What is a key customer demographic analysis, and how do you do it?
Also known in business more generally as ‘target market analysis’, we prefer a more rigorous segmentation of customers so that we can understand their drivers behind purchasing decisions, how long they’re likely to take to decide before a sale, openness to brand touch points (aka ‘triggers’), and where they will first come to be aware of your brand – so that marketing efforts can be as efficient as possible, instead of using a ‘spray-and-pray’ method.
By mapping out multiple customer profiles (unless your offering is really niche, you should have more than just one), you’ll be able to prioritise where to aim your efforts to increase awareness amongst their cohort, which one should be focussed on (as it might vary with the seasons), and how much resources to allocate to those efforts.
What traits to start with?
As a rule of thumb, some basic demographics to help segment your customer profiles should at least include:
Age and generation.
Gender.
Ethnicity.
Geographic location.
Annual income.
Education status.
Type of employment (especially if they have several streams).
Hobbies and interests.
Political outlook (this may, however, be hard to quantify with some assumption creeping in).
What to do with the information afterwards
The traits should be clustered together and then used as a basis to form a profile, to then attach other sources of metadata (i.e., buying habits, media consumption, where they shop, etc). Once you’ve completed your key customer, you should then build a secondary and a tertiary (or more if you’re market is complex).
Your key, secondary, and tertiary customer profiles should be prioritised by more than just short-term sales, as we’ve seen with markets over previous decades, they often change at short notice.
It’s also important to realise, your key customer demographic analysis is likely to change over time, as buying habits change, technology and innovation alter behaviour, and other factors (such as region, season, etc), however it is key for a marketing team to revisit it at least annually.
The pandemic has shown us that focussing your profile-raising activities purely on physical and word-of-mouth interactions is a critical vulnerability for businesses.
It limits you to people in your geographical area of the ad placement, but also that your target customer happens to see it and takes a positive perspective of your organisation afterwards. It doesn’t allow for engagement outside of the local area, and we suspect, that it won’t lead to organic marketing (that is people talking about it) unless it really is remarkable.