Demographic data is a key ingredient when it comes to product development, delivery and performance analysis. Savvy businesses use demographic data to formulate a customer profile. Why? Unlike brick and mortar retailers who come face-to-face with (and get to know) their customers, online customers maintain a certain level of anonymity. Demographics give us insight into who is buying the product, which in turn helps to advise product development, performance tracking and marketing plans.

Who is Your Customer?

Analyzing demographics data provides a customer blueprint or profile. Get to know your ideal customer by identifying key characteristics using the following criteria:

• Demographics: age, gender, income
• Psychographics: personality type, preferences
• Behavior: including likes and dislikes, sports, hobbies, interests, etc.

Find out what your customers do and other actions they take so that you can better understand who they are, where they’re finding information and what is important to them:

• Where do they hang out?
• What do they read?
• What do they search for online?
• How did they find your site?

Solicit feedback from customers through surveys and ratings. Answer the following questions:

• Why did they originally buy from our company?
• Why do they continue to buy from our company?
• What do we do that others don’t?
• What are areas in which we could improve?

Create Customer Profiles

Once you have the data collected, use it to build a customer profile or persona. Include tangible characteristics that will help you see your customers as more than just traffic numbers, but living, breathing people. Be sure to create a specific profile for each identifiable client group. Assign names and images to humanize your profiles.

Marketing - A Competitive Edge

Know more about your customers in order to outsmart, and outperform your competitors. This holds true across all marketing channels including social, email, display advertising and search engine marketing.

Demographics data shows that Americans in every age group are showing an increased social media presence, a trend that holds strong across gender, race, religious and socioeconomic lines. Social media usage has changed dramatically in the last ten years.

According to Pew Research Center, “Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65%) use social networking sites, up from 7% in 2005.” In addition, social media usage among seniors has risen from 2% in 2005 to 35% today (Pew Research Center).

Analytics data provided by social platforms today not only depicts how users are accessing digital content, but how they are sharing, discussing and using it. Measurement tools such as Google Analytics further pinpoint how and what social media platforms your client groups are using and how they are landing on your site.

According to Pew Research Center, “Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65%) use social networking sites, up from 7% in 2005.” In addition, social media usage among seniors has risen from 2% in 2005 to 35% today (Pew Research Center).

Demographic insight works for marketing beyond social too. Some demographics are more likely to open emails at certain times, and are more likely to engage with certain subject lines. If you’re allocating some of your budget to display advertising, be sure you’re targeting the websites that your customer demographic is most likely to visit, and displaying advertisements that will resonate with them.

Put Customer Profiles to Work for You

Now that you have a clear picture of the client groups you are serving, product development, performance tracking and marketing become more refined. Creating content with these ideal customers in mind will save precious time and resources. Not only will you be able to better serve your customers by taking a proactive approach, you will also have a formula in place to reach new customers. For example, if the data shows that the 18-35 age group interested in health and fitness is spending more of their time utilizing social media apps than browsing the web, dedicate resources to sharing supplemental digital content or video trailers for health and fitness on their social media platform of choice… Snapchat or Twitter perhaps? Anticipating your customers’ needs by creating customer profiles will streamline every aspect of business moving forward.