Why does demographic marketing matter?

Every business has a specific target demographic.  Customer-facing businesses are often left scratching their heads as to how to market to their target audience, and why different audiences require different marketing campaigns.  The simple reason as for this being that demographics are a larger scale look at different kinds of people.  Each group of people has a different understanding of what they need out of a company they do business with.

Building the Strategy

The first step of marketing to a target demographic is to understand what it is.  To do this, companies can find a service that uses facial recognition software to gather data on their customers.  This step is important because it helps businesses determine which demographics they are already successful with.  Additionally, it tells them who they should target.  Another significant piece of information businesses can get from this type of analysis is whether or not their target demographic is responding to them at all, or if the data indicates that they should shift who they are catering to.

After a company has determined who their target demographic is, they need to plan a marketing strategy around them.  This can include actions as simple as featuring members of that target demographic in their marketing materials.  For example, if a business prides itself on diversity, but doesn’t feature any of it in their marketing materials, the shift is simply to include some diversity, which doesn’t necessarily require them to spend extra capital.  Another method of targeted campaigning is to find locales that their target demographic already frequent, and use both online and offline strategies to target them at that location.  Using this strategy ensures that the business is generating impressions with the target demographic.  Also, social media can help with building online strategy.  Facebook, for example, has a feature that can boost posts to users based on the users’ age, gender, or locale.

Analysis

The final step of marketing to a target demographic is to analyze the effectiveness of their campaign.  In this regard, a business must consider some key questions.  The first is whether or not there was an increase in sales or attendance by the target demographic.  The company can use this information to decide whether to continue marketing to their target demographic or whether this needs to be re-evaluated.  After this, a business must determine whether or not it is worth putting more money into the campaign.   If the audience is not responding, or if the campaign has reached a critical point, where the ROI will be diminishing, the business should cease investing in the campaign.  The latter is a very desirable position to be in.

Businesses must be geared towards particular groups of people.  Using this analysis method helps a business determine both how effective their strategy is, and who they are catering to.