to better understand and segment groups of people, right? And it includes information that is included in demographics, such as age, gender, income level, education, occupation, marital status, ethnicity, race, household size, geographic location, and income, right? A lot of these are like census-type information in the way we describe populations by numbers and characterizations. And you could segment your audience based on these demographic factors to create specific buyer personas that represent different segments of your target market.

One segment might be stay-at-home moms between the ages of 25 and 39. Another segment might be retirees, people, men and women, 60 years and over. And you might have the same product, but communicate the benefits or different benefits to each of these different segments, which is why you have different segments, because they have different needs, different expectations, different aspirations.

And you speak to them differently and find them on different platforms. One group might be on Instagram and the other group might be on X, right? So the more you understand about your audience from a demographic standpoint, the easier it is to locate them and communicate with them, right? And we use data from web analytics, social media insight, and customer data, your sales reports, et cetera, to validate your demographic assumptions, right? So you may go into the market with certain assumptions about who your core audience is, but when you get the actual results, when you look at your meta, you go to your meta business suite and you see who's engaging with your content on Instagram, it might be that the actual audience for your content is older than what you thought your target audience should be or is, right? So you do want to validate the initial assumptions that you have around the demographics with this information. And I'll go into a little bit more detail as to where you can find this information.

But let's discuss psychographics. Psychographics is diving deeper into the psychographic profiles of your target audience to understand their values, their attitudes, their lifestyle, their interests, their hobbies, their aspirations, and their personality traits. Psychographics are essentially the qualitative characteristics of people that explain why they behave the way they do, going beyond the surface-level demographics.

Instead of focusing on who your audience is, such as the age, the gender, the income, all those demographic factors, psychographics look at the mindset, the lifestyle, the motivation, right? And in doing so, you want to be able to identify common pain points, desires, aspirations, and motivations that influence their purchasing decisions and behaviors. And what is this going to help you do? It's going to help you communicate to them. It's going to help you position your product to them.

And we'll be getting into product positioning and communications because the more you understand about what it is that they need, what it is that they're looking for, what's preventing them from reaching their aspirations, the more compelling your advertising messaging and your brand messaging is going to be because you're addressing the things that are important to them. There's relevance. And so just to summarize that, demographics tell you who the customer is.

Psychographics tell you why they buy, engage, or prefer one product over another. And then there are consumer behaviors. And we want to analyze the behaviors and purchasing patterns of your target audience, including where they shop, how they research products, which social media platforms they use, and how they prefer to communicate.

All those points are important factors that you have to consider when developing your campaign strategy. And we want to use data from website analytics, and we'll look at Google Analytics in this session, social media insights, and customer interactions to identify behavioral trends and preferences. And you can get some information sometimes from your sales force.

They're out there speaking to the customers one-on-one, in many instances, and finding out why they're not buying or what they're looking for. And actually, that information should be cataloged and shared with the marketing team that's creating the messaging. It should be that linkage.

And you need to utilize psychographic insight to build out audience personas and develop audience targeting strategies. Once you understand, the more you understand, whether it's psychographic, demographics, or the behavior of the audience, all of which will be cataloged in your personas, then you could develop the, we're using this insight, develop more sophisticated audience targeting strategies, right? So when we talk about behavior, we're talking about the observable actions and patterns of consumers. This may include both offline and online behavior.

Unlike demographics, who they are, or psychographics, why they think or feel a certain way, behavior focuses on what people actually do, right? This includes engagement behavior, how they interact with marketing channels, whether they're clicking on ads, subscribing to emails, downloading white papers, following brands on social media, which brands are they following, as well as the purchase behavior. How often do they purchase? When do they purchase? Are they seasonal? Do they only purchase when there's a sale? And what do they buy? What are the core products that they're interested in? Are they first-time buyers or are they loyal customers or repeat purchases? Are they purchasing online or are they going into stores and purchase? All of this information, most of this, if that, all of this information is tracked, right, somewhere, and we have to analyze that information and to gain a better understanding of how our consumers are behaving. All right, so I already introduced audience personas, and just to reiterate, an audience persona is a semi-fictional profile representing a key segment of a business's target market created from data about real customers to provide a relatable, detailed picture of who they are, what they need, and how to reach them, right? So you're including demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics in your persona, and you want to give each persona a name, a photo, a background story, and specific attributes that represent your ideal customers.

Why do you do that? Because you want to make them alive. You want them to no longer just be facts and figures in a spreadsheet or Google Doc or deck, but something that pulls all that together into a composite that anyone who's working to market to this group understands who exactly it is that they are marketing to. And so the personas are used to guide your marketing strategies, content creation, product development, and customer engagement efforts.

All right, now once you have developed your targeted audiences and created personas for your audiences, you want to continuously test and refine your target audience profile based on feedback, web analytics, and social insight, right? Feedback can come from Google reviews or Yelp reviews, can come from questions you ask customers, you know, continue to, you know, interact with your customers, web analytics, and we'll look at the information that you can get from Google Analytics, and social insight. Each of the social media platforms tracks customer engagement and customer demographics. You want to monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns and customer interactions to identify areas for improvement and optimization.

And good news, in the day, in the, you know, the era of AI, most, if not all of these marketing platforms, Meta, TikTok, Google, LinkedIn, etc., will provide recommendations to optimize your campaign by having AI analyze your campaign and as well as campaigns of your competitors and come up with best practices and ideas specific to your campaign. You also want to stay informed about evolving customer needs and market trends by reviewing social media trend reports and other sources of consumer information, and I'll show you that. And once that's done, you want to create a feedback loop with your target audience to gather insights, solicit feedback, and build relationships.

You want to encourage customer engagement through surveys, reviews, social media interactions, and customer support channels to understand their preferences and address their concerns, right? And one great way of, you know, obtaining information, a survey-wise, and we can do so after a customer service call. I'm sure you've all been on customer service calls where you said, hey, if you stay on for a few minutes, we'd like to ask you a few questions. You can email surveys to your customers, right? And you want to use the results of this feedback to tweak your product offerings, your customer policies, your brand messaging, and your marketing campaigns.