
For business owners to be successful, they must show how their products add value for consumers. This is called branding and a brand aligns the characteristics of your product with the needs of consumers. The goal is to build long-term relationships based on the consistency of products. Business owners need to have a strong understanding of their target audience.
Demographics and psychographics help business owners identify the wants and needs of consumers. Demographics consist of objective data such as gender, age, income, and marital status. Psychographics are subjective. These characteristics address activities, interests, and opinions. When marketing products, owners build campaigns that use both strategies.
Defining Your Target Audience
While demographics are key, psychographics allow business owners to further refine their audience by addressing morals, ethics, political values, attitudes, biases, and prejudices. Marketing companies create detailed market segments for their clients. Two people could be the same age and gender; nonetheless, they could have different values that influence their purchasing decisions.
Marketers use five personality traits to explain behaviors: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. For example, openness has a gradient that defines personality profiles. Consumers rating high in openness are inventive and curious while consumers rating low in openness are consistent and cautious.
These traits determine how marketers deliver messages to target audiences. Here’s another example. Consumers rating high in conscientiousness are hard-working and punctual while consumers rating low in conscientiousness are lazy and disorganized. This demonstrates the power of psychographics. Owners customize messages based on these observations. This is a good way to find market niches.
Consumers and Motivations
Picture a marketer trying to define a target audience for energy bars. The marketer can develop an advertisement geared towards athletes and fitness enthusiasts. This would lead to success. However, there are more opportunities. Marketers - delving into the psyche - determine that some energy bar consumers are vegans. This is an opportunity for business owners to address these values within a clearly defined niche that is void of animal by products.
Demographics are relevant. For example, 57% of global makeup consumers between 18-34 years old are a target audience. This information can be used to further pinpoint market segments. What motivates some women to wear makeup? Some women are insecure about their appearance, so they use makeup to cover flaws. Attractive women wanting to enhance their appearance tend to use makeup to be more confident, sociable and assertive.
This leads to a significant opportunity for further developing a consumer profile. Cosmetic companies have been criticized for testing their products on animals. As of 2021, the largest cosmetic companies backed animal testing for cosmetic products. This creates a market gap that can be filled by marketers using psychographics. This market segment consists of conscientiousness consumers who are hard-working and well-organized. These people fit the profile of an influencer.
Psychographics can be applied to diverse products. Take the auto industry. Automobile companies spend a lot of money on advertisements, so they want to ensure their getting value for their dollars. Porsche is an example of an organization that modified the five personality test to be industry specific. The auto producer wanted to appeal to a market segment beyond sports cars enthusiasts who are primarily men. They wanted to market the auto for females.
Potential buyers considered sports cars to be too high-performance and exotic to be driven every day. The goal is to position Porsche as a vehicle that would provide the thrill of a Formula One car, even if someone was just using the car to go to the grocery store.
Marketers achieved this goal by showing Porsches in everyday settings such as picking a child up from school or going to a store to buy school supplies s for the upcoming school year. In the first two months of the campaign, there was a 35% increase in 911 sales.
Demographics and Psychographics – A Case Study
Restaurants are also using demographics and psychographics to reach consumers. The Meatball Shop -with six locations - demonstrates the effectiveness of demographics and psychographics when used together. The owners initially used demographics. Were their other locations missing out on marketing opportunities as well?
One target location had a promising, consumer profile – they lived within walking to the restaurant, had incomes over $100,000, had no children, and had an average age of 29. These are great demographics that led to the creation of a happy hour called Bars and Beers at that location.
But how do business owners gather psychographic information? There are many sources: market research, focus groups, customer interviews, customer surveys, questionnaires, and social media. Regarding the latter, marketers locate influencers on social media in order to gather information that addresses the wants and needs of consumers within the given business sector.
Changes in branding coincide with fluctuating customer preferences. Owners modified brands based on the unique values of their consumers. The outcome? Owners filled market gaps by understanding the wants and needs of consumers at different locations. The owners of The Meatball Shop used the skills of market researchers to meet consumer preferences.
Once business owners identify demographics and psychographics, they need to publish market research through search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising and influencer marketing. According to one survey, 87% of consumers start their purchasing process online.
Another key factor addresses the content of your competitors. It’s very important to understand how competitors attain loyal customers. Owners can fill market niches and market gaps by conducting a comparative analysis. Finally, marketers should include images with every social post. Images with quotes and numbers prove most effective.
Content creators provide owners with significant avenues for developing effective online information. One focal point is the headline. Writers need to grab the attention of the audience in order to brand the product. Essentially, a headline can influence the perception of the article. These headlines must reveal the value of the product. The headline brings consumers into the marketing funnel.
Hashtags are another factor impacting content strategies. Hashtags guide audiences toward relevant subject matter found within the marketing funnel. This first phase in consumer development is called awareness. The last phase is conversion. The goal is to cultivate customers to advocate your product.
Here’s a final statistic that shows the effectiveness of videos within digital marketing - 73% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase a product after watching an online video that successfully brands and positions that product. Well, this concludes our article on branding, demographics and psychographics. Check with us next week when we’ll talk about scaling and growing your company! Entrepreneurship!