Demographics and Psychographics: Target Tactics

Demographics are the average or typical characteristics of the people who buy your products or services. Such characteristics include age, income, education, status, type of occupation, region of country, or household size. Demographics can also include the age of children, the status of home ownership, one's home value, and whether one's home is located in an urban or a rural location.

Psychographics take this idea a step further: These include people's lifestyles and behaviors — where they like to vacation, the kinds of interests they have, the values they hold, and how they behave. Even though you may have determined your demographic group, people within that group still have very different perceptions about the benefits or value of your product and will be motivated for different reasons. These differences are known as psychographics. To further target your efforts, you've got to determine not only who buys (or will buy) your product, but what makes them want to buy it. Include as much psychographic information as you can dig up, such as what their spending patterns are, whether they are brand conscious when it comes to your product type, what influences their buying behavior, what promotional efforts they respond to most often, etc. You also want to know how they go about buying it and what you can do to encourage them to buy more. You need this information so you can, in effect, clone your best customers. It is important to really pick apart what motivates them to buy.

The information you glean from a journey into your target audience's brain is often key to your marketing efforts, particularly the positioning of your product. It includes the audience's activities, interests, and opinions. You have to work through behavioral factors, economic factors, and even interpersonal factors to get to the root of purchasing behavior.

To hone this information to fit your marketing needs, you will need to conduct research — survey people who have bought your products or those who use similar ones.

You need to know both demographics and psychographics in order to advertise and sell your product effectively. You'll need to match the audience's characteristics of the media you choose with the characteristics of your desired purchasers. In that way, you won't lose precious dollars on wasted advertising and marketing. Moreover, you need information about your customers so that you can meet their needs better than the competition does.

There are many new and exciting ways of collecting that makes marketing demographics and consumer profiling sound easy. You can have your website set “cookies” and track your customers’ web-browsing habits. You can get information from price clubs at grocery stores where customer cards are scanned along with their groceries. Computerized information from the local phone company or cellular service provider can tell you a person’s habits on the phone.

With so many technical options for collecting demographic data from and about consumers, how do you decide which options to employ and how to use the information you get? You need to have your eyes “on the street” and to make sure you’re in touch with changes in demographics, buying habits, wants and needs. First, you need to decide what information is important to you. Then you need to figure out how to get it. Many people do this in the wrong order- they do their research on what information they can get, then try to figure out how to use it! Although you should take advantage of windfalls when they happen, don’t let the “tail wag the dog” by determining your needs based on what appears to be available at the moment.