7–10 minutes“You can’t test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don’t care about demographics. You have to understand who you’re going after.” – George Lois
Before I get started, I have a simple question to ask you.
Do you know your customers?
No, seriously. Do you really know who your customers are?
Do you know what your customers like? Do you know what your customers’ pain points are?
What is the ideal customer’s age group? Are they young or in an older age group?
Do they live in an urban environment? Or do they live somewhere rural? Or do they live in between?
These are all particularly important questions to ask yourself if you run a business or want to start a business. It is important to know who’s going to buy your products or request your services. If you don’t know who your customer is, then it will be something that you will need to dig deep and brainstorm before you go any further.
What are customer demographics?
Customer demographics are components of statistical data used to describe the characteristics of a business’s customers. It is used to efficiently categorize consumer groups for business purposes, which includes using it as a part of a marketing plan. It helps businesses to be able to segment and directly target certain groups when marketing a product and/or service.
Below are the traditional components used as demographic data:
- Age
- Gender
- Race or ethnicity
- Household income
- Education level
- Marital status
- Geographical location
- Occupation
- Home ownership (Rent or Own)
- Number of children in household
Why is important to understand customer behavior?
While it is nice to use traditional demographics, it is also important to examine behavior trends as well. By doing so, it will help provide a clearer understanding and picture of your ideal customer or customer group. It is important to understand behavior elements such as motivation, perception, beliefs, and attitudes can greatly influence purchasing decisions. Other behavior elements that affect purchasing behavior include personality traits, values, interests, and lifestyles, which adds complexity to a demographic analysis.
When you understand these psychological purchasing drivers, it helps to enable marketers to develop the right message that connects on a deeper level and tapping into the underlying psychological reasons why consumers choose one brand over another. By having the right message, you develop a human connection with your company and its branding.
What are other psychological factors that affect consumer behavior?
Emotions are a powerful force in consumer behavior. Research shows that emotional responses can significantly influence buying decisions, often more so than rational thought. There is no single type of emotion that affects when a customer decides to make a purchase. Both good and bad emotions affect consumer purchasing behavior.
Let’s think about it for a moment.
Who has not gone to the store and bought a pint of ice cream or a 6-pack of beer after a very emotionally charged day? When was the last time that you saw an ad and it triggered an intense emotional memory from your childhood? When was the last time you bought your favorite dark chocolate bar as a reward after motivating yourself to thrive through an intense day?
Marketers who understand the emotional triggers that compel consumers to act can create campaigns that evoke the desired feelings, whether it’s joy, nostalgia, or urgency, enhancing the overall purchasing experience. It makes a big difference in the success of a marketing campaign when a company markets a product based on a specific human emotional experience.
Emotions can affect many distinct aspects of the consumer purchasing behavior. It can make an impact on how a customer maintains brand loyalty with your brand.
Emotions can affect the type of purchase that a customer makes – both big and small – and the timing of the purchase. If a customer has higher arousal emotions (i.e., anger, joy, surprise), then it will lead to more impulsive purchasing decisions. On the other side, when a customer has lower arousal emotions (i.e., calm, peaceful, relaxed, bored, depressed, tired), then it will lead to taking more time to make the purchase and require more research before the purchase can be made.
Emotions can affect the level of customer satisfaction. If a customer is happy, then the level of satisfaction goes up. On the other hand, when a customer is angry or sad, then the level of satisfaction goes down. When satisfaction is down, it will require more effort from the company to encourage a customer to make the purchase, which will potentially cost more.
Why is segmenting your audience important?
Once you know who your ideal audience is, it is time to segment this information into a customer group or persona. By combining the demographic and psychographic data into customer segments, it will help you create more targeted marketing campaigns that speak directly to the motivations and preferences of different consumer groups. Along with creating target marketing campaigns, segmenting this data is especially important because it helps companies to save time, money and other resources.
With that said, be sure to create more than one customer group or persona and give each one a human name: i.e., Jane, Anna, Bruce. By doing so, it will provide an essential tool to use in the future for any new product or service that you decide to create and add a human touch to its creation.
Consider segmentation as your secret sauce for any marketing campaign.
What are the best practices for using both demographics and customer behavior in marketing?
To effectively reach diverse consumer profiles, businesses should adopt a multi-faceted marketing approach in the form of personalization. This includes creating personalized content that speaks to the unique needs and preferences of different audience segments. By tailoring to a specific audience segment, personalization can help improve communications with customers by aligning with their needs and desires.
By creating effective marketing content using both demographics and psychographics, companies create more effective marketing content that connects with its audience. When companies and its brands connect with its audience, it increases customer engagement along with increased brand awareness and loyalty.
Along with creating a human connection, using personalization as a part of a company’s overall strategy can help to drive successful and informed business decisions that can go beyond a company’s marketing. It can help other departments within a company like sales, product development, and customer service, which could potentially save money for a company because the company understands the customer’s needs and desires.
This is a win-win for everyone.
When using personalization as a part of your company’s overall strategy, it is important to know whether you are targeting the right customer for your product and/or service. It is important to review your target audience frequently and continuously revise your customer personas as needed. Be sure to take note and determine if your customer personas are too broad or too narrow in scope.
When a company targets the wrong customer, it can make an impact on the company’s overall financial bottom-line, especially with its marketing budget. There’s the risk of lost time because you are taking time away from the customers that you want to target. A company also risks negative feedback and bad reviews, which can harm a company’s reputation.
How do you know if you targeted the right customer audience?
Utilizing data analytics and consumer feedback can help refine marketing strategies, ensuring that messages are relevant and resonate with various demographic and psychographic groups.
Whether you use Salesforce, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, HubSpot, or MailChimp, it is important to review your data to track what’s working and what’s a virtual dumpster fire waiting to happen. At the end of the day, data does not lie. It will be the only source of honest feedback that you will receive. With that said, be sure to obtain data from multiple sources, so you can obtain enough information that will help make the right decision to move forward in either direction.
When analyzing data, be sure to utilize A/B testing using a small portion of your customer persona whenever you try any new campaign strategy to be sure, which content will work for what your goals are. It is important to know what works for your target customer persona. By doing so, it will help to save money and time.
And if both options do not do well, then it is completely okay to start from scratch. It may be the most ideal solution, yet it is better than receiving negative feedback from customers.
Conclusion
When you are running a business or want to start a new business, it is important to know who will buy your products or request your services. It is important to use both demographics and psychographics to develop several customer personas for your business and give each persona a name. By doing so, this tool will help you know what products customers want and why they want them.
Personalization helps to develop a human connection with your business. By segmenting your personalized customer personas, it will help save money and time to focus on marketing campaigns that will be successful.
With each innovative marketing campaign, be sure to test often using an A/B method to be sure that you are targeting the right consumer persona and not the wrong one. By using multiple data analytic sources, it will help create an honest picture of how successful your marketing strategy is.
In the end, by putting everything together, your business will be on the road to success.
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