What are Demographics?
Demographics is a statistical view of a population, generally including age, gender, income, schooling, occupation, and other demographic information.
- They are the statistical component of marketing used to identify population segments by specific characteristics.
- They describe us as individuals: ethnicity, age/generation, gender, income, marital status, education, and homeownership.
- It affects all business owners’ choices when developing a marketing plan. Using demographics gives you a head start in understanding your market.
- It is the ultimate categorization tool because grouping consumers based on characteristics allows organizations to serve their ideal customers’ needs better.
Hence, a sales-related definition would be: “The characteristics of human populations and population segments, especially when used to identify consumer markets.”
Marketing means “selling a product or service to the person most likely to buy it based on their unique needs and preferences.”
Why is Sales Demographics Important?
Understanding your target customers’ demographics is critical to your business’s success. Whether small or large, businesses need a targeted approach to consumers.
Business owners or sales reps often first gather demographic information to include in the business plans used to raise start-up funds and guide the launching of the business. Demographic information includes geographic area, age, income, race, gender, and education level. It also includes shopping habits, marital status, number of children, and other information about consumer characteristics. Due to technological development, many options and tools exist to gather the data necessary for business plans. Business owners nowadays start to use some of the best business plan software when it comes to gathering demographic info for their business plans. This software uses AI and open resources to do that quickly and precisely. A lot of important information lies in the demographic.
Demographic information is one of the best pieces of information you’ll collect from your audience, and it is a number of the foremost processes. It helps you outline style components like the colors your target market can respond best to and the ideal user expertise for your average customer’s technical knowledge.
This information may help you gear your site’s content and data toward the foremost search for keywords and terms. It will basically help you use the principles of program improvement to your benefit. Also, it helps you avoid the hit-and-miss marketing method.
5 Reasons to Use Demographics in Sales –
Demographics should be a basic action in sales pipeline management. Here are a few reasons supporting the statement.
1. Understanding the Ideal Customer
Every business has an ideal customer profile. As you create the ideal customer profile, you delve deeper into that customer’s tastes, preferences, and potential issues with a product or service. Doing so allows you to improve and create sales opportunities targeting your desired customer. Hence, your sales representatives wouldn’t have to waste a lot of time.
2. Lowering Sales and Marketing Costs
Sales and Marketing can be extremely expensive, and a medium is one of the factors that essentially decide your budget. If you know your target demographics, you can stretch that budget by going where you can find your ideal customer. If you’re looking to target an audience, spending money on a direct mail marketing campaign wouldn’t make sense–they’re all on social media. Instead of large, blanket sales and marketing strategies that cast wide nets for a few fish, you can cast your fishing rod and catch your limit in a smaller, more effective pond.
3. Identifying New Opportunities
Not only do demographics help you find your ideal customer, they can help you identify gaps in your sales/marketing strategy. You will have to understand different consumer bases. Similarly, your key demographic might ask for products and features based on their lifestyles, which would mean a no-brainer addition to a product or service line.
4. Creating Unique Selling Points
Demographics help you create a good sales/marketing story. Instead of just throwing a product or service out there and hoping it sticks, you can create as well as define scenarios to which your customers can relate. If you think about some of the products and services you use regularly, chances are you can identify times when you were specifically marketed based on age, gender, geographical location, economic status, and overall lifestyle.
5. Increasing Sales
The most important function of demographics in sales/marketing is increasing sales. By understanding consumers, any business can increase marketing efforts to target those most likely to buy. Whether changing your marketing strategy or offering current customers more products and services, you must know what consumers want.
Hence, it’s well worth the sales rep’s time to work up a demographic profile of the target company before much time has been spent.
Applications of Demographics in Sales’ Perspective –
- Demographics can help you avoid costly mistakes in your marketing plan.
- They can reveal that placing fliers on car windshields is not the best marketing plan for an errand business, which needs to target small, single-owner businesses.
- A survey can provide information about gym membership preferences that attract more customers.
- You can use demographics to identify subscribers of your city’s largest newspaper as the ideal consumer market for your new magazine.
- A dry cleaning business owner might base her decisions on a chamber of commerce survey that shows residents of a specific moderate to high-income community drive at least 10 miles to the nearest dry cleaner.
- The number of homeowners in a community influences your decision about where to locate your hardware store.
- A survey of carpet cleaning customers might reveal that most customers search the Internet first for local businesses.
Where to get the Demographic Information?
Demographic information is gathered from several sources.
- The federal or state commerce departments produce and collect demographics from many sources.
- Census Bureau data – Free to use and a wealth of demographic information.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics – A Consumer Expenditure Survey. The Demographic categories used include sex, age, race, and ethnic origin.
- Social Security Fact Sheet – High-level data about African Americans, American Indians, Hispanics, Asians, Women, and Young People.
- Tax Records – It can generally be found by searching “tax assessor’s office” for the county you are researching. This data is a goldmine for the length of residency, mortgage information, tax exemptions, and deferrals.
- She-Conomy – A compilation of statistics about marketing to women.
- The local chamber of commerce can provide demographic information about your city, county, and state.
- Look for professional and trade associations for demographics related to specific industries or professions.
- Standard & Poor’s publishes its Industry Surveys and Consumer Index.
- Your local librarian can point you to statistical and demographic collections.
Demographics are used to get your message out to a group of people who will be receptive to hearing it. This will also allow you to save sales/marketing dollars, as you will not be spending money on ads in places where your ideal customer does not frequent.
Hopefully, this post will give you an idea of how to pick some demographics that could represent your ideal customer.
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