Do you know who your website and social channels are targeting? If not, that’s another discussion for another post. Assuming you have been targeting specific demographics, what do they look like? In this post, we’ll examine micro-demographics you could be missing that are just waiting for someone like you to find them.
Traditional Demographics
When you picture demographics, you likely think of gender, age, location, income level, education, ethnicity, country of origin, etc. These are indeed helpful metrics that have been fairly successful in marketing for a very long time. However, it’s important to realize that technology has allowed us to learn much more nuanced information about our clients without even having to ask them. If you’re not using your analytics to help you get a clearer picture of your audience, you’re most certainly missing out.
Behavioral Segmentation
Cue the concept of behavioral segmentation! What is it, you ask? Behavioral segmentation relies on what people do, consume, dream about, buy tickets for, pin on Pinterest, and simply choose when many available options are present. For example, two American-born Chinese women in their 30s living in San Francisco might sound similar on paper, but likely have completely different interests and values. One could be an adrenaline junkie who spends a fair amount of disposable income on skydiving trips, igloo hotels, rafting lessons, and is not a believer in organic foods. The other may spend money on fine wines, museum tours, and foreign language lessons. They’re probably looking for a different approach and tactic from an attorney or other hired professional, as well.
Use Everything Available
It’s been said over and over again for ages that knowledge is power. Search analytics and social media activity affords us an array of information that simply wasn’t available to us without personally polling people before and it would be silly not to use it. Should you throw out traditional demographics? Absolutely not, but you shouldn’t only rely on them anymore, either. What you should do is create distinct client personas and target people based on both traditional demographics and behavioral segmentation. Where are your potential clients hanging out online? What have they been searching for? If you can master that, converting customers online will be easier than ever before.
