Understanding consumer behaviour can be a challenging task, but demographic data can shed light on the factors influencing customers’ choices. It helps businesses gain insights into whether location, age, gender, or other demographics play a role in their preferences. Armed with this knowledge, businesses can make informed predictions about future product demand and anticipate how customers are likely to respond.
What is demographic data?
Demographic data refers to statistical information gathered about various characteristics of a population, such as age, gender, income, and more. This data is instrumental in researching products or services, evaluating their market performance, identifying target audiences, and determining popularity across different regions.
Collecting Demographic Data For Your Business
Understanding your audience is crucial, and one effective method for gaining insights is by analysing the demographics of your website users. This valuable information about your customers can be easily obtained from website visitor demographics, with the most popular tool being Google Analytics. Google Analytics collects demographic data from users logged into a Google account, along with additional insights from third-party cookies and app data.
While you can learn more about your website demographics by encouraging customers to create accounts and providing information during purchases, this approach may overlook visitors who don’t convert. Another option is to utilise browser cookies to track user activity on your site, but this requires obtaining permission from visitors each time they access your site.
However, In Spring 2021, Apple introduced the iOS 14 update, granting users the option to opt out of tracking technologies. This significant change has had a profound impact on the way Apple user data can be used to inform advertisers about their performance. Considering the vast global user base of approximately 7.33 billion people on Apple’s iOS technology, the loss of data due to opt-outs has been critical for advertisers.
Despite this setback, there are still solutions available. Facebook’s Conversion API emerges as an alternative for advertisers seeking to gather user event data in compliance with privacy regulations. This API enables advertisers to directly send user event data from their website or mobile app to Facebook’s servers. We have more information on conversion API tracking in our blog: Conversion API Tracking: What You Need To Know.
Aside from your website, you can also gather digital marketing demographics from other sources. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram provide demographic details for business accounts, while LinkedIn offers site demographics through a free reporting tool. Additionally, studying how your competitor’s markets to specific demographics can yield valuable insights, especially when targeting similar consumer groups.
3 Key Uses Of Demographic Data In Marketing
Leveraging demographic data is essential for businesses seeking to understand their customers better, predict market trends, and develop effective strategies for the future.
To group customers based on variables including age, gender
By grouping consumers using demographic data, it allows businesses to understand each segment, what they want and how they want it. It will help the business to market each product or service differently based on the consumer groups they are targeting and as a result, generate a more effective and lucrative marketing strategy.
Businesses can use demographics to determine the next step of their growing business.
By understanding what their customers are looking for, they would be able to determine things such as; whether would customers like a new location and if so, how far would they be willing to go out of their way to get there. They could also help to avoid making costly mistakes and this will help to push the business forward. The more tangible information you have to inform business decisions, the more likely they are to succeed.
To customise products to specific consumer groups.
Demographic data can be used to customise products by finding out what is wanted by consumers and changing the existing product to fit the desired outcome. The whole idea of customising products would be to save time and money on products that aren’t wanted or that don’t fit your consumer specification.
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