Identifying Your Demographics for Your Business

You probably have a good idea of your local demographic – who is spending money on your brand in your community. These are people that you see regularly, oftentimes in person or over the phone, and from whom you can get micro-feedback easily. This is a good place to start with understanding your target market.

However, in today’s digital world, marketing needs to reach farther and be more flexible than what is often portrayed in movies and television shows. Even mom-and-pop businesses have to compete with major brands on platforms such as Google Reviews, Yelp, and other platforms.

This is important for maintaining your brand, but most importantly also for growing and expanding your business and market potential. You have to protect your brand from not only competitors, but also a transient market and to compensate for the growth, decline, and changes in the population of your area.

Let’s look at some of the key elements of understanding your demographic and how important that is to digital marketing. Some of the most important categories are:

• Age
• Occupation
• Salary
• Location

Age Demographics

Age is one of the aspects of consumer identity that is most like a rubber-band. It expands and contracts as technology and communications do the same, but also has elements that tend to stay in the same relative area in relation to other parts of the age spectrum.

If you sell luxury sports cars, for example, you can generalize the idea to include young, single people and middle-aged to early retirement aged people no matter the other elements involved. Why these age groups?

Very generically speaking, young single people who are doing well for themselves might purchase them as a status symbol. Meanwhile, retired and middle-aged people are either often new empty-nesters or enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of work to achieve a lifelong dream.

This is not so easy to identify in many other markets, however. For example, people of all adult ages enjoy going to casinos in Las Vegas, in which case it becomes more about educating your audience than being able to identify a singular age group.

It’s also important to note that identifying a target market and focusing marketing on them does not mean you should exclude others who are interested. You never know where a lead might come from, and what kinds of trends might take your brand to a new audience altogether!

Occupation

It’s important to point out that none of these categories by themselves is enough to truly find your market. That said, occupation can help you understand what kinds of pricing, sales, and other point of sale concepts might be most important to bringing in your target market.

Occupation can be misleading if used in isolation, but it can give some broad categorizations of market personalities and disposable or flexible income, depending on what you are selling. For example, if you are selling fishing boats in a lake-side community where most of the people work in industrial, blue collar work, you have a pretty solid market base around you.

On the same token, you need to consider that population when considering pricing, what types of boats to carry, and how much inventory to maintain in stock. Once everyone who wants a boat in that community has what they need, how do you maintain that clientele? How do you find new clientele?

Understanding the occupations in the area, you might discover that a parallel product, such as stand-up paddleboarding or kayaking, much more affordable watersports activities, could provide a means to get into another niche in the market. You might also then have younger clients with a positive experience with your brand later on coming in to buy your top-of-the-line fishing boat as they move up in their job.

Salary

This might seem obvious, but market research into salaries is one of the most important considerations when marketing your brand. If you’re trying to sell Lamborghinis in a town with no major industrial or technological corporate presence, it’s going to be difficult because that much disposable income tends to come from specific types of jobs and entrepreneurs.

That’s not to say it’s impossible at all, but it’s something to be aware of!

Another thing to consider with salary is what niche can your business fill that the surrounding community’s labor pool can afford. Whether this is at the top or bottom of the range of income is also important to consider because that can and will affect sales – do you go for regular, repeat sales, or once-in-a-while sales with service packages to maintain income?

Location

This was touched on a bit earlier, but location is extremely important to your brand’s digital marketing. You can have the most amazing website and social media on the market, but without being able to either bring your customers to you or your business to them, you’re going to have a hard time.

Going back to the boat sales example from earlier, it’s far easier to sell boats when there is a body of water for people to use somewhere nearby. Las Vegas, in the middle of the desert, has a thriving boat market because Lake Mead, Lake Las Vegas, Lake Mohave, and several other bodies of water are nearby and it has a large population.

On the same token, if you are selling street motorcycles in a rural environment where there are mostly gravel or dirt roads, and the ground is covered in ice and cold most of the year, you are going to have a harder time than in Las Vegas.

Location is important to consider on multiple levels: where are your customers located, where are you located, and how can you bridge that gap?

Conclusion

These are just four of the most important aspects of identifying your demographic, or target market, and making sure that you are marketing your product effectively to bring in that revenue, create leads, and improve your brand.

It’s a lot of work, but it is essential to understand and maintain constant research and engagement with your marketing plan to keep up with the rapid pace of digital marketing and digital audiences. Trends on social media can last as little as a few hours or days, and missing out on those opportunities can cost you lost revenue and clientele.

PixelPop Marketing offers free consultations to meet with us and learn how we can help your business thrive in today’s digital world. To find out more about how we can help you with affordable options, or even how you can help yourself, get started with us today!